When I worked on Nintendo U64 video games (I mostly did the AI), we used C++ effectively to write fast code that was maintainable.
However, no project that I have worked on since had the requirement for runtime performance over-trumping the huge gain of productivity of languages like Java, or better yet Lisp, Python or Smalltalk.
Writing and maintaining software is a business - it the total cost vs. benefit that counts.
I am a OSX/Linux/Java user, so this might be a stupid question:
How difficult would it be to write Word macros or some other type of easily installable plugin that would make it easy and transparent for Word users to use OpenOffice XML formats instead of the frequently moving target of Word document formats?
For many Knowledge Management applications, it would be a huge win have documents stored in a standard XML format. This could also help prevent Word lockin. If such a set of macros or plugin came from IBM, most businesses would (I think) find them acceptable.
I am usually a big Apple booster (starting when I wrote the free chess program they gave away with the earliest Apple IIs), but this has me pissed off:
I ordered iLife (to get iDVD) Sunday night - probably not so smart just before new announcements.
Anyway, I got an email early this morning saying that they had just shipped the old iLife 1.1 (which, I admit is the one I ordered) - still, one would think that they could have held my order for 1 day.
Unless a free upgrade is easily obtained, I will be an unhapy customer.
Like some other posters, I have watched my consulting rates drop drastically after the the dot-com bust, then slowly rise to about two-thirds of what I used to charge.
In the U.S., I think that we as a country have been going a little crazy with materialism and greed - there is some justice for salaries to slightly equalize with developing countries.
a little off topic, but: what is the deal with the tax break for large gas guzzelling vehicles? I was amazed at an article in the Arizona Republic this mornig of local Hummer and SUV sales sky-rocketing because of a Bush-$100,000 tax break for any 'business' (own a motel? - get a free Hummer!) to buy large fuel inefficient vehicles.
I may be a little off base here, but I don't think so: I believe that our addiction to buying foreign oil with borrowed money (making our foreign debt crisis occur much sooner, rather than later) is a worst threat to our national security than terrorism.
Anyway, Happy New Year! I wish you all health and happiness.
As long as environmental laws and treaties are respected and
workers in third world countries are treated fairly, I am a
supporter of globalization. Since I rely on remote consulting
to make a living, I am very much in competition with IT workers
in India and other regions where highly educated engineers can
be hired cheaply.
Why then do I support globalization? Because it is an inevitable
fact of modern life - I believe in adjusting to the world around
me instead of having unrealiatic expectations that the world will
conform to my desires.
I believe that the key requirement for white collar workers
in both the U.S. and in lower work cost areas like India is the willingness
and enthusiasm for making education a life-long persuit.
With certainty, many of us who have been blessed in the past with
very high wages in the U.S. will feel some economic pain, but I
believe that workers in the U.S. must adopt a mindset that includes
a passion to compete dollar-for-dollar with workers anywhere in
the world - this means constant education and an eagerness to really
understand the business needs of employers and consulting customers.
For the IT industry, this means that the focus must be on business
needs over technology - that technology is a tool, and unless you
are a university professor or work in a research lab, then business
processes are as important as computer science.
I use a fairly effective algorithm to do this in my product:
I first classify the text into a category, then weight every word in the text based on how much it contributed to this classification - I then output as a "summary" of the one or two sentences in the original text that most contribute to the classification of the entire text.
I have an Israeli friend maintains that the Israeli and Palestinian people (like people everywhere) are good and decent - it is the leadership on both sides that is attrocious. I totally believe him.
Try a Google search on "Israel Peace Now" - lots of Israelis want to get out of the West Bank.
In the US, the pro-Israel lobby is incredibly strong. The first president Bush was (perhaps) not re-elected because he publically criticized the settlements on the West Bank. His son is not making the same mistake.
The fact that the Palestinian leadership (if you can call it that) is bad seems self evient.
Just my opinion: don't blaim the people, blaim the leadership.
.. I meant "statistical approaches", not "statiscal approaches"..
(I was trying to type while holding my wife's baby parrot, and he sometimes goes nuclear if you don't pay enough attention to him:-)
BTW, pardon the shameless plug, but I added a short chapter on statistical nlp (simple enough example program to understand easily) to my free Java/AI web book.
I spent more years than I care to admit writing natural language processing software that tried to extract semantic information - conceptual dependency, parsers, etc.
