ePragmatic - practical solutions

Come join me to discuss practical solutions in the field of technology, let's get practical

Thursday, September 30, 2004

 

CA to Lay Off 800 Workers

IS IT GOOD OR BAD?

Depends on how you view it, after first debate of Kerry Vs Bush it is tough to decide what is good or bad about the iraq war, another such war happening in IT industry is "Outsourcing".... whether it is good or bad??? read the article below...

Global Warming - Good or bad
Terrorism - Good or bad
African country crises - Good or bad
OutSourcing - Good or bad

"Change is Constant", so better get used to change now or later... now read the article below and put your your 2 cents (comments) ....

CA to Lay Off 800 Workers: "CA to Lay Off 800 Workers
By Don E. Sears
September 29, 2004

Computer Associates on Wednesday announced a restructuring plan that will lay off 800 employees, or about 5 percent of its workforce, with 550 of the 800 reductions to take place in North America.
The plan is expected to bring $70 million in savings on an annualized basis to Islandia, N.Y.-based Computer Associates International Inc., once the layoffs are completely implemented. The plan will cost about $40 million, or 4 cents per fully diluted common share. The majority of the charge should occur in the second quarter of fiscal year 2005. "



Tuesday, September 28, 2004

 

Could a 'GBrowser' Spawn an 'MBrowser'?

Could a 'GBrowser' Spawn an 'MBrowser'?: "Could a 'GBrowser' Spawn an 'MBrowser'?
By Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Watch
September 26, 2004

If Google releases a browser, will Microsoft do an about-face and deliver a new stand-alone version of Internet Explorer?

This is cool that Google has booked domain names already as Gbrowser.com .....hmm may I should book all domain names starting with Letter "G" :) like GShopping.com, GMate.com, GTravel.com, GOS.com (GOperationsystem.com) or how about this GSoft.com like Microsoft.com ..... lol



Saturday, September 25, 2004

 

Hiring Technical People

productmarketing.com: "Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Hiring Technical People

Johanna Rothman has published Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science Of Hiring Technical People, available at Amazon.
She writes, 'Hiring knowledge workers, such as technical people, is different from hiring purely skill-based staff. Knowledge workers are not just the sum of their technical knowledge; they are the sum of their technical knowledge and the way in which they apply that knowledge to the product. The method with which they apply their knowledge is determined by how they use their technical skills for the product, how they manage their work, and how they manage their relationships with other people. Skill-based staff members have a set of skills they can apply the same way in almost all situations. Knowledge workers must adapt their knowledge to the situation.'

More about Johanna and the book on her blog, Hiring Technical People."



Monday, September 20, 2004

 

Hello : Introducing BloggerBot

Hello : Introducing BloggerBot: "Introducing BloggerBot
Now you can use Hello to publish pictures to any Blogger blog.
Meet BloggerBot.

Just use Hello to send your pictures to BloggerBot. BloggerBot will automatically resize your JPG pictures, add your captions, and publish your pictures to the Web.

You don't have to resize pictures by hand, transfer files, format HTML posts, or even find a place to host your images - Hello does all the work for you. And, it's totally free. "



Sunday, September 19, 2004

 

What is in BETA?

I ran into Yahoo's new beta site for travel....

FareChase - Searching the Internet for Travel!: "Search Here. Travel Everywhere.Whether you are looking for flights, hotels or rental cars, we search more than 50 internet travel websites so you can find the trip you want at the price you want. "

Also A9 is out of beta process that begun in April and now the site is capable of linking ur Amazon's searches history into this and gives you some cool interfaces to bookmark, search etc... take a look at it ... A9.com



Saturday, September 18, 2004

 

Yahoo! Groups : "biz_analysts" Messages

I recently posted a message on our Yahoo groups called "Biz_analysts" trying to analyze what a Business Analyst should do? The topic name is "Analyze this.... Analyze that..."

Yahoo! Groups : biz_analysts Messages : Message 29 of 30:
"Analyze this .... Analyze that.... sounds like a movie name, where
Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal have played outstanding
performance ... anyways the reason to post this image and topic
on 'BRAIN' yahoo groups is to hear your views, I feel that as a
Business analyst we should not only Analyze uni-direction, but need
to Analyze bi-directional... what does that mean???

Well, we (BA's) go out and start understanding business requirements
and the problems faced by our customers and try to write requirement
documents, Use case, UML, blah blah, which i terms as 'Analyze
this'...

Now at this juncture, before pouring those documents to development
teams, ideally one should take requirements and share them with your
internal development teams and understand their point of view and
the tools they are planning to use to address the problems, which I
term as 'Analyze that...'

