Thomas – LeDanois – published some interesting tests about spam (first, second and third post).
Thomas posted a test email on his blog and, six hours after the post, the first spam arrived. Really incredible…
NEWS: spam
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Monthly Archives: July 2004
PRIVATE: Montreux Jazz Festival
I was yesterday evening at the Montreux Jazz Festival with my old friend (I know him for more than 22 years ;-) Manu, the CEO of Boomerang.
Wow, this was such a marvelous concert!
We went specially to be able to listen to and to see the Pat Metheny Trio, with Pat Metheny, Christian McBride (bass player – Diana Krall, Sting, George Duke, Natalie Cole, etc.) and Antonio Sanchez (drummer – Michael Brecker, John Patitucci, Marcus Robert, etc.). These three guys were really incredibly good, specially Antonio Sanchez who did such an “impossible-to-forget” chorus in the middle of the set, wow!!
Sure that the very special landscape of Montreux and its lake plays also a role in this kind of special event.
TOOLS: new version of The Panorama Factory
Smoke City Design launched a new version – v3.3 – of The Panorama Factory, a panoramic stitching program for Windows I tested in this post in April 2004 (you can also find the test on my website).
The new features of this release are presented here.
You can find an example below, based on 8 pictures (2’608×1’952) which generated a panorama of 12’040×1’591 (be careful: about 4.04 MB!).
NEWS: Technorati registered its 3 millionth blog yesterday
[Via Sifry’s alerts]
Technorati reached yesterday its 3 millionth blog registered ;-) Quite impressive! Some statistics:
Logic that Technorati has some infrastructure issues to solve ;-)
Source: Sifry’s alerts
PRIVATE: week-end
It was a marvelous day, isn’t it?
BLOG: re-launch of my Website
After quite a lot of effort, I re-launched my website!
New design, navigation, contents, etc. Let’s have a look.
Let me know what you think about it ;-)
NEWS: consolidation in the Software industry, Microsoft – SAP
An interesting article from Wharton about the consolidation in the Software industry and the talks between SAP and Microsoft. Some extracts of this article:
Microsoft, the world’s largest maker of software for personal computers, last year had approached Germany’s SAP, the world’s leading business-software company, about a potential merger, but the preliminary talks were discontinued this spring.
The coming consolidation in software will involve companies in the three chief categories of software for both businesses and for consumers. They are: applications (software that handles a slew of administrative tasks for corporations, such as financial management, procurement, human resource management and order processing, as well as for desktop computers); platforms (the so-called “middleware” systems on which some software applications run and which coordinate different software programs); and system infrastructure (the operational software that keeps computers running).
Raphael Amit, professor of entrepreneurship and director of the Wharton Electronic Business Initiative, says a combination of SAP and Microsoft would be “advantageous from a strategic standpoint for both companies. For Microsoft, it would be going up market [to sell products to the world’s biggest companies] and for SAP it would expand its reach into segments of the market where SAP today does not enjoy a high degree of penetration.” SAP reportedly has a 54% share of the global market for enterprise software, compared with 13% for Oracle and 11% for Microsoft.
Other possible merger partners for SAP include IBM and Accenture, according to Amit. “Going with IBM or Accenture, which have armies of engineers who could help implementation of software, is a natural. SAP does software but not implementation, and Accenture and IBM do implementation but not software. There’s a certain degree of complementarity. But the story with Microsoft is a bit different. Microsoft, unlike Accenture and IBM, is not very active in the space where SAP dominates, so SAP would bring a lot to Microsoft. Maybe SAP is worth a lot more to Microsoft than to Accenture and IBM. And from that standpoint the shareholders of SAP might be better off with Microsoft.”
NEWS: Tera Computing
I published in March 2004 an article about “Tera Computing” and the incredible increase in requested volume of digital data. Some new inputs concerning this topic:
NEWS: a Danish lesson :-)
A blogger’s friend of mine, Thomas, also called “Le Danois” (read a little bit his posts, you will understand why ;-), described in one of his last post how he organized his engagement announcement to his wife to be.
I must say I was *very* impressed how he did that and I’m happy that my wife is not regularly reading my weblog ;-) Thomas, you are making pressure on all of us!
Congrats to them both and all the best!
BLOG: back in the “real” world
I was 4 days off for a very interesting workshop about “change management”, some posts to come in the next days ;-) We did this in the middle of nowhere, more precisely in a Benedictine monastery called “Kloster Fischingen” (webiste in German). The monastery is an old one, it was actually built in 1138 (!) and is located in an incredible beautiful landscape. It is still active, 7 Benedictine monks are living in this monastery.
The rooms are also quite…special :-)
No TV, no phone, quite austere… On the other hand, there is a wiFi Hotspot from swisscom in the monastery. Wow, I can tell you, that was a great experience to be connected in this kind of place. Swisscom is just exagerating: 9 CHF (~6 euros) / 30 minutes for a 56 K connection, on top of the business subscription….
It was somewhat strange to make a workshop about “change management” in a totally timeless place, out of the world :-) Great experience!