Wednesday 28 July 2010

Bing Is The Biggest Loser In Yahoo Japan's New Google Deal

Bing Is The Biggest Loser In Yahoo Japan's New Google Deal:

bartz ballmer sign

"Yahoo Japan's new deal to farm out search and advertising to Google is the worst news for Microsoft Bing, which is in the process of taking over Yahoo's search technology in the U.S."

Terry Semel Was Paid Half A Billion Dollars To Run Yahoo Into The Ground

Terry Semel Was Paid Half A Billion Dollars To Run Yahoo Into The Ground:

"This jaw-dropping reminder of how much money Semel was paid to run Yahoo into the ground comes from the Wall Street Journal's wrap up of the 25 top paid executives of public companies over the last decade."


BBC News - Dogs 'mimic movements of owners'

BBC News - Dogs 'mimic movements of owners':

"The new evidence supports a theory of learning which suggests that a system of 'mirror neurons' and the capacity to imitate are forged as an animal learns and develops, rather than this system being inborn."

This tendency to mirror what we see it a hardwired bask part of our brain structure. For a virtual reality to work it needs to enable this mirror response in the viewer.

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Combing More than One Document Library in a View




Here is a trick I have learned. Say you have more than one Document Library in a site. Access could be controlled by AD membership. You want to show all three document libraries in a view. Each document library has a view for Open and a view for Closed documents. What you want is to create two views, once showing all Open documents in the three libraries, the other showing all Closed. If all you have is MOSS out of the box and now web parts from a firm like Quest this trick might meet your needs.

First create 2 empty Document Libraries. Nothing will ever go in them, they are just place holders. In this example they are called All Open View and All Closed view.


Open each document library and select Edit Page. Here is the trick. Add all the other document libraries you want to show.


And apply the views to the document libraries. You can even delete the document library All Closed Views. So you have a page called All Open Views with three documents libraries with their views set to Open and a view called All Closed Documents with three documents libraries with their views set to closed.



Remember that you need to have the views created before you insert the document library on the pages. Document libraries inserted on pages don't update changes to views. Also be sure the security on you place holder document libraries (All Closed Views, All Open Views) is set so no one can add anything to them. Remember they are just place holders.
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Friday 23 July 2010

BBC News - Neurons to power future computers

BBC News - Neurons to power future computers: "Researchers are developing novel computers by mimicking the way that neurons are built and how they talk to each other."

Diagram of sensory areas in human brain, SPL

SharePoint Search 2010 in a Small Scale Farm - Hardware - Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

SharePoint Search 2010 in a Small Scale Farm - Hardware - Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs


Web Servers Specs

There are four Web servers in the farm. 3 are used to serve content (2 of which are also used as the Search Query/Search Query and Site Settings Servers). The other server is used as the search crawl target (to reduce the load on our content servers while search is crawling)

Server

WFE/Query Server/QP

Crawl Target

Processor(s)

2 quad core @2.33 GHz

2 quad core @2.33 GHz

RAM

32 GB

16 GB

Operating system

Windows Server® 2008, 64 bit

Windows Server 2008, 64 bit

Size of the SharePoint drive

6x146GB 15K SAS (3 RAID 1 Disks)

Disk 1: OS and Product

Disk 2: Swap, BLOB Cache and Index

Disk 3: Logs and Temp directory

3x146GB 15K SAS (3 RAID 1 Disks)

Disk 1: OS and Product

Disk 2: Swap and BLOB Cache

Disk 3: Logs and Temp directory

Number of NICs

2

2

NIC Speed

1 Gigabit

1 Gigabit

Authentication

NTLM

NTLM

Software version

SharePoint Server 2010 (pre-release version)

SharePoint Server 2010 (pre-release version)

Services running locally

Query Server/Search Query and Site Settings

No services

Search Crawler Specs

There is one SharePoint 2010 Search crawler server in the farm.

Server

Search Crawler

Processor(s)

2 quad core @2.5GHz Xeon

RAM

16 GB

Operating system

Windows Server 2008 R2, 64 bit

Size of the SharePoint drive

4x136GB 15K SAS (2 RAID 1 Disks)

2x418GB 15K, SAS (RAID 1) *

Disk 1: OS and Product

Disk 2: Swap and BLOB Cache

Disk 3: Logs and Temp directory

Number of NICs

2

NIC Speed

1 Gigabit

Authentication

NTLM

Software version

SharePoint Server 2010 (pre-release version)

Services running locally

Crawl Server

* These drives were big ,not because of a requirement from the product, but because they were readily available at the time when the hardware was being configured

Database Servers Specs

This is the database server that is dedicated to SharePoint 2010 Search.

