There are poor countries, and then there are failed states. Sending these things to a failed state, without a strong rule of law and robust social structures, where misrule is the rule, is a recipe for disaster. Sending these things to places with a strong social fabric and a (mostly) honest government is a great idea.
Such countries do exist, and they would benefit the most from a solid education system. Zimbabwe would be a poor candidate to receive these. In Botswana, they would be a great idea. Algeria would be a poor candidate. Tunisia would be a fine one. Columbia or Congo? They'd be stolen to fund the wars. Suriname or Cape Verde? They would help bring third world nations into the first world.
They managed to build a modern, portable system for less money than a new iPod. Give them some credit for smarts. They will only deploy these where they will do some good.
Don't try to tell me that Excel, or even Google search rank, is more important than C has been.
C originated as a part of the Unix system, which came in at No. 1. So it wasn't overlooked if you can put it in its proper context.
Surely, if the Java language makes the cut, other languages should make the cut too - C? BASIC?
Java gets on the list for being a system, not a language. Java as a language wouldn't make it in the corporate and computer science world without the JVM and the concept of write once, run anywhere backed up by a fantastic and vast set of easily implemented libraries and objects. It's easy enough to be taught in community college programming classes, and powerful enough to run entire corporations. That's why it's on the list, warts and all.
And, if they're going to include OSes, WINDOWS doesn't make the cut? I'm sure I'll get shot around here for making this comment, but Windows has done wonders for bringing the computer to the masses.
Michael Dell's reverse-engineered IBM PC BIOS is what brought computing to the masses... and as such, should arguably be on the list. MS-DOS and Windows were really just tagging along for the ride.
Windows doesn't make the cut because it's crummy software and neither broke new ground nor achieved technical brilliance. It's really just a pale shadow of the MacOS, so why not go with the Mac? MacOS makes the cut because it took the things the Xerox Star was trying to do, and made it practical for everyday use.
Apart and aside from the fact he sees little or no value in things like objects or IDEs, he writes in an inpenetrable victorian style. It's either fine satire skewering the irony of luddite technologists, or the poor guy just doesn't have a clue how laughable his essay was.
As he snarkily pooh-pooh's the distribution of realtime stock and financial data as a web service, it's probably the latter. I used to work for a company who ran their own ticker plant and had software on the desks of almost every stock broker, investment banker and forex trader on the planet. The client/server requirments of the system were immense. The client had to be maintained on Windows, Sun, Mac and was being slooooowly ported to linux, was fragile as hell and a pain to install and upgrade. The server was a farm of eight midrange Sun or AS/400 boxes, fed by redundant T1's from the ticker plant, and this would only accomodate two or three hundred users.
Then we went to a web-based client, sort of like AJAX before people started calling it AJAX, and all the headache went away. It's not a small or trivial thing, and it radically changed the way business was done, and for the better.
Just because it's new and has a buzzword doesn't mean it's a flash in the pan. The moral of the story is to use your judgement, and avoid formulas. Even tried-and-true ones. Silver bullets may not exist, but technology doesn't stand still, no matter how many hours you've sunk into learning emacs and gdb.
This is headed in the wrong direction. The traditional role of the ad is to attract the eye, and get the consumer to consider and then remember the product when they want/need it in the future. Even if the ad isn't clicked on, the company advertising is getting itself noted and noticed, for free. That's the entire value of traditional print, radio, TV and billboard ads, just given away by web content providers. It's unreal, and is stifling the growth of online media. I suppose it's OK for enormous middlemen like Google, but it sucks for those making and maintaining websites. Advertisers have gotten too much of a free ride, and the models used to support this free ride... banner ads, popunders, flash ads, etc... have been largely self defeating.
Making the burden on the content creator heavier and more onerous before they get their dollar is not the way to go. The middlemen and the ad buyers are getting too much for too little in return. New models need to be developed. I'm in favor of the old fashioned sponsorship: flat fee so it's a predictable expense for the ad buyer, and predictable income for the content provider. I'm sure there are other ways to charge advertisers what their advertisements are worth, and increase their effectiveness at the same time.
1) The biggest news in Java is that you don't have to program in Java anymore. Popular languages like Python, Ruby and Eiffel(HA! Loser.) have all been ported to the Java VM, and have access to to the Java libraries, in addition to the Python/Ruby/OCaml(HA! Loser.) libraries.
2) You will only ever need to know Java, Ruby or Python to make it as a Web Programmer.
3) RoR is teh hawt. On the Java side, knowing Spring, Hibernate, struts, jUnit, JSF and (hold your nose) Beans will get you far. Python? HA!
4) Python was in, now it's on its way out. Python geeks can keep the perl geeks warm when it snows. Take comfort, the Ruby guys will be there to huddle up with you in five years. PHP guys don't get paid, but will be wanted by people who don't like to pay programmers.
5) C++. How quaint. You must have come from the game programming field. Perhaps you should go back there? We sure as hell don't want you. Go and keep the LISP guy company at the geezer end of the bar.
I work 3rd shift on a "SSMTW" schedule for a Telecom/ISP Which Shall Remain Nameless. I will call it Tiswsrncom. I live in a fantastic community, a small New England town better known for its culture, comforts and conveniences than its proximity to anywhere you can make money for knowing what "ls -laF" does. So, I commute 45mins each way, 1.5 hours total daily, while speeding, to get to a job that's a long ways away from being close to real money.
My S.O. is so totally not cool with this. For one, she wants me awake during the day on the weekends, especially long weekends. For another, she doesn't want to wake up from a nightmare to be greeted by an empty bed.
But she and I both realize that it's not going to be forever. I'm working where I am to put a roof over our heads in a very nice part of a very nice town, at a rate that would put us in a rat-infested hovel closer to a majot city. She's going to law school (or, in other cases, might be raising a kid or two, a fully acceptable full-time occupation, be you dad or mom), and I'm working for crap money at a crap job I have to drive halfway to Outer Mongolia to be near.
