Theodore Ts'o offered an insightful summary of issues affecting future development on the ext3 filesystem, "it is clear that many people feel they have a stake in the future development plans of the ext2/ext3 filesystem, as it [is] one of the most popular and commonly used filesystems, particular amongst the kernel development community. For this reason, the stakes are higher than it would be for other filesystems." He listed the three main concerns for future development as stability, compatibility confusion, and code complexity, "unfortunately, these various concerns were sometimes mixed together in the discussion two months ago, and so it was hard to make progress. Linus's concern seems to have been primarily the first point, with perhaps a minor consideration of the 3rd. Others dwelled very heavily on the second point."

Theodore went on to say, "to address these issues, after discussing the matter amongst ourselves, the ext2/3 developers would like to propose the following path forward." He listed a four step plan beginning with the creation of a new ext4 filesystem registered with the kernel temporarily as 'ext3dev', "this will be explicitly marked as an CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL filesystem, and will in affect be a 'development fork' of ext3. A similar split of the fs/jbd will be made in order to support 64-bit jbd, which will be used by fs/ext4 and future versions of ocfs2." Theodore explained that new features will go into the ext3dev tree, with only bugfixes making their way back to the stable ext3 tree. He noted that it will remain important that the ext4 code base can mount ext3 filesystems, "this is necessary to ensure a future smooth upgrade path from ext3 to ext4 users." Finally, "probably in 6-9 months when we are satisified with the set of features that have been added to fs/ext4, and confident that the filesystem format has stablized, we will submit a patch which causes the fs/ext4 code to register itself as the ext4 filesystem." He further noted that once ext4 is deemed fully stable, it may completely replace ext3 in the source tree.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Joseph Perello, CMO for the City of New York.  As president and CEO of the New York City Marketing Development Corporation, Joe and his team develop new types of public-private partnerships that use New York City's vast set of resources and its powerful image to generate revenue, support City agencies and promote New York around the world. Prior to joining the City, Joe co-founded the marketing agency Perello & Company, which specialized in sports consulting, team and league marketing services, and sponsorship measurement and development. Earlier, Joe served as Vice President of Business Development for the New York Yankees. Previously, Joe served as an executive with David Bowie's internet firm Ultrastar and spent ten years with the affinity credit card issuer MBNA America. As Vice President of Sports Marketing, Joe managed the national marketing efforts for MBNA's Sports Sector and launched the bank's successful NFL Visa card program.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative two-hour discussion.

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Darrel Rhea, Principal/CEO of Cheskin.  Darrel Rhea is a Principal and CEO of Cheskin and a passionate spokesperson for the design research industry. He has been a pioneer in incorporating market research into the brand design and product development process. Rhea is considered one of America’s leading strategic design consultants, having extensive experience managing industrial design, product development and innovation, graphic design, and brand identity creation. His qualifications for this commitment include a degree in design and psychology, many successful years in graphic design and entrepreneurial endeavors, and over 20 years with Cheskin. Rhea is a producer and leader of professional development seminars for senior executives in marketing management, market research, and corporate design management at leading corporations including Pepsi, Kraft USA, General Foods, General Mills, Clorox, 3M, Andersen Windows, Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, Frito-Lay, AT&T, Motorola, HP and many others. He lectures regularly with industry organizations such as the American Marketing Association, the Design Management Institute, the Industrial Design Society of America, the American Institute of Architects and the Art Center College of Design.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative discussion.

Recently I have been thinking a lot about how software and content developers target different software platforms.  Two very compelling recent developments are the adoption of Flash video and AJAX. 

Both Flash and DHTML have been around for a long time.  It seems that over the past year these two technologies are really taking a big jump. 

One is standards based. One is proprietary.  One has weak developer tools. One has strong content tools.  Both have relative ubiquity. 

A key question for me is what factors govern the decision framework for making a bet on these technologies.  How do developers and content creators “do the math” to decide that the power and customer value of the experiences they can create are worth the cost of development, page load time, test hit, etc. to make a bet on these?

For the .NET Framework, the story has several dimensions.  For server side programming, and websites in particular, there seems to be about an even trade off between PHP or JSP and ASP.NET.  This is pretty clear with the rate of new site development on ASP.NET and the options you get today from hosting companies. 

Client side targeting is another part of the story.  Right now web sites with hosted Windows Form controls are rare and corporate IT team do actively write .NET Framework applications.  Consumer penetration is actually quite good with estimates of 55-60% of all desktops today have the .NET Framework 1.1.  There are a lot of shareware/freeware apps now starting to take a bet on the .NET Framework. I personally suspect this is because of the great tools and the speed of development.

So, how does your team approach this area? When do you decide to take a technology dependency? What a key factors for you?