In the Einstein case, he said "The theory predicts gravitational waves, but they'd be nearly impossible to detect." In the EM dive case, what's going on is "Here's a theory for radical behavior that we cannot yet reliably detect."
If you're going to blow off Newton, it's more important that you get pretty airtight experimental results that are significantly better than "might not be noise" than you have a theory to explain them.
The natural progression of "web as platform" is to (safely) expose your hardware to web-based applications, for your benefit. Vendors who currently enjoy being the gatekeepers of various walled gardens (I'm lookin' at you, AppleSoft) are going to try to stall this progression as long as they possibly can, as it threatens their cash-cow businesses. I very much doubt the handful of web platform vendors integrating WebGL right now are going to allow it to run amok in the same way that ActiveX and Flash have over the last decade.
She isn't sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it's some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her return. She's duly grateful – even fervently so – for the details of her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns about them. Her sole asset is the Field Circus, a thirty-years-obsolete starwisp massing less than twenty kilograms including what's left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that has suddenly chugged into life, she'd be stranded in the realm of ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of incarnation, she's got a dilemma. Because one of the Field Circus's passengers has never actually had a meatspace body...
Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They're a ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and arcs that don't repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling. Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground underfoot is dry but feels swampy.
Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years, existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from its creditors by masquerading as a life-form.
I was in film school with John Knoll, who was really into special effects even then. At the time, there was no CGI, so many of PhotoShop's metaphors originated with the optical and photographic techniques used to perform, say, blue-screen traveling mattes. I remember seeing "this cool software my brother and I are working on" on a Mac II at ILM, doing a feathered, alpha-blended photo composite (giving a third eye to a photo of a baby) in the late 80s. At the time, the software was used to do background blending and stitching for CGI sequences in "The Abyss".
I have written on professional computer graphics software in the last few years, use the GIMP regularly in my applications-development work, and think PhotoShop still kicks it all 'round the block for fit and finish as well as raw capability. I agree with the earlier comments on Clayton Christensen, but don't think a product that tries to duplicate the market leader is the important one. I'd say perhaps that Picasa would be a better example there, quietly chomping away at the low end of PhotoShop's features for crop, scale, rotate, color-correct etc.
I was one of the original developers on Picasa. Two things you might want to know. One: a LOT of Picasa, particularly the main UI code, makes extremely light use of the Win32 apis. Two: If you check the WINE logs in the last while, you'll see a lot of beneficial commits coming from Google employees. Some of these were directly inspired by Picasa, which *does* make use of some of Windows' more obscure APIs that WINE didn't have full support for initially.
We have a special shell for some users that requires they enter what they're doing. They basically do "sudo bashforroot" and have to type in "installing foobarnator" and then they get a root prompt.
My point is that (particularly with ISVs), if you embrace Microsoft-controlled technologies, you give your mightiest potential competitor the keys to your kingdom. You can buy your way out of this problem by embracing an isolation layer (XUL/XPCOM, Qt, Wx, web-based applications) or creating your own.
I've written a lot of Win32 code, too. I have total respect for the developer tools, and I'm sure C# shaves a lot of the rough edges off Java.
But it's gonna be kind of tough to repurpose your code to OS X when MS announces the Windows version of your product if you've written it all in C#...
I don't understand how people can get so enamoured of the.NET world, devote their professional careers to C# and the MS universe, and then wonder what happened when MS decides to zig when they want to zag.
Seriously. I see Spolsky and Sink congratulating themselves on how well they've managed to sneak out of the MS sandbox with clever PHP translation schemes and the like.
Gosh, guys, you don't have to give Redmond the remote control to your shock collars just because you want a little bit of leverage writing code.
Work a little bit harder and you can be free of Microsoft and in control of your own destiny. You won't see the Mozilla foundation complaining about how.NET just broke all their code in Windows Vista, but you can bet you'll see it on the blogs of less experienced coders.
When I was at idealab!, at the end of 1999, there was a little company called blastoff.com.
They ultimately purchased a Soviet-era booster, with the intent of landing robotic rovers on the moon. I suppose the idea was to charge advertisers "astronomical" sums to scrawl their names in the moon dust.
After millions down the tube, something interesting happened.
In a replay of the original NASA moon efforts, blastoff.com generated multiple spinoff companies to market technologies under development to support the lunar effort. Among them were Evolution Robotics, a streaming video company (think bittorrent behind the corporate firewall), and others.
As one of the brighter developers remarked during a meeting: 'Yeah, and we're using the same "moon" as the Apollo program -- it's this warehouse in Burbank...'
Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of my first day at work at Enfish, one of the very first desktop search engines. You can try it yourself at enfish.com. I also wrote part of the indexing system for what eventually became X1 at idealab after I left Enfish in 1999.
