Yostivanich

“Until fairly recently, Share­Point was one of those busi­nesses. But now that Microsoft’s Share­Point sales have passed the $1 bil­lion bar­rier (they were $1.3 bil­lion for fis­cal 2009, which ended for Microsoft on June 30), what’s Microsoft’s next big thing? What prod­ucts is the com­pany bet­ting on to become the next big, near-term hits? At Microsoft’s Finan­cial Ana­lyst Meet­ing (FAM) last week, com­pany offi­cials shared a few tid­bits about one of those busi­nesses: Microsoft Sys­tem Cen­ter. Sys­tem Cen­ter encom­passes a vari­ety of system-management tools that Microsoft sells to IT pro­fes­sion­als who want to man­age their Win­dows — and Linux/Unix — clients, servers, hyper­vi­sors and more.” Really a bil­lion for a cruddy sys­tem like SharePoint.

“The Restricted (age over 18) ser­vice lets you con­trol a 3D scant­ily glad girl on your desk with a printed icon. All you need is a web­cam for this fun look­ing aug­mented real­ity appli­ca­tion. You can watch a brief tuto­r­ial video on how this works below.
The Soci­ety AR Girls are avail­able on this site. Aug­mented Real­ity will over role us this year. Aug­mented Real­ity Apps will soon hit the iPhone and more and more web­sites offer expe­ri­ences that only require a web­cam.” What a sex­ist, pos system.

“The Microsoft-Yahoo search deal was big news this past week, and I took plenty of press calls about it, includ­ing from the AP. But to quote what I told the AP, I have to pay them $17.50.” AP really needs to start fix­ing this system.

“Conca’s posi­tion is not shared by the elected lead­ers of New Mexico—if it were, the argu­ing would be over by now. But it is an indi­ca­tion that while the prob­lem of nuclear waste remains unsolved, there are a num­ber of rea­son­able can­di­date solu­tions. Some, like Carls­bad, resem­ble Yucca in kind if not location—find a quiet area and bury the stuff. Oth­ers rely on increas­ingly com­plex recy­cling schemes. But until elected offi­cials imple­ment an alter­na­tive plan—a process, if Yucca is any guide, that could take decades—the waste will lan­guish at 131 stor­age sites around the coun­try.” Evan­tu­ally we are going to have to deal with the nuclear waste.

“Although the sci­en­tific case for anthro­pogenic cli­mate change has never been stronger, the stum­bles and the attacks may be influ­enc­ing a U.S. pub­lic that does not fully under­stand how sci­ence works. A poll in May by Ras­mussen Reports found 39 per­cent of vot­ers believe humans are to blame for global warm­ing, down from 47 per­cent a year ago. These days cli­mate researchers have to scru­ti­nize their work for not only its sci­en­tific impli­ca­tions but also for the public-relations ram­i­fi­ca­tions, too.” Real time data hurts the sci­en­tific world.

“The Sears case also sig­naled a depar­ture from what the commission’s pre­sumed posi­tion that as long as mar­keters wrote detailed pri­vacy poli­cies, they were pro­tected. Sears had included infor­ma­tion about track­ing in its user license agree­ment, but that wasn’t good enough any­more, Mr. Vladeck said. The changes Mr. Vladeck is con­sid­er­ing could mean a dif­fer­ent online world, where sites couldn’t depend on tar­geted ads to make money. But could a site refuse to allow access to peo­ple who wouldn’t hand over data? Mr. Vladeck said that the com­mis­sion would have to con­sider whether that meant busi­nesses were treat­ing con­sumers unfairly, but over all, he said he was not trou­bled by the prob­lems this might pose for mar­keters.” The FTC is over­reach­ing here in a big way and businesses/marketing firms are going to backlash.

“For­mer US Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton has left North Korea with two Amer­i­can jour­nal­ists whose release he has helped to secure. Mr Clinton’s spokesman said the party was fly­ing to Los Ange­les, Cal­i­for­nia, where the reporters would be reunited with their fam­i­lies. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il issued a spe­cial par­don to the jour­nal­ists after meet­ing Mr Clin­ton on Tuesday.”

“A really fast dic­tio­nary… fast like a ninja.” Freak­ing fast.

“The list of omit­ted words includes some which have utterly non-objectionable senses: ass, snatch, pussy, cock, and even screw. (Ass and cock appear through­out the King James Bible.) Every time I think I’ve seen the most out­ra­geous App Store rejec­tion, I’m soon proven wrong. I can’t imag­ine what it will take to top this one. Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to pur­chase a cen­sored dic­tio­nary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.” WTF???

