The best and easiest ways to migrate to Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 OS.

http://whitepapers.zdnet.com/abstract.aspx?docid=1036487&promo=550&tag=nl.e550&cval=wit2.zdnet&ctype=default

Well, I’ve spent the better part of two years now learning about Enterprise 2.0 and how it can be applied at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. I have been practicing Knowledge Management for over 10 years there and it has been a constant struggle to get people to see the value in sharing knowledge, learning from our mistakes (though we pay great lip service to it in the form of never-quite-realized attempts at collecting “lessons learned”), and not re-inventing the wheel.

I first became aware of E2.0 after reading Tim O’Reilly’s seminal paper, “What is Web 2.0“, and it started me thinking about how we could use the design concepts he laid out so well to our inside-the-firewall efforts to increase our communication and collaboration capabilities. I actually thought I was in the forefront of the effort and was somewhat chagrined when I discovered Professor Andy McAfee had been writing about it for at least a year prior to my discovery. He was the one who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and, after my initial disappointment with NOT being actually in the vanguard, I was thrilled to find there was a body of work out there I could learn from.

I also soon found Dion Hinchcliffe, who wrote prolifically and lucidly about E2.o, as well as created lots of excellent graphics that made sense of how the connections worked and what, in fact, should be connected. I have a large collection of Dion’s graphics gathered together in a rather large PowerPoint presentation that I drag out and look at now and again to remind of why I’m doing what I’m doing and how it all fits together.

At the end of July of this year I was fortunate enough to become a member of an organization of E2.0 practitioners, the 2.0 Adoption Council, dedicated to advancing the acceptance and application of Enterprise 2.0 design principles. Rather than tell you much about it, I want to point to Dion’s latest post entitled “Enterprise 2.0: The 2009 Year in Review, where he has the following to say:

Communities of practitioners began to form. One of the best stories of the year was the formation and rise of the 2.0 Adoption Council. Founded by my good friend, the tireless Susan Scrupski, the 2.0 Adoption Council is a practitioners-only community (no vendors or consultants allowed) that has developed an impressive following. Well over a hundred companies are now represented on projects from the quite small to the quite large. It’s also one the very best sources of data — their latest report is packed full of useful information — for what’s taking place with Enterprise 2.0 today. If you’re engaged in Enterprise 2.0 work, I urge you join the council and increase our collective knowledge of what’s happening with enterprise social computing.

If you are at all interested in how your business can perform better and be more effective – not merely more efficient – you owe it to yourself to understand what E2.0 has to offer you. If you are working now to get your company to adopt these practices, consider doing what Dion suggests, joining the Council and learning from some of the best practitioners in the world. You can read his entire post here.

I find it interesting that like the proverbial “bad penny” the unethical actions of Intel relative to waging “a systematic campaign to shut out rivals’ competing microchips,” continues to turn up.

The latest example of poor corporate citizenry from the monolithic chip maker was revealed yesterday through an announcement that the FTC is suing Intel as it relates to the future of the graphics processor market.

Specifically, and as reported yesterday by ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan, the FTC complaint includes allegations that Intel:

• Cut off rivals’ access to the marketplace;
• Deprived consumers of choice and innovation;
• Was anti-competitive for a decade as it moved to shore up its monopoly;
• And now is working to choke off rivals in graphics chips.

I will leave it to you to access and review at your leisure the FTC complaint against Intel in its entirety through the following link.

The real question I have is simply this, if Intel is a corporation in which its conduct is determined by its executive leadership, then why for the most part have these executives remained nameless?

Perhaps I am missing something, but isn’t their exclusion from the proceedings tantamount to blaming a car for an accident instead of the driver? After all who made the decisions to implement and aggressively pursue what the FTC refers to as “anti-competitive tactics,” that “were designed to put the brakes on superior competitive products that threatened its monopoly in the CPU microchip market?”

As long as those who “drive” an enterprise which violates fair business practices, and in the process breaks either existing laws (or warrant the creation of “new rules for regulating business conduct”) are not called to task, I doubt that things will change.

Perhaps John Berling Hardy, author the book “Have We Been Played?” is on to something when he suggests that by holding a corporate brand accountable for the actions of its leadership, the belief is that this will somehow assuage perhaps even deflect public anger away from those who are truly responsible.

