• Microsoft extends XP downgrade rights date by six months - Vendors can continue to "downgrade" new machines to XP until July 31, 2009. Of course, they still count it as a Vista license.
• The top five reasons why Windows Vista failed - Interesting and I think on target observations and probably why the XP downgrade date has been extended. A few quotes:
• "The public reputation of Windows Vista is in shambles, as Microsoft itself tacitly acknowledged in its Mojave ad campaign"
• "Forrester Research reported that just 8.8% of enterprise PCs worldwide were running Vista. Meanwhile, Microsoft appears to have put Windows 7 on an accelerated schedule that could see it released in 2010."
• "With Windows Vista, software bloat appears to have finally caught up with Microsoft."
• "... a lot of existing software and hardware were not compatible with Vista when it was released in January 2007."
• gOS 3.0 goes gold - Looking for an alternative to Windows? gOS is a nice distro that layers on some additional ease of use on top of Ubuntu including a host of Google apps and gadgets and it includes Wine for running the odd Windows app one might need to. I gave it a shot in VirtualBox over the weekend and liked what I saw. I'd love to see this applied to OpenSolaris.
• First look at the T-Mobile G1 - Or if you want to just go mobile, you'll soon have an alternative to the iPhone. Specs sound impressive (based on Google Android platform) and may get me to switch from my Curve to it rather than an iPhone, but I've have to switch to T-Mobile. Any experience with comparing AT&T to T-Mobile?

I am a big sports fan, as has probably been apparent from some of my blog entries, and as such am into football. I've generally been a fan of the AFC, particularly the AFC West having grown up and lived most of my life on the west coast, and as you would expect am also a Pac-10 fan.

In addition to being a fan and watching a lot of games, my inner geek gets the better of me and I dust off my computer ratings each year and have done so yet again and you can see them here. I've actually been doing them fairly regularly since 1991 when I got started after Georgia Tech's disputed championship as I thought there should be a way to objectively determine who is #1. I used Jeff Sagarin's ratings as my inspiration but have worked to tune my system to both have ratings that pass the "smell test" but also ones that do well in predicting games against the spread.

Over the years, I added in doing ratings for the NFL too and have toyed with doing them for college basketball, but it is most entertaining to look at the college ratings as that is where there is no playoff and one can argue for hours on end who is #1.

The current college ratings have Oklahoma #1, Missouri #2, Penn State #3, and USC #4. Going into this weekend Dallas was #1 in the NFL despite their loss with Tennessee close behind at #2.

In addition to doing ratings and weekly predictions, my system is able to project final records. Interestingly there are six (!) teams projected to finish the college season undefeated and in the NFL Tennessee is projected to finish 14-2 ahead of a bevy of teams at 12-4. It is still early though so things can certainly change.

So, take a look and let me know what you think.

• Apple drops developer NDA - It's about time. Was anything gained by having the NDA? "... the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success". No kidding!
• Train engineer was texting just before California crash - Sad to hear
• Chinese monitoring Tom-Skype messages - Not a surprise that this is happening in China, but serves as a reminder that any communication, e-mail, IM, etc. should not be considered secure and private. Skype's response here

• New Spring maintenance policy - Quite the discussion
• Cisco Picks Up Jabber for Collaboration, IM - Cisco continues the acquisitions. Oracle joining the game too?
• Integrating Linux into the SME - Interesting views on various Linux distros. But has he tried OpenSolaris?
• Hey, Microsoft. About those ads… Yeah, like that - Thoughts on Microsoft's recent Bill and Jerry ads
• Oracle OpenWorld: Looking for some excitement - The author wasn't terribly impressed with what has been presented thus far. "It was more like Oracle 101 - for those who have never heard of the company."

• Tab Skips Select Form Fields in Mac Browsers - Had been annoying me for awhile and finally got around to finding the fix.
• Lenovo denies ditching Linux - Options to order Linux has quietly disappeared. The new later confirmed.
• HP to cut 24,600 jobs in EDS integration - Not unexpected, but still a large number.
• VirtualBox 2.0 is out - I've downloaded and will be trying it out soon.
• Sun gains market share in external disk storage - The market grew at a healthy 18.8% but only Sun (34.7%) and NetApp (22.9%) outgrew the market.

I blogged about our new offer and TCO calculator a couple of days ago and thought I'd share some of the response thus far.

