Harish Raju Musings

HP experienced revenue declines in every area of its business with the exception of Services, which is its EDS unit purchased last year. Services revenue increased 116 percent to $8.7 billion due mostly to the acquisition.

Revenue from notebooks dropped 13 percent, and desktops 25 percent. HP’s total PC shipments were also down 4 percent for the quarter.Chief Executive Mark Hurd remained upbeat during a call with analysts. “We executed well in a challenging market,” he said Wednesday afternoon. “I’m particularly pleased with the results of our Services segment. We now have a second segment with significant recurring revenues.”

The Services unit contributed one third of the company’s profits during the first quarter.

But the Services business was the lone bright spot.

“Though there were pockets of organic growth, the slowdown in IT spending was global,” Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak said.

HP earnings dip nearly 10%, will cut salaries | Business Tech - CNET News

Now that the iPhone SDK has officially been released and the Apple App Store is open for business, it’s time to write killer mobile applications! To do that, you’ll need to use several powerful (and possibly unfamiliar) tools: Xcode, Interface Builder, Objective-C, and then the iPhone SDK itself. It can all be a little overwhelming at first. Learn how to write your first table-based iPhone application from Bill Dudney, an experienced iPhone developer.

The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Writing Your First iPhone Application

The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

Azure reduces the need for up-front technology purchases, and it enables developers to quickly and easily create applications running in the cloud by using their existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework. In addition to managed code languages supported by .NET, Azure will support more programming languages and development environments in the near future. Azure simplifies maintaining and operating applications by providing on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web and connected applications. Infrastructure management is automated with a platform that is designed for high availability and dynamic scaling to match usage needs with the option of a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Azure provides an open, standards-based and interoperable environment with support for multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML.

Microsoft also offers cloud applications ready for consumption by customers such as Windows Live™, Microsoft Dynamics™, and other Microsoft Online Services for business such as Microsoft Exchange Online and SharePoint® Online. The Azure Services Platform lets developers provide their own unique customer offerings by offering the foundational components of compute, storage, and building block services to author and compose applications in the cloud.

About - What is the Azure Services Platform? | Azure Services Platform

Tags: microsoft, cloudcomputing, azure services platform

What caused the rise of the PC platform? Undoubtedly, it was the clones. No other platform was ever cloned to the extent that the PC was. (The Apple ][ was cloned by Franklin computers and others before Apple sued them out of existence, and Apple did briefly flirt with licensed Macintosh clones from 1995 until 1997). If IBM hadn’t come late to the personal computer party, and hadn’t rushed its first PC from off-the-shelf parts and a third-party operating system, this story might have read very differently today.

The only person who predicted the Attack of the Clones was Bill Gates, who recalled that many mainframe computers had spawned work-alike clones in the past. It was this foresight that enabled him to get IBM to agree to a contract whereby Microsoft could license MS-DOS to third parties. IBM, thinking in mainframe timelines and assuming that clones would be perpetually years behind the originals, thought nothing of this stipulation. They were only concerned with getting the lowest possible flat rate for MS-DOS (which they mistakenly called PC-DOS) in the first place.

Thirty years later, computers had firmly cemented themselves in the public imagination. They were huge boxes, covered with blinking lights and whirring reels of tape. Banks and big corporations all had computer rooms, closely guarded by a priesthood of programmers and administrators. Science fiction novels and movies imagined impossibly brilliant supercomputers that guided spaceships and controlled societies, yet they were still room-sized behemoths. The idea of a personal computer, something small and light enough for someone to pick up and carry around, wasn’t even on the radar.

Total share: 30 years of personal computer market share figures: Page 1

Tags: microsoft, apple, ibm, pc

Part of the issue is that programming systems are defined by the user’s needs, which are infinitely varied across companies. Once you step out of standard software packages and into the custom code world, every system is completely unique and is shaped by the users and by the individual humans working on the project.

This is one of the joys of working in software in my experience, since even problems that are similar to ones you’ve solved before can add new twists and features, keeping the work fresh and challenging.

