the inventor of Simula passes on

Kristen Nygaard, the inventor of Simula, the first Object-Oriented computer language (way, waaay ahead of its time) has passed on. I studied Simula as an undergraduate along with other early OO languages such as Beta, both clean, advanced languages with some things that many languages today (think Visual Basic) don't yet have, and, as far as I know, it was the first high-level language that didn't use a pre-processor, and was all the better for it.

the myth of cybersecurity

Ray Ozzie writes on News.com on why security is almost nonexistent in today's networked environments. His article is related to today's posting on his weblog. In part he advocates "cellular" approaches to security, which is (unsurprisingly) something that his company's product (Groove) does.

Security is non-existent, right. But whose fault is it? It's not a problem with the users. Users end up circumventing security because it's too hard to use, slow, cumbersome. Once security is embedded into everything and transparent, then people will use it... without knowing it. It's on us to provide it.

u2log

I just found u2log.com a "u2 weblog". It should get interesting with the impending release of the new album (rumors put the radio release of the single at 15 september, and then release of single in October with the CD following a few weeks later). The first two songs are said to be called Electric Storm and The hands that built America.

the next microsoft office

An Infoworld interview with Jeff Raikes (VP of Productivity and Business Services) on the future of Microsoft Office and how it will interact with Sharepoint services and Groove.

Comparing this to the rumors that appeared about two months ago relating to Office 11 (ie., post Office XP, which was O.10) and "Office NGO" or "Office .Net" (which might have been simply concepts floated out as FUD or simply as the result of infighting at MS) it seems the interview doesn't seem to contradict them, but how close these two visions end up being is anybody's guess.

Regardless of how difficult to use Office 11 will be (hint: even more difficult than Office XP, since it has all these new collaboration features) I am always impressed that Microsoft can manage to churn out these incredibly complicated products, mixing client, server, products from other companies, etc, and in the process making sure that they are obliterating the competition, whoever they are and making a bundle.