The Sikh Geek

A few years back India put in place a dual nationality programme for the Indian diaspora. If you were of Indian origin through birth there or via your parents you could apply for Indian nationality. So, why would a country whose population is over 1 billion want more people in its country? There is only one answer and that is because it’s about the Economy. They want to attract the best and brightest back, those that left and went and set up businesses in Silicon Valley and who have been some of the most able people around the world . It’s the 60th Anniversary of India since independence, since it stepped out of the shadow of centuries of occupation, first by the Moghul Emperors and then by the British. India has a lot to thank the British Empire for. The very reason major corporations are falling over themselves to set up development centres there and outsource to India is because of the structures, both political and civil instigated by The Raj. It’s coming to bite us in the ass. I can see it from both perspectives. British Indians born and brought up in this country are going to India to work and live and I can only see that accelerating over time. Nations normally worry about what comes in, they rarely care about what’s going out. Global economics and global corporations are no respecters of borders. An Indian sitting across the Globe doesn’t have get off his backside to affect your job. India is already the third largest investor in to the UK and with projections over the next five years that VC funding in India will be greater than that in the UK the rise of India is assured.

This ONLamp Article gives a great overview of Mono which is an implementation of .NET on Linux and the Mono guys have also been working hard on getting Silverlight working for Linux as well with some good progress.

This is one to definitely to come to at De Montfort University, Leicester. You can confirm attendance on Facebook or check out the website. Believe me you want to know about Machinima, it beats playing around with a bunch of servers!!

This is not new but Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems CEO, has a blog post entitled “Momentous Day for Solaris”. IBM is going to OEM Solaris on its x86 System X Servers. Schwartz is pointing to “choice” and when you look at what IBM System X servers support today then you have Windows Server, Linux (Red Hat & Novell) and now Solaris. So, if you’re an organisation running a load of commodity Intel based servers which servers are going to best protect your investment. Sun has seen a bit of a resurgence in Solaris since it opensourced Solaris in the form of OpenSolaris. I think this is a clever move by both companies. It is good for IBM where Enterprise customers want to move away from expensive Sun hardware running Solaris onto commodity Intel Servers and it is good for Sun where Enterprise customers are considering IBM Severs running Linux.

UPDATE

In the interest of fairness, the HP Proliant Servers support the same range of OSes and in fact have a compatibility matrix for Debian and Oracle EL (in addition to Red Hat and Novell SUSE). Cool!

Here is the original post.

 I don’t really need it but let’s face it when do we ever get another gadget when we need it! I have a SPV C600 with Windows Mobile 5.0 which works okay. There are a few things which are a bit dodgy such as the Radio Circuity has a tendency to lose network connection in low signal levels and slow to reacquire it. The device does occaisionally fail to switch-off unless you hold the standby-power key for a prolonged period. It is however an essential business tool. The SPV E650 is available for free and has Windows Mobile 6.0 but you’ll have to sign-up for another 12 month contract period but is no great problem.

If you are looking at selling Sharepoint Services in conjunction with SBS 2003 R2, then you need the following Resource DVD from Microsoft. It is called “How to Sell, Deploy and Build Business with Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 (WSS) and SBS 2003 R2″. I got this DVD from a couple of Partners in Denver who had helped develop it with Microsoft. Stuart Crawford who is one of the Canadian SBSC PALs and SBS MVP had used this resource to sell a stack load of Sharepoint implementations.

If any one knows how to get hold of one of these in the UK or whether they are part of the Action Pack, then please let me know. I’ll see if I can find out as well.

Also, check out the Main SBS Partner Site for some good content on SBS and Sharepoint Services.

Don’t discount OfficeLive as this is a WSS 3.0 site and you can do some really clever stuff with it and with the first 3 months free and then £22.99 + VAT per month for the Premium Edition it is a bargain.

What a great post on Port 25 on Linux and Windows interoperability. The best and most detailed overview of what Microsoft and Novell are doing and aiming for. This is one of my passions “interoperability” and in that lies some great opportunities for Microsoft. As the post says heterogenous systems are growing rapidly and customers want solutions that work seamlessly together. Nice to see them mention Eclipse which is an Open Source framework for building rich client applications based on Java originating from IBM and which forms the basis of the new croos-platform Lotus Notes client. Eclipse doesn’t use the standard SWING Gui Toolkit but IBM’s SWT GUI Toolkit. You can build some great apps using Eclipse and have the look and performance of native apps all using Java, thanks to SWT.

We are going to be thanking these guys profusely in the years to come and shows what you can do with with a small talented team.

Think informal atmosphere talking about Web 2.0, Business and ideas on how you can make effective use of Social Networking technologies in your organisation over some coffee. That’s what the CreativeCoffee Club is and it’s coming very soon to Leicester. Yes, Leicester that bastion of the knowledge based economy and home to the greatest thinkers in New Media stuff!! Seriously, this is going to be good, mixing academic thinking with business pragmatism and coming up with some interesting and exciting outcomes. I’m hoping to be actively involved in linking the local business community to these events. There’s a great bunch of people behind this, who are very passionate and stimulating to be with. What more could you ask for?