20 June 2006 in Business | Comments (3)

Stumbled accross an interesting article on the stuff business pages this evening about the NZ tech sector. This includes all sectors in technology and provided an interesting break down of the relative sizes of those sectors:

Top Technology Sectors by size:
1 Appliances ($1, 088 million)
2 Navigational Aids ($540m)
3 IT services and Support ($463m)
4 Healthcare Products ($440.5m)
5 Biotech ($277.4m)
6 Electronics ($259.4m)
7 Software Development ($243.8m)
8 Agritech ($240m)
9 Digital Media ($172.4m)
10 Production Equipment and Materials Handling ($164.8m)

Overall I don’t think software is actually doing all that well in this list. Admitedly once you combine development with IT services and support it gets to second place but we should easily be taking a first position place.

To read the full article click here

– JD

16 June 2006 in Blogging, Intergen | Comments (2)

Gabriel Smith, a fellow Intergenite is now blogging which is very cool (I’m trying to slowly convince everyone to blog! ).

Gabe is going to be blogging about his soon to be released child and tech stuff as well. If you don’t know Gabe, he’s into HDTV, PVR technology, Coding and general gadgets. Good to have in your RSS reader and always good for providing advice when you’re looking into any of those topics

And for a bit of a Friday funny… the url is http://www.gabelog.net.nz (don’t say it too fast… great marketing if you ask me )

- JD

16 June 2006 in Business, Microsoft | Comments (0)

Ray Ozzie joined Microsoft as their CTO when his company, Groove Networks, was acquired in March 2005. Effective immediately he has taken over as the Chief Software Architect, the role that Bill Gates has had since stepping down as Microsoft CEO.

In two years time Bill Gates will cease working at Microsoft full time and start working full time for the Gates Foundation.

This will be interesting since Ray Ozzie is so focused on web based delivery. Very clever guy but I’m sure the share price will slip a bit on this news.

- JD

16 June 2006 in Code | Comments (0)

A week ago I posted a blog entry detailing my concerns about some elements of Ruby on Rails (RoR) and had a terrific response from a wide variety of people. Overall it would seem that most people agreed to an extent with most of the points but many didn’t see them as major problems but more things that needed to be worked on. Of course some people found some points not to be problems at all and that’s good for them.

Thanks to all of those that posted comments, I hope you found the discussion as useful as I did.

I think that despite investing ~$150 in buying the books on Rails and Ruby that I’ll be putting it on the back burner for the time being. I’ll keep an eye on what is going on in that space but I already have a lot on my plate just keeping track of some of the really cool stuff that’s coming out from Microsoft (and from people building products in that space) in the next six months.

- JD

15 June 2006 in Events | Comments (0)

Miraz has posted that the WebStock videos are now available online for everyone to view.

WebStock was a fantastic event and I haven’t met anyone yet who didn’t come away having learnt something and with a different perspective on a few different things. Well worth watching a few of these if you couldn’t attend. Also it’s impressive to see the multitude of video formats and associated material.

View the video selection here

- JD

14 June 2006 in Code, Microsoft | Comments (2)

Anybody who reads my blog that is also having a serious play around with the new Office System and in particular SharePoint 2007 will want to check out the SharePoint 2007 SDK. While parts of the documentation process are still in progress I haven’t often seen SDK content that is as complete as this.

The samples are separated out from the huge 117MB chm file but I would strongly recommend getting the full SDK. It makes reasonably easy reading too

- JD

13 June 2006 in Code, Microsoft | Comments (2)

Just a quick post about SharePoint 2007 for anyone who is also playing with it. Make sure you disable the Windows Defender real-time protection when creating new sites. It intercepts and prevents changes to your hosts file so your sites don’t get created properly even though the site creation will claim to have been a success.

This shouldn’t be a problem on an actual server but while tinkering at home it’s worth noting.

- JD

12 June 2006 in Microsoft, Windows | Comments (7)

I’ve been using Windows Vista Beta 2 at home for a few days now (bit of a laggard I know) and have been enjoying reading other peoples thoughts on it. One thing I’ve seen as a common theme is comments about memory consumption. For a bit of a laugh I thought I’d see just how bad Vista’s memory consumption was and here is what I found:

Windows 95, Recommended memory: 8MB

Memory in 1995 cost $500 for an 8MB SIMM

Windows XP, Recommended memory: 128MB

Memory in 2001 cost $60 for 128MB

Windows Vista memory requirements ~1GB

Memory at the moment is $121 for 1GB

Some things to note:

1. 2001 was the year that had the massive memory glut and prices became stupidly cheap. Perhaps this was fortunate for the release of XP.
2. The memory price in 2001 was a rough conversion of mine to the NZD plus our magically tech gear markup.
3. There is still six months of memory price drops before Vista actually comes out.
4. I’ve used the “Vista Premium Ready” Certification for this example. If comparing to the “Vista Capable” certification which requires 512MB it would be $61 for 512MB – only a buck more than XP prices.
5. I read the recommended memory requirements for Windows 95 off the Windows 95 box that I still have in my closet that my Dad brought the day Windows 95 came out

Looking 6 months ahead, I’d be willing to predict that memory prices will be approximately in line with the costs of Windows XP which is pretty darn good considering the massive memory glut for the time. According to Yahoo the price of a computer capable of running windows Vista will be approximately 70% of the cost of a computer that was required to run XP.

So I don’t quiet get why exactly is Vista’s memory usage really an issue? It surely can’t be a price issue.

- JD