Microsoft have picked up a some stick recently for not appealing to the ‘Windows Experience’ and I would have to agree with that point of view.
The new Windows Vista Site is something different though – now that has feeling.
The ‘Experience’ comes first and then the ‘Features’ – great.
ZDNet are looking for bloggers I here. Am I interested? Not sure. What are the requirements?
Do you have a passion for technology? Want to share your from-the-trenches perspective with ZDNet’s readers? ZDNet is expanding its coverage with a series of new blogs on a variety of business and technology topics. We’re also seeking lT execs to contribute to blogs covering the government, education and healthcare fields.
What’s your area of expertise?
If you’ve got great credentials, good writing ability, and passionate authenticity, we’d like to hear from you. Please send an e-mail–with your full name, preferred daytime contact information, and a relevant writing sample–to David Grober. And yes, we’ll pay for steady, high-quality blogging.
Well I have a lot of this experience, but could I ever live down the description “passionate authenticity” – I’m British . If this is you, please feel free to apply.
I’m not at CES this week.
Just wanted everyone to know.
No real reason, just felt left out not having anything to say about a big show with a few gadgets. Tried to watch the Bill Gates Keynote so I didn’t feel as left out; even that wouldn’t stream.
Can’t say I’m too bothered about not being in Las Vegas though.
Ah well .
Someone sent me an interesting statistic today which fascinated me, mainly because I couldn’t understand it. In the experience of this particular person someone supporting Windows could support nearly 40 servers, whereas someone supporting another OS (which shall remain nameless) could support less than 10 servers. We are talking about two mature operating systems here.
I haven’t got around to a full challenge of the assertion but I couldn’t see it. Surely the operating system support overhead is about the same these days, I certainly wouldn’t have expected a four-fold difference, that’s huge. That would mean that a Windows server would only need to carry a quarter of the load of any other operating system to be cost effective. OK, there are some capital cost differences but they are small compared to the operating costs.
Am I that far out of touch?
Every day I drink water, every day it’s crystal clear and tastes great. I don’t have to think about it, I just go to the utility turn on the tap on the water filter and out it comes. I don’t really even need the water filter it just tastes a bit better that way.
I don’t have to walk for my water.
I don’t have to boil my water.
I don’t have to put a purifying tablet in it.
I don’t have to worry about disease.
I don’t have to worry whether the well will be empty.
What a luxury.
We can so often look at the things that we use everyday and miss the fact that they are a luxury. Pure clean water is indeed a luxury. There are millions of people all over the world for whom water is a constant concern. Apparently 1.2 billion of us don’t have access to safe drinking water. Water is even the cause of war in some parts of the world. I have none of those concerns I just go to the tap and there it is.
Jesus talked about a relationship with Him being like having ‘living water’, removing the need to ever be thirsty:
1Jesus realized that the Pharisees were keeping count of the baptisms that he and John performed 2(although his disciples, not Jesus, did the actual baptising). They had posted the score that Jesus was ahead, turning him and John into rivals in the eyes of the people. 3So Jesus left the Judean countryside and went back to Galilee.
4To get there, he had to pass through Samaria. 5He came into Sychar, a Samaritan village that bordered the field Jacob had given his son Joseph. 6Jacob’s well was still there. Jesus, worn out by the trip, sat down at the well. It was noon.
7A woman, a Samaritan, came to draw water. Jesus said, “Would you give me a drink of water?” 8(His disciples had gone to the village to buy food for lunch.)
9The Samaritan woman, taken aback, asked, “How come you, a Jew, are asking me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?” (Jews in those days wouldn’t be caught dead talking to Samaritans.)
10Jesus answered, “If you knew the generosity of God and who I am, you would be asking me for a drink, and I would give you fresh, living water.”
11The woman said, “Sir, you don’t even have a bucket to draw with, and this well is deep. So how are you going to get this “living water’? 12Are you a better man than our ancestor Jacob, who dug this well and drank from it, he and his sons and livestock, and passed it down to us?”
13Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks this water will get thirsty again and again. 14Anyone who drinks the water I give will never thirst–not ever. The water I give will be an artesian spring within, gushing fountains of endless life.”
15The woman said, “Sir, give me this water so I won’t ever get thirsty, won’t ever have to come back to this well again!”
Water is a symbol of life itself, without water there is no life. I need water to live; I need ‘living water’ to really live. It’s a blessing and an honour to have both.
