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This makes me feel good about my skills at judging up front how long a project is going to take: University of Wisconsin is $40 million in the hole and not much nearer to patching their legacy payroll system. That's ridiculous, but this stuff is hard. Each individual piece is easy, sure, but when you try to put them all together you quickly move into unexpected territory.

A first attempt to replace it with Lawson Software was scrapped in 2006 after years of work and a cost of $28.4 million. The project, a public relations embarrassment for the university, was doomed by poor project leadership and planning, bureaucratic infighting and technical complexity.

The university started planning for a second attempt in 2007, this time using Oracle's PeopleSoft system.

Giroux said earlier planning budget estimates and timelines had to be changed because "we did not have the full picture of how complex this project would be."
You think?
- jim 6-19-2009 9:40 pm [link] [add a comment]

New iPhone camera looks very good.
- jim 6-18-2009 2:41 pm [link] [add a comment]

Olympus releases their long awaited micro four thirds camera, the Pen E-P1. A little too rich for my blood but that's a great camera. I think cellphone cameras are going to hurt the low end of the digital camera line, but there's room for these compact but very sophisticated shooters. And I love that retro look.
- jim 6-16-2009 1:38 pm [link] [2 comments]

AnandTech is seriously in love with the new MacBook Pro. For the short take jump to the conclusion here:

There’s no other way to say this. If you care about battery life and portability at all, buy the new MacBook Pro. Go to the Apple store and buy one....

Ever since I first looked at the power consumption specs of Nehalem I thought it didn’t make any sense to buy a new, expensive notebook before Arrandale’s launch in Q4 2009/Q1 2010. While performance will definitely increase considerably with Arrandale, Apple just threw a huge wrench in my recommendation. The new MacBook Pro is near perfect today. If you need a new laptop now, thanks to its incredible battery life, I have no qualms recommending the new MBP....

I’m not sure there’s much else I can add other than Good Job, Apple.
He did extensive real world battery tests and found that the new MacBook Pros show a 100% increase in battery life over the previous generation! He got 6.5 hour out of a full charge doing normal surfing and music playing. And over 8 hours in some cases. Yikes. That's pretty amazing. And the 15 inch model - with 4GB of RAM now standard - is now only $1699. I'm still in love with mine, but wow.

- jim 6-13-2009 2:50 pm [link] [add a comment]

Classic email comedy gold:

I must say, Im quite upset. I have been using images from your web site on my web site for along time now and suddenly they are gone. and I am concerned. I am using my web site to build up my business which is not easy and you changed the location or deleted them or something.

My concern is that if you do not upload the images again I might have to contact my lawyer as I am using these images for the purpose of advertising and this sudden change without warning means I have to find where you have moved them to and get them working again.

- jim 6-12-2009 10:32 pm [link] [add a comment]

Apple's annual World Wide Developer's Conference began this morning. Apple's #2, Phil Schiller, is giving the keynote speech right now. He's already announced new MacBooks although nothing too big to report: slightly faster, better battery, cheaper prices. I'm actually glad they didn't change too much because the MacBook Pro is easily the most satisfying consumer electronics product I have ever owned. It's really close to perfect.

The new OS X (10.6 Snow Leopard) is due soon, so that's going to dominate the conference because that's what software developers care most about. In terms of the keynote probably the only things of interest about Snow Leopard to casual users is what looks like pretty full Exchange support , and a $29 price tag (new versions are usually $129.)

New iPhone. $199 for 16GB. $299 for 32GB. The old iPhone will remain and drop to $99.

New iPhone includes 3MP autofocus camera w/ video recording. Compass. Much better battery life. Along with a bunch of software improvements that everyone will get with the impending release of iPhone OS 3.0.
- jim 6-08-2009 8:16 pm [link] [add a comment]

A few days after me, UNIX turns 40 years old.
- jim 6-07-2009 9:04 pm [link] [1 comment]

jQuery Tools looks really nice.

- jim 6-06-2009 9:15 pm [link] [add a comment]

Palm released it's new phone, the Pre, yesterday. A bunch of the usual suspects received review units ahead of time, and their reviews pretty much all agree. It's a very nice phone.

This is an interesting story because Palm was basically dead. They went from complete control of the electronic pocket organizer market space to nothing very quickly. They literally almost went out of business. Then in a last ditch effort to save the company Palm hired Jon Rubinstein and gave him complete control to build a new team and design a product that would save their lives. Rubinstein had been through this before when he worked at Apple and had a hand in creating both the original gumdrop iMac, which saved Apple from a similar extinction, and the original iPod, which launched them into the profitability stratosphere.

And it looks like it worked. To be way too short about summing up the reviews and initial impressions I'll say: it's basically as good as the iPhone but with a hardware qwerty keyboard, without visual voicemail and without an enormous and often very inexpensive app store, and runs on Sprint instead of AT&T.

Whether that sounds a little better than the iPhone or a little worse depends on the viewer, and probably mostly turns on the keyboard issue.

Still, for how well Palm seems to have done with the Pre, will it matter? The iPhone has a massive head start. And WWDC (Apple's yearly conference for independent software developers) starts on Monday where it is widely anticipated that Apple will release the new iPhone. Nice timing. Being basically as good as the iPhone may not last for too long.

I may take a look at the Pre, but I think I'll be buying the new iPhone.
- jim 6-06-2009 9:03 pm [link] [add a comment]

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