At the same time though, this is what prevents me from referring to software development as engineering, because there is no silver bullet, no common standard or schema for doing things.

We are artists that are really good at math and logic.

Look at the estimation problems we have in software. How many of you out there can truly, honestly, to the day pick out when you will be finished with a software project?

The bigger the project, the rarer this ability is. Sure you can fudge your numbers and add padding so you can be reasonably sure you won’t be late, but calling your complete date agressively is near impossible in large projects with many team members simply because you are working with thought-stuff and unlike building a bridge, you can’t pull a template from the last 40 bridges you’ve built and nail down a relative time line.

Additionally, the human factor kicks in on large projects. It has been well noted by researchers like Sackman, Grant, and Erikson that “very good professional programmers are 10 times as productive as poor ones”.

This is also unlike building a building where the variance in productivity between say, people putting up drywall is far less than 10 times. If software development was more like engineering you’d be able to walk in and say “oh, you want an invoice billing system, that’ll take 500 hours” and you’d hit that target nearly every time. This is far from reality.

Rejecting Software Engineering - Eric Wise

Tags: 10xSoftware Engineering, Software Engineering as an art

IPhone 2.2: Safari Redesign, Possible Cut and Paste | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

Chrome’s use of the Open Source Windows Template Library:

WTL is distributed under the MS-PL or Microsoft Public License. This is a VERY relaxed license that basically says “have fun, and don’t call if there’s trouble.” In the Open Source world, licenses like that make people smile.WTL is a C++ library for Win32 development and is kind of like MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), but a lot more lightweight. It was originally worked on by Nenad Stefanovic as an internal thing at Microsoft that was then released as an unsupported sample. Nenad is still listed on the old SourceForge project.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen - The Weekly Source Code 33 - Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome

Tags: Chrome, Google, Microsoft

Apple’s iLife is a great suite for managing and editing your movies, music, and photos with an affordable collection of software applications… if you have a Mac. If Apple ported it to Windows, I think they’d sell a million copies overnight because the apps are all incredibly easy to use. While software bundles like Roxio Easy Media Creator and Nero 7 Ultra Edition include everything plus the kitchen sink for media editing and management, they both fail to make the process as elegant as using Apple’s iLife. Microsoft hasn’t stepped up to the plate to offer all the features, although Windows Vista does include some of the features in the Premium and Ultimate flavors.
Here’s list of apps to build your own iLife suite for Windows.

The iLife equivalent for Windows XP is:

Piscasa for Photos
Mixcraft for Music
Movie Maker for Movies
MyDVD for DVD authoring

The iLife equivalent for Windows Vista is:
Picasa for Photos
Mixcraft for Music
Movie Maker for Movies
DVD Maker for DVD authoring

iLife for Windows

Tags: iLifefor Windows

Next-Generation Intel® MicroarchitectureIntel’s next-generation microarchitecture (codenamed “Nehalem”) represents the next step in processor energy efficiency, performance, and dynamic scalability. Designed from the ground up to take advantage of hafnium-based Intel® 45nm hi-k metal gate silicon technology, Nehalem will also be the first to introduce Intel® QuickPath technology.

Now performance really does come “on-demand”We’ve expanded and redefined what’s possible for technologies to come:

* Dynamic scalability, managed cores, threads, cache, interfaces, and power for energy-efficient performance on demand.

* Design and performance scalability for server, workstation, PC, and mobile demands with support for 2-8+ cores and up to 16+ threads with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT), and scalable cache sizes, system interconnects, and integrated memory controllers.

* Simultaneous multi-threading brings high-performance applications into mainstream computing with 1-16+ threads optimized for a new generation multi-core processor architecture.

* Scalable shared memory of Intel QuickPath technology features memory distributed to each processor with integrated memory controllers and high-speed point-to-point interconnects to unleash the performance of next-generation Intel® multi-core processors.

* Multi-level shared cache improves performance and efficiency by reducing latency to frequently used data.

Next-Generation Intel® Microarchitecture — Nehalem