I gave up a few years ago, now I mostly use statiscal approaches (markov processes, word counts, huge databases of proper names, etc.)
As an Internet user from the mid-1980s, I used to be known at work as someone who could find stuff fast. My secret was simple: I kept file lists of well known FTP sites in a single directory, and grep'ed to find references, then FTPed around to grab stuff.
I like Google better:-)
Still, the web is just a good second start: I still have not lost faith in the Semantic Web.
That said, I was fairly much shocked yesterday when I went through the little exercise of converting my main web page to XHTML. The problem was that there is no standard way (yet) to embed RDF in XHTML and still have a page be a legal XML document. Strange but true. I ended up placing comment tags around my RDF - yuck.
I have worked on both web services infrastructure tools and developed web services, so this is a subject of interest:-)
I have a few thoughts on security:
Every computer inside a firewall should be as secure as possible. One compromised computer should not necessarily compromise your network.
Web service responses shoudl be document centric - SOAP is best used not as RPC but as a rich document (XML payload) request. Make requestors sign their requests.
I am listening to a classical music track right now - sounds great.
I have been buying songs from Apple's Music Store - lots of fun, and I think that I will support Magnatune also:
really, when people/organizations do something good support them!
I like the use of a Creative Commons License also (I publish my free web books under a CC license and I was the featured commoner a few months ago - so I am a little biased:-)
Not to be too idealistic here, but: if enough people buy from companies like Magnatune that might help change the music industry for the better.
-Mark
RDF Tools
on
Practical RDF
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I enjoyed this book review - useful, and the links to tools are useful.
One tool not mentioned: the semantic web library for
Swi-Prolog
that provides a high level toolkit for dealing with RDF, Owl, etc. Since the hoped-for use of RDF is applications that make logical inferences, Prolog seems like a good language to use:-)
The Jena and Sesame packages are written in Java and also are very good tools.
The big problem is getting people to use RDF - this technology can only be useful if enough people use it (think FAX machines).
I believe that the earliest large scale adoption of Semantic Web technologies will really be on company LANs and be used for organizing company/.organizational information.
Think of shifting from information technology to knowledge management technology.
My $199 Chineese PC has components, including the CPU that are also manufactured in China.
Except for writing my new book (my publisher supplied me with Word macros that I must use), I find this $199 PC with
SuSE Linux to provide a super productive environment! When I get time to get back to work on my own products next December, my cheap Chineese PC meets all my needs (in my case, this is running Java JDK, ant, IntelliJ, Tomcat, Joram JMS, JBoss, etc.) I have to love low overhead and a $199 computer is a sweet price point that an Intel based machine would have a difficult time meeting.
Real breakthrouhs in search technology are likely to come from Semantic Web technoligies: using standards like RDF, OWL, etc. for document markup based on content type (using standard ontology definitions).
The technology for the Semantic Web is good enough - people and organizations just have to be willing to add semantic markup. This will enable what I would call knowledge based search.
Some good tools are:
I believe that independent film producers could make a decent amount of money by doing the following:
Make low res Quicktime and MPEG versions of their movies available for free download and viewing.
Bundle collections of their movies on a single DVD and sell it inexpensively.
This could cut out the middleman so the film producers might make enough money to support their art.
After finally getting broadband at the beginning of this year, I really enjoyed the Sundance online film festival (for those of us who did not make it to the actual festival).
I would have liked to be able to buy low cost DVDs of the Sundance movies - wish they had been available.
I started to get into the AI field professionally around the early 1980s.
I remember the excitement in the U.S. AI community when Feigenbaum went to Japan and sold the government there on the 5th generation build-a-real-AI project.
Funny - I do not remember any animosity - mostly just wishing them good luck.
BTW, the 5th generation project was built around logic programming (Prolog variants). I have never understood why more people do not use Prolog. For an admittedly small percentage of software projects, Prolog is the best language for solving problems - well worth learning. (A very good free LGPL Prolog is available
here).
I have written 2 open content (Creative Commons license) web books (with a 3rd available in rough, incomplete form) on Java + AI, and Common LISP programming.
I get a lot out of writing open content material. The best thing is getting sincere thanks from people who use my work. A secondary benefit is that I think that it helps my consulting business.
That said, I probably spend only 5% of my "work" time producing free open content - I do have to pay the bills.
