A daily digest of IT news, curated from blogs, forums and news sites around the web each morning. We highlight the key commentary and demystify the real story.
In this special IT Blogwatch, we look back at what bloggers were saying about IT news in June. From iPhones to aviation and from H-1B workers to Windows 7, bloggers blogged it and your humble blogwatcher watched it.
By Richi Jennings: your humble blogwatcher, who selects bloggy morsels for your enjoyment every day. Not to mention how we used to play games on phones...
We kicked off the month with the inevitable leaks about the then-unnamed new iPhone. Jesus Diaz' reaction was typical:
I'm looking at these images from a Hong Kong blog, and they totally look like The Real Thing to me. Sure they are blurry, but those applications' user interface definitely screams Apple design. The gallery shows the compass and autofocus in actionwhich can't work in current hardware.
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As we get closer to WWDC, it seems that some stuff may be starting to leak. We saw potential parts from the next-generation iPhone 3G and what may be a new finish.
But before we could marvel at what WWDC hath brought, E3 was upon us. And Matt Peckham found the IT angle amongst the gaming fraternity:
Microsoft utterly wowed with "Project Natal." I mean really wowed. Yeah, it's kind of a dumb name, but it may turn out to be the most impressive show item any company's crowed about in years.
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Now think beyond games for a moment, which is where trotting out a filmmaker of Steven Spielberg's stature factors more than superficially. ... It's part of more than just Microsoft's gaming lineup. Think about ... a system that already knows whether you're grumpy or melancholy, smiling or frowning, how many fingers you're holding up, or how curled or extended each one is.
Speaking of Microsoft, everyone wanted to know when the Windows 7 release date is. Vitaliy N. Katsenelson sought a meme simile: [Sought a whatnow? -Ed.]
If Susan Boyle was a stock, Id call her a deep value stock with very low expectations, and thus a great margin of safety, selling at a discount to its fair value.
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Microsoft ... doesnt have the luster it once had. It's seen as middle-aged, overweight and slow, and it is believed by many that creativity retired with Bill Gates. The sentiment is so horrible that there is almost universal expectation that it will not come up with another good product, ever. ... But the ugly duckling is about to sing, and it will be a Susan Boyle-like performance.
The tragic Air France crash in the Atlantic at the start of the month inevitably led to uninformed speculation on the role of computers. However, Shannon Jacobs is a former pilot (or claims to be):
I tend to favor machines over humans. As Einstein noted, there are no limits to human stupidity, but you can design any degree of redundancy you want into mechanical systems. The simple question is cost versus probabilistic safety.
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As regards the storm, I actually came close to getting killed when something like that caught me off guard.
When the Indian-born CEO of IT services vendor HCL Technologies was reported to have said some "unfortunate" things about American IT graduates, bloggers such as Renganathan "Guru Panguji" Ramamoorthy vehemently disagreed:
About 90% of the Indians in these software houses have NO frickin clue on how to write good code. Trust me, Ive been there and done that. For ITIL and Six Sigma, they are not aware of basic quality processes and follow them on a rote model if instructed in written points pasted across bulletin boards.
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The Indian institutes ... have the awesome reputation of churning out mindless coding zombies who dont ask a question, but can churn out code at mindnumbingly fast rates (of course with poor quality: bugs are the way maintenance guys make money).
And the biggest news of the month was the sad death of Michael Jackson, which posed a problem for several overloaded Internet services. Tom Chamberlain heard a distant wake-up call:
It's a reminder that the web still has a long way to go before it can replace one way venues such as television. In fact I'd go further and say the technology industry needs to take serious note of this. As the industry pushes more and more into programs and services that require greater bandwidth it's instructive to see how even people seeking simple text can bring the biggest sites to their knees.
We are living on borrowed time bandwidth wise and, as Robert X. Cringely is so fond of pointing out, a web where everyone is streaming in HD is not something our current bandwidth capabilities can support. That's something we should all take notice of.
Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 24 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him as @richi on Twitter or richij on FriendFeed, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itblogwatch@richij.com.
