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Enterprise computing is headed for “massive changes,” according to SAP co-founder and former CEO Hasso Plattner. He vows that the boardroom shakeup at SAP over the weekend, which he helped engineer, will change the company’s culture and help drive technical innovation.

SAP announced Sunday that it has accepted the resignation of its CEO Leo Apotheker. The company immediately appointed Bill McDermott, the current head of SAP’s field organization, and Jim Hagemann Snabe, the current head of product development, to serve as co-CEOs.

“We will have changes in our management style,” Plattner said Monday morning during a sometimes rambling, sometimes confessional press conference in which he, alone, spoke on behalf of SAP. “We will have fewer hierarchy levels, we will have more agile project teams with a flat structure, and we are ready for critical decisions.”

Incremental improvement was once a favored style of development, Plattner said, but he added that radical changes have to be embraced when they are presented. “We are at a crossroads now in technology,” he explained. “We will see radical changes in hardware technology this year and on the horizon… and SAP is more than prepared to take advantage.”

Plattner cited super-large in-memory systems, parallel computing, on-demand software, cloud computing, and mobile phones as components that SAP will more rapidly embrace. Of course, competitors ranging from Salesforce.com, RightNow, and Workday to arch-rival Oracle are exploiting these technologies, too. In some cases they are well ahead. Rivals will no doubt air this week’s turmoil and admissions by SAP in competitive bids against the vendor.

Plattner’s comments make it clear that he took the lead role, as chairman of SAP’s Supervisory Board, in replacing sales-oriented CEO Leo Apotheker with co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe. Plattner said SAP needed a unifying strategy and leadership that could end infighting and win back trust.

Microsoft’s Windows 7 is sucking the life out of laptops and netbooks at a faster rate than its predecessors, according to computer users who posted their complaints on a support forum maintained by the software maker.

Windows 7 screen shot

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Some users are complaining that the operating system is draining their batteries at an alarming rate, while others say the OS is issuing false alerts, warning them that their batteries are about to run dry despite having a full charge.

“Unbelievable!” wrote forum member RVBoston, in a post Wednesday. “It is Feb 2010, so this issue is already 8 months old and no fix from MS?”

Another user, Mnemeth, also complained that the problem has been ongoing for months. “It was working fine then all of a sudden, around the 1st or 2nd week of October 09, it wouldn’t hold a long charge and I got the error,” the user wrote.

One forum member said the glitch forced him to switch to an alternate operating system.

“After 20 years of using Microsoft OSes, I’m moving to Linuxpermanently,” wrote Russ Latham. “I just wiped Win 7 off my new Acer and installed Ubuntu 9.10. Everything works and the battery is showing normal capacity,” he wrote.

Microsoft officials, according to numerous Internet reports, confirmed that they are investigating the issue.

“The warning received on some computers using Windows 7 uses firmware information to determine if battery replacement is needed,” a company spokesman said.

“We are working with our partners to determine the root cause of what appear to be erroneous warnings and will update the TechNet forum with information and guidance as it becomes available,” said the official.

InformationWeek has published a look at the technical and political ramifications of Google’s problems in China. Download the report here (registration required).

The Ruby on Rails project has delivered a beta release of Ruby on Rails 3, the latest major version of the popular Web development framework that features Merb integration.

In a blog post announcing the new beta release, Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, wrote: "You thought we were never going to get to this day, didn’t you? Ye of little faith. Because here is the first real, public release of Rails 3.0 in the form of a beta package that we’ve toiled long and hard over."

Yet, the technology has been delivered, albeit in beta and, as such, "surely not perfect yet," Hansson noted.

Rails 3 is focused on bridging the core Rails technology with the new ideas brought in from the Merb team, which joined the Ruby on Rails development effort. Merb is a model-view-controller (MVC) Web framework written in Ruby. And Rails 3 delivers the best features of Merb and Rails into a single new release.

In a blog post, Yehuda Katz, a member of the original Merb team turned core Rails committer, said:

“One of the things that most surprised and impressed me is the Rails core team’s (and especially DHH’s) attention to detail and the experience of the beta release. For weeks, we’ve been ‘this close’ to releasing, but the experience of starting up a new Rails app or upgrading from a Rails 2.3 app still felt too unpleasant. In this kind of situation, it’s tempting to say ‘it’s just a beta—people who use beta software know what they’re getting,’ but that would have been a major cop-out. For many people on the leading edge, a poor beta experience will shape their perception of the product as a whole. So we waited a bit, but now we’re finally here.”

Moreover, the Rails 3 release notes said:

"There are all the good ideas brought over from when the Merb team joined the party and brought a focus on framework agnosticism, slimmer and faster internals, and a handful of tasty APIs. If you’re coming to Rails 3.0 from Merb 1.x, you should recognize lots. If you’re coming from Rails 2.x, you’re going to love it too."

Also, among what Hansson calls the "headliner features" are:

·         Brand new router with an emphasis on RESTful declarations

·         New Action Mailer API modeled after Action Controller (now without the agonizing pain of sending multipart messages!)

·         New Active Record chainable query language built on top of relational algebra

·         Unobtrusive JavaScript helpers with drivers for Prototype, jQuery, and more coming (end of inline JS)

·         Explicit dependency management with Bundler

In all, "the new version feels lighter, more agile, and easier to understand," Hansson said. "It’s a great day to be a Rails developer."

Indeed, the team did its best to make the transition to Rails 3 easier for developers. According to the Rails 3 release notes: "…we’ve tried our best to deprecate the old APIs with nice warnings. That means that you can move your existing application to Rails 3 without immediately rewriting all your old code to the latest best practices."