Enfish has the best Windows integration, and X1 has a very snappy search. Enfish uses less memory for a large index and supports more data types.
Linux types can always use glimpse or roll something themselves with Lucene (an apache project).
Nice to know that it only took a decade for the product category to heat up...
For users of (Google's) Picasa "Hello" IM program, you can add "Bloggerbot" to your friends list, and then automatically send it photos from Picasa (a very nice photo management program) to be automatically published to your blog.
The most complete of the desktop search tools is probably Enfish (commercial, free test drive). X1 searches somewhat more quickly. I worked on both, and would say that it's a difficult business proposition, particularly in the face of competition from Google.
I was one of the original developers of Picasa (search, web export and other features). I've got to say, the former Kai Krause developers who work there really know their pixels. Even in the 1.0 incarnation you'll see a lot of attention to subtle details of animation, alpha blending and UI that is usually missing from commercial apps. Every last coder there has written notrivial Mac and Linux software, so it's up to Google to pull the strategic trigger for those ports, if any.
I'm pretty certain that those guys will be making iPhoto users jealous before long.
Manually breaking down our beautiful Herman Miller cubicles, loading it into a rental truck (which rolled out into the street at one point when its brake failed), and moving operations from our swank Pasadena offices to a warehouse in Monrovia, where we worked for eight weeks before moving back to Pasadena, where we worked for four weeks before RedHat bought and closed down ArsDigita. Great co-workers, lousy 'software development' experience...
A lot of Overture guys, many of whom I have personally worked with at idealab and elsewhere. These are *good* guys, people. I don't know if yahoo intends for them to do anything super cool or not, but the folks writing code can pretty much do anything.
The director of BSG, was my partner for a semester at film school He's freakin' brilliant, so expect something really interesting. The original series was, and remains, utter crap.
Slashdot Mirror
In the Einstein case, he said "The theory predicts gravitational waves, but they'd be nearly impossible to detect."
In the EM dive case, what's going on is "Here's a theory for radical behavior that we cannot yet reliably detect."
If you're going to blow off Newton, it's more important that you get pretty airtight experimental results that are significantly better than "might not be noise" than you have a theory to explain them.
The natural progression of "web as platform" is to (safely) expose your hardware to web-based applications, for your benefit. Vendors who currently enjoy being the gatekeepers of various walled gardens (I'm lookin' at you, AppleSoft) are going to try to stall this progression as long as they possibly can, as it threatens their cash-cow businesses. I very much doubt the handful of web platform vendors integrating WebGL right now are going to allow it to run amok in the same way that ActiveX and Flash have over the last decade.
She isn't sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it's some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her return. She's duly grateful – even fervently so – for the details of her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns about them. Her sole asset is the Field Circus, a thirty-years-obsolete starwisp massing less than twenty kilograms including what's left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that has suddenly chugged into life, she'd be stranded in the realm of ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of incarnation, she's got a dilemma. Because one of the Field Circus's passengers has never actually had a meatspace body ...
Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They're a ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and arcs that don't repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling. Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground underfoot is dry but feels swampy.
Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years, existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from its creditors by masquerading as a life-form.
A more reasoned explanation about what's going on here, from one of the dojo toolkit founders:
http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/2009/05/a-quick-word-on-dojo-and-patents/
I was in film school with John Knoll, who was really into special effects even then. At the time, there was no CGI, so many of PhotoShop's metaphors originated with the optical and photographic techniques used to perform, say, blue-screen traveling mattes. I remember seeing "this cool software my brother and I are working on" on a Mac II at ILM, doing a feathered, alpha-blended photo composite (giving a third eye to a photo of a baby) in the late 80s. At the time, the software was used to do background blending and stitching for CGI sequences in "The Abyss".
I have written on professional computer graphics software in the last few years, use the GIMP regularly in my applications-development work, and think PhotoShop still kicks it all 'round the block for fit and finish as well as raw capability. I agree with the earlier comments on Clayton Christensen, but don't think a product that tries to duplicate the market leader is the important one. I'd say perhaps that Picasa would be a better example there, quietly chomping away at the low end of PhotoShop's features for crop, scale, rotate, color-correct etc.
I was one of the original developers on Picasa. Two things you might want to know. One: a LOT of Picasa, particularly the main UI code, makes extremely light use of the Win32 apis. Two: If you check the WINE logs in the last while, you'll see a lot of beneficial commits coming from Google employees. Some of these were directly inspired by Picasa, which *does* make use of some of Windows' more obscure APIs that WINE didn't have full support for initially.
A mechanical "toy" computer from the late 1960s. Here's a pic:
http://www.doughtie.com/gavin/
We have a special shell for some users that requires they enter what they're doing. They basically do "sudo bashforroot" and have to type in "installing foobarnator" and then they get a root prompt.
http://www.mbeebo.com/
Very slick AJAX chat interface to popular chat services.
