Hey, not to roll over or anything, but for many users of Linux, SMP and JMF support is not really so critical.
Since SMP is a build option, it would be trivial to generate a source tree without it (right?).
I know that this sounds a little cowardly (but not anonymously so:-) but it would take away some of Microsoft's and SCO's attack on individual users of Linux.
-Mark
When I develop in Java, LISP, Python: portability!
on
Don't Be a Sharecropper
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
OK, I enjoyed the article.
However, my Java code is portable. Same goes for LispWorks Common LISP: build once and deploy on all of the OS platforms that I am interested in. Python code is portable.
So, Bray's argument should be don't use proprietary APIs.
I do agree that writing web services avoids lockin problems. I hardly ever write standalone GUI apps anymore - everything is either a web service (SOAP, XML-RPC, or XML over HTTP) or has a web based front end.
Over half of my consulting jobs are in the "quick as you can" mode.
I make the effort to point out the pros and cons of spending more time - then let my customers decide what they want.
However, one thing that I do (for the quick jobs), is to send my customer a very short email (after agreeing on how the project will be done) summarizing our agreement to do a "quick as you can" project. Then, at the end of a project, I re-send the same email - remind them what they agreed to!
The same technique should work if you are an employee at a company.
Sometimes it is correct to do a "quick as you can project" - other times it is better to go for maximum quality. A quick project should produce correctly running code, but will be more difficult to maintain and modify in the future.
If people are not living in crowded, overpopulated environments, then yes, by nature people are generous by nature.
I will try to make it simple for you: try comparing how people interact in a small town versus in a very large city: in a small town, people talk to strangers, generally friendly, etc. It seems that in large cities, in crowded environments, people are still friendly, but there is definitely a barrior.
If you have ever travelled to non-industrialized areas and interacted with non-industrialized people, then you would now what I am talking about.
I used to publish my free web books as Open Content, but I switched over to a CC license also (BTW, I was CC's 'featured commoner' last week - a real honor, because CC is a great group.)
By nature, people want to share, and the CC licenses and agenda helps a lot.
-Mark
The real point of the article
on
Does Google = God?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Sure, the technical details of the article were fluff.
However, the real point of the article is that in an increasingly linked world, it is more important than ever to be good world citizens.
Lord Rees Moag and James Davidson make this point in their book 'Sovereign Individual": large countries become increasingly vulnerable to small countries and organized groups because of the threats of cyber attacks, etc.
As this article points out, with the free flow of information, small groups can share information and form larger political and action groups.
Not to be political, but I was against the recent Iraq War because I think that it is a very bad idea to alienate other countries when we largely depend on the global "dollar standard" for hoarding money and purchasing oil to prop up our economy. I am a more than a little concerned that our turning our backs on the UN will cause us all kinds of problems in the future. (BTW, the US has vetoed 35 UN security council resolutions ssince 1970 - so, it was not so atypical for Russia, France, and Germany to threaten to veto one of our resolutions.
-Mark
I bought a $199 Linux PC at Frye's
on
More Cheap Linux PCs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe I was lucky, but the box I bought has been very relible for the few weeks that I have had it:-)
Seriously, the hardware seems OK - the salesman said that they had sold a lot of this model (totally made in China, with a Chineese Linux that immediately got replaced with a fresh SuSE install) - and no returns so far.
Anyway, I love cheap commodity hardware! That said, I wouldn't mind a dual G5 system.
-Mark
Re:Ugh...Fry's hax0r3d by Ch1n353 $199 specials...
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, some of my friends have kidded me about the same thing:-)
I guess the point about a $199 box: in my case, this is not a mission critical deployment. I like to run a few Java server side public demos - if the $199 box crashes, until I buy a new one, I can switch IP addresses to another box, and be back up quickly.
A disposable server is not a good idea from a save-the-envionment point of view. However, it took me less than 30 minutes to set up SuSE Linux and my Java server side demos - I am unlikely to have to touch this system for a long, long time.
But, your point is well taken: a quality component system (or a $500 Dell server) migth end up being cheaper if the cheap system fails quickly.
-Mark
Sun's Java One Conference
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Since I am a Java consultant, I usually take the time to watch the Keynote speeches at Java One on their web site (RealVideo is awesome:-).
There does seem to be a sense of angst in the presentations: just about everyone seems to gripe about the economy. As a long time holoder of Sun stock (ouch!), I can feel their pain. On the other hand, recently a top Micorosft exec was complaining to me about the value of his stock options - everyone is feeling the heat in this industry.
While I have always liked Sun hardware, they are having their lunch eaten on the low end. For example: I just had to replace a server - I went to Frye's and bought a Chineese built Linux PC for $199; after reinstalling my prefered SuSE distro, I have what appears to be a reliable (and very low power use) server - close to free.
It is difficult to compete with Linux and cheap hardware.
Sun does make the point that soon there will be more sales of Java enabled cell phones and PDAs than PCs - still, I don't see how they can make much money in that product space.
Earlier this year, a fairly high ranked Microsoft executive told me the Microsoft must grow at a fast pace to keep stock options valuable. I think the phrase he used was "grow another Disney each year".
