SSWUG-TV
With Stephen Wynkoop
SQL Server Injection prevention and help, interview with Philip Japikse, Patterns and Practices Evangelist for Telerik. We also have the latest news on Oracle’s purchase of RightNow Technologies, IBMs push into unstructured data analysis and more.
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Last week’s show: Interview with Peter Serzo, Senior SharePoint Architect with High Monkey Consulting. We also have the latest news coming from the PASS Summit 2011 and a special "IMHO" segment with SQL Server MVP Denny Cherry.
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Featured Article(s)
Thinking Like the Owner Sets You Apart
Laura Lee Rose, who is a business coach and corporate exit strategist, shares how testers, developers and project managers can think like an entrepreneur in their current corporate position. She explains how “thinking like the owner” paves the way for advancement within the company and beyond.
Visual COBOL
That’s right…it’s actually been done. I remember joking and laughing in the early 1990s about creating languages like Visual RPG, or Visual COBOL. The primary reason was the fact that COBOL as it was used in the 90s was not object oriented in any fashion, which was really one of the key aspects of the term "Visual" (hat in hand I admit that Visual Basic available at that time wasn’t truly object oriented either). IMHO Microsoft did a nice job of converting FoxPro into an object oriented language.
What is the Business Case for joining a product that was not object oriented with the Java or Dot Net environment that is fully object oriented? Micro Focus, the company selling Visual COBO, provides this guidance taken from their product data sheet on Visual COBOL for Visual Studio 2010.
"Previously IT organizations and ISVs considered their only option to deliver the new features and deploy into the standard frameworks was to rewrite business applications in Java or C#. This introduces both cost and risk for little added value. With Visual COBOL the application can remain in COBOL and the application provider can choose to deploy in native code or as managed code for .NET or JVM platforms, gaining the benefits of the platform and the traditional strength and reliability of existing application….
Visual COBOL provides familiar, high-performance developer tools to address the needs of modern business IT. By combining rich tools with a modern language, existing applications can be reused in new ways, integrated with other systems and deployed to cost-effective and robust execution environments.
Visual COBOL for Visual Studio is a part of the Visual COBOL 2010 product portfolio from Micro Focus which includes testing and developer productivity tools."
Reader Predictions
Here are some more predictions from our readers…
George Writes:
What ever happened to optical computers? in 1993 when the first one was demonstrated, they promised us that we would be able to buy a desktop for $10K by the year 2000 that would be at least 10,000 times faster than the fastest super computer of the day. Awhile back IBM made a grand announcement of just such a CPU and it disappeared…
Alas, where have they gone? There was an Israeli startup called Lenslet that got 26 million or so frm Meryll Lynch and they produced an optical CPU on a DSP card that was 10,000 times faster than the best silicon based cards, for telephone switching, audio and video processing and such.
Donald Writes:
This is fun.
It is not what will happen but when.
Artificial intelligence – when the density of networks in a computer’s memory exceeds that of the human brain. Next Five years.
As an outgrowth of "Cloud" computing, "Skynet becomes self-aware." could happen any day.
Very many technologies will be developed and discarded (or little used) because the assumptions about the world’s resources that caused them to be developed turn out to be wrong: electric cars, mass transportation systems, fusion reactors.
Although I see the return of the "Internet appliance" as the TV/computer/cell phone.
Embedding phones in your head is nothing new, I read a sci-fi story about it when I was in high school.
No, Even though Oracle will never get it’s act together it won’t matter because it is too big to fail. Oracle will buy the following companies within the next 10 years:
- HP
- Dell
- Apple
- AT&T
It won’t have to buy Microsoft, Microsoft will go bankrupt.
Sprint and Verizon will merge in the next 2 years to fight off AT&T/T-Mobile.
Motorola will fade in to oblivion or be bought by Mr. Matshushita
There will be an increasing number of technological dropouts, sort of a subculture of technophobes.
Someone will pay me $200 for my working Commodore 64 (the carton is dryrotted though).
Send your comments to btaylor@sswug.org. I’d sure be interested to hear from anyone using Visual COBOL If you have more predictions…I’ll save a little room for you.
Cheers,
Ben
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