One of the oft-mentioned improvements in Visual SourceSafe 2005 is what is affectionately called the "LAN booster" service. Configurable in the SourceSafe Administration tool under Server/Configure in the LAN tab, it can be enabled by checking the misleadingly titled checkbox "Enable LAN service for this computer".
After you've checked and applied, you'll notice a new process running - SSService.exe (appearing as a new service - Visual SourceSafe LAN Service - running under the LocalService account in your service manager).
There are a lot of claims that this module is doing wonders for performance - for instance that it is stream-compressing all of the content on the wire, improving the speed "3-5x!". However, after some analysis I've determined that it's doing nothing of the sort.
In other words the "LAN Booster" doesn't make SourceSafe an actual client-server source control system (the Internet web service sort-of does for a limited set of purposes, and again only with the plug-in in Visual Studio 2005), and its performance improvement is marginal at best in real world use.
One of the most important software development tools out of Redmond, remarkably, is Visual SourceSafe - In shops across the land, it is the source control system.
Granted those shops probably didn't kick the tires of the competitors, rigorously choosing amongst the competing SCM tools before investing their time and codebase to VSS. Instead they likely found it bundled in their MSDN subscription, or attached to some other Microsoft product, and read soothing words about the excellent integration with Visual Studio. They brought that poor, weepy-eyed little source control tool in from the rain, gave it some cocoa, and sat it down by the fireplace. Soon enough it became their hammer, and an integral part of their development process (probably a hated part of their development process. If you've ever fought with an offline complex Visual Studio project, you'll know what I mean by that).
The remarkable part of all of this is the absolutely terrible treatment that Microsoft has given this product. It recently got the first real update that it has gotten since Visual Studio 6, remaining largely static over the intervening period (with trivial little changes). While you could say that you shouldn't mess with something that works, Visual SourceSafe has carried some absolutely terrible flaws through the years, most obvious being the file database method of operation that led to endless security and reliability problems. SourceSafe 2005 didn't do anything to fix that fundamental problem.
Even with the new release, Visual SourceSafe users are still used and abused, though. I decided to put the product through its paces, both for consulting purposes, and for yafla software development, and I am absolutely amazed by the problems and pitfalls. From missing options (like turning off HTTPS from the client when trying to use the internet option), to terrible typos and transpositions in their instructions (did they read these things? Things like telling you to run aspnet_iisreg rather than the correct aspnet_regiis), to installs that just completely fail to work under anything but a cleanroom install (for instance it insists that you don't really have IIS if your first website isn't internally coded "1"). On three separate machines the internet hosting option (one of the major new options, finally adding marginal client-server functionality, albeit with a host of caveats and limitations) didn't install properly. I finally had to setup a new, freshly installed virtual machine to give it what was likely the only environment they tested it in, and it appears to install marginally properly.
If, through some magic, I get this product working properly, I'll post a quick summary (I had hoped to get some metrics of the savings that both the internet web service option, and the SSService option, brought to the table), but as it is I'm simply amazed at how botched this whole process has been. They've been working on this product for how long now?
Two weeks back I derisively mentioned Microsoft's Live.com gadget creation contest (where they're trying to egg on development of gadgets for their web app by contest giveaways). Now Ebay is getting into the game - they've announced prizes for the best applications that hook into Ebay, extending the value of their services. So Ebay gets a more vibrant developer community, with more tools and services for their highly lucrative clients, and the developers get...a remote chance at winning some token prize.
As a professional software developer and enterpreneur, this serves as a huge omen, yelling out "There is no money to be made in this market". The normal carrot that draws developers into a niche is revenue, with which there is little need for additional incentives (e.g. Why would I care about your token game machine when I'm planning on selling 50,000 copies of my software at $49.95 each?). So when an organization becomes desperate enough to start doing giveaways, you know that niche is undergoing pretty unhealthy times.
A bubble is expanding, and for those of you who missed out on getting rich like everyone-else-supposedly-did during Bubble 1.0 (being in the technology market, it was confusing to relatives that I wasn't a hundred-millionaire in the late-90s: The newspapers were telling them that everyone in tech was overflowing with cash. On the flip side they were confused that I remained employed and making a good wage after the crash, because the newspapers were telling them that everyone in tech was unemployed and replaced by offshoring), here is your magic machine to tell you what you need to do. Press the button and start raking in the millions!
Apparently the marketing plan for Riya is bloggers and online "word-of-mouth". This seems to be paying off very well: Many are blogging about or discussing this "amazing" product, and how it's going to revolutionize the photo tagging world. Flickr (Yahoo!) and Google are going to be knocking down their door trying to get a piece of that action!
Remarkable, though, how incredibly few people have actually used the product, and how few will actually vouch for its capabilities. If you want to sign-up currently, and try the product out yourself, it's an "invite only" affair (though strangely you have to send them your email address - That's not invite only. That's a lottery system). Despite the so-called press (see the Wired article above) heaping on strangely uncritical praise, no credible reviewer has had a round with the software. Odd, wouldn't you say? Wouldn't it make sense to get a respected reviewer to vouch for its capabilities before firing up the press wagons? Someone credible who would put it through its paces and either credit or discredit it, putting their actual career on the line if they misrepresented it.
