The Edukators

Very good movie!

German Title: Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei
English Title: The Edukators (or "you are too rich")

"The movie is essentially about three friends with seemingly no particular direction in life other than petty political activism now and then. But Peter and Jan have found a very clever way of subverting the socio-economic system they so despise. Calling themselves "the Edukators", they break into the homes of the fabulously wealthy only to make some absurd adjustments to the arrangement of their furniture and leave a simple note behind: "You have too much money."

Undoing the Industrial Revolution (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

"The last 200 years have driven centralization and changed the human experience in ways that conflict with evolution. The Internet will reestablish a more balanced, decentralized lifestyle."

ILOG Rules for .NET: Geschäftsregeln mit Office bearbeiten

könnte interessant sein:

(COMPUTERWOCHE) - Ilog bringt Anfang Dezember sein "Ilog Rules for .NET" auf den Markt. Dieses neue Paket zur Verwaltung von Business Rules setzt nach Angaben des Herstellers vollständig auf Microsofts .NET-Plattform und bietet darüber hinaus Integration mit Office, Visual Studio und SharePoint.

Es besteht aus den vier Komponenten "Rule Solutions for Office" (integriert einen "Point-and-Click"-Editor mit natürlichsprachlicher Syntax für Geschäfsregeln in Microsofts Bürosuite), "Rule Studio for .NET" (Plug-in-Set, mit dem Visual-Studio-Entwickler Geschäftsregeln im IDE entwerfen, testen und in ihre Anwendungen integrieren können), "Rule Team Server for Sharepoint" (Repository für Geschäftsregeln, auf das Policy-Manager und Geschäftsanwender über Windows Sharepoint Services gemeinsam zugreifen können) sowie der "Rule Engine for .NET" (nativ für .NET entwickelte Regel-Engine zur nahtlosen Einbindung in Applikationen unabhängig von Architektur und Programmiersprache). (tc)

Warning Regarding Leased Lines from Deutsche Telekom Competitors in Germany

There are several competitors of Deutsche Telekom who offer leased lines throughout Germany.

The company I am working for is using leased lines from one of these providers to build a WAN between our sites in Germany. The provider is offering his service significantly cheaper than Deutsche Telekom does. However there's a downside we did not expect.

Our central site has a direct fiber connection to the provider network. At two other sites however this is not available, because the provider does not have his own network / fibre infrastructure in this city. Nevertheless he offered to connect this site to our central site.

How does he do it? He teams up with a local provider. However this local provider doesn't have a direct connection to our office in this city either - he needs to rent the "last mile" from Deutsche Telekom. This means that our WAN connection to this city is bought from one provider, but underneath its dependent on three providers.

First of all, going through three providers is of course adding several possible points of failures.

Those providers to not always talk to each other when it comes to maintenance. We've had outages that turned out to be "planned maintenance", however we were not informed and it happend in the midst of the day during our business hours.

Even worse, once we had an outage starting friday evening. Our provider did not even notice the outage. He monitors the connection to the local provider, but did not notice at all that the connection from the local provider to our office had failed. This is in spite he has an SLA that covers the end-to-end connection.

Not going with the Ex-monopolist Deutsche Telekom saves money, but it comes at additional risks.