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Aron Ralston. You may not know the name, but you probably heard of his amazing story. Mountaineering by himself in Utah in 2003, his forearm and right hand became trapped for four days by a boulder that had slipped down on them. Finally out of water, he amputated his own hand with a multitool, to save his own life. For months – long before last October’s SharePoint Conference where gossip and dreams of Office for the iPad were a common…

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  As a child, my parents took my brother and I on several vacations. My dad’s a history buff, though – specifically the Civil War timeframe – so many of our vacations had a historical angle to them. One I remember best was a trip to the Washington, D.C. area when I was almost 10. In particular, we went to Colonial Williamsburg. I never would have imagined it then, but one thing that I saw there has stuck with me…

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Yes, I said it. Windows 8 should completely, blatantly steal a feature from OS X “Mountain Lion”. Issue certs for ISVs outside (not just inside) the store, lock Windows down to them by default, and revoke them when they go rogue. The reality is that Windows 8 on x86/x64 needs Gatekeeper (signature-based whitelisting) far more than the Mac does. I’ve seen huge cry from the open-source crowd about Windows 8 boot security, Mac App Store apps having to live within…

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I spent three days this week with a rather intense migraine. Hovering between pain and vertigo, I had an idea for a blog post I wanted to write. I blathered into Dragon Dictation on my iPad, only to realize I was rambling on about a subject that needed simplicity.  So I waited to write when I was cogent. I believe that Ken Segall’s upcoming book likely covers some of the same area I’m about to – albeit in more depth,…

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Recently a peer and I were talking about the phrase in the title of this post. We both heard it at Microsoft, and I know I heard it at startups after I left too. If you haven’t heard it before, the idea is as follows. There are three properties of a product: Delivery date Key features Product quality Generally when building a product, one of them gets cut, so you wind up usually only delivering two: Features and quality, but…

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I’ve asked repeatedly for more information on Windows for the ARM platform. Today, I got it. I still have a few questions, and I have some nagging concerns still. But they did answer a few key questions. In his blog post today, Steven Sinofsky discussed quite a bit, but you can break it down into roughly 6 areas: Windows on ARM (WoA) fundamentals (what it is, and what it isn’t). The Consumer Preview (and the role – or lack thereof…

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For more than 10 years, I’ve used Microsoft’s 10 Immutable Laws of Security as a “debate ender”. The 10 Immutable Laws is an article that can help unlock some simple security fundamentals in a manner easily digested by those new to security. I’ve been getting more and more irritated with the people “running” my government lately. I say “running” because enough of us vote for these people to get them in to federal, state, and local offices. But once they…

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I was able to find  a customer on the Office 15 Technical Preview, and confidentially asked them 10 questions about the Technical Preview, based on just a few days of use. The results are below, and I think you’ll find them both surprising and informative. Q1: What are you most excited about in Office 15? “Without a doubt, we are most excited that Office 15 will run on both redacted and redacted“ Q2: Is there a feature that you think…

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Last October, I noted on Twitter that an unusual (I mean highly unusual) number of spammers on Twitter used an avatar photo of a woman. But not just any woman. In addition, many spammers seemed to use a photo of a woman specifically with cleavage showing. Since I have been doing some research on criminal domains that involves a fair amount of REST querying anyway, it didn’t take much work for me to build a query engine where before reporting them…

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Do the engineers who design the electrical supplies for electronic gadgets hate their customers? Am I wrong, or doesn’t it seem like this 20+ year passive/aggressive game of inconsistent sizes, voltages, wattages, and connectors , along with designing AC adapters that block AC wall outlets or take up two or more spaces on a surge suppressor has gone on too long? I’m cleaning my office today. At least I’m trying to. I’m getting rid of two old Netgear WiFi routers,…

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