Works fine in Firefox
My point is that (particularly with ISVs), if you embrace Microsoft-controlled technologies, you give your mightiest potential competitor the keys to your kingdom. You can buy your way out of this problem by embracing an isolation layer (XUL/XPCOM, Qt, Wx, web-based applications) or creating your own.
I've written a lot of Win32 code, too. I have total respect for the developer tools, and I'm sure C# shaves a lot of the rough edges off Java.
But it's gonna be kind of tough to repurpose your code to OS X when MS announces the Windows version of your product if you've written it all in C#...
I don't understand how people can get so enamoured of the .NET world, devote their professional careers to C# and the MS universe, and then wonder what happened when MS decides to zig when they want to zag.
.NET just broke all their code in Windows Vista, but you can bet you'll see it on the blogs of less experienced coders.
Seriously. I see Spolsky and Sink congratulating themselves on how well they've managed to sneak out of the MS sandbox with clever PHP translation schemes and the like.
Gosh, guys, you don't have to give Redmond the remote control to your shock collars just because you want a little bit of leverage writing code.
Work a little bit harder and you can be free of Microsoft and in control of your own destiny. You won't see the Mozilla foundation complaining about how
Argh. I want the nano to have Bluetooth. Syncing the Treo with the Powerbook without detangling a forest of cables is a glorius thing.
When I was at idealab!, at the end of 1999, there was a little company called blastoff.com.
They ultimately purchased a Soviet-era booster, with the intent of landing robotic rovers on the moon. I suppose the idea was to charge advertisers "astronomical" sums to scrawl their names in the moon dust.
After millions down the tube, something interesting happened.
In a replay of the original NASA moon efforts, blastoff.com generated multiple spinoff companies to market technologies under development to support the lunar effort. Among them were Evolution Robotics, a streaming video company (think bittorrent behind the corporate firewall), and others.
As one of the brighter developers remarked during a meeting: 'Yeah, and we're using the same "moon" as the Apollo program -- it's this warehouse in Burbank...'
The bubble man, you gotta miss it sometimes.
I wrote the web export system. There's even a way to define your own templates. Search the picasa directory for a .doc file that explains how.
Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of my first day at work at Enfish, one of the very first desktop search engines. You can try it yourself at enfish.com. I also wrote part of the indexing system for what eventually became X1 at idealab after I left Enfish in 1999.
Enfish has the best Windows integration, and X1 has a very snappy search. Enfish uses less memory for a large index and supports more data types.
Linux types can always use glimpse or roll something themselves with Lucene (an apache project).
Nice to know that it only took a decade for the product category to heat up...
For users of (Google's) Picasa "Hello" IM program, you can add "Bloggerbot" to your friends list, and then automatically send it photos from Picasa (a very nice photo management program) to be automatically published to your blog.
http://supermodelpersonals.blogspot.com
For example
The most complete of the desktop search tools is probably Enfish (commercial, free test drive). X1 searches somewhat more quickly. I worked on both, and would say that it's a difficult business proposition, particularly in the face of competition from Google.
Open source, used in a commercial game. Check it out:
http://www.radonlabs.de/nebula.html
As far as I know, Kai is doing interesting but secret stuff in a castle in Germany. (Nice work if you can get it).
I was one of the original developers of Picasa (search, web export and other features). I've got to say, the former Kai Krause developers who work there really know their pixels. Even in the 1.0 incarnation you'll see a lot of attention to subtle details of animation, alpha blending and UI that is usually missing from commercial apps. Every last coder there has written notrivial Mac and Linux software, so it's up to Google to pull the strategic trigger for those ports, if any.
I'm pretty certain that those guys will be making iPhoto users jealous before long.
Manually breaking down our beautiful Herman Miller cubicles, loading it into a rental truck (which rolled out into the street at one point when its brake failed), and moving operations from our swank Pasadena offices to a warehouse in Monrovia, where we worked for eight weeks before moving back to Pasadena, where we worked for four weeks before RedHat bought and closed down ArsDigita. Great co-workers, lousy 'software development' experience...
A lot of Overture guys, many of whom I have personally worked with at idealab and elsewhere. These are *good* guys, people. I don't know if yahoo intends for them to do anything super cool or not, but the folks writing code can pretty much do anything.
The director of BSG, was my partner for a semester at film school He's freakin' brilliant, so expect something really interesting. The original series was, and remains, utter crap.
...was commercial software from at least 3 years ago that attempted to be exactly what 'dashboard' is supposed to be.
It was... intensely useful to some people. You can still download it from enfish.com if you're on Windows.
http://www.enfish.com
Same thing -- hard to make it fast enough.