Sledging could be described as bouncing down a bumpy hill on a piece of plastic in the freezing cold. But that description would completely miss the point. Sometimes a purely factual description of something is just not adequate. Here in England we don’t really do winter sports because we don’t really get enough of a winter; especially here near as we are to Lancashire’s West Coast where the Gulf Stream and the Irish Sea keep everything wet and mild.
Every now and then though we do get the opportunity to get out into the snow and to enjoy the delights of the one thing that is for us English the nearest thing we will get to a winter sport in our home country – sledging. Last year (as it now is) while we were visiting family on the East Coast between Christmas and the New Year we were blessed with some truly glorious snow, crisp and fluffy.
Sledging reveals so much about the English psyche. All that is required for sledging is something that resembles a hill, a modicum of snow and something that can be sat up which will preferably slide on the snow. The ability to slide though doesn’t appear to be completely necessary though. Being an inventive nation we can think of all sorts of objects and places that fulfill two of the requirements the thing we struggle with is the snow.
When I was a child a friend had a sledge which was a converted bike; rather than having wheels at the end of the forks it had some metal guttering. It slid fabulously, the problem was stopping. Anyone who has learnt to ride a bike knows how painful it can be to reach a sudden stop on a bicycle; a sudden stop is inevitable when travelling down a hill on snow without any form of brakes.
Over the years I have had the pleasure of sliding down various slopes on all sorts of objects, each of which I have called a sledge. Some of them have been wonderfully successful; some less so. The simplest has to be the bivy bag, otherwise known as a long piece of plastic sheeting. This particular object requires you to take a little run and to throw yourself onto the floor belly first hoping to slide forward rather than landing in a heap and going nowhere.
As a child we used to have a metal framed sledge which managed to survive being used by both myself and my older brother; I think my younger sister may have also used it but I’m sure it was only occasionally when we boys were around.
The feeling of sliding out of control down a hill is great. Some people grow up never seeing snow and never getting the opportunity to sledge – I am so blessed.
If you don’t think Exchange scalability is an issue when compared to Domino look at this set of comments to a post by Ed Brill. In Exchange terms the discussion for most corporate customers isn’t anywhere near the 10,000 users per server mark it’s much lower than that – less than half normally.
The real issue isn’t the capital costs of hardware – it’s the cost of operation of a significantly more complicated infrastructure.
The move of Exchange 12 from 32–bit to 64–bit is not just about memory, it’s also about IO. In this article Terry Myerson starts to indicate the benefits:
Specifically, when comparing E2K3 to E12 on the same hardware, with the same user profile – but with a 64-bit OS vs. the 32-bit OS, our current tests show a >70% reduction in IOPS/user. In a future blog entry, we’ll discuss these improvements in detail.
Well, it’s certainly needed and needed soon. I have been working with a number of customers recently who have had to drive down the number of users in their Exchange implementations because of issues with storage performance. During deployment it’s easier and cheaper to have less users per server and less complicated storage than it is to try and consolidate. This is not a good situation to be in.
Oh, and the article is also interesting for the information it contains on memory issues.
Happy New Year to all of you – I know it’s no longer that new but I was determined to leave the computers alone for a few days and it felt great to do it.
Happy New Year to all of you – I know it’s no longer that new but I was determined to leave the computers alone for a few days and it felt great to do it.
We are so privileged to live within driving distance of some of the most beautiful countryside. We are busy people though, and carving out time to enjoy them requires precision planning sometimes. The lead up to Christmas is one of the most busy times with both Sue and I involved in organising events at church, and the kids both involved in extra activities.
It was a real blessing, therefore, to be able to carve out a whole day on Christmas Eve and to be able to get up to the Lake District. Leaving from Preston the weather looked like it might not be the best for walking, it was foggy. As we drove north the fog got thicker and the temperatures got lower. Being British though we carried on regardless. It’s one of the traits of our national heritage that once we start something we see it through to the end, no matter what the consequences. Climbing out of Kendal though it all changed. We moved above the fog into a glorious crisp sunny winters day. It was like springing from one day into a completely different day in less time than it took to say “wow”.
We had already set our sites on walking around Rydal Water where we were to explore the caves and enjoy the peace of the lake itself. Rydal Water sits in a basin between a number of different hills and is regularly flat calm. We weren’t disappointed. The sun shining on the brown colours and the flat calm lake made for a view that took our breath away; the cold air adding to the experience.
Jonathan had taken some climbing rope with him which helped us to get into most of the caves even though it was quite icy. The caves are man made, resulting from iron ore mining and are vast spaces.
It was a great day which we finished off with a late lunch in Ambleside.
Some people have the ability to capture the sense of a place, its peace, its beauty, its tranquility, its connectedness, I don’t but I hope the picture give you a sense of a glorious day.