Well, we can agree that problems come from large companies pushing DRM, etc.
re: freedom to access art:
I do pay to visit art museums - I will probably take some heat for this, but museums that own art do not have to make digital images available for free on the web - but it would serve the interests of society if they did.
I like to find 'art', etc. on the web that is available. I especially like it when universities web publish high quality images of old scrolls, etc.
re: the music business:
everyone knows that in general the music business sucks: the best advice to musicians is probably to not sign any deals with record companies, and self promote their own CDs at their concerts.
That said, I still believe that Apple has walked a fine line (fairly well) for providing an online music service that I am having fun with.
Hey, I agree with you re: freedom to access information!
I totally support the anti-copyright movement (if that is the right term).
I have two free web books that I publish under a Creative Commons license (and a 3rd in progress).
However, as a producer of material, I choose to give it away. I was the "featured commoner" a few weeks ago:-)
A major problem in the U.S. (and Europe also, I think) will be the limitations of freedom to access information - I believe that this will be an unfortunate fallout of collapsing economies, governments panic'ing and trying to maintain control, etc.
At least a couple of times a month, I spend an hour or two just listening to the music samplers, and perhaps buying a few songs. For a dollar or two, I am entertained, and I end up with a new songs to listen to. I am very happy with Apple's service.
For permantent copies, burn an audio CD.
When I first heard of Napster, I quickly downloaded 7 or 8 songs that were old favorites - in all cases I had bought the LPs, but had lost the records or they were damaged. (fair use?) However, I was turned off by some aquaintences collecting thousands of songs that they did not buy.
Not to go off on too big of a rant, but it seems like too many people think that it is OK to break the law: steal music, steal cable TV, let dogs off of leashes where it is not permited and they become public nuisances, etc., etc.
If you think about it, people who steal stuff on the internet might end up contributing to loss of freedom on the internet - not worth it! As multi-national corporations take over media and general control of governments, I believe that keeping the internet free becomes a major concern and goal.
Sorry about being negative, but: isn't it a worry that when large numbers of people break laws, and this data is available to the government, that this is a form of 'crowd control'?
I work as a programmer (and software architect), so I have
lots of compassion for IT people who will loose their jobs in this country. I lost my job a few years ago when my dot.com went out of business.
That said, except for environmental concerns, I think that globalization makes a lot of sense: perform work and manufacturing where it can be done most cost effectively.
Since I work as an independent consultant who mostly telecommutes, I have long considered cheaper overseas IT folks to be the competition. The question is, how to compete?
For starters, I try to constantly educate myself. Secondly, I believe in Joseph Campbell's teachings: "follow your bliss": do the work that you love to do. Just like a lot of people 'here' on Slashdot, I love what I do and I could not imagine working in another field. So, I compete with foreign workers with passion for what I do, constant education, and many years of diverse experience.
I know that this might sound callous, but I just believe that protectionism is a mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
When I worked on Nintendo U64 video games (I mostly did the AI), we used C++ effectively to write fast code that was maintainable.
However, no project that I have worked on since had the requirement for runtime performance over-trumping the huge gain of productivity of languages like Java, or better yet Lisp, Python or Smalltalk.
Writing and maintaining software is a business - it the total cost vs. benefit that counts.
-Mark
How difficult would it be to write Word macros or some other type of easily installable plugin that would make it easy and transparent for Word users to use OpenOffice XML formats instead of the frequently moving target of Word document formats?
For many Knowledge Management applications, it would be a huge win have documents stored in a standard XML format. This could also help prevent Word lockin. If such a set of macros or plugin came from IBM, most businesses would (I think) find them acceptable.
-Mark
I just talked with customer service - they also advised simply returning the product (and gave me an RMA number).
I ordered iLife (to get iDVD) Sunday night - probably not so smart just before new announcements.
Anyway, I got an email early this morning saying that they had just shipped the old iLife 1.1 (which, I admit is the one I ordered) - still, one would think that they could have held my order for 1 day.
Unless a free upgrade is easily obtained, I will be an unhapy customer.
-Mark
In the U.S., I think that we as a country have been going a little crazy with materialism and greed - there is some justice for salaries to slightly equalize with developing countries.
a little off topic, but: what is the deal with the tax break for large gas guzzelling vehicles? I was amazed at an article in the Arizona Republic this mornig of local Hummer and SUV sales sky-rocketing because of a Bush-$100,000 tax break for any 'business' (own a motel? - get a free Hummer!) to buy large fuel inefficient vehicles.