We have to do a balancing act of addressing customers/market
requirements (inward) and address technology and tools (outward) to
customers/market, this balancing act helps us to release
products/projects on-time and stay with technology that and cutomers
benefit in both ways.

Whether you are a Business Analyst for Product based company or
Project based companies, whether you use Rational tools or Product
mgmt tools, the inward and outward information sharing has to
occur....

So why don't you guys Analyze this thought .... and provide your
opinions and views ...

'Doc, Doc ur good.. ohh yeah ur good ...', famous dialogues from the
movie :)"



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Thursday, September 16, 2004

 

Skype - Free Internet telephony that just works

Well here we have another FREE services offered for Internet Telephony .... If you guys like this service then add me to your list my screen name is "dialmenow"......

Skype - Free Internet telephony that just works: "Skype is free Internet telephony
that just works.
Skype is for calling other people on their computers or phones. Download Skype and start calling for free all over the world."



Monday, September 13, 2004

 

PC Magazine News: Bose Technology Re-imagines Auto Suspension

Innovation at its best .... from a Company who are pioneers in sound and music are now into car suspension .... Bose ur the Boss :)

PC Magazine News: Bose Technology Re-imagines Auto Suspension: "Bose Technology Re-imagines Auto Suspension
By Bill Howard
August 26, 2004


Maybe your dream car has an 11-speaker Bose entertainment system in the cabin. Well, the next performance car of your dreams could have a Bose suspension system under the sheet metal. Seriously. The Framingham, Massachusetts, company best known for audio systems and speakers, has developed a revolutionary computer-controlled suspension system that replaces the traditional shocks and springs with electronic actuators. The result is a ride that's absolutely flat over the bumpiest of roads and around sharp corners. In theory, a car could even bank into turns, as do planes and high-speed trains. "



Sunday, September 12, 2004

 

How does Product Management help us get better products?

How does Product Management help us get better products?

Thinking about this question for sometime I had no quick answer in short conversation, so I kept my observance of how other companies changed products....

Well, I was washing my face and I noticed that I had a pimple/acne (dude this age u still get it ...anyways) and wanted to get rid of it, so i applied a cream from neutorgen, I can do this only in the night before sleeping coz if I applied during morning/evening times anybody could notice the cream, since it was white in color and looks like a patch on your face when applied :) ... .. so this was not effective as experienced by the consumers and they were forced to apply during night times...

OK, so "how did Product Management solve this conundrum"?
As Product Managers are called market messengers, they did their market survey and found out that their is a problem with their consumers,... they wanted to liberate them so they can apply this cream whenever ... after research and development the next version of the product from neutrogen had some amazing features, I purchased this new product without knowingly the cream was not white anymore, it was your skin color, I mean it was transparent cream.... so now i can apply anytime, even go to office and still nobody notices that I had a cream for acne applied and the cream is doing its job of kicking away the pimple/acne ... For neutrogen, they gained market share and consumers loved this product much better than all those white creams based ones...

This was one of the features among many they came up with and they have kept their innovation quest going ... some of the companies don't even understand the need of product management, they mostly promote their own feature lists and then look for buyers instead of other way round ....

Software Product Management: If you can't define it, you're doing a bad job at it...


Sunday, September 05, 2004

 

Inside Intuit: How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft

YOU got to read this or best buy this book ..... Home Page: "Inside Intuit: How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft
and Revolutionized an Entire Industry"

To read click here as you read the timeline how Intuit won all this years the author makes it point to say that Intuit is celebrating 20yrs of fun, passion, product development and stayed as leader in small and medium business .....

I wld say Microsoft a big Copier, bigger than XEROX, shld we start calling MS as "MicroCopy"

Intuit is truly the No.1 product based company, I would love to work .... make sure to read rest of the pages on that site ....

 

Blogging continues, after break ;)

Well, I kind of went of the track as i needed some break to make my India trip after nearly 2 and half yrs since my last visit ...

The trip was good, as planned i was able to visit bangalore, delhi, agra and was fortunate to see the 8th wonder of the world "Taj Mahal" Click here.

So now back to blogging ..... First thing i did was to throw away my old desktop and bought a new HP Pavilion with dvd and cd writer and 200GB HDD (well thats gonna be filled in few months for my kind of surfing :), it is really cool desktop built with firewire card, 8in1 card readers and also flat 17" monitor all for well 1200$ kind of pricy but when u want the best u got to pay the best ....

Only things i dont like is they have installed XP home edition and the damn guys have removed the personal web server IIS on this edition so now i'm stuck have to upgrade to XP pro where MS can make money ... and office 2003, 2 month trial ... basically Bill wants to keep his billionarie position tight ....



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