Server

SQL Server - Search DBs

Processor(s)

2 quad core @3.2 GHz

RAM

32 GB

OS

Windows Server 2008 R2, 64-bit

Storage and geometry

2x136GB 15K SAS (RAID 0)

6x60GB Solid State Disks, SATA (RAID 5)

Disk 1: OS. SQL Server y Swap

Disk 2: Search and Temp DBs and log files

Number of NICs

2

NIC Speed

1 Gigabit

Authentication

NTLM

Software version

SQL Server 2008 R2 (Pre-Release)


Microsoft Developers - Are you ready with 2010 technologies? - UK Technical Advisory Services - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Microsoft Developers - Are you ready with 2010 technologies? - UK Technical Advisory Services - Site Home - TechNet Blogs:

"We are delivering a series of development guidance around Microsoft Visual Studio� 2010/Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and data access technologies, Microsoft SharePoint� 2010, Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server� 2008/R2, to enable partners on these latest technologies. Below is the list of some of the technologies on which we can provide guidance across the software development life cycle.

Please feel free to call us at 44 844 800 6006 Option 4 or send an e-mail to uktas@microsoft.com."

Thursday 22 July 2010

Microsoft Will Give a Free Windows Phone 7 Device to Every Employee

Microsoft Will Give a Free Windows Phone 7 Device to Every Employee: "Even before we hear the first sales estimates, we can safely say that a Windows Phone 7 device will be in the hands of a rather large user base. How do I know that? Well, Microsoft announced it will be giving a free Phone 7 device to every employee – all 90,000 of them."

Saturday 17 July 2010

The Genocide Behind Your Smart Phone - Newsweek

The Genocide Behind Your Smart Phone - Newsweek: "A key mover behind the Congo campaign is the anti-genocide Enough Project: witness its clever spoof of the famous Apple commercial. Major names like Hillary Clinton and Nicole Richie have gotten on board. And the timing is perfect: new rules requiring American-listed companies to improve their supply-chain transparency are folded into the financial-reform bill that passed Congress this week."

Friday 16 July 2010

Photo-friendly Facebook trumps photo-sharing sites

Photo-friendly Facebook trumps photo-sharing sites: "Facebook, which has Microsoft Corporation among its investors, is growing at three times the speed of top specialty photo websites, according to data from comScore."

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Thursday 15 July 2010

BBC News - Government has 'let down' video game development in UK

BBC News - Government has 'let down' video game development in UK: "The games industry say it has been 'let down' by the government, following its decision not to award tax breaks."

The premise giving the sector 20% tax relief had been floated by the Labour government before the last election.

But the Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey, told delegates at the video game Develop conference in Brighton that the case "had not been made".

Dr Richard Wilson, chief executive officer of game trade association Tiga, told BBC News he was "disappointed".

"We had already made a very convincing case to the previous government and both the Conservative Party and Lib-Dems said that they supported tax relief during the last parliament.

"We clearly convinced them at one point. What's essentially happened is the Conservative Party - and George Osbourne in particular - reneged on that promise.

"It's hard not to feel let down by them," he added.

BBC News - Broadband Britain rollout delayed by three years

BBC News - Broadband Britain rollout delayed by three years: "The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has blamed a lack of funds for the government's decision to delay the roll out of 2 megabits per second broadband in the UK."

The previous government had set 2012 as a deadline for network to be in place.

Mr Hunt said he did not think there was "sufficient funding in place" to meet that goal.

BT also warned that it will cost billions to get fast broadband to every part of Britain.

Steve Robertson, chief executive of BT Openreach, told BBC 5 live's Drive programme that the goal could not be achieved without around £2bn in public funding.

Research Shows SharePoint Surge Continues but Strategies Lacking | EndUserSharePoint.com

Research Shows SharePoint Surge Continues but Strategies Lacking | EndUserSharePoint.com:

"Half of the smaller businesses implementing SharePoint are addressing the issues of information management for the first time. Even in the largest organizations, a quarter of the businesses have no previous experience with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) or Document Management (DM) systems. As a result, only 22 percent provide any guidance to staff on the use of content types and classification. In addition, just 15 percent have retention policies and legal discovery procedures – risking content chaos within SharePoint as well as outside of it, according to the AIIM report."

BBC News - Internet has 'not become the great leveller’

BBC News - Internet has 'not become the great leveller’: "'The internet has not become the great leveller that it was once thought it could be,' according to Harvard academic Ethan Zuckerman."

Ethan Zuckerman

Mr Zuckerman was speaking at the TED Global (Technology Entertainment and Design) conference in Oxford.

He said that the web was now contrary to the original utopian vision and users focused on information from a handful of wealthy countries.

"It's making us 'imaginary cosmopolitans'," he told delegates.

Social networks, he said, made the problem worse with the majority of people sharing information with folk who share their world-view.

