2009/05/28

Gemini is designed to look as much like Excel as possible, so its data will look like a set of Excel tables. Anyone familiar with Excel 2007 tables (which is still probably only a small minority of the hundreds of millions of the world’s Excel users) will immediately feel at home. However, Gemini tables are actually stored as highly compressed, column-indexed, in-memory objects, not Excel worksheets. They are viewed and manipulated in the new Gemini client window, not in the Excel worksheet itself....

2009/02/16

Project Gemini was announced at the second annual Microsoft BI Conference in Seattle on October 6, 2008, and there is no doubt that it was the highlight of the three-day conference. The Gemini code-name is meant to imply that Excel and Analysis Services, and end-users and IT, will be twinned using the new product, but our pun (‘BOTH’) reflects the view that Gemini appears to be both a brilliant way of introducing Analysis Services to Excel users and some rather smart technology....

2010/09/04

The reality is that management by targets was always going to run into trouble. Wherever there are targets, there are a series of unintended consequences, many of which hit our headlines on a daily basis. From a systems thinking perspective, targets are actually tools and have long been in the frame for damaging improvement, preventing learning and sowing disorder. Here’s why....

2010/09/04

KeyWack is a game for people with babies and small children who like to sit at their parent’s computer and bang the keyboard. KeyWack prevents babies from accidentally opening most programs or documents, and makes banging even more fun by drawing shapes and playing random sounds as the keys are whacked. You can also click with the mouse to place a shape at a particular location....

2010/09/04

(Supposedly) an article from the 50's that describes how a good housewife should behave