But here's the deal: in three years, I'll have either seniority or a new company paying me what I'm worth. My S.O. will be pulling down fast-track corporation money the closer she gets to her degree. This will mean a larger new house nearer to where she works, or where I work, or an enormous investment property right where we are, only I'll be there the whole weekend and all night as I go to day shift, and we'll enjoy our position.
The key is this: your job is an investment in future happiness. If it will bring you wealth and security for the next 30 years, do it. Your wife will understand... she won't be happy, not at all, but if she understands, deep down, what you're doing is for her and not something you're doing to her, you'll be ok.
If it will bring you strife, unhappiness, anguish and the misery of being alone, forever: go work for 7-11 and screw aerospace. The key is to explain how it will make the both of you deleriously happy for decades if you're unhappy, but mostly content, for a year or three.
Also, more practically, I sold my '69 Cadillac convertible, and bought something Asian with a 100k mile warranty and 35mpg. Sacrifices must be made, and I couldn't make it with a gas-guzzling, unreliable V8 pickup or luxo-barge.
The Pepper Pad is indeed an alternative to the Origami platform, and one that burdens you with, perhaps, the single worst keyboard ever to disgrace a PDA. I mean, the "thumboard" makes the Treo look speedy.
But that's besides the point. The point is, Origami looks suspiciously like a Newton. It's spawned some fat and ugly Newton-wanna-be's, true, but they're Newtons... too big to fit into the pocket, but doesn't have a clamshell keyboard to make it a subnotebook.
I find it endlessly entertaining that Microsoft's last gasp at saving their Windows Tablet platform is by aping the dead and defunct Newton form factor, at roughly the same price-point of the old Newton. The irony is especially delicious when you realize that the Newton tanked largely because of the form factor... Palm came along with something pocketable, and kicked Apple's ass up and down the store aisles.
I wish Microsoft had aped a more useful form factor, like the Psion 5mx. Pocketable, but with a touch-typable QWERTY keyboard and an expansion card slot. Then I'd have somwething worth putting Ubuntu on.
Well, this just goes to show that the model of Health Insurance is a rotten one for healthcare. Fortunately in this day and age, it's usually just a synonym for "HMO."
Otherwise, under your model of "insurance", I would be dead, as I'd quickly be pauperized to the point of no longer being able to afford medicine, doctor visits or emergency care. I fail to see how any system preventing this, "socialist" or not, is BAD.
It's nice to know the doctrinaire right-wingers really are out to kill me.
Y'know, I get the feeling I'd do a lot better with my career if I were to strike out on my own as an independent consultant or by founding a small start-up. The problem is, I have a health condition that requires a trip to the emergency room once every few years, and some seriously expensive medicine to keep it under control. There is no way in hell I can find affordable health insurance on my own, and I can't afford the enormous cost of an ER trip out-of-pocket, or the couple hundred bucks per-month in medication while I'm in the "Eat ramen, max out the credit cards and work out of the garage" phase any solo gig or small company goes through for the first year or so.
Even if I didn't have the health condition, and were fit as a fiddle, I'd be doing the equivalent of driving without car insurance. I'm one serious traffic accident or cancerous tumor away from financial ruin if I don't have healthcare.
So, I turn down all kinds of consulting gigs, and leaf wistfully through my file of business plans, and wonder, do I love my country more than I love my career? I'm poorer and less fulfilled by living in a country without a single-payer system. I'm dependent on a corporate benefits package, and unable to pursue the American Dream.
I could emigrate to New Zealand in a heartbeat, as they're looking for tech workers there and would put me on an immigration fast-track. I really like Montreal and Halifax, too... but I'm a New Englander at heart, and I would like to stay where I feel I belong, where all my family and freinds are.
Now I find out that even with a company-funded HMO, I'm not as healthy, either. I mean. what the hell am I getting for my healthcare dollar? It's a serious chunk of change out of my paycheck and my employer's operating budget, and an expense that gets more and more and more expensive every year without returning much in the way of improvement in quality of service or quality of life. As far as I can tell, I'm just paying to fund Washington lobbyists and golden parachute accounts for HMO and Big Pharma execs.
I think it's time to put to rest the United State's overpriced, poorly managed and underperforming healthcare system, and join the rest of the civilized worl in the 21st century.
An anecdotal tale of an unconfirmed in-the-wild exploit on a site run by a corporate rival? MAN THE LIFEBOATS! Mac OS X is no longer secure! No better than Windows with Microsoft's few... ahh... few thousand virii and exploits in the wild, no sir! Panic! Mass mayhem! Purchasing of Dells!
Pfft.
The Tech Punditocracy has been banging the drum on Mac OS X's insecurity pretty heavy these past few months. I'm beginning to believe it's just a scam to sell AV software to gullible IT managers, and to protect windows VARs from a growing corporate push to switch to a more secure platform than Windows.
I have yet to be bit by any sort of malware in all my years of using a Mac. The same cannot be said of my Windows experience... virii, spyware, worms... it's a vast and growing problem. On the Mac, it's a tiny and controlled problem. The difference is mainly in software architecture and in corporate attitudes to fixing software issues. Apple comes out ahead on both counts. It ain't no OpenBSD, sure, but it beats running two AV scanners and three spyware detectors just to check your email.
I can see why they haven't migrated yet. There are a few business apps, mostly vertical applications for ticketing, billing and invoice, that need to be run on Windows. For instance, where I work, we use a proprietary ticketing system that is unlikely to be ported to anything that isn't Windows. It enters problems on a customer's account, and assigns the problem to the appropriate technician, who then updates the ticket as needed.
But here's the deal... for all of its slowness, awkward GUI implementation, dubious reliability and stratospheric license and support contracts, all it really does is read and update database records. It's a LAMP application with out the L, A or P.
Here's a bigger deal... almost all vertical client/server apps can be replaced by a web-based application. Almost all of them do nothing but update and display database records.
Why not just hire a full-time RoR geek or two to crank out LAMP applications that will be robust, secure, customizeable to meet coprorate standards, easy to deploy and dirt cheap compared to a multi-zillion dollar per-seat license?
Why not indeed.