The Register wrote that "Sun has capitalized on Oracle jacking up licensing of the BEA middleware products with an offer for its own open-source suite". And drilling into the "jacking up" link in that story gets to you this where Larry Ellison reportedly "told another customer who'd ripped chips from his server just to pay his Oracle license to basically put up and shut up, because things ain't getting cheaper". There's a company that is interested in customer satisfaction!

InfoWorld's article quotes Brad Shimmin from Current Analysis saying "My overall impression is that Sun has seized upon a legitimate market opportunity here, stemming from the usual FUD surrounding the rationalization and integration of two such daunting product portfolios (Oracle and BEA) and more uniquely the purported price increase Oracle announced for WebLogic in July".

The SOA Talk blog also wrote on the subject and included a link to their prior story on the acquisition and skeptical customers saying "BEA users do not want Oracle products".

Interesting stuff. Take a look to learn more.

As you are probably aware, Oracle announced significant price hikes for much of its software including the application server and other integration middleware in the wake of their acquisition of BEA. In light of this, we thought it would be useful to do some comparisons of the pricing for Sun's middleware against the new pricing and found that Sun's offerings provided a significant cost savings over the equivalent Oracle offerings in nearly every situation. Furthermore, our innovative subscription pricing model gives companies an alternative that can save even more money in most cases, reduce the large upfront capital expense traditionally associated with acquiring enterprise software, and eliminate "socket counting" audits that must be done with most perpetual licensing.

Rather than keep our research a secret, we've created an on-line calculator to allow anyone to put in the specifics of their environment and company and see the potential cost savings for themselves. I encourage you to visit sun.com/logic yourself to enter your own scenarios, but something as simple as a 20 socket, 4 cores per socket license on x64 hardware has a 5 year TCO with Sun's offering that is over 72% less than the equivalent with Oracle WebLogic or Fusion.

If you visit the site, you'll also see that we are running a limited time offer that includes:

• A FREE 5 day SOA workshop
• Complimentary adapter for WebLogic
• An opportunity to lock-in our current pricing for 12 months

To take us up on this offer, you'll need to register so do so today!

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been "the thing" in the integration world the past few years with vendors latching on to the term and enhancing or creating new products that support all aspects of SOA such as ESBs and BPM/orchestration tools. All the while, customers have been continuing to implement standard EAI patterns using point to point integration products and Message Oriented Middleware (MoM) for publish and subscribe solutions. These EAI solutions continue to work today, but increasingly are being asked to move more and more from batch based processing to real time and event driven processing.

Enter Event Driven Architecture, or EDA. EDA takes the principles of SOA such as loosely coupled components and services, and applies them to event emitters and consumers. In a way, where SOA provides loose coupling for synchronous service invocations, EDA provides loose coupling for asynchronous systems. In this way, EDA is very complimentary to SOA.

But EDA goes beyond just asynchronous systems and enters into Event Stream Processing and Complex Event Processing (CEP). Event Processing provides for receiving events from any source, and aggregating, correlating, analyzing, monitoring, and otherwise processing the events. Additionally where SOA is typically used to process individual requests in isolation from others, Event Processing handles events from multiple sources in the context of previous events providing new insight into the behaviors of systems and users.

The result of this processing can be to trigger other processes or send alerts in response to thresholds being exceeded, or to use the aggregated events for reporting for dashboard applications. Applications of Event Processing includes fraud detection, algorithmic trading, security monitoring, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and many more.

Sun's Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) has always had EDA capabilities given its roots in EAI and MoM and with the Intelligent Event Processor (IEP), we are adding the Event Processing capabilities that today's EDA's require to compliment the SOA capabilities inherent in Java CAPS. By having this be a component of a broader integration platform, the IEP can leverage the adapters and engines of the platform rather than having to recreate that functionality like a standalone CEP offering has to.

To learn more, visit the Open ESB Community where the IEP is being built. Additionally, see the August 2008 Java Developers Journal with an article on EDA and the IEP on page 16.

I'm pleased to share that Master Index support of MySQL is now available in the Mural Community. See the announcement and go get the bits to try it out. The MySQL support is in both the stable and nightly builds.

This is an important milestone as it allows the community to now adopt an MDM solution without requiring an expensive and closed source database. MySQL has always been supported as a source of information to be indexed, but with this development the index itself can now use MySQL.

This is also the first step in delivering this support for our customers of the MDM Suite and Java CAPS. Stay tuned!

Now that we've endured the opening ceremonies, swimming, gymnastics, and the U.S. basketball teams rolling over their competition, it is now time for the real events at the Olympics to start!