"We think we're getting a broad view of the world, because it's possible that our television, newspapers and internet could be giving us a vastly wider picture than was available for our parents or grandparents," he said.

"When we look at what's actually happening, our world-view might actually be narrowing."

Mr Zuckerman, an entrepreneur, blogger and researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said that it was his aim to change the situation and realise the original vision of the net.

Microsoft Channel Chief: Potential BPOS Marketplace? | MSPmentor Managed Services News & Blog

Microsoft Channel Chief: Potential BPOS Marketplace? | MSPmentor Managed Services News & Blog:

"Roskill certainly didn’t predict that Microsoft would create a BPOS application marketplace. But the clues he shared suggest BPOS will become more than basic hosted applications. It sounds like Microsoft will find a way for VARs and MSPs to truly add value, rather than simply reselling standard hosted applications."

By the numbers: Do we have Facebook fatigue? - CNN.com

By the numbers: Do we have Facebook fatigue? - CNN.com: "The other problem with the possibility of hitting peak-Facebook? There's only one way to go from there and that's down. Users are finicky, and Facebook could find itself caught in a battle of just trying to retain users who might jump ship to Google's rumored new network or even just decide they are tired of maintaining a social networking profile."

Or as I have been thinking for some time, that the Internet web is really governed more like fashion, trends come and go. Microsoft is sort of the collector of trends converting those that last in to business tools.

Is Facebook becoming a 'tool' for cheating spouses? - CNN.com

Is Facebook becoming a 'tool' for cheating spouses? - CNN.com: "A recent survey by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that 81 percent of divorce attorneys have seen an increase in the number of cases using social networking evidence during the past five years. More than 66 percent of those attorneys said the No. 1 site most often used as evidence is Facebook with its 400 million registered users."

No business case in half of SharePoint implementations - Page 1 - Enterprise Business Applications

No business case in half of SharePoint implementations - Page 1 - Enterprise Business Applications:

"Half of implementations of Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint collaboration platform go ahead without a formal business case, according to research from a content management industry association. And that’s causing confusion on the content management and records management sides of the house, says the lead researcher on the study.

"The ease of creating SharePoint sites means end-users can implement the technology. It’s a bit of a nightmare scenario, Miles said, but “it would be an impossible scenario” with other enterprise applications.

According to the survey, a third of organizations have no plans regarding where SharePoint should be used, and where it shouldn’t.

“If you give people unfettered control to create these sites, they will,” Miles said. Every meeting, every social event can spawn a new site, and companies often don’t have end-of-life policies to control their lifecycles, he said. This site sprawl is an issue for 25 per cent of users, according to the survey.


Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Wednesday 14 July 2010

BBC News - Microsoft announces Windows tablet PC plans

BBC News - Microsoft announces Windows tablet PC plans: "Tablet devices which run the Windows 7 operating system will launch in the coming months, according to Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer."Steve Ballmer and Slate

This is a space Microsoft has been no good at before. To be honest, I really don't know if I want Windows on my Slate. I would like it a bit better to manage documents on it and edit my work documents from a Slate, that would give me a great deal more mobility. But the simple iPad/iPhone/iTouch UI seems to be just about right for a small device. I would have just a larger version of windows mobile.

I guess the key point is that Microsoft should probably come up with something other than Windows for getting small. Microsoft messed up on mobile because it needed to keep using Windows.

BBC News - Search engine Bing gains market share

BBC News - Search engine Bing gains market share: Microsoft's search engine Bing has shown impressive growth in its first year say industry experts

Bing.com search engine

Gordan Brown on the political potential of the Internet



England's Al Gore speaks at TED.

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world | Video on TED.com

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world | Video on TED.com

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Milo! Microsoft may have just transformed Virtual Reality

I blog about both collaboration and virtual reality. My collaboration tool is Microsoft SharePoint and my work keeps me in the Microsoft world. To date my interest in Virtual Reality and my work with Microsoft have been separate, and then along came Milo:



Milo is a Virtual Reality being that can be interacted with verbally, visually and kinetically. No keyboards. This demo is the most advanced concept I have seen yet for interactions between Machine and Human.

Monday 12 July 2010

Facebook to launch Panic Button

Facebook has announced it is to launch a "panic button" application on its social networking site.

The button, aimed at children and teenagers, will report abuse to the UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) and Facebook.

The application will also appear on their homepage to say that "they are in control online".

The launch follows months of negotiation between Ceop and Facebook, which initially resisted the idea.

Ceop, the government law enforcement agency tasked with tracking down online sex offenders, called for a panic button to be installed on social networking sites last November.

Bebo became the first network to add the button with MySpace following suit, but Facebook resisted the change, saying its own reporting systems were sufficient.

