Powers Unfiltered

An entrepreneur’s journey into grid computing and partnering with Microsoft, by John Powers

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Entries Tagged as 'Usability'

Good News on Wall Street

March 10th, 2009 · No Comments

Who says there’s no good news for financial companies?
Penny Crosman provided some good news for banks, hedge funds, and other money managers in her article today in Wall Street & Technology — good news for financial developers and IT professionals who need to access more processing power without complex application re-engineering. 
You can read the article [...]

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Tags: Grid applications · Press coverage · Usability

Good Night, AdCenter

October 13th, 2008 · 3 Comments

After two years of testing the promises, wishes and hopes of the Microsoft AdCenter team, and thousands of dollars spent to no avail, Digipede is done with Microsoft’s online advertising.
I, CEO of a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, do hereby proclaim my opinion, based on firsthand experience, that Microsoft AdCenter is entirely without value to our [...]

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Tags: Partnering with Microsoft · Usability

Last month’s least surprising (and least correct) cloud pronouncement

August 14th, 2008 · 2 Comments

OK, this one came out while I was on vacation, so it’s a little old, but I can’t let it pass.
The new head of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst, says “The clouds will all run Linux.”
Really? What’s next? The head of Boeing telling us that all transportation will be via 787s? Or [...]

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Tags: Cloud computing · Press coverage · Usability

It works in the lab — now what?

June 9th, 2008 · No Comments

Digipede CTO Robert Anderson is blogging about a recent experiment we’ve conducted in our lab, assessing what it would take to get the Digipede Agent running on Mono. (For those of you who don’t know, Mono is a cross-platform implementation of .NET, developed as an open-source project led by Miguel de Icaza, and sponsored [...]

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Tags: Compute Cluster Server · Grid applications · Partnering with Microsoft · Usability

Digipede Network V2.1 — Beyond the Press Release

June 5th, 2008 · No Comments

Releasing software is hard.
Sure, the individual steps like specifying, developing, testing, documenting, and planning support for new software features are difficult enough — but the discipline of knowing when to STOP adding features, and to focus instead on finishing a complete, polished, release-ready product is tougher than it sounds to those outside the industry.
In any [...]

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Tags: Customer Service · Entrepreneurship · Grid applications · Growth · Partnering with Microsoft · Usability

Digipede in .NET Developer’s Journal grid computing article

June 3rd, 2008 · No Comments

Derek Furguson of Bear Stearns (now JPMorgan Chase) has a good article in .NET Developer Journal about how to apply genetic algorithms and grid computing to the problem of market timing in stock trading. I was pleased to see that he chose to implement his algorithms using the Digipede Network.
His article is in [...]

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Tags: Grid applications · Press coverage · Usability

Five Suggested Technical Improvements for the Microsoft Partner Web Site

January 29th, 2008 · 5 Comments

In the spirit of Todd Weatherby’s comments about opening a dialog regarding the Microsoft Partner Program Web Site, here are five technical things Microsoft could do to improve interactions with partners and customers.  I (and other partners) have put forward some more radical ideas for redesign of partner program policies and tools, but let’s start [...]

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Tags: Partnering with Microsoft · Usability

Hey, Microsoft — get off of my cloud

January 8th, 2008 · 5 Comments

All my regular readers know I use the Microsoft partner Web sites fairly often, and that I experience frustrating time-sucking issues almost as often. Believe me, I spare my readership the great majority of my experiences with the unending nightmare that is the Microsoft partner online world, and when I do raise these issues I’m [...]

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Tags: Customer Service · Partnering with Microsoft · Usability

Microsoft Channel Builder — 30 months of futility and counting

October 22nd, 2007 · 3 Comments

As a vocal detractor of Microsoft’s Channel Builder, I feel I have to report anything positive that happens there, too (note that prior to this week I have never had anything even remotely good to report in my 2.5 year history of using this tragically misguided Microsoft tool). So I promise, buried in this long [...]

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Tags: Partnering with Microsoft · Usability

Microsoft vs. Microsoft — here we go again

June 24th, 2007 · No Comments

I will post another million positive things about the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WWPC) any day now.  Promise.  I love this event.  Honest.  But for now — arrrg.  Microsoft’s use of its own tools is driving me nuts.  Here we go again. 
As many of you know, I’m a big fan of large conferences, under certain [...]

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Tags: Events · Partnering with Microsoft · Usability