This is where the new growth in the IT industry is headed. Already, most of the tools I need to interact with the vast and varied store of corporate data are web-based utilities. Admittedly, I work on the technical side of a major ISP, and we tend to be more elightened about such things, but really... Linux on the desktop will be a reality sooner rather than later.
The trick isn't porting applications to the Linux desktop, but to the Linux server.
I'm not as impressed by the sillicon as I am by their product... it's a platform-agnostic application accellerator, designed to make Java apps (or any other VM app) optimized for multithreading go like stink. It does for processing power what a storage server does for disk space. Plug it into the network, and go... all it does is run a gajillion threads for the VM living on your general purpose servers. Each core probably isn't very powerful (altho they are 64bit RISC designs), but if you're in dire need of cramming as many lightweight transactions through as possible, lots and lots of little optimized processors are going to be more help than one or two big, fat general-purpose Opterons.
It's a very neat concept, and the careful wording ("virtual machine accellerator") indicates that they aren't tied to just Java... Azul's Compute Pool could be something future Parrot-lovers can use to sneak LAMP into places where Java rules all.
They're using some serious sillicon know-how to fuel an innovative and original product... gives me hope we aren't doomed to a wintel-only world, after all.
Before you invest a lot of time, effort and money crafting a GUI front-end for your application, you should really stop and consider that you may not need one.
If your app is basically a way of querying a database on a server deep in the bowels of the computer room, you should be coding the interface as a web application. Especially now that AJAX is on the scene... modern AJAX tools and a Java backend can put together some very powerful applications that don't have the same development and deployment costs that an executable on every desktop would.
AJAX isn't a cure-all, and not likely to help much if you're interacting with local datasets with lots of processing horsepower (as in an imaging program like the Gimp or a sound editing program) or constructing a platform-independant application that's mostly self-contained (like a game or a p2p client.)
It is great for things like CRM applications, scheduling tools, inventory tools and ticket-monitoring... stuff that need to read and set values in a database somewhere. It's even good for applications that were previously in the domain of the workstation and the PC, like lightweight data visualization tools and PIMs.
What's more, the development cycle of an application that only needs a copy of IE or Firefox to run will be a lot easier for you, the user/customer and the poor slobs in IT who would need to come up with a deployment plan, and =then= an upgrade plan when rev 1.2 comes out.
Bastards forgot most Nikon DSLR users aren't able to use full-frame lenses. They just took their old Contax MM lenses and slapped them into an F-mount. This is as atrocious as Pentax's 45mm pancake lens for their DSLR... no one needs a short telephoto prime. Gimme a "standard" Tessar for the APS-C sized sensor! Gimme a fast and sharp Distagon with an angle of view equivalent to 20mm in 35mm for the D70! Bah.
Actually, I wonder if Apple missed the boat by not coming up with a great VM engine to build on top of. It would take hardware dependence out of the equation. There are some interesting virtual machine environments... not just Java, there's also Squeak, a very successful cross-platform Smalltalk environment (well, successful for smalltalk, at any rate) that will run a Rails-like environment, only with the web server and RDBMS rolled in, on one of any of two dozen platforms without a single recompile. Soon there will also be Parrot, which will do Perl and Python up right in a VM.
By moving Mac OS X to a similar(or better!) virtual machine, they could have solved a lot of problems with threading, clustering and garbage collection, not to mention future-proofing. There's no guarantee the first or second generation of quantum chips will be x86 compatible... but you will be able to port a VM to a quantum computer, regardless of its pedigree. You also only have to worry about building to a single target that will optimize itself to whatever its being run on...
Perhaps this is too sci-fi, but the pieces have been in place for more than a decade. And, ya know, Squeak =does= run the same on a Sparc Solaris server as it does on my iBook... and it's coded by a bunch of amateurs and academics without almost any corporate help at all. Picture it with a more friendly language and a better set of user interface API's...
This is why I'm confused about the push to "All Intel, All the Time!" Apple, with Mac OS X's Unix and NeXT roots, should embrace a multi-platform strategy to get the most bang for its buck wherever it can. The PowerPC-derived Cell will rock for workstation and servers, and the Meron will kick major butt for home user kit. Best tool for the job, and just compile for the famous NeXT "Fat Binary." Back in the day, the same NeXT executable would run on 68040, Sparc, PA-RISC and Pentiums. Why not now? Why tie yourself to x86 alone, when there are better alternatives to fit the niche you're targeting?
I don't see how this is different from the old film SLR market: Canon has the lion's share, Nikon can't make up for lost time and second-rate glass, and the rest squabble over the scraps.
Sony's in a fine position to upset the applecart... they're the dominant consumer/prosumer digicam brand, and a DSLR with Minolta's electronics know-how coupled with Zeiss optics at a Sony price-point will be a world beater, believe it.
(And Contax sold more Arias and NXs than they could make, precisely because they were $500 cameras people could stick a $1000 lens on. Pity the N1 Digital's imaging chip sucked so bad... killed the company dead.)
Next time try some Gaffer's Tape... reknowned in the studio photography world to stick like a sumbitch, leave no residue when peeled away, and block light completely. It's a high-threadcount black cotton tape with masking tape adhesive, and it realy is dark-safe.
There is only one response worth the content provider's while - Death Penalty.
Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Apple, Edmunds and Akamai need to simply cut off traffic to all Bell South customers. Bell South's clientelle needs Google and Yahoo more than Google and Yahoo need them. Make the bastards come crawling back on their bellies as a lesson to others.
You want to see some real improvements, talk to the application coders and try to get them to 'leverage paralellism' in their applications by making them multi-threaded.
Dumping the problem into the lap of the application programmers isn't leveraging anything very effectively.
My latest motherboard has an extremely high bandwidth I/O architecture, built in from the ground up. I have memory bandwidth that was unheard of just 3 years ago. The damned thing burns through just about every task I throw at it.
Congratulations! You've just discovered Moore's Law. You should write a paper or something.
Now, take just enough of your PC so it fits into your pocket and doubles as a cell-phone, letting you still use the part you left on your desk while you ride the bus to work. Oops! You can't!
