SAP's Henning Kagermann thinks that big companies are too conservative (afraid?) to adopt SaaS.
But while it is the sales people, numbers crunchers and purchasing pros who enter information into these systems, traditional business software isn't designed with these workers in mind. It's designed for these workers' bosses, who need a single place to track what their departments and employees are up to.
With every other company trying to increase productivity and bring the consumer/collaborative angle into their software it's interesting that SAP chooses to remain archaic and conservative. Only time will tell if that's the right choice.
Writers and producers at ABC News demanded payment for after work usage and reached a settlement with management. ABC agreed last week that workers can get paid for some work on their BlackBerrys -- if it goes "beyond routine."
I go through phases of Blackberry obsession. Lately I have been forcefully placing my electronic leash face down on my desk at home so I can't see the red light blinking.
Self-control is a powerful thing. The Blackberry is a great device that serves an important purpose, but most people should be able to recognize when they've crossed the line.
I posted last week on Oracle's clever but annoying move of raising prices so they could discount and still maintain margins. Today I saw that United is raising prices AND requiring an overnight stay--the bane of the business traveler. This royal pain will start in October and remind us all how much we hate to fly.
Taking an economic view of the situation, I think we all understand that fuel prices have gone through the roof and that affects United dramatically. But I would think that it makes a great deal more sense to pack the planes full (for example on same-day trips) than it does to force travelers to stay overnight.
How long passengers have to stay under United's new minimum-stay policy will depend on the destinations involved, the price of the ticket and the length of the flight.
For example, travelers booking the cheapest seats between Chicago and Minneapolis or Boston and San Diego will now be forced to stay three nights or the entire weekend, Urbanski said.
Is it just me, or does this seem completely insane?
Oracle raised the prices for a number of its products this week, by as much as twenty percent in many cases. While on the surface this seems silly in a down economy the truth is that it's actually a very smart move.
First of all, Oracle sets the pricing for the database market (and now possibly the app server market too) and therefore should always be looking for ways to increase their prices. The other important aspect is the fact that Oracle discounts heavily off list price. With a large increase (say 20%) they stand to even their loss on the list vs. actual price. It's deviously ingenious.
Do I think this is good for Oracle customers? No. But, once again I have to marvel at the economic prowess that Oracle continues to display. Meanwhile, just go get some MySQL.
If you own a Jura F90 Coffee Maker, you can also buy a Jura Internet Connection Kit, which lets you program and set your coffee prefs via the network: however, its got a bunch of vulnerabilities that allow for remote denial-of-coffee attacks
According to Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle we should all be drinking more:
Coffee drinking was on the rise during the mid 1600s, coffee houses spread through England filling an important niche--public meeting place which did not serve alcohol. Originally coffee was sold as a medicine, "the first steps it made from the cabinets of the curious as an exotick seed, having been into the apothecaries' shops as a drug." Coffee became increasingly popular during the plague of 1664 when it was believed to be therapeutic and protective against the "Contagion," as it was called.
Via Boing Boing
Reddit launched itself as an open source project today and chose the occasionally controversial CPAL license for the release.
There doesn't appear to be a goal of monetization as much as there is a goal of ubiquity through proliferation. If that were reversed there is no question that the GPL is a better choice.
I happen to think CPAL is exactly the right choice and here's why:
1. It's one of only 3 OSS licenses that take the "network" into account (CPAL, OSL, AGPL) whereby usage can be considered distribution.
2. It doesn't require that code be given back
3. It enforces the brand of the developer (in this case Reddit) which actually has some benefits.
Matt has been mostly against CPAL (see this post about Facebook) but I have been trying to sway him into realizing that the license doesn't dissuade developers. His argument (which makes sense to a point) is that they should put code out under Apache or something completely permissive. That however, limits what the code developer themselves might want to do in the future.
Just when you thought that your ADD couldn't get any worse, the guys at MyHome 2.0 have built a Twittering Teddy Bear. Considering that Twitter has been historically unreliable you should be guaranteed at least a bit of quiet now and then.
I pretty much gave up on Twitter after the IM shut down and the spotty SMS...maybe if I build one of these my baby will feel a deeper link to my inner-most tweets?
Via Gizmodo
Besides the fun of ruining Microsoft's day, the Mozilla team is going for a world record. You can learn more about it here.
Considering that Microsoft has yet to be a real friend to open source I have to be at least a bit suspect of the intentions behind the sponsorship of the ongoing open source census.
My guess? I think Microsoft wants access to the results both so it can understand open source but also so it can start to consider legal actions against the most popular products and the companies that develop them.
I'll apologize in advance if the motives are completely altruistic but if the past is any evidence, we should really avoid giving this kind of information to Microsoft with no benefits attached to open source.
The company's "customers, partners and developers are working in increasingly heterogeneous environments," so participation in projects such as the census is relevant to the "ecosystem" in which Microsoft operates, said Sam Ramji, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy, in a prepared statement.
I, along with many others in the open source vendor and developer community have met with Sam and I think we all believe he has good intentions, but it's still Microsoft and needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Replay Solutions today announced it's new tool for Enterprise Java. Replay's tools are often described as Tivo for the Java applications, which I think is an accurate description.
Basically you can run your Java apps, stop, pause, rewind etc. all in one fell swoop. With the launch of ReplayDIRECTOR for Java EE, users can now drill down into source code during replay to quickly identify the root cause of an issue.
You can see a demo video here.
From the product description:
ReplayDIRECTOR for Java EE allows companies, teams, or individuals to make deep recordings of their software applications and servers at any stage of the application life cycle. ReplayDIRECTOR virtualizes and re-executes applications, so that when errors occur, users can fast-forward directly to the root cause. ReplayDIRECTOR will reproduce any application errors and can be coupled with any standard debugger, profiler or diagnostic tool to quickly correct errors in the code.