“The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twit­ter, Face­book, MySpace and other social media sites from its net­works, effec­tive imme­di­ately. Yet many within the Pentagon’s high­est ranks find value in the Web 2.0 tools. The Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has 4,000 fol­low­ers on Twit­ter. The Depart­ment of Defense is get­ting ready to unveil a new home page, packed with social media tools. The Army recently ordered all U.S. bases to pro­vide access to Face­book. Top gen­er­als now blog from the bat­tle­field. The Marines say they will issue waivers to the Web 2.0 block­ade, if a “mis­sion crit­i­cal need” can be proven. And they will con­tinue to allow access to the military’s inter­nal “SNS-like ser­vices.” But for most mem­bers of the Corps, access to the real, pub­lic social net­works is now shut off for the next year.”

“The EIA’s analy­sis of the House cli­mate leg­is­la­tion says the aver­age U.S. fam­ily would pay $142 more in energy expenses in 2020, and $583 more in 2030, if it were enacted. The pro­jec­tion from the EIA is in line with pro­jec­tions made by the Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office and the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, and con­tra­dict claims by energy and busi­ness trade groups that con­sumers would pay thou­sands of dol­lars more a year under the plan to fight global warm­ing.” Not bad.

“As I con­tinue to flesh out my MooTools MVC frame­work, I found a neat way to imple­ment a tem­plat­ing sys­tem, using only what MooTools gives me. The goal of tem­plat­ing sys­tems is to allow you to write in your tar­get for­mat (usu­ally HTML), and denote where vari­ables should be tied in.” Pretty neat.

“As we first reported the exis­tence of a few days ago, Google’s Theme Gallery for Chrome has gone live. On the page, you can find 29 offi­cial themes that range from sub­tle (greyscale) to hideously ugly (legal pad).”

“Idly chit-chat and non-promotional con­ver­sa­tion is kind of the point of Twit­ter, not what­ever brand­ing and syn­er­gis­tic strat­egy might be laid out in such an (alleged) memo.”

“Hori­naja is a slide-show ready-to-use for scriptaculous/prototype or jQuery. Hori­naja is inno­vant because he use your mouse wheel for a best nav­i­ga­tion.” Very cool.

“Police in India are guilty of wide­spread human rights vio­la­tions, includ­ing beat­ings, tor­ture and ille­gal killings, a new report alleges. The US-based group Human Rights Watch says India’s polic­ing sys­tem facil­i­tates and even encour­ages abuses. It says there has been lit­tle change in atti­tudes, train­ing or equip­ment since the police was formed in colo­nial times with the aim to con­trol the population.”

“The global rise of Face­book is noth­ing less than astound­ing. In the month of June alone it gained 24 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors world­wide, com­pared to the month before, for a total of 340 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors world­wide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trail­ing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, accord­ing to com­Score (see table below). Face­book itself only offi­cially acknowl­edges 250 mil­lion active reg­is­tered users (but you don’t have to be a reg­is­tered user to visit some Face­book pages).” Trail­ing Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, wow.

JPL and NASA pro­vide info on objects approach­ing Earth.

“Mr. Ritholtz notes that the gov­ern­ment wasn’t always so will­ing to pro­vide a safety net to banks. He con­trasts efforts of George W. Bush last fall to those of Franklin D. Roo­sevelt in the Great Depres­sion. Roo­sevelt, he says, came to the res­cue of ordi­nary peo­ple, financ­ing pub­lic works pro­grams that cre­ated jobs and mak­ing mort­gage loans to home­own­ers fac­ing fore­clo­sure. It all started to change in 1971, Mr. Ritholtz writes, when the gov­ern­ment dished out $250 mil­lion in loan guar­an­tees to Lock­heed, which was ail­ing because it had sub­mit­ted low bids to win gov­ern­ment mil­i­tary con­tacts. That bailout paved the way for the $1.5 bil­lion res­cue of Chrysler in 1980. He writes that this res­cue left the car­maker with the same man­age­ment and did noth­ing to change oner­ous union contracts.”

“Wall Street gos­sips tell us that Apple (AAPL) exec­u­tives have dropped hints sug­gest­ing the com­pany is con­sid­er­ing cre­at­ing a ser­vice that would allow iTunes Store account hold­ers to use those accounts to make pur­chases on par­tic­i­pat­ing third-party sites across the Inter­net.” I won’t use it.

“And in gen­eral: is deal­ing with these gov­ern­ment agen­cies any worse than, say, deal­ing with the cable com­pany? The prej­u­dice against gov­ern­ment seems to have become free-floating, unat­tached to any actual expe­ri­ence.” Good question.

Only FoxNews can con­tra­dict itself.

“North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has granted a “spe­cial par­don” to two jailed U.S. jour­nal­ists which releases them from deten­tion, the offi­cial KCNA news agency reported on Tues­day.” Bill Clin­ton just got there and they are already par­doned, dang.

“Brands and agen­cies alike, believe that chang­ing your mes­sage is the best way to spark inter­est from the con­sumer. When you have noth­ing inter­est­ing to say, change some­thing. I believe that doing the ground­work, under­stand­ing the place your brand fills in the consumer’s heart, spend time cre­at­ing a strate­gic plat­form, choose a bril­liant posi­tion­ing and live with it.”