I may be a little off base here, but I don't think so: I believe that our addiction to buying foreign oil with borrowed money (making our foreign debt crisis occur much sooner, rather than later) is a worst threat to our national security than terrorism.
Anyway, Happy New Year! I wish you all health and happiness.
-Mark
Why then do I support globalization? Because it is an inevitable fact of modern life - I believe in adjusting to the world around me instead of having unrealiatic expectations that the world will conform to my desires.
I believe that the key requirement for white collar workers in both the U.S. and in lower work cost areas like India is the willingness and enthusiasm for making education a life-long persuit. With certainty, many of us who have been blessed in the past with very high wages in the U.S. will feel some economic pain, but I believe that workers in the U.S. must adopt a mindset that includes a passion to compete dollar-for-dollar with workers anywhere in the world - this means constant education and an eagerness to really understand the business needs of employers and consulting customers. For the IT industry, this means that the focus must be on business needs over technology - that technology is a tool, and unless you are a university professor or work in a research lab, then business processes are as important as computer science.
I first classify the text into a category, then weight every word in the text based on how much it contributed to this classification - I then output as a "summary" of the one or two sentences in the original text that most contribute to the classification of the entire text.
Not really sumarization, but useful.
-Mark
Try a Google search on "Israel Peace Now" - lots of Israelis want to get out of the West Bank.
In the US, the pro-Israel lobby is incredibly strong. The first president Bush was (perhaps) not re-elected because he publically criticized the settlements on the West Bank. His son is not making the same mistake.
The fact that the Palestinian leadership (if you can call it that) is bad seems self evient.
Just my opinion: don't blaim the people, blaim the leadership.
-Mark
Who is afraid of whom?
-Mark
(I was trying to type while holding my wife's baby parrot, and he sometimes goes nuclear if you don't pay enough attention to him :-)
BTW, pardon the shameless plug, but I added a short chapter on statistical nlp (simple enough example program to understand easily) to my free Java/AI web book.
-Mark
I gave up a few years ago, now I mostly use statiscal approaches (markov processes, word counts, huge databases of proper names, etc.)
-Mark
I like Google better :-)
Still, the web is just a good second start: I still have not lost faith in the Semantic Web.
That said, I was fairly much shocked yesterday when I went through the little exercise of converting my main web page to XHTML. The problem was that there is no standard way (yet) to embed RDF in XHTML and still have a page be a legal XML document. Strange but true. I ended up placing comment tags around my RDF - yuck.
-Mark
I have a few thoughts on security:
Every computer inside a firewall should be as secure as possible. One compromised computer should not necessarily compromise your network.
Web service responses shoudl be document centric - SOAP is best used not as RPC but as a rich document (XML payload) request. Make requestors sign their requests.
Use SOAP over HTTPS.
Avoid using Windows :-) (Hey, this is /.)
-Mark
I have been buying songs from Apple's Music Store - lots of fun, and I think that I will support Magnatune also: really, when people/organizations do something good support them!
I like the use of a Creative Commons License also (I publish my free web books under a CC license and I was the featured commoner a few months ago - so I am a little biased :-)
Not to be too idealistic here, but: if enough people buy from companies like Magnatune that might help change the music industry for the better.
-Mark
One tool not mentioned: the semantic web library for Swi-Prolog that provides a high level toolkit for dealing with RDF, Owl, etc. Since the hoped-for use of RDF is applications that make logical inferences, Prolog seems like a good language to use :-)
The Jena and Sesame packages are written in Java and also are very good tools.
The big problem is getting people to use RDF - this technology can only be useful if enough people use it (think FAX machines).
I believe that the earliest large scale adoption of Semantic Web technologies will really be on company LANs and be used for organizing company/.organizational information.
Think of shifting from information technology to knowledge management technology.
-Mark
Except for writing my new book (my publisher supplied me with Word macros that I must use), I find this $199 PC with SuSE Linux to provide a super productive environment! When I get time to get back to work on my own products next December, my cheap Chineese PC meets all my needs (in my case, this is running Java JDK, ant, IntelliJ, Tomcat, Joram JMS, JBoss, etc.) I have to love low overhead and a $199 computer is a sweet price point that an Intel based machine would have a difficult time meeting.
