Apéritif
Sometimes industry entries can be heavy eating, it can be good to have something light to stimulate the appetite.
Soon to be former employees strike back: Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer started pink slipping employees, so some of the employees struck back with the only weapon the recently unemployed have, humor. I can understand why the rabid dogs in the legal department fired off a cease & desist but they had to have known there was a snowball's chance in hell of it being successful. I suppose even lawyers have MBO targets to achieve.
MegaPixel Myth: Mark Lewis mentions that our need for higher resolution is driving information growth and he's right it is but he chooses the unfortunate example of a 10 MegaPixel camera which while it can generate larger image sizes it may not generate a better quality image.
This falls into line nicely with some buying advice I've been following of late, it's not your number of pixels it's the size of your CMOS sensor. MegaPixels are one of those very inaccurate measurements which people have adopted in the hope it'll speak to the quality of the image a camera can produce. Nice marketing, great at point of sale, but it's like using CPU clock speed as a measure of performance which of course means it's an insanely inaccurate metric.
Given a choice between buying some 10 MegaPixel monster and a Digital SLR with half the pixel count you should buy the SLR. You'll get a larger sensor size which means it'll take a better quality of picture, and as the more pixels you cram onto a smaller sensor the less light efficient they all become it'll take a better picture in lower light levels or at higher speeds.
VMware IPO redux: Having left the Moscone Centre after General Powell's closing keynote at the RSA Conference I met a friend of mine and went to see Curse of the Golden Flower in the Sony Metreon across the street. The movie was beautifully shot and was enjoyable if you're interested in Asian cinema. "So EMC are selling part of VMware?" he asked. "Pretty much, but I'm not sold on the idea myself." I responded. "I felt the same way when Apple started selling it's stake in ARM but it was the right thing to do and it made us a fortune. There's lots of upside for EMC in this deal and virtually no downside that I can see."
As I was chewing on Popcorn at the time I didn't get a chance to respond, and then the trailer for Sunshine ran where upon we spent the rest of the time before the movie started trying to figure out how practical it would be to re-ignite the Sun.
Get a life: I can't sit down in front of a computer anywhere without immediately logging into my corporate email account & Powerlink. I'm not a Crackberry user but I might as well be as the temptation to check & respond to email or read up on something work related when I'm supposed to be relaxing or getting on with my life is just too much these days.
It's time to take drastic measures.