This is a very simple paradigm shift, and can almost emulated by VNC on your smartphone, but not satisfactorily, and not easily, as the OS doesn't understand it has to handle the UI for both the cell phone and the 30" flat panel monitor in the same application. This is because that mobo is essentially the same computer, only faster, that the mobo vendors were selling in '01. The OS projects and vendors can't see past the plain ol' whitebox PC.
Big paradigm shifts that would completely re-orient computing are impossible in the current market.
Wait, I thought the problem was with the PC architecture
This is because you are inattentive, and don't like to read.
- now it's data management?
Data management is what computers do, sport. Better, faster and more convenient data management is why there's a computer industry at all. Wake up.
Moving data between various devices is the job of applications. If the applications aren't written to interoperate and share data intelligently, there's nothing the OS can do to fix that.
Nothing... except create better ways for applications to interoperate with other applications and with local and networked peripherals. Sort of the definition of an operating system, ya know? In the modern day (since 1988 or so), the OS takes responsibility for the entire operating environment, with all the attendant APIs and utilities.
Dumping the problem into the application developer's lap was how MS-DOS did it, not how modern operating systems do it, and certainly not how next generation OS projects will do it.
Well, he's right. Windows is based, more or less, on the old VAX/VMS model. Linux is a modern OS kernel, but it's designed to run a variant of the Unix operating system, which was shiny and new before the Star Trek with Captain Kirk went into syndication.
The same can be said for MacOS X and the BSD's... hell, for pretty much every OS under the sun. BeOS and Plan 9 were the last attempts at someone trying something new with any technical success, and their lessons were largely lost on the industry.
Innovation in operating systems is pretty much at a standstill outside the academic environment. Current operating systems cannot leverage parralelism very well for anything but hyper-specialized applications. Current operating systems have user environments that are crummy at managing massive amounts of data crammed into cavernous storage systems. Current operating systems are rotten at deploying your data across networked devices like cell phones and MP3 players and DVRs without a crapload of work.
There are acres of room for improvement, but the current paradigms aren't keeping up. Part of the problem is the PC architecture... it's not well suited for anything but a workstation or server, and even then, it's not all that well suited. It's shackling the industry to a very limiting hardware model, trading innovation in effciency and effectiveness for better benchmarks at the same old stuff.
Someone's going to need to design and market a new platform... OS and Hardware, that manages your data better with less effort across more devices, before we can get things moving again.
Otherwise I foresee more of the same... computers completing benchmarks faster, but not doing anything new and innovative.
Linux is a very nice unix, perhaps the pinnacle of achievement for the Unix Way, but the Unix Way isn't all that special anymore, and is really showing its age. Windows is an order of magnitude in worse shape. It's just that no-one with an industry presence is willing to try anything new anymore, and companies like SGI and HP are going broke sticking to the old model long after it's stopped working for them.
Compared to the insanely cool, science-fiction advanced consumer tech, everything from cell phones to high-speed internet available in Europe, Japan and South Korea, the US is dowdy and backwards. Cingular ain't got squat on DoMoCo, and even a Mielle washer/dryer set is lightyears ahead of the stone-age clunkers Kenmore and Maytag inflict on the American household.
When it comes to technology obsession, the High Street in London and the Akihabara in Tokyo are where it's at.
If you can't afford to recruit a development team, you can't afford to be in business as a software vendor. End of story.
Outsourcing involves huge overhead and dicey contractual negotiations, and you'll spend more money than you'll save as a small outfit, even if the coders themselves are in India. The money you save in HR you'll blow on travel, telecoms and lawyers. Especially lawyers, and you'll lose the company if you try to half-ass it.
If you are unwilling to hire more than one geek to do the work needed to create your product, you are too undercapitalized to be in business. Fix that, and try again when you're able to spend some money to make some money. Otherwise, you're wasting your time, your employee's time, and your investors' (woefully inadequate) money.
A P2P protocol that requires a centralized organizing entity, such as a hub, tracker or server, isn't really a P2P protocol. Decentralizing the bandwidth and the storage isn't enough to ensure unimpeded file sharing... the indexing needs to be decentralized as well. This way, there is no single point of attack to take down the P2P network.
This just isn't to protect music pirates from the record companies, but to protect legitimate distribution systems from malicious attack, either governmental or criminal.
Dissatisfaction with the quality of an article in Wikipedia is not a fatal flaw... it's the engine that makes Wikipedia work. If a user needs information on a topic, and the information is incorrect or incomplete or poorly presented, the user will, in some cases, just go out and research what they need to know using other sources......and then they'll contribute what they learn back into Wikipedia.
Wikipedia does not hold to the standards of print references because it's not finished. It's a work constantly in progress, and you get to see the work in progress as well as a finished product.
Bearing that in mind, Wikipedia must not be judged by its worst entries, as those entries will be brought up to par eventually... in a few hours or a few years. Bad entries will be made into good entries as the right editor for the job steps forward.
This requires information filtering abilities on the part of the reader, and these abilities have too long been dormant in most readers... in a polished and professional publication, mistakes aren't acknowleged as such. There's even a sentiment that if it's in print, it's an absolute irrefutable fact, rather than the best information available to the publisher.
In Wikipedia, the reader knows that what they are reading is a collection of the best information available to the writers... and they can modify it if they see a mistake, or have more to add to the topic. That sort of dynamic interaction with the source material is very, very powerful, and can lead to a depth impossible in a regular encyclopedia on obscure topics... everything from Hallucigenia to Indian Clubs. Try getting that info out of your Brittanica.
Wikipedia is great as a point of departure for further study. It will, at the very least, provide the reader with a notion of what the scope and nature of the subject is, and the incompleteness and error of the artivle will be corrected as people who know what they're talking about step forward over time.
Slashdot Mirror
There are poor countries, and then there are failed states. Sending these things to a failed state, without a strong rule of law and robust social structures, where misrule is the rule, is a recipe for disaster. Sending these things to places with a strong social fabric and a (mostly) honest government is a great idea.
