Posted on June 18th, 2008 by Scott Jones
While many of the enhancements in Firefox 3.0 are good ideas and much welcomed, this release suffers from the same phenomenon as many new releases of platform-type software. That is, lack of 3rd party support. With supposedly over a thousand add-ons available out there, Firefox has, after all, become essentially a platform. This is by design, as extensibility is one of the basic value props Mozilla promotes for the open source browser. I’m highly acclimated to (and now dependent on!) the ten extensions that I use with Firefox 2.x (not counting the DOM Inspector and Talkback). So when I activated a Firefox 3.0 layer and cranked it up, I was dismayed that only two of my extensions worked (or had an update available). One of the broken ones (the Unified Back-/Forward Button) has been incorporated as a feature of Firefox 3.0, but w/o 70% of my add-on functionality, my browser was effectively broken by this user’s reckoning.
Read more…
2 Comments »
Filed under: Computers & Technology
Posted on June 10th, 2008 by Scott Jones
LordJeb just posted a paper that talks about the adverse effects of the Seventeenth Amendment. In his intro, he touches on a topic near and dear to my heart — the tyranny of majority, and how the US founding fathers hoped to protect against it by establishing our country as a constitutional republic, not as a democracy. The definitive document on these concepts is Federalist No. 10, which it just so happens I wrote a (shorter) paper on when I was taking political science classes back in the previous century. So in the interest of discourse, here is my little piece on Federalist No. 10, written May 23, 1995:
Read more…
No Comments »
Filed under: Politics
Posted on March 3rd, 2008 by Scott Jones
I toned down the last paragraph of this Juice article last week for posting on the company site. But I can’t help myself. Here’s the original edit:
The great part for SVS development is that we didn’t have to write any of this stuff. All the needed info was just there in Windows, waiting for SVS to come along and use it to make magic. This is one example of what I mean when I say that SVS extends the plumbing that is inherent in native Windows. MS put the process tracking system in place for a lot of reasons, but it’s core to SVS being able to do what it does. It makes redirection and prioritization — and the resultant normal visibility of virtualized apps — possible. It’s one of the reasons why the lead engineer who invented SVS, Randy Cook, knew that we didn’t need to build a new, alternate execution environment like other app virtualization vendors have. They didn’t need to build a proprietary execution environment, either, actually, but they did anyway. And you see the results. Guess Randy just understands Windows architecture better. 
No Comments »
Filed under: SVS
Posted on February 9th, 2008 by Scott Jones
There are lots of different names for it out there. Intel calls it “Emerging Compute Models.” Dell and EDS call it “Flexible Computing”. Others call it “Desktop On-Demand” or any number of other names. I’ve been known to call it “Dynamic Environment” or (more recently) “Optimized Client Architectures”. What we are all talking about is the same, however — the more immediate, more reliable, more secure and less costly delivery of computer services to end users, whenever they need them, no matter where they are.
Read more…
1 Comment »
Filed under: Computers & Technology, SVS
Posted on September 12th, 2007 by Scott Jones
Posted on January 29th, 2007 by Scott Jones
Before I tried to get this job with Altiris, I tried for a position at Symantec’s American Fork, UT, development center. Just before my scheduled interview, the position was moved to Cupertino, CA. Since relocation was not an option at the time, I withdrew my app. Considering how things have worked out… Boy, am I glad that happened! Not only did I get the best product assignment a PM could hope for, but I ended up working for Symantec after all! Excelsior!
No Comments »
Filed under: Computers & Technology, General
Posted on December 27th, 2006 by Scott Jones
Last week, I found out that one of my best friends is dead. I first met John Midtgard in 6th grade. Since we left the cradle of Zephyrhills High School back in 1984 (me) and 1985 (John), we have each moved several times. We’d be apart for a few years, but then once we got back together, it would be like no time had passed. We’d just pick right back up, still good friends. The first parting was when I went off to UF a year before John did. He of course caught up with me soon enough. Then I joined the Navy for four years while John went off to Seattle for a while, and we regrouped again back in Gainesville, Florida, in 1990. It sucks that he died during another one of those forkings of our paths, and the most prolonged.
Read more…
3 Comments »
Filed under: General
Posted on December 21st, 2006 by Scott Jones
A few months ago, we chose to add some new features to SVS and change “SVS 2.0 SP2″ into “SVS 2.1″. This is causing customers to wait longer for some important bug fixes that were targeted for 2.0 SP2. In my first draft of this post, I went into all of the details of the decision and explained our QA process and so forth, in hopes that you would appreciate why one project and one release is ultimately better for customers. But I don’t want to go through all that; since SVS 2.1 beta 1 shipped, the heat seems to be off. Everyone is happy with the performance fixes and many customers are rolling the 2.1 beta into production as if it were in fact 2.0 SP2. Still, I wanted to vent a bit of frustration over an issue that most (if not all) software PM’s are familiar with.
Read more…
No Comments »
Filed under: Computers & Technology, Product Management
