Juan Carlos' Little Windows World Blog
Welcome to my little Microsoft Windows Blog World... This series of blog webpages aims at supporting and helping those who work with Microsoft Technologies. In particular, the main focus of this blog will be in the following Microsoft Technologies (Microsoft Windows Clustering, Exchange, Active Directory and the Windows Operating System).
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Airport Passenger Screening
JCS
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/airport_passeng.html
It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently (see also...
An Economic Analysis of Airport Security Screening
JCS
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/an_economic_ana.html
Interesting paper: "Passenger Profiling, Imperfect Screening, and Airport Security," by Nicola Persico and Petra E. Todd. The authors use game theory to investigate the optimal screening policy, in a scenario when there are different social groups (separated by felons, race,...
The Beta vs. CTP Dilemma
JCS
http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2006/04/03/567032.aspx
Over the last couple of years, the CTP or Community Technology Preview has been one of the bigger changes in the way Microsoft release software. Microsoft introduced the concept of CTPs with the "Whidbey" .NET Framework and Visual Studio release but I was happy to see the concept spread to SqlServer, Expression, WinFX and even Windows!
CTPs have been very valuable to us as we have been able to get some great feedback in near real time from customers rather than waiting for a long Beta cycle or worse until after the product has been released to hear the feedback.
But, of course, CTPs have not been without their paint points... Frequent releases come with variable quality and are often incompatible with other pre-release software putting developers in a state of "CTP Madness" where it is often difficult to figure out what two builds work together. JasonSu and I did create a cure - or at least a treatment - that I have heard helps a lot. But the pain certainly does not go to zero.
So, as we begin planning the interim release schedule for Orcas I find myself torn between the traditional value (and costs) of betas and the new value (and risk) of CTPs. The downside of betas is that in order to drive up the quality we need pretty much all hands on deck working on the beta... if there are a few features that are not quite done, it is hard to keep those features moving forward during the beta lock down. This effectively means we extend the release schedule by the Beta lockdown time. We also attempt to "line-up" Betas of related products so that customers can use them together. The plus side of betas is that because we drive the quality up and make them work together, conventionally wisdom is that more customers are able to try it out and get us feedback.
But I wonder if we did a good job with quality throughout the cycle making the builds fairly usable as they come out, could we replace the two or even three beta cycle with less betas and more regular CTPs? This of course only works if we get customers to give us the good quality, real-world feedback on CTPs.... if we don't get the good feedback until very late in the cycle then the plan didn't really save us anything.
So what do you think? Do "betas" offer you\your customers something specific that CTPs don't? Are you able to pick up the CTPs and try real deployments on them or is that something you can only do with Betas?
Un estudio sitúa a Barcelona y Madrid entre las ciudades europeas con peor calidad de vida
JCS
http://www.elpais.es/articulo/sociedad/estudio/situa/Barcelona/Madrid/ciudades/europeas/peor/calidad/vida/elpporsoc/20060410elpepusoc_4/Tes/
Barcelona y Madrid tienen peor calidad de vida que otras grandes ciudades europeas como Bruselas, Berlín, Dublín, París o Londres, según el estudio mundial sobre Calidad de Vida que Mercer HR Consulting realiza cada año en 215 ciudades del mundo, para que los gobiernos y empresas puedan adaptar la retribución de sus trabajadores expatriados.
Adiós a los atascos
http://www.elmundo.es/suplementos/ariadna/2006/275/1144424039.html
Coger el coche en Semana Santa es una lotería. Puede que todo vaya sobre ruedas y vea la ciudad alejarse en su espejo retrovisor nada más arrancar el coche, pero también puede acabar en medio del atasco. ¿Sabrá qué carretera debe evitar si no conoce la ciudad de destino? Este año nadie va ayudarle. El que viene, lo hará su navegador GPS. Y no le costará ni un solo céntimo. Leer
Inside Deep Thought (Why the UI, Part 6)
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/05/568947.aspx
This is the sixth part in my eight-part series of entries in which I outline some of the reasons we decided to pursue a new user interface for Office 2007.
Microsoft is tracking your every move!
Soon after you install Office 2003 on your computer, a balloon pops up asking if you would like to "Help Make Office Better." If you click on it, you are given the opportunity to enroll in something called the Microsoft Office Customer Experience Improvement Program. If you opt-in, anonymous data about how you use Office are uploaded to Microsoft occasionally in the background.
If you're the curious type, you might have wondered where your data goes. Well, today I'm here to answer the question: it goes into an Excel spreadsheet I have sitting on my desktop.
OK, back up. Back in the olden days of designing software at Microsoft (say, pre-2003), design decisions were mostly supported by guesswork. There's a classic Microsoft interview question (that I've never heard of anyone actually using) "How many gas stations are there in the United States?" Many have criticized that type of question as being feckless; personally, I agree and it's not representative of how I choose to spend my interview time with a candidate. But the rough "estimate an answer and defend it" style required to answer the gas station question was at the heart of how many design decisions used to be made at Microsoft.
Suppose you were designing the adaptive menus in Office 2000 and you wanted to know what features people use the most. Well, you start by asking a "guru" who has worked in the product for a long time. "Everyone uses AutoText a lot," the guru says. The louder the "experts" are, the more their opinions count. Then you move on to the anecdotal evidence: "I was home over Christmas, and I saw my mom using Normal View... that's probably what most beginners use." And mix in advice from the helpful expert: "most people run multi-monitor, I heard that from the guy at Best Buy."
So much of what we did was based on feel, estimation, and guesswork. How much that was true only became clear with the introduction of a technology called SQM (pronounced "skwim").