In the emerging world of social media where personal branding and citizen journalism are the epitome of personal accountability, who are these faceless “Eyes Wide Shut” executives?

The best place to start is right at the top, with the individuals who have been at the helm during the past ten years when, as the FTC alleges, the infractions occurred.

While I do not have either Mr. Otellini’s or Mr. Barrett’s personal e-mail addresses, perhaps flooding Intel with e-mails directed at these executives would be a good first step?

The Son of Man by René Magritte

At worst, a Don Quixote-type gesture such as sending an e-mail en masse will at least enable you to transition your displeasure from the realms of the “faceless businessman” to one of a tangible persona.

Paul S. Otellini, Intel CEO since May 18th, 2005

Craig R. Barrett, Intel CEO 1998 to 2005

30

http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091214/MEDIABUSINESS/912149996/1078/FREE

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Todays list includes big names: MTV, Ricoh, Soundcloud, Wikipedia, Oracle, etc…

Never stop failing!

Update: NMBS added.

Those who haven’t already seen it should immediately hit this link for what I think is the best rundown of how the Internet is polluting and distorting our information cycle.  It was written by tech writer Ed Bott on ZDNet two days ago. It chronicles the way that the web takes a bogus “report” cooked up by an irresponsible organization and shoots it out all over the place. The poor company under this kind of fire can do nothing but try to put out the conflagration with their corporate squirt gun. Bott writes:

I’ve spent the better part of the last 48 hours looking into the colossal fiasco that is the “Black Screen of Death” story. It’s a near-perfect case study in how Internet-driven tech journalism rewards sloppy reporting and how the echo chamber devalues getting the story right.

The company in question here is Microsoft, which was victimized by a story that said Windows was suffering from a dreaded Black Screen bug. There was no truth to it. But the story went viral, which in this day and age is easy. Everybody is an aggregator. Nobody checks facts. Nobody feels any responsibility for bulls**t stuff they help spread out there. Hey! They’re just passing along the viral goodies!

It’s like a sneeze on an airplane. Everybody gets sick. Nobody’s to blame.

But seriously. If you haven’t read the post, read it here.  And keep it in mind the next time you see something on the Internet, anywhere on the Internet. At its best aggregation is entertaining. Most of the time? It’s gossip. And it’s pretty much where the state of the art is going in tech, politics and this week, sports. Hell, it’s not just going there. It’s arrived.  Have you heard the new stuff about Tiger?

Saw this summary in a Zdnet newsletter.

SAN FRANCISCO–Pushing several steps farther in the multicore direction, Intel on Wednesday demonstrated a fully programmable 48-core processor it thinks will pave the way for massive data computers powerful enough to do more of what humans can.

It has always been technology, – computing, in particular –  to emulate the human being and human mind.

Camera’s with the fastest autofocus and complex digital processing chips don’t even come close to how the human eye works - immediate response to light, depth of field, focus, detecting movements, etc.

Artificial intelligence, with all its, well, artificial, intelligence, still can’t figure out why anyone would find funny a sentence like, “Why did the chicken cross the road?… To get to the other side! Duh!”. We would laugh, but the computer can’t figure out the humour in it.

It just goes to explain that the human being is not just a mere orgnanism with a higher-than-average intelligence quote.

And with Intel’s new chip above, they claim,

“The machine will be capable of understanding the world around them much as humans do,” Rattner said. “They will see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities, and will demand as a result very (powerful) computing capability.” – Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner

48 Cores (fyi mainstream computing today has an average of 2 cores) – to only begin to understand the world around us? Technology has a long way to go.

Maybe someday, with a gazillion cores, computing may indeed be able to be very human in action, perception of surroundings, maybe even be able to take a logical statement, find an illogical possibility, and tell it as a joke, but there is one thing it will never be able to do…

Know God.

It will never be able to understand the need to pray, never feel a sense of awe at its surroundings and make it bow down in worship.

Man may invent a robot that can outlive the average human 3 times over, but it will never have eternal life – “to know thee, the only True God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou sent” -John 17:3.

This inability, is enough to convince me, that we are not merely organisms, but are a creation of God, created differently from the rest of the habitable and inhabitable world – created with the ability to know God, and for the purpose of enjoying Him and worshipping Him.