There are things in life which are done which are routine; there are other things from which we build memories that live with us and make us who we are. For some reason it’s not the routine that builds the memories but the extraordinary, the things outside of the routine. Our walk around Rydal will be a memory that we will take with us.
I’m not the kind of person who actually ‘love’ or ‘hates’ anything, well not when it comes to IT, it’s only stuff on a two dimensional screen after all .
So linking together my post on intuitive software and my complaints about lack of process I thought I would further enhance my thesis that there is no ‘common sense’ by talking about two piece of software that I use every day, my email clients – Notes and Outlook. Yes, I get the joy and delight of using both and have done for many years, I’m not going to get too far into their advanced features, I’m talking here about email, calendaring and tasks and I’m only talking about the clients. It’s also a bit of a follow up to my post on technology zealot.
These are random thoughts and not meant as a detailed analysis of the things that get me going, they are just things that I have observed. The fact that I have observed them means that they either work better than I would regard as common sense or worse.
I’m a bit worried about writing this post though since reading yesterday’s article from Creating Passionate Users which basically said that if you ask people to explain why they regard something as good or bad their reasoning turns to mush, or at least that’s what I think it was saying .
Anywhere here goes, I’ve started so I had better see it through.
The first thing I need to explain is the difference in the way that I display the two products. I have Notes displayed in a grid configuration something like this:
My Outlook configuration is different, it’s like this:
I have absolutely no idea why they are different, they just are . I think it may have something to do with default configuration but that would be pure speculation.
My first dilemma is which product to start with, if I start with either then people will assume that I have a bias and that is not what I am wanting to say. I’ll say it again for those zealot out there – what I am saying is what I have observed as either better than or worse than my common sense in both products.
I really like the way that Notes does sorting in views, the idea of having many columns and being able to click on each one and for it to work quickly is great. I have a large mailbox and it always amazes me how quickly it can do the resorting. Outlook doesn’t quite do it particularly the way that I have Outlook configured, there is only enough room for one column really. I use grouping and I like that a lot. At this point I also have to say that I break every tenet of GTD and keep everything in my Inbox. I don’t actually see why I need to move it elsewhere, I don’t get bothered that it’s in their. I work a process whereby I flick through the mail, if it needs an immediate action I action it, if it needs thinking about or needs longer time I flag it for follow-up. That brings me onto my next point.
I really like the way that Outlook does flagging of items, it makes perfect sense to me to be able to right click an item and to be able to quickly give something a tag. There are two dislikes of Notes here. The first one is that flagging requires me to do too much clicking. First I have to click on ‘follow-up’ which gives me a drop down list to choose from. The options on here demonstrate some lazy coding because it asks me if I want to ‘add or edit a flag’, or to ‘remove a flag’. I have an item selected and they should know whether the item already has a flag which need modifying or removing or whether it doesn’t have one at all and hence needs adding. Anyway, assuming it’s a new flag that I am wanting to add I click on ‘Add or Edit Flag’ I then get another dialogue box asking me lots of things about the flag. Now this is where the common sense bit comes in. I know that it’s not really lazy coding . I know that the coding has been done that way to allow for the selection of and flagging of multiple documents; but it’s not common sense to me to do that; it’s not the way I work. I want to flag individual items very quickly because that’s how I deal with my email. Once flagged I then go through and prioritise. I can’t prioritise until I have flagged everything because I don’t know what something’s relative priority is gong to be until I have got to the end of my stack of unread emails. Outlook, however, works the way I want to work, it follows my common sense.
The next part of my problem with Notes flagging actually affects more than just flagging it is a problem throughout Notes and that is the use of the right-click and double-click. Why can’t I right click an item in my inbox to flag it? Why when I double-click an attachment does it open the properties dialogue box and not open the attachment? Why when I right-click on an item in my inbox can’t I reply?
Notes semi-offline experience is great, really great. Working on local data, but still being able to get to online data without telling Notes that it is now online is great. Outlook Cache mode goes some way to catching up on this one but it’s nothing like as flexible. With Notes I can choose which database is used locally, even down to the address book, Outlook can’t do that. If I’m in cache mode I get the offline address book, no choice.
Well this post is getting long, perhaps I had better finish there and put some more into a later post. Just a quick thought before I finish though. If you are thinking about telling me that I can use Outlook against Notes and that should give me the best experience then don’t bother because I’ve tried it and it is terrible, and anyway as I said at the beginning I’m not doing a detailed comparison of the two I’m just making observations.
Graham Chastney 