Pressure mounted on Facebook following the rape and murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall by a 33-year-old convicted sex offender, posing as a teenage boy, who she met on Facebook.

Sunday 11 July 2010

JavaScript Kit- Your comprehensive JavaScript, DHTML, CSS, and Ajax stop

JavaScript Kit- Your comprehensive JavaScript, DHTML, CSS, and Ajax stop: "'Learning jQuery (Packt Publishing)' book review We review 'Learning jQuery', a book aimed at introducing new comers to the jQuery framework."

Saturday 10 July 2010

BBC News - Five quits Project Canvas scheme

BBC News - Five quits Project Canvas scheme: "Five has pulled out of Project Canvas - the development of an internet-connected TV set-top box.

The channel, which has been put up for sale by parent company RTL, is reviewing its digital strategy and does not see the project as a priority.

Its share of the �16m scheme is likely to be funded by partners the BBC, ITV, BT, Channel 4 and TalkTalk."

Rober1236 Jua the Cyber Trekker of Second Life

Friday 9 July 2010

SVG Intro

What is SVG?
  • SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics
  • SVG is used to define vector-based graphics for the Web
  • SVG defines the graphics in XML format
  • SVG graphics do NOT lose any quality if they are zoomed or resized
  • Every element and every attribute in SVG files can be animated
  • SVG is a W3C recommendation
  • SVG integrates with other W3C standards such as the DOM and XSL


Another great intro by W3School.

The famous evolution of SharePoint graph up to 2007

JavaScript name types

JavaScript has a lot of ways of talking about time. W3School provides and excellent summary of all JavaScript data types.


XHTML vs HTML

Well the time has come for SharePoint UI developer to fully embrace XHTML. Hopefully we have all been coding for years in XHTML standards, but if its always good to remember the fundemental strengths of XHTML.

The Most Important Differences:
  • XHTML elements must be properly nested
  • XHTML elements must always be closed
  • XHTML elements must be in lowercase
  • XHTML documents must have one root element

w3school is probably the best place to send your developers to get their heads around the new world of JavaScript, XML, and XHTML. Its stresses the fundamentals that we tend to lose sight of in our day to day work.

»XPath Evaluation on XML Streams« Project

As XML data becomes a de facto standard on the Web, querying XML data is becoming an issue of great importance, a real research challenge. Several solutions have been proposed in the last years to this challenge, described in various working drafts of W3C or research papers. As a core of this common effort has been identified a navigational approach for information localization in XML data, comprised in a powerful language called XPath...


http://www.pms.ifi.lmu.de/forschung/xpath-eval.html

XML Namespaces Explained

There are really two fundamental needs for namespaces:

To disambiguate between two elements that happen to share the same name

To group elements relating to a common idea together
OK, so these statements are a bit vague - let's give some examples here:

To disambiguate between elements that happen to share the same name...

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/xml-namespaces-explained

Limits of SharePoint 2007

Mark Harrison: SharePoint Scaling Limits: "I frequently get asked for SharePoint scaling limits so I though I would blog an entry I can refer people to.


First an extract from the Capacity Planning section of the Windows SharePoint Services Administration guide which answers general WSS limits questions:

None of these are hard limits enforced by the system. They are guidelines for designing a server that has good overall performance.

  • Site collections (Database scope) 50,000 ... Total throughput degrades as the number of site collections increases.
  • Web sites (Web site scope) 2,000 ... The interface for enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well much
    beyond 2,000 subsites.
  • Web sites (Site collection) 250,000 - You can create a very large total number of Web sites by nesting the subsites. For example, 100
    sites each with 1000 subsites is 100,100 Web sites.
  • Documents (Folder scope) 2,000 ... The interfaces for enumerating documents in a folder do not perform well beyond a thousand entries.
  • Documents (Library scope) 2 million ... You can create very large document libraries by nesting folders.
  • Security principals (Web site scope) 2,000 ... The size of the access control list is limited to a few thousand security principals, in other words users and groups in the Web site.
  • Users ( Web site scope) 2 million ... You can add millions of people to your Web site by using Microsoft Windows security groups to manage security instead of using individual users.
  • Items (List scope) 2,000 ... The interface for enumerating list items does not perform well beyond a few thousand items.
  • Web Parts (Page scope) 100 ... Pages with more than 100 Web Parts are slow to render.
  • Web Part personalization (Page scope) 10,000 ... Pages with more than a few thousand user personalizations are slow to render.
  • Lists (Web site scope) 2,000 ... The interface for enumerating lists and libraries in a Web site does not perform well beyond a few thousand entries.
  • Document size (File scope) 50 MB ... The file save performance degrades as the file size grows. The default maximum is 50 MB. This maximum is enforced by the system, but you can change it to any value up to 2 GB (2047 MB) if you have applied Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 1.