B3

“Microsoft announced Friday their new ‘M’ language, designed especially for building textual domain-specific languages and software models with XAML. Microsoft will also announce Quadrant, for building and viewing models visually, and a repository for storing and combining models using a SQL Server database. While some say the language is simply their ‘D’ language renamed to a further letter down the alphabet, the language is criticized for lack of a promised cross-platform function because of its ties to MS SQL server, which only runs on Windows.“
(source: /.)

Too late, we have RAX now.

If you use spreadsheets, (Yes, you! We know who you are!) please read this article on spreadsheets and this one that argues: Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Excel for Statistics! and if you can still read through the tears, try this one.

Many people will gasp in horror at the thought of using a programming language instead of a spreadsheet. The fact is that a spreadsheet is a programming language — it is just one that you are used to.

If you write a text file (csv or txt) from Excel or Works, then numbers will be written with a limited number of significant digits. [...] There is no telling how much damage has been done because precision has been lost, mostly unknowingly. There is a trick to get full precision, however — turn the numbers into text.

Exercise: in the first few rows of column A put some numbers but include at least one blank cell; below these numbers take the average of the cells; in cell B1 write the formula =A1; copy the formula down. You will get two different means.

Put numbers in the first three rows of column A; in the fifth row of column A put the formula =SUM(A1:A3). You will get the sum of the three numbers. Now put a number in the fourth row of column A. In at least some versions of Excel the formula will magically change and you get the sum of the four numbers.

Microsoft made the year 1900 a leap year (even though in reality it is not) because another spreadsheet had mistakingly made the error. In order to maintain compatibility with the competing spreadsheet, they reproduced the bug. (They seem to have maintained the attitude that bugs should be replicated.)

To quote Andy Tanenbaum: “An quantitative increase in order of magnitude needs an qualitative increase in order of magnitude.” Here this effect works out (at least) two ways. One, a large pool of photos (increase in quantity) have to be processed (increase in quality) to become usefull again. Two, the availability of a large pool of photos enables a whole new experience (photo tourism).

But you have to be double smart to first see the possibilities and than to enable them.

(source: UW)

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Microsoft uncovered the first official details of the next Windows version. The software uses a touch interface and should be finished end of next year.

Read full article

Silverlight dashboards are hard to find these days. Infragistics have created an interactive demo which is called faceOut. You’ll need to have Silverlight 2 installed on your machine to view the demo.

Visit the site or Watch the video if you don’t want to install Silverlight.

Volledig artikel

The recently released 2008 Gartner BI Magic Quadrant analysis focuses on the consolidation that is underway in the BI reporting and dashboarding space. The diagram below seems straight-forward, but you must realize that with the speed of acquisitions in our space, it was already obsolete when released. The Gartner analysis missed the late breaking news of the SAP/Business Objects acquisition.

Several large application and software infrastructure vendors initiated major BI acquisitions in 2007. Macrotrend of market consolidation.

Megavendors are beginning to dominate the BI market — in less than one year, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM will have gone from accounting for a quarter of the market to owning over two-thirds of it. As such, the “Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 2008″ reflects the tipping point at which the market moves away from being led by independent BI vendors like Business Objects and Cognos, to one where the megavendors rule. Future BI investment decisions will be tethered much more closely to strategic sourcing and stack-led factors, and will be more influenced by organizational relationships with application and infrastructure vendors.

Full article

Met Air kunnen ontwikkelaars internetapplicaties bouwen met behulp van html, css, Ajax, Adobe Flash en de nieuwe versie van de opensourcetool Flex, die gelijktijdig met Air is uitgebracht. Deze applicaties kunnen offline gebruikt worden, gegevens op de harde schijf benaderen en zijn niet afhankelijk van een browser. Ontwikkelaars kunnen hun huidige ontwikkeltools blijven gebruiken om Air-applicaties te ontwikkelen. Air en Flex voor Windows en de Mac zijn gratis te downloaden, terwijl een Linux-versie van Air later dit jaar wordt verwacht. Ook wil Adobe de Air-software beschikbaar maken voor handhelds en mobieltjes.

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