Based on an advice of Laurent, I’m now testing newsgator, which is at the same time a news agregator and a blog publishing tool (this post is realized in newsgator). What’s really cool is that this tool is completely integrated in Outlook and has a publishing plug-in for blogger. Other ones already exist for Radio, .Text, MovablePoster, etc. (see here for the complete list).

First impression: the agregator part is well integrated in Outlook and very easy to set-up. The publishing part seems to be ok! I will use this tool for a while, stay tuned for more information in some days!

Second impression (after the first publishing): I have to check some details about the post process, specially the formatting and title parts ;-)

As promised, I would like to write down some thoughts about an article – Reclaim your job – from S. Ghoshal and H. Bruch published in the Harvard Business Review from March 2004.

I like this article because it talks about the so-called managers (uhm, have you noticed – manager – not leader ;-) who just complain all the time about:

I am sure that you also meet regularly this kind of managers ;-) Bruch and Ghoshal made a quite impressive analyse about these points and found out, as expected, that….these are just excuses! This kind of boring reaction is mainly due to a lack of self-confidence and/or inhibition due to risks.

On the opposite, the two authors tried to identify which are the most important elements to be able to reach some success, instead of loosing time, focus and energy by complaining all the time. Three blocks crystallized:

– have our tasks under control and to manage the expectations of our stakeholders

– proactivity (acting, instead of re-acting mindset)

– go away from the desire to be indispensable

– busy to effective work

– learn to say simply “no”

– try to find new way to receive resources (money, people, mgmt attention, etc.)

– out-of-the-box, no can’t do mindset

– no limitation, break the rules

– choose a patient, methodical, out-of-the-box approach

– understand well the corporate strategy

– present alternatives to serve it efficiently

– base = strong expertise in a specific field

Waou, I find this framework really interesting and reproductible based on by own experience.

We all have lost one of the major out-of-the-box thinker in the field of strategic leadership, I mean Mr. Sumantra Ghoshal, who died unexpectedly on March 3rd 2004…..

I was preparing a blog concerning his last great article in the Harvard Business Review from March 2004, co-authored with Heike Bruch, Reclaim your job, when I found this painful information on the Harvard Business Review’s web site.

Do you know Sumantra Ghoshal? I personaly really like this guy and you HAVE to read at least two of his books, both co-authored with Christopher Bartlett:

– Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution

– The Individualized Corporation: A fundamentally new approach to Management.

I will publish my blog concerning the mentionned article in a few days.

Another “useful” Google’s tool (in beta). It gives you the possibility to monitor specifics Google searches by sending you an email alert each time the results are different. Very easy to use (web interface).

You can register your searches here.

Since some weeks, I’m listenning to and watching the following Red Hot Chili Peppers’ DVD:

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Live at Slade Castle

It’s really one of the best live I ever heard! Great sound, high video and effects quality. These guys are definitely crazy :-)

Specially the bass player with his skeleton costume. A must-have.

An interesting interview of Vint Cerf for CNET news.com -Vint is the current Chairman of the ICANN and one of the fathers of Internet. It’s about domain names and addresses, the architecture of Internet, ICANN itself, United Nations’ and Internet. A must-read!

After one active month, a good rank with the Yahoo’s search ;-)

Let’s try this, i.e. a search with the keyword “didier” and “beck” with Yahoo.com.

Two researchers, F. Oberholzer from Harvard and K. Strumpf from the University of North Carolina, published recently a Harvard Business School study about the music companies’ allegation that the Internet file sharing is responsible for the drastic reduction in sales. They proved that this connection simply doesn’t exist!!

“Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.“

:-)

thx to vowe for the link.

In February 2004, Pat Gelsinger – the CTO of Intel – presented some great inputs concerning the future developments in the field of processor during the last Intel Developer Forum.

Do we really need the increasing power of processors? – yes

Based on the experience made in the past, the increase in processor power is always used by / surpassed by innovation and new tecnologies. The offer is somewhat creating the demand, as with Microsoft products.

Incredible volume of digital data

The volume of digital data is already today surpassing the volume of non-digital data (study from Berkeley in 2003). Almost all new data are digital ones. Some figures to illustrate this:

Not enough?

Personally, I have:

=> These new common characteristics will allow a common definition of one new unique architecture which will be able to compute the Tera-requests.

Performance development

How can we define performance in the field of processor?

In the past, there was a clear concentration on speed increase, although some architectural improvements also appeared (hyper-threading, MMX technology, etc.). Some major obstacles are appearing now with frequencies increases and size of transistors decreases:

Consequently:

– performance increase has mainly to come from architectural innovations (rather than frequency increase)

– or disruptive change in the processor technology (eg.: photonic computing)

Conclusion

“A massively multicore architecture in which each core has multiple threads of execution with minimal memory latency, resistance-capacitance interconnect delay, and controlled thermal activity is needed to deliver teraflop performance”.