Ok, just kidding, the aforementioned events have been great, but track and field does start tonight with the Heptathlon, heats of the mens 100m, and heats in the womens 800m. It will be good to see what Bolt, Gay, and Powell have to offer and also see what Pamela Jelimo chooses to throw down in the first round.

Thankfully, I have CBC to watch and see things live while the rest of the west coast has to wait 3 hours for NBC's coverage.

More to come later.

It is becoming easier and easier to get a personal computer from a major manufacturer running something other than Windows. Of course, there is always a Mac which has been and continues to be a very good option for many, but it is major traditional PC manufacturers offering models with Linux that may be the sign that Windows foothold on the "PC" may be weakening.

Dell announced offerings some time ago, but recently announced new laptops that will be running Ubuntu giving a nice selection of machines to choose from, desktop or laptop.

IBM has also announced "Microsoft-free desktops".

Choice is good!

• Track & Field News Predictions: Men's Top 10s - Bolt predicted to complete the double. Lagat to get the 1500 but 2nd in the 5000 to Bekele.
• Track & Field News Predictions: Women's Top 10s - U.S. Women in the 100, 200, and 400, Dibaba to get the 10000 but 2nd in 5000 to Defar. Jamaica picked in the 4x100!
• Gay removes flash from 100m dash - Kudos to Kobe for knowing to ask about Gay's leg.
• Powell propelled by personal tragedy as he prepares for greatest showdown on earth - Speaking of his WR in his first race after Worlds last year where he shut it down early, "I definitely would have gone under 9.7 but I slowed down because it was a heat."
• Edwin Moses: An Olympic message - We should all listen when one of our greatest speaks: "Without a doubt, there is absolutely no other event on the planet that has so much meaning and can have such an enormous effect on so many people."
• Where have all the spectators gone? - An interesting dynamic that having lower cost tickets could result in people being more willing to buy but then not show up. Some blame is put on corporations that don't use their tickets too.
• U.S. men gymnasts get unexpected bronze - Finishing on Pommel wasn't pretty, but it held up. Women's team final tonight (lineup).
• Doping control is bleeding Asafa Powell dry - I'm glad they are testing, but this seems a little extreme: "About two days ago, I got pretty upset, because since I've been here, they have tested me four times, and took blood, a lot of blood, ... I'm saying that they are taking so much blood that we are going to be very weak for the finals of the 100 meters."
• Mac doesn't want to play Olympic Games - Microsoft apparently doesn't care about Mac PPC users. They don't care about Linux users either, but that is no surprise.

I know I've included numerous entries as part of my track and Olympic links blog entries on the pollution in Beijing, but this latest story I saw deserves its own entry.

According to Telegraph.co.uk, a British smog monitoring unit was forced to be shutdown. It had already been limited to registered users but when it was reporting that pollution levels in the area many Olympic events are at were above an Air Pollution Index of 100 (which is agreed upon as unsafe) while the governments measurement was 95, that was apparently too much.

I'm not sure if I'm more disappointed that the Chinese asked for the site to be shutdown or if the British group gave in. Perhaps they didn't have an option ...

• U.S. Olympian Lopez Lomong's great escape - A sobering story that makes one appreciate everything we have and take for granted.
• Tape Delay by NBC Faces End Run by Online Fans - As expected, NBC is trying to thwart attempts by viewers to get to watch events less than 12-24 hours after they happen. With today's technology, how could they think this wouldn't happen? And how about NBC just show us events live as the way around it? Some good quotes: 'As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place.' “The idea of watching a 14-hour delay is repulsive”. “We have a billion dollars worth of revenue at stake here, so that means we’re not public television, for better or worse.” Television networks “no longer have the same viewer monopoly they had 30 years ago — why don’t they see that?”
• A dissenting view on the air quality - "But for the vast majority of sports, I don't think air quality is going to be a big deal at all. It ain't pretty, no. But it's not making lungs burn."
• Teg’s Olympic Journal #3: Hello From Beijing! - He also says the air looks bad but seems ok at least on easy days.

After one day of events, I think I've found the best place to find results online.

First, I tried NBC Olympics and was disappointed to not be able to easily find the results from the mens gymnastics qualifying. In fact, the only thing I was able to find was the summary of the team scoring and no details on qualifying for the all around or the event finals.

I went searching and found what appears to be the official results site which is great. It allows you to drill in by sport and see all the details. I even found that it has play by play for beach volleyball!

Now, if you are stuck watching the Olympics on the NBC family of networks, the NBC site is pretty good, although other than the main network the schedule for the other channels is pretty general so it is hard to tell when specifically an event will be.

Enjoy the games!