Such countries do exist, and they would benefit the most from a solid education system. Zimbabwe would be a poor candidate to receive these. In Botswana, they would be a great idea. Algeria would be a poor candidate. Tunisia would be a fine one. Columbia or Congo? They'd be stolen to fund the wars. Suriname or Cape Verde? They would help bring third world nations into the first world.
They managed to build a modern, portable system for less money than a new iPod. Give them some credit for smarts. They will only deploy these where they will do some good.
SoupIsGood Food
Don't try to tell me that Excel, or even Google search rank, is more important than C has been.
C originated as a part of the Unix system, which came in at No. 1. So it wasn't overlooked if you can put it in its proper context.
Surely, if the Java language makes the cut, other languages should make the cut too - C? BASIC?
Java gets on the list for being a system, not a language. Java as a language wouldn't make it in the corporate and computer science world without the JVM and the concept of write once, run anywhere backed up by a fantastic and vast set of easily implemented libraries and objects. It's easy enough to be taught in community college programming classes, and powerful enough to run entire corporations. That's why it's on the list, warts and all.
And, if they're going to include OSes, WINDOWS doesn't make the cut? I'm sure I'll get shot around here for making this comment, but Windows has done wonders for bringing the computer to the masses.
Michael Dell's reverse-engineered IBM PC BIOS is what brought computing to the masses... and as such, should arguably be on the list. MS-DOS and Windows were really just tagging along for the ride.
Windows doesn't make the cut because it's crummy software and neither broke new ground nor achieved technical brilliance. It's really just a pale shadow of the MacOS, so why not go with the Mac? MacOS makes the cut because it took the things the Xerox Star was trying to do, and made it practical for everyday use.
SoupIsGood Food
Apart and aside from the fact he sees little or no value in things like objects or IDEs, he writes in an inpenetrable victorian style. It's either fine satire skewering the irony of luddite technologists, or the poor guy just doesn't have a clue how laughable his essay was.
As he snarkily pooh-pooh's the distribution of realtime stock and financial data as a web service, it's probably the latter. I used to work for a company who ran their own ticker plant and had software on the desks of almost every stock broker, investment banker and forex trader on the planet. The client/server requirments of the system were immense. The client had to be maintained on Windows, Sun, Mac and was being slooooowly ported to linux, was fragile as hell and a pain to install and upgrade. The server was a farm of eight midrange Sun or AS/400 boxes, fed by redundant T1's from the ticker plant, and this would only accomodate two or three hundred users.
Then we went to a web-based client, sort of like AJAX before people started calling it AJAX, and all the headache went away. It's not a small or trivial thing, and it radically changed the way business was done, and for the better.
Just because it's new and has a buzzword doesn't mean it's a flash in the pan. The moral of the story is to use your judgement, and avoid formulas. Even tried-and-true ones. Silver bullets may not exist, but technology doesn't stand still, no matter how many hours you've sunk into learning emacs and gdb.
SoupIsGood Food
This is headed in the wrong direction. The traditional role of the ad is to attract the eye, and get the consumer to consider and then remember the product when they want/need it in the future. Even if the ad isn't clicked on, the company advertising is getting itself noted and noticed, for free. That's the entire value of traditional print, radio, TV and billboard ads, just given away by web content providers. It's unreal, and is stifling the growth of online media. I suppose it's OK for enormous middlemen like Google, but it sucks for those making and maintaining websites. Advertisers have gotten too much of a free ride, and the models used to support this free ride... banner ads, popunders, flash ads, etc... have been largely self defeating.
Making the burden on the content creator heavier and more onerous before they get their dollar is not the way to go. The middlemen and the ad buyers are getting too much for too little in return. New models need to be developed. I'm in favor of the old fashioned sponsorship: flat fee so it's a predictable expense for the ad buyer, and predictable income for the content provider. I'm sure there are other ways to charge advertisers what their advertisements are worth, and increase their effectiveness at the same time.
This new Google approach doesn't deliver.
SoupIsGood Food
1) The biggest news in Java is that you don't have to program in Java anymore. Popular languages like Python, Ruby and Eiffel(HA! Loser.) have all been ported to the Java VM, and have access to to the Java libraries, in addition to the Python/Ruby/OCaml(HA! Loser.) libraries.
2) You will only ever need to know Java, Ruby or Python to make it as a Web Programmer.
3) RoR is teh hawt. On the Java side, knowing Spring, Hibernate, struts, jUnit, JSF and (hold your nose) Beans will get you far. Python? HA!
4) Python was in, now it's on its way out. Python geeks can keep the perl geeks warm when it snows. Take comfort, the Ruby guys will be there to huddle up with you in five years. PHP guys don't get paid, but will be wanted by people who don't like to pay programmers.
5) C++. How quaint. You must have come from the game programming field. Perhaps you should go back there? We sure as hell don't want you. Go and keep the LISP guy company at the geezer end of the bar.
SoupTellsItLikeIt Is
I work 3rd shift on a "SSMTW" schedule for a Telecom/ISP Which Shall Remain Nameless. I will call it Tiswsrncom. I live in a fantastic community, a small New England town better known for its culture, comforts and conveniences than its proximity to anywhere you can make money for knowing what "ls -laF" does. So, I commute 45mins each way, 1.5 hours total daily, while speeding, to get to a job that's a long ways away from being close to real money.
My S.O. is so totally not cool with this. For one, she wants me awake during the day on the weekends, especially long weekends. For another, she doesn't want to wake up from a nightmare to be greeted by an empty bed.
But she and I both realize that it's not going to be forever. I'm working where I am to put a roof over our heads in a very nice part of a very nice town, at a rate that would put us in a rat-infested hovel closer to a majot city. She's going to law school (or, in other cases, might be raising a kid or two, a fully acceptable full-time occupation, be you dad or mom), and I'm working for crap money at a crap job I have to drive halfway to Outer Mongolia to be near.
But here's the deal: in three years, I'll have either seniority or a new company paying me what I'm worth. My S.O. will be pulling down fast-track corporation money the closer she gets to her degree. This will mean a larger new house nearer to where she works, or where I work, or an enormous investment property right where we are, only I'll be there the whole weekend and all night as I go to day shift, and we'll enjoy our position.