SQM, which stands for "Service Quality Monitoring" is our internal name for what because known externally as the Customer Experience Improvement Program. It works like this: Office 2003 users have the opportunity to opt-in to the program. From these people, we collect anonymous, non-traceable data points detailing how the software is used and and on what kind of hardware. (Of course, no personally identifiable data is collected whatsoever.)
As designers, we define data points we're interested in learning about and the software is instrumented to collect that data. All of the incoming data is then aggregated together on a huge server where people like me use it to help drive decisions.
Hard at work in the SQM data center.
What kind of data do we collect? We know everything from the frequency of which commands are used to the number of Outlook mail folders you have. We know which keyboard shortcuts you use. We know how much time you spend in the Calendar, and we know if you customize your toolbars. In short, we collect anything we think might be interesting and useful as long as it doesn't compromise a user's privacy.
How much data have we collected?
About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.)
Over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days.
Reflected in these numbers is that we don't even retain all the data points we receive... particularly, we get so much Word and Outlook data that 70% of it is thrown away.
So, one of the biggest reasons that we decided to do the new user interface for Office 12 is simply that, for the first time, we have the data we need to make intelligent decisions. Anything we would have done in the past would have been based more on guesswork and bias than on reality. Data is just one input to the design process, of course, but there's something extraordinarily empowering about knowing which commands people use often and which they don't. And knowing which commands are used in sequence with which other commands. And which commands are used 7x more with the keyboard than with the mouse. And how big people's screens are... and how much of the time they use Excel maximized... and how many documents they use at once... and which commands literally are never used... and which are used much more frequently by East Asian users... and on and on...
Knowledge is power. And having that knowledge makes this the right time to reinvent the user interface of Office.
Want to guess what is the most-used command in Microsoft Word? The top 5 commands used? Post your guesses in a comment and I'll answer in the next post.(OK, this is a repost so a lot of you know the answer already. If you want to view the guesses from the first time I posed this question, view the comments with the original post here.)
Virtual Server 2005 R2 es ahora GRATIS y se soporta oficialmente Linux
http://blogs.technet.com/davidcervigon/archive/2006/04/05/424278.aspx
Hola de nuevo
Hoy hemos terminado con los dos eventos de lanzamiento de Windows Server 2003 R2. Hoy en Barcelona, tras nuestra demo en la que clusterizabamos una máquina virtual de Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 en dos Blades de HP x64, hemos anunciado en directo que Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise es ahora gratis, descargable desde la Web y lo que es aún más divertido, que damos soporte a algunas versiones de Linux (RedHat y SuSe), para las cuales se han desarrollado las Virtual Machine Additions correspondientes.
Toda la información en detalle está aqui:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/evaluation/news/bulletins/vs05pricing.mspx
David
Saturday, April 01, 2006
SyncToy v1.2 for Windows XP
SyncToy v1.2 helps you copy, move, rename, and delete files between folders and computers quickly and easily
http://www.activewin.com/awin/comments.asp?HeadlineIndex=34204
Ley europea de itinerancia (roaming) para operadores móviles
Interesante articulo en Banda Ancha...
Todo el que ha viajado fuera de su país con el móvil ha sentido esa sensación de estar comunicado cuando enciende su móvil y puede usarlo como si no hubiera salido del país, para luego convertirse en un sentimiento bastante doloroso al ver la factura, y es que el mandar un simple SMS te cuesta casi más que bajarse el último juego del mercado. Pero bueno ... es asumible ... estás en otro país y todas las llamadas que hagas son internacionales, pero cuando ves en la factura los cargos de llamadas recibidas, ahí te duele de verdad.
Parece ser que el gobierno europeo (esos políticos viajan mucho) también se han dado cuenta de ésto y han decidido tomar cartas en el asunto. Están preparando una ley (que entrará en vigor en el segundo semestre de 2007) aplicable a los 25 Estados miembros según la cual las operadoras destinatarias (las que se usan cuando estás fuera) no podrán cobrar a las operadoras origen (con las que los clientes tienen el contrato) más de lo que cobran en territorio nacional por usar su red, esto quiere decir que tu operadora origen pagará mucho menos a la operadora destino, lo que en teoría repercutirá en unas tarifas más competitivas.
Actualmente el coste de una llamada de 4 minutos en itinerancia puede alcanzar desde los 0.20? hasta los 13.05?
Vía Finanzas.com
Tarifas Vodafone en itinerancia
Movistar
Amena
Página de la Unión Europea sobre itinerancia
Feliz viaje! ;)
Friday, March 31, 2006
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814596/?sd=RMVP&fr=1
See ýa
Juan Carlos Sanz
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
TopDesk Now With Flip 3D
La ultima version de TopDesk contiene una buena imitacion de las funcionalidades 3d del Windows Vista.
Para descargar....
http://www.otakusoftware.com/topdesk/
The latest build of application switcher TopDesk contains a pretty good imitation of Windows Vista's Flip 3D feature, where open windows are viewed in a 3D-like view, slightly sideways, and you can shuffle through them. TopDesk already did a great job mimicking Mac OS X's Expose feature, and this new one just means more bang for your $9.95 (or 30-day free trial), and at minimal cost to resources on most mid- to high-end systems.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Another visit to TechEd
I´ll post more info on my way back... for now w´ll see what Microsoft has to offer this year...
See you all there...
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Welcome to Juan Carlos' Windows World Blog
Bienvenidos al 'Blog' de Juan Carlos en el mundo MS Windows... El objetivo de esta pagina será ayudar a esas personas que trabajan con las tecnologias Microsoft Windows. En particular, estos Blogs estan enfocados hacia las siguientes Tecnologias Microsoft (Clusters de Microsoft Windows, Exchange, Directorio Activo y el Sistema Operativo de MS Windows).