 So God created man in his ownimage, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. Gen 1:27

iFotoGuide is receiving a lot of press these days.  Two days ago a Google search revealed only 4 pages.  Today, the same search returned well over 20 pages with coverage on major news outlets including cnet.com, ZDNet.com, Businessweek and About.com.  Dozens of blogs and sites focusing on what’s happening in the world of Apple and the iPhone have also mentioned iFotoGuide.  If you’re as excited about iFotoGuide as we are, please share your thoughts on the app on your blogs, websites and forums.  Heck, we’d even be happy if you told your dog all about us.  Thanks to all for spreadin’ the word!

Yahoo: http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20091129/bs_prweb/prweb3271394;_ylt=AkMUETeieeRI6iMRriJRr9F0fNdF

MacWorld: http://www.macworld.com/appguide/app.html?id=343437&expand=false

Cnet: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10406587-1.html

ZDNet: http://content.zdnet.com/2346-9595_22-369012.html

Businessweek: http://bx.businessweek.com/iphone/

About.com: http://usparks.about.com/

Een Britse pubeigenaar heeft een boete van bijna 9000 euro gekregen omdat een van zijn klanten auteursrechtelijk beschermd materiaal had gedownload via het open wifi netwerk in het café.

De Britse wetten rond open wifi-netwerken en de aansprakelijkheid van de eigenaren daarvan zijn een grijs gebied. Volgens rechtenprofessor Lilian Edwards zouden aanbieders echter in theorie niet aansprakelijk kunnen worden gehouden voor wat hun klanten downloaden, schrijft ZDNet UK.

Het is echter moeilijk te achterhalen wie er dan wel verantwoordelijk is. “Niemand weet wie de downloader was, omdat het ip-adres van de hotspot is.”

Bron. NVT

Peter Marwan setzt sich in einem Beitrag auf zdnet.de mit dem Thema BPM auseinander. Bei der Lektüre des Artikels fallen insbesondere zwei Stellen auf, die einen Kommentar verdienen.

So heißt es etwa zu Beginn:

„Erstens ist die Zahl der Anbieter groß, zweitens sind die Unterschiede oft gering und drittens sind diese oft mehr auf unterschiedlich gesetzte Schwerpunkte zurückzuführen, als auf technologische Überlegenheit der einen oder anderen Lösung.“

Die Frage der technologischen Überlegenheit ist ohnehin herstellerzentriert und führt letztlich in die komplett falsche Richtung. Denn niemand kann am Ende des Tages allgemein gültig sagen, worin technologische Überlegenheit besteht. Für den Anwender kommt es dagegen vor allem darauf an, sein Geschäft vollständig und flexibel abbilden zu können.

Im Folgenden zitiert Marwan den BPM-Spezialisten Michael Otte:

„[Die] BPM-Architektur neuer Lösungen sollte so flexibel beschaffen sein, dass mit geringen Anpassungen auch neue Anforderungen an die Geschäftsprozesse im laufenden Betrieb unterstützt werden. Genau daran fehle es den großen Komplettlösungen jedoch oft.“

Dieser Gedanke ist vollkommen richtig. Denn auch bei einem noch so großen Sammelsurium von Regeln, wird es immer wieder zu Situationen kommen, die es bislang noch nicht gegeben hat. Der Anwender muss dann dazu in der Lage sein, Prozesse zur Laufzeit ändern zu können.

Eine der wichtigsten Voraussetzungen ist dabei die Verbindung von Daten und Prozessen: Sie bedingen sich gegenseitig. Prozesse ohne direkten engen Bezug zu Daten sind genauso nutzlos wie Daten, die sich nicht prozessgesteuert verwalten lassen.

Dazu bedarf es aber eines quasi universellen Systemmodells, das innerhalb der gesamten Organisation – also auch jenseits von Fachbereichen und ihren spezifischen Anwendungen – Gültigkeit besitzt.

Ist dieses vollständig umgesetzt, rückt auch der Gedanke der Operational Intelligence in greifbare Nähe, so dass sich Daten durch die spontane Darstellung von Prozessen aggregieren lassen. Dabei kann man sowohl neue Situationen abbilden als auch ganz konkret erfassen, welche Vorgänge in einem Prozess noch offen sind und in welchem Schritt man sich gerade befindet. Ganz praktisch bedeutet das schlussendlich auch,  dass ein solches Framework rein situativ Aufgaben an die Mitarbeiter verteilen und deren Abwicklung verfolgen kann.