The key is this: your job is an investment in future happiness. If it will bring you wealth and security for the next 30 years, do it. Your wife will understand... she won't be happy, not at all, but if she understands, deep down, what you're doing is for her and not something you're doing to her, you'll be ok.
If it will bring you strife, unhappiness, anguish and the misery of being alone, forever: go work for 7-11 and screw aerospace. The key is to explain how it will make the both of you deleriously happy for decades if you're unhappy, but mostly content, for a year or three.
Also, more practically, I sold my '69 Cadillac convertible, and bought something Asian with a 100k mile warranty and 35mpg. Sacrifices must be made, and I couldn't make it with a gas-guzzling, unreliable V8 pickup or luxo-barge.
SoupIsGood Food
The Pepper Pad is indeed an alternative to the Origami platform, and one that burdens you with, perhaps, the single worst keyboard ever to disgrace a PDA. I mean, the "thumboard" makes the Treo look speedy.
But that's besides the point. The point is, Origami looks suspiciously like a Newton. It's spawned some fat and ugly Newton-wanna-be's, true, but they're Newtons... too big to fit into the pocket, but doesn't have a clamshell keyboard to make it a subnotebook.
I find it endlessly entertaining that Microsoft's last gasp at saving their Windows Tablet platform is by aping the dead and defunct Newton form factor, at roughly the same price-point of the old Newton. The irony is especially delicious when you realize that the Newton tanked largely because of the form factor... Palm came along with something pocketable, and kicked Apple's ass up and down the store aisles.
I wish Microsoft had aped a more useful form factor, like the Psion 5mx. Pocketable, but with a touch-typable QWERTY keyboard and an expansion card slot. Then I'd have somwething worth putting Ubuntu on.
Well, this just goes to show that the model of Health Insurance is a rotten one for healthcare. Fortunately in this day and age, it's usually just a synonym for "HMO."
Otherwise, under your model of "insurance", I would be dead, as I'd quickly be pauperized to the point of no longer being able to afford medicine, doctor visits or emergency care. I fail to see how any system preventing this, "socialist" or not, is BAD.
It's nice to know the doctrinaire right-wingers really are out to kill me.
Y'know, I get the feeling I'd do a lot better with my career if I were to strike out on my own as an independent consultant or by founding a small start-up. The problem is, I have a health condition that requires a trip to the emergency room once every few years, and some seriously expensive medicine to keep it under control. There is no way in hell I can find affordable health insurance on my own, and I can't afford the enormous cost of an ER trip out-of-pocket, or the couple hundred bucks per-month in medication while I'm in the "Eat ramen, max out the credit cards and work out of the garage" phase any solo gig or small company goes through for the first year or so.
Even if I didn't have the health condition, and were fit as a fiddle, I'd be doing the equivalent of driving without car insurance. I'm one serious traffic accident or cancerous tumor away from financial ruin if I don't have healthcare.
So, I turn down all kinds of consulting gigs, and leaf wistfully through my file of business plans, and wonder, do I love my country more than I love my career? I'm poorer and less fulfilled by living in a country without a single-payer system. I'm dependent on a corporate benefits package, and unable to pursue the American Dream.
I could emigrate to New Zealand in a heartbeat, as they're looking for tech workers there and would put me on an immigration fast-track. I really like Montreal and Halifax, too... but I'm a New Englander at heart, and I would like to stay where I feel I belong, where all my family and freinds are.
Now I find out that even with a company-funded HMO, I'm not as healthy, either. I mean. what the hell am I getting for my healthcare dollar? It's a serious chunk of change out of my paycheck and my employer's operating budget, and an expense that gets more and more and more expensive every year without returning much in the way of improvement in quality of service or quality of life. As far as I can tell, I'm just paying to fund Washington lobbyists and golden parachute accounts for HMO and Big Pharma execs.
I think it's time to put to rest the United State's overpriced, poorly managed and underperforming healthcare system, and join the rest of the civilized worl in the 21st century.
An anecdotal tale of an unconfirmed in-the-wild exploit on a site run by a corporate rival? MAN THE LIFEBOATS! Mac OS X is no longer secure! No better than Windows with Microsoft's few... ahh... few thousand virii and exploits in the wild, no sir! Panic! Mass mayhem! Purchasing of Dells!
Pfft.
The Tech Punditocracy has been banging the drum on Mac OS X's insecurity pretty heavy these past few months. I'm beginning to believe it's just a scam to sell AV software to gullible IT managers, and to protect windows VARs from a growing corporate push to switch to a more secure platform than Windows.
I have yet to be bit by any sort of malware in all my years of using a Mac. The same cannot be said of my Windows experience... virii, spyware, worms... it's a vast and growing problem. On the Mac, it's a tiny and controlled problem. The difference is mainly in software architecture and in corporate attitudes to fixing software issues. Apple comes out ahead on both counts. It ain't no OpenBSD, sure, but it beats running two AV scanners and three spyware detectors just to check your email.
I can see why they haven't migrated yet. There are a few business apps, mostly vertical applications for ticketing, billing and invoice, that need to be run on Windows. For instance, where I work, we use a proprietary ticketing system that is unlikely to be ported to anything that isn't Windows. It enters problems on a customer's account, and assigns the problem to the appropriate technician, who then updates the ticket as needed.
But here's the deal... for all of its slowness, awkward GUI implementation, dubious reliability and stratospheric license and support contracts, all it really does is read and update database records. It's a LAMP application with out the L, A or P.
Here's a bigger deal... almost all vertical client/server apps can be replaced by a web-based application. Almost all of them do nothing but update and display database records.
Why not just hire a full-time RoR geek or two to crank out LAMP applications that will be robust, secure, customizeable to meet coprorate standards, easy to deploy and dirt cheap compared to a multi-zillion dollar per-seat license?
Why not indeed.