Facial and scene recognition is easy in theory - it's something we've all imagined up, inventing our own naive ways to do it - but in reality it is extremely difficult. Yet these guys not only managed to leap the gigantic hurdle of facial recognition (including discerning among incredibly similar people - close relatives, and supposedly even twins), but they added in fantastic, unparalleled text detection as well (in one case purportedly reading a tiny car logo sloped about 70 degrees away from the camera, among other fairly impressive feats).
When it comes to revolutionary technologies like face/scene recognition, it is critically important to withhold judgement until it actually proves itself in the real world (and no - I'm not being hypocritical. I'm not saying it doesn't work - I honestly don't know - but I'm just say that without proof otherwise claims of revolution seem a little premature). Facial recognition in particular is a field filled with hucksters and fraudsters, grossly overselling the capabilities of their system with dummied up sample cases and ridiculously ideal scenarios (or even worse - "mechanical turks" have been known to occur). I consider facial recognition much like the compression market - how many times have we heard about revolutionary new compression technologies, sold through jimmied up demos and "observers" on the dole, that in the end turned out to be nothing but a fraud (or a completely impractical edge scenario that is of no value in the real world).
I have no idea if this particular product is legitimate or not, but the lack of credible analysis thus far makes the growing chorus of revolution a bit difficult to stomach.
A wide range of motivations drive the creation and maintenance of weblogs (blogs). I'm using the term "blog" to generically refer to the content management system that many are using today (such as what you see here), even though it is quickly evolving away from the minute-by-minute "what I'm doing and what I'm listening to!" style that earned it so much deserved derision in the first place.
Sometimes someone really has something they want to gripe about, and a blog offers an easy and accessible soapbox to vent from. Brand X makes terrible cars, the waiter at the local Denny's was a jerk, or Walmart represents satan incarnate (or incorporate?). No one is forced to read it, and if search engines are polluted with these random rants, well that's a search engine problem and not a blogging problem.
And why shouldn't they use this cathartic medium if it helps them get it off their chest? Even if their entries are only read by a couple of close friends or family, that is the original spirit of the internet materialized.
Other times a blog is a tool to promote yourself, or a product, in a way that one hopes to leverage into business or personal success (in new-speak: to monetize it somehow. Indeed, that's the case here - I have an exciting venture that I'm going to use as a source for content in here on occasion). Generally this sort of self-promotion blog gets the initial slingshot by capitalizing on some association with a famous event, product, or corporation, and leveraging that into (often unearned) authority in other realms. "Bob, the guy who worked on the install for Office 95, has written some thoughts about Microsoft's opposition to OpenDocument..."
It's become quite a proven formula, and examples abound.
I consider Joel Spolsky of Fogcreek Software a pioneer in using a blog for this sort of self-promotion, using the "authority" technique I mentioned previously, even though he was doing it before we called it blogging. He has used www.joelonsoftware.com to publish some fantastic essays of various levels of formality (which were even printed out in dead-tree form), doing so for quite a few years. He has taken the fact that for a brief period he worked on the automation engine for Microsoft Excel and parlayed it into attention and credibility for his business, and has gotten attention for his thoughts regarding virtually anything relating to Microsoft (in particular those things that could be interpreted as "anti-Microsoft". The minions love when Joel disparages Microsoft, because his tenuous association with Excel in the past makes him an authority figure on all things Microsoft).
Joel is a "best case" example of this technique, as he happens to be incredibly insightful and pragmatic, and is an excellent author as well.
The "Joel Fomula" - leveraging some industry connection or history to build awareness for some new venture - is growing in popularity as more are seeing this as a critical strategy. Everyone who had anything to do with any well known (or infamous) product, however remote their role, is coming out to give their take on some current situation (and a cynic would say that they're "karma whoring" - they're saying exactly what the populace wants to hear, throwing sand in the eyes of their old masters if it helps get them mentioned on Slashdot).
This is becoming so formulaic that I'm getting a bit cynical about it all. Oh look, the former `Director of Product Marketing for Apple's "Pro" applications' has given the world his thoughts about digital rights management (all 271 words). Zzzzzzz.
Expect more somehow-connected-at-some-point people to pander to the populace as they try for their piece of the Bubble 2.0 action. They'll tell us how everyone should get along, Microsoft is evil, all IP should be free, and so on. It's a proven equation.
Came across this looking at the gift issue of Consumer Reports. You can see their website at http://www.flypentop.com/. It's the most heavily produced, "Hollywood"-type website I've seen for some time. Quite impressive.
The technology itself is really intriguing. I suspect a lot of it is smoke and mirrors (e.g. you can't randomly adhoc, but instead have a fairly constrained set of actions, each with a limited set of options, that they just happen to demo, acting as if it magically correlated with their need), however it's an interesting approach - could this be an alternative to PDAs? There are a tremendous number of possibilities with that sort of technology. Interesting stuff.