So going by the title of this post you probably already figured out that I’m going to be talking about Mashups this week. What is a mashup anyway? You may have heard of a mashup before and are thinking of something like this:

While that’s really cool, that’s not what I’m talking about when I’m speaking of Mashups. Now bear with me, because the information on Mashups has a tendency to get really nerdy really fast. Just take a look at the information Wikipedia has on the subject and you’ll see what I mean!

To explain it simply, a mashup is a combination of two or more APIs that were intended to do one thing, but when combined it gives them a new functionality outside of the original intent. Kind of like when you take a coat hanger and bend it into a straight line and use it to roast your hot dogs over a fire on a camping trip.

In this video David Berlind at ZDNet talks about what exactly a mashup is, so if you’re a visual learner this video gives an excellent explaination and really breaks down what a API is.

He mentions a few websites in there that I haven’t heard of. One of which was EVDB, but upon looking it up it turns out EVDB is now known as Eventful. Seems pretty cool!

I was looking around for resources that actually help you put together Mashup APIs and I came across one called Wavemaker. It seems pretty cool, and the concept looks fairly simple. It has two versions, an enterprise version which costs money, and an open source version which is supported by the community. After watching this video, it seems to be fairly sophisticated and quite capable of doing a fair bit.

In this video Google presents the Yahoo team that put together Yahoo Pipes. It’s a bit old, but it has some great information on what Yahoo Pipes is and how you can use it to create Mashups.

Yahoo has their own tutorial video as well, incase you are interest in learning how to use Pipes! Unfortunately it’s not on a source that wordpress likes for me to link it in my blog, so you’ll have to follow a page. I know I know, you have to click a link, it sucks, but some how I know you’ll be just fine.

So how do I feel about Mashups? I think it’s pretty amazing and it means I will have a lot more flexibility in designing a website, or application. It also means my job will be a lot easier, the more sophisticated these tools get.

One Bloor Site

Construction has not started yet on the originally planned 80-storey luxury Condominium site (now cancelled) at One Bloor, Toronto.

The original developer sold the Condo site before construction started because of lack of financing. The new developer is re-doing the property for a smaller development and a much shorter Condo tower.

The Bloor Yonge area is seeing more and more new Condos in various phases of completion.

• The Uptown
• Crystal Blu
• Casa
• The Bloor Street Neighbourhood Condos

All these Luxury Toronto Condos are within minutes of this corner, described as Canada’s most important intersection.

Standing here, with the complete corner levelled and now fenced in, we wonder why all the great plans for the highest Condo/Hotel in Canada never made it off the ground.

Gone are the plans for the planned 500 Condos, the 120 room Hotel and the upscale retail space on the first three floors.

The dream lives on.

Search current new and resale Toronto Condo Listings in the Bloor Yonge area.

Related Posts:

Bloor-Yonge Condo

New Toronto Condos, Luxury Homes In The Sky

Yonge Bloor Condos 15 St. Mary

 An application to permit a 29-storey residential Condominium  in the Bloor and Yonge street neighbourhood has been submitted to City council.

The area just south of Canada’s , most famous intersection  Yonge and Bloor, is located on the corner of St Mary and St. Nicholas Streets.

Anyone that has “happened” upon St. Nicholas St. with all the original and reproduction Victorian Heritage homes, will find it very different and pedestrian friendly.

New Condos like  Crystal Blue , The Uptown Residences and U Condominiums are all new projects in the general area. Casa  Condos and the Bloor Street Neighbourhood Condos are just East of this project.

• Manulife Centre -51 Floors
• The Uptown- 48 Floors
• Crystal Blue-34 Floors
• U Condominiums (2)-55 Floors

I really do not think that this high-rise Toronto Condo will change this neighbourhood as much as others propose. Already several high Condos are in the immediate area on Bay St. and the Manulife Centre (1972) really couldnt be much bigger and has yet to change the neighbourhood in 37 years.

Just perhaps, this new Condo development will be a positive anchor to the Heritage community of St. Nicholas Street.