Off course I expect noise like this from Intel!
Intel likes globalization when it favors them :-)
-Mark
Actually, there is a lot of interesting technology behind Protege.
Also, Protege is really an "academic" project, not a commercial project.
-Mark
The technology for the Semantic Web is good enough - people and organizations just have to be willing to add semantic markup. This will enable what I would call knowledge based search. Some good tools are:
HP's semantic web toolkit
Protege Ontology Editor
RDF and semantic web tools for Swi-Prolog
-Mark
- Make low res Quicktime and MPEG versions of their movies available for free download and viewing.
- Bundle collections of their movies on a single DVD and sell it inexpensively.
This could cut out the middleman so the film producers might make enough money to support their art.After finally getting broadband at the beginning of this year, I really enjoyed the Sundance online film festival (for those of us who did not make it to the actual festival).
I would have liked to be able to buy low cost DVDs of the Sundance movies - wish they had been available.
-Mark
I remember the excitement in the U.S. AI community when Feigenbaum went to Japan and sold the government there on the 5th generation build-a-real-AI project.
Funny - I do not remember any animosity - mostly just wishing them good luck.
BTW, the 5th generation project was built around logic programming (Prolog variants). I have never understood why more people do not use Prolog. For an admittedly small percentage of software projects, Prolog is the best language for solving problems - well worth learning. (A very good free LGPL Prolog is available here).
-Mark
I get a lot out of writing open content material. The best thing is getting sincere thanks from people who use my work. A secondary benefit is that I think that it helps my consulting business.
That said, I probably spend only 5% of my "work" time producing free open content - I do have to pay the bills.
-Mark
re: freedom to access art:
I do pay to visit art museums - I will probably take some heat for this, but museums that own art do not have to make digital images available for free on the web - but it would serve the interests of society if they did.
I like to find 'art', etc. on the web that is available. I especially like it when universities web publish high quality images of old scrolls, etc.
re: the music business:
everyone knows that in general the music business sucks: the best advice to musicians is probably to not sign any deals with record companies, and self promote their own CDs at their concerts.
That said, I still believe that Apple has walked a fine line (fairly well) for providing an online music service that I am having fun with.
Thanks for your comments.
I totally support the anti-copyright movement (if that is the right term).
I have two free web books that I publish under a Creative Commons license (and a 3rd in progress).
However, as a producer of material, I choose to give it away. I was the "featured commoner" a few weeks ago :-)
A major problem in the U.S. (and Europe also, I think) will be the limitations of freedom to access information - I believe that this will be an unfortunate fallout of collapsing economies, governments panic'ing and trying to maintain control, etc.
Anyway, thanks for your comments.
For permantent copies, burn an audio CD.
When I first heard of Napster, I quickly downloaded 7 or 8 songs that were old favorites - in all cases I had bought the LPs, but had lost the records or they were damaged. (fair use?) However, I was turned off by some aquaintences collecting thousands of songs that they did not buy.
Not to go off on too big of a rant, but it seems like too many people think that it is OK to break the law: steal music, steal cable TV, let dogs off of leashes where it is not permited and they become public nuisances, etc., etc.
If you think about it, people who steal stuff on the internet might end up contributing to loss of freedom on the internet - not worth it! As multi-national corporations take over media and general control of governments, I believe that keeping the internet free becomes a major concern and goal.
Sorry about being negative, but: isn't it a worry that when large numbers of people break laws, and this data is available to the government, that this is a form of 'crowd control'?
I work as a programmer (and software architect), so I have lots of compassion for IT people who will loose their jobs in this country. I lost my job a few years ago when my dot.com went out of business.
That said, except for environmental concerns, I think that globalization makes a lot of sense: perform work and manufacturing where it can be done most cost effectively.
Since I work as an independent consultant who mostly telecommutes, I have long considered cheaper overseas IT folks to be the competition. The question is, how to compete?
For starters, I try to constantly educate myself. Secondly, I believe in Joseph Campbell's teachings: "follow your bliss": do the work that you love to do. Just like a lot of people 'here' on Slashdot, I love what I do and I could not imagine working in another field. So, I compete with foreign workers with passion for what I do, constant education, and many years of diverse experience.
I know that this might sound callous, but I just believe that protectionism is a mistake.
-Mark