This is where the new growth in the IT industry is headed. Already, most of the tools I need to interact with the vast and varied store of corporate data are web-based utilities. Admittedly, I work on the technical side of a major ISP, and we tend to be more elightened about such things, but really... Linux on the desktop will be a reality sooner rather than later.
The trick isn't porting applications to the Linux desktop, but to the Linux server.
I'm not as impressed by the sillicon as I am by their product... it's a platform-agnostic application accellerator, designed to make Java apps (or any other VM app) optimized for multithreading go like stink. It does for processing power what a storage server does for disk space. Plug it into the network, and go... all it does is run a gajillion threads for the VM living on your general purpose servers. Each core probably isn't very powerful (altho they are 64bit RISC designs), but if you're in dire need of cramming as many lightweight transactions through as possible, lots and lots of little optimized processors are going to be more help than one or two big, fat general-purpose Opterons.
It's a very neat concept, and the careful wording ("virtual machine accellerator") indicates that they aren't tied to just Java... Azul's Compute Pool could be something future Parrot-lovers can use to sneak LAMP into places where Java rules all.
They're using some serious sillicon know-how to fuel an innovative and original product... gives me hope we aren't doomed to a wintel-only world, after all.
The correct answer is, "None of the Above."
Before you invest a lot of time, effort and money crafting a GUI front-end for your application, you should really stop and consider that you may not need one.
If your app is basically a way of querying a database on a server deep in the bowels of the computer room, you should be coding the interface as a web application. Especially now that AJAX is on the scene... modern AJAX tools and a Java backend can put together some very powerful applications that don't have the same development and deployment costs that an executable on every desktop would.
AJAX isn't a cure-all, and not likely to help much if you're interacting with local datasets with lots of processing horsepower (as in an imaging program like the Gimp or a sound editing program) or constructing a platform-independant application that's mostly self-contained (like a game or a p2p client.)
It is great for things like CRM applications, scheduling tools, inventory tools and ticket-monitoring... stuff that need to read and set values in a database somewhere. It's even good for applications that were previously in the domain of the workstation and the PC, like lightweight data visualization tools and PIMs.
What's more, the development cycle of an application that only needs a copy of IE or Firefox to run will be a lot easier for you, the user/customer and the poor slobs in IT who would need to come up with a deployment plan, and =then= an upgrade plan when rev 1.2 comes out.
SoupIsGood Food
Bastards forgot most Nikon DSLR users aren't able to use full-frame lenses. They just took their old Contax MM lenses and slapped them into an F-mount. This is as atrocious as Pentax's 45mm pancake lens for their DSLR... no one needs a short telephoto prime. Gimme a "standard" Tessar for the APS-C sized sensor! Gimme a fast and sharp Distagon with an angle of view equivalent to 20mm in 35mm for the D70! Bah.
SoupIsGood Food
Actually, I wonder if Apple missed the boat by not coming up with a great VM engine to build on top of. It would take hardware dependence out of the equation. There are some interesting virtual machine environments... not just Java, there's also Squeak, a very successful cross-platform Smalltalk environment (well, successful for smalltalk, at any rate) that will run a Rails-like environment, only with the web server and RDBMS rolled in, on one of any of two dozen platforms without a single recompile. Soon there will also be Parrot, which will do Perl and Python up right in a VM.
By moving Mac OS X to a similar(or better!) virtual machine, they could have solved a lot of problems with threading, clustering and garbage collection, not to mention future-proofing. There's no guarantee the first or second generation of quantum chips will be x86 compatible... but you will be able to port a VM to a quantum computer, regardless of its pedigree. You also only have to worry about building to a single target that will optimize itself to whatever its being run on...
Perhaps this is too sci-fi, but the pieces have been in place for more than a decade. And, ya know, Squeak =does= run the same on a Sparc Solaris server as it does on my iBook... and it's coded by a bunch of amateurs and academics without almost any corporate help at all. Picture it with a more friendly language and a better set of user interface API's...
SoupIsGood Food
This is why I'm confused about the push to "All Intel, All the Time!" Apple, with Mac OS X's Unix and NeXT roots, should embrace a multi-platform strategy to get the most bang for its buck wherever it can. The PowerPC-derived Cell will rock for workstation and servers, and the Meron will kick major butt for home user kit. Best tool for the job, and just compile for the famous NeXT "Fat Binary." Back in the day, the same NeXT executable would run on 68040, Sparc, PA-RISC and Pentiums. Why not now? Why tie yourself to x86 alone, when there are better alternatives to fit the niche you're targeting?
Too much politics, and not enough engineering.
~ SoupIsGood Food
I don't see how this is different from the old film SLR market: Canon has the lion's share, Nikon can't make up for lost time and second-rate glass, and the rest squabble over the scraps.
Sony's in a fine position to upset the applecart... they're the dominant consumer/prosumer digicam brand, and a DSLR with Minolta's electronics know-how coupled with Zeiss optics at a Sony price-point will be a world beater, believe it.
(And Contax sold more Arias and NXs than they could make, precisely because they were $500 cameras people could stick a $1000 lens on. Pity the N1 Digital's imaging chip sucked so bad... killed the company dead.)
SoupIsGood Food
Next time try some Gaffer's Tape... reknowned in the studio photography world to stick like a sumbitch, leave no residue when peeled away, and block light completely. It's a high-threadcount black cotton tape with masking tape adhesive, and it realy is dark-safe.
SoupIsGood Food
There is only one response worth the content provider's while - Death Penalty.
Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Apple, Edmunds and Akamai need to simply cut off traffic to all Bell South customers. Bell South's clientelle needs Google and Yahoo more than Google and Yahoo need them. Make the bastards come crawling back on their bellies as a lesson to others.
~ Theophilous Bolt
You want to see some real improvements, talk to the application coders and try to get them to 'leverage paralellism' in their applications by making them multi-threaded.
Dumping the problem into the lap of the application programmers isn't leveraging anything very effectively.
My latest motherboard has an extremely high bandwidth I/O architecture, built in from the ground up. I have memory bandwidth that was unheard of just 3 years ago. The damned thing burns through just about every task I throw at it.