Have you ever noticed that Hollywood directors like to wash down the streets before shooting the scene? In the above picture you will have to guess:

• Did I have the Streets washed down by the City?
• Did It Rain?
• Did I have a Hollywood Director help in his scene?

In doing some research on this post I noticed the size of upcoming Bloor area Condos:

• Uptown-48 Floors
• X Condominiums-45 Floors
• Casa-45 Floors

These are huge Toronto Condos, try and look up from street level at Casa!!

What surprised even me, was that The L Tower Condos are showing 55 Floors, thats going to be really high at Yonge and Front!

Here are updated Toronto Condo Listings, some in the Bay Bloor Area.

Related Posts:

Toronto Condos Downtown

New Condos Revitalize Toronto’s Neighbourhoods

Okay, yes, I’m guilty. I just taught a class on PR, SEO & Social Media this week, and I explicitly told my students that they MUST keep their blogs up to date, updating at least once a week, and I myself have failed. I realize this makes me a hypocrite.

But I’m back on the wagon again, at the Blog World Expo 2009 in las Vegas, NV Right now, listening to Leo Laporte, the man responsible for The Tech Guy Labs. Used to be/work for ZDNet.

Next big thing he says for his company — making live webstreaming and watching video online as easy as watching television. “Make content cheaply and distribute it over the Internet for free – you all could do the next ‘LOST’.”

He’s launching a new platform, Twit.tv, to show his weekly TV shows easily & efficiently through a Roku box.

Sounds complex – check it out for more info: http://twit.tv/

He says the dollars that went to advertising with big media companies will be directed toward smaller niche mediums that demonstrate consistent following. Like his innovative technology, Twit TV.

Lastly, he says, if you’re just doing blogging, should be podcasting and/or webcasting too — b/c we’re all multimedia nerds, essentially. I threw in the nerd part he didn’t.

Big decision to make tonight – hit the club or the slot machines??? Hmmmm … What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, so I’m not tellin’.

There are certainly ideal groups of people who are capable of moving towards a 100 percent Open Source or Linux environment in both their professional and personal lives. I’m not really interested in discussing the political and ideological aspects or why someone would want to make that choice.

The greater and more important question is, who CAN switch to Linux?

Click to read the rest of this article at ZDNet Tech Broiler.

IBM’s Privacy Chief, Harriet Pearson, urges a forward-looking approach for Asian regulators when it comes to data privacy.  In an Interview with ZDNet Asia, Pearson admonishes that regulators “wouldn’t you want to leap ahead, anticipate the direction and then enact laws and policies that try to support growth while protecting people? Why would you want to photocopy a model that has been the subject of a lot of study about how it does not necessarily keep up?”  European laws should not be copied because “policies and laws will always be behind what humans and technology are doing.”

Here’s an amusing piece about a misadventure in online journalism.
It’s about Yahoo sentencing 200,000 Iranians to death!:

‘How much horseshit? Let’s break it down, just for giggles. Koman’s unnamed source for the story was a guy who had translated an Iranian blog post written in Farsi. The post – which, let’s say it again, was written in Farsi, which Koman doesn’t speak – was published on the blog of an avowedly anti-government Iranian student group. In the original post, which Koman quoted without a secondary source or an independent translation, it was claimed that Yahoo’s Malaysian subsidiary had passed on the information after access to their Iranian site was blocked by Tehran. Yahoo doesn’t have an Iranian site, nor does it have a base of operations in Malaysia. Neither Koman nor anyone else at ZDNet bothered to put the allegations to Yahoo before publishing a story which Koman admitted he hadn’t got entirely “buttoned down”…’

See entire article –WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other misadventures in online journalism -by Paul Carr on October 10, 2009 -Tech Crunch

i.Tech Dynamic has come out with a solar-powered Bluetooth headset that you can currently buy on the U.S. market through some of the e-tailers (specifically Amazon.com and Skymall.com).

The product, called SolarVoice 908, is supposedly unique among its product set for its digital background noise reduction features and for its support of Bluetooth Advanced Distribution Profile (A2DP). A flashing green light tells in you when the unit is solar-charging. You can also charge it via a USB cable or a traditional A/C adapter.

i.Tech claims “infinite” standby time while in “optimum” sunlight; or 140 hours with a regular charge. The talk time ceiling is five hours. The suggested retail price is $74.99.


Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/green/?p=7756