Congratulations! You've just discovered Moore's Law. You should write a paper or something.
Now, take just enough of your PC so it fits into your pocket and doubles as a cell-phone, letting you still use the part you left on your desk while you ride the bus to work. Oops! You can't!
This is a very simple paradigm shift, and can almost emulated by VNC on your smartphone, but not satisfactorily, and not easily, as the OS doesn't understand it has to handle the UI for both the cell phone and the 30" flat panel monitor in the same application. This is because that mobo is essentially the same computer, only faster, that the mobo vendors were selling in '01. The OS projects and vendors can't see past the plain ol' whitebox PC.
Big paradigm shifts that would completely re-orient computing are impossible in the current market.
Wait, I thought the problem was with the PC architecture
This is because you are inattentive, and don't like to read.
- now it's data management?
Data management is what computers do, sport. Better, faster and more convenient data management is why there's a computer industry at all. Wake up.
Moving data between various devices is the job of applications. If the applications aren't written to interoperate and share data intelligently, there's nothing the OS can do to fix that.
Nothing... except create better ways for applications to interoperate with other applications and with local and networked peripherals. Sort of the definition of an operating system, ya know? In the modern day (since 1988 or so), the OS takes responsibility for the entire operating environment, with all the attendant APIs and utilities.
Dumping the problem into the application developer's lap was how MS-DOS did it, not how modern operating systems do it, and certainly not how next generation OS projects will do it.
SoupIsGood Food
Well, he's right. Windows is based, more or less, on the old VAX/VMS model. Linux is a modern OS kernel, but it's designed to run a variant of the Unix operating system, which was shiny and new before the Star Trek with Captain Kirk went into syndication.
The same can be said for MacOS X and the BSD's... hell, for pretty much every OS under the sun. BeOS and Plan 9 were the last attempts at someone trying something new with any technical success, and their lessons were largely lost on the industry.
Innovation in operating systems is pretty much at a standstill outside the academic environment. Current operating systems cannot leverage parralelism very well for anything but hyper-specialized applications. Current operating systems have user environments that are crummy at managing massive amounts of data crammed into cavernous storage systems. Current operating systems are rotten at deploying your data across networked devices like cell phones and MP3 players and DVRs without a crapload of work.
There are acres of room for improvement, but the current paradigms aren't keeping up. Part of the problem is the PC architecture... it's not well suited for anything but a workstation or server, and even then, it's not all that well suited. It's shackling the industry to a very limiting hardware model, trading innovation in effciency and effectiveness for better benchmarks at the same old stuff.
Someone's going to need to design and market a new platform... OS and Hardware, that manages your data better with less effort across more devices, before we can get things moving again.
Otherwise I foresee more of the same... computers completing benchmarks faster, but not doing anything new and innovative.
Linux is a very nice unix, perhaps the pinnacle of achievement for the Unix Way, but the Unix Way isn't all that special anymore, and is really showing its age. Windows is an order of magnitude in worse shape. It's just that no-one with an industry presence is willing to try anything new anymore, and companies like SGI and HP are going broke sticking to the old model long after it's stopped working for them.
SoupIsGood Food
Compared to the insanely cool, science-fiction advanced consumer tech, everything from cell phones to high-speed internet available in Europe, Japan and South Korea, the US is dowdy and backwards. Cingular ain't got squat on DoMoCo, and even a Mielle washer/dryer set is lightyears ahead of the stone-age clunkers Kenmore and Maytag inflict on the American household.
When it comes to technology obsession, the High Street in London and the Akihabara in Tokyo are where it's at.
SoupIsGood Food
If you can't afford to recruit a development team, you can't afford to be in business as a software vendor. End of story.
Outsourcing involves huge overhead and dicey contractual negotiations, and you'll spend more money than you'll save as a small outfit, even if the coders themselves are in India. The money you save in HR you'll blow on travel, telecoms and lawyers. Especially lawyers, and you'll lose the company if you try to half-ass it.
If you are unwilling to hire more than one geek to do the work needed to create your product, you are too undercapitalized to be in business. Fix that, and try again when you're able to spend some money to make some money. Otherwise, you're wasting your time, your employee's time, and your investors' (woefully inadequate) money.
SoupIsGood Food
A P2P protocol that requires a centralized organizing entity, such as a hub, tracker or server, isn't really a P2P protocol. Decentralizing the bandwidth and the storage isn't enough to ensure unimpeded file sharing... the indexing needs to be decentralized as well. This way, there is no single point of attack to take down the P2P network.
This just isn't to protect music pirates from the record companies, but to protect legitimate distribution systems from malicious attack, either governmental or criminal.
SoupIsGood Food
Dissatisfaction with the quality of an article in Wikipedia is not a fatal flaw... it's the engine that makes Wikipedia work. If a user needs information on a topic, and the information is incorrect or incomplete or poorly presented, the user will, in some cases, just go out and research what they need to know using other sources...
Wikipedia does not hold to the standards of print references because it's not finished. It's a work constantly in progress, and you get to see the work in progress as well as a finished product.
Bearing that in mind, Wikipedia must not be judged by its worst entries, as those entries will be brought up to par eventually... in a few hours or a few years. Bad entries will be made into good entries as the right editor for the job steps forward.
This requires information filtering abilities on the part of the reader, and these abilities have too long been dormant in most readers... in a polished and professional publication, mistakes aren't acknowleged as such. There's even a sentiment that if it's in print, it's an absolute irrefutable fact, rather than the best information available to the publisher.
In Wikipedia, the reader knows that what they are reading is a collection of the best information available to the writers... and they can modify it if they see a mistake, or have more to add to the topic. That sort of dynamic interaction with the source material is very, very powerful, and can lead to a depth impossible in a regular encyclopedia on obscure topics... everything from Hallucigenia to Indian Clubs. Try getting that info out of your Brittanica.
Wikipedia is great as a point of departure for further study. It will, at the very least, provide the reader with a notion of what the scope and nature of the subject is, and the incompleteness and error of the artivle will be corrected as people who know what they're talking about step forward over time.
SoupIsGood Food