It seems odd to me that a company that has so much cash and such high profit margins requires mandatory fast growth, but then I am a humble programmer, not a financial guy:-)
The whole idea goes against my basic philosophy of "take what you need and leave some for others". Not to go off on a huge tangent, but in the western world, greed seems to far outweigh issues like building an enjoyable and productive career. As Josepgh Campbell used to say "follow your bliss"...
That said, Balmer probably has some fun with Microsoft:-)
I agree with you - one point that I had not considered is that it is easy to have multiple JDK/JRE instances on a server - keep 1.3 around for legacy systems.
One of things that makes older more mature languages like Common Lisp (and perhaps Smalltalk) nice to work with is a feeling of both having really solid implementations and not breaking legacy code.
I like the idea of boxing and generics, but, these changes will affect old code (probably?) and the platform in general.
My vote would be to freeze the Java language (perhaps after 1.5) and concentrate on the following:
memory footprint
runtime efficiency
I would not like to see Java become a language designer's playground.
Because of great infrastructure software like servelt/JSP containers, (perhaps EJBs:-), XML utilities, solid web services support, etc. Java is a great platform.
Leave it alone (the sooner the better) except for improvements in the implementation.
There is one big advantage of Java on the server side:
With Java, I have free servlet/JSP containers (Apache Jakarta Tomcat), a free EJB container when the use of EJBs makes sense (JBoss), simple SOAP support (Apache Jakarata Axis), lots of XML/XSLT tools, etc.
The commercial Lisp vendor that I use does not directly support web services (every few months I propose to them that they hire me to write such support:-)
There are several fine commercial Lisp development systems and many fine/good free Common Lisp compilers.
You are right though - relatively few programmers seriously use Lisp. This does not bother me in the least. Personally, I always like to use the right tool for a job. Choosing the right tool also involves issues like "can I find a programmer to maintain this code", etc.
I used Common Lisp recently on a commercial product that I developed - I was only planning on selling "shrink wrapped" executables and the algorythms that I used were tricky (for me at least) to figure out - so using Lisp seemed like a good choice.
On the other hand, I make most of my living writing (or getting customers started with) Java server side stuff - using Java and web standards helps insure the value of the resulting project (with source code) over the long haul.
A few months ago, I had to do some tricky coding - I used Smalltalk to get the algorithm right - then rewriting in Java was trivial.
BTW, I enjoy using different programming languages.
One of the reasons I love to code in Lisp so much is that it is a concise language - Paul Graham has it right when he says that short programs are easier to change.
When I have to code in Java (most of the time), I try to keep my applications as short as possible by first developing and testing low level class libraries to support a project - once these are tested, I find it easier to write much shorter application programs that I can tweak easily.
Still, I find Common Lisp to be my most productive language (Smalltalk is pretty good also:-).
-Mark
I worked for SAIC for about 20 years
on
Inside SAIC
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
SAIC is a great company. The employee stock ownership program was really a stroke of genious.
The company founder Bob Beyster is a great guy (I used to crew for him on his sailboat - fun!).
I also feel that the management of SAIC is extremely honest; I never worry about an Enron or Health South type financial crisis for SAIC. When I was an active employee, I heard stories of people getting fired for even a wiff of questionable activity.
I run a business out of my house as a (tax wise) "sole proprieter". On my tax forms, I combine both consulting fees and products sold as income for my business. (I am also an author, but that income is tracked separately.) For consulting, no sales tax needs to be collected; for products, simply keep tract of which sales occur in your state (this might change!).
Not to give them a plug, but I use PayPal for all product sales and small consulting jobs - a yearly dump of payments makes doing my taxes fairly easy (actually, I print out the yearly report fairly often - just to have hard copy).
Since the economy basically sucks and the IT industry is in the tanks, it is great to be able to work out of your home to save money.
Anyway, I am not making much money (compared to a few years ago), but I am happy and having lots of fun.
Inxight has good visualization and natural language processing tools, for sure (though pricey).
Not to make too big of a shameless plug, but my www.knowledgebooks.com stuff tries to be sort-of competitive with Inxight (although I have just been working on this stuff about 1/3 time for a few years - I will acknowledge that they have a head start:-).
I really believe that most people will routinely use what I would call information appliances - systems that basically remember our entire digital lives and provide ways to quickly find information based on topic, time of creation/modification, linked from other similar data or experiences, etc.
One huge problem that I have as a developer (as I have recently talked about on my blog) is that if you are not Microsoft and can not peek inside proprietary data and file formats, then you have a difficult time writing software that runs in the background and has access to everything that you are doing on your computer. Storage, information retrieval, backups, etc. are all solveable problems, but proprietary data formats used by > 90% of the desktop market are a major problem.
One possible idea would be integration with OpenOffice and live with a small market share.
.. and saw the reason: the market reacted to this purchase.
I am fairly much addicted to my iBook (a great X Server for using my Linux server) and I do hope that Apple stays in business. Really, Mac on the desktop and Linux on the servers - perfect:-)
I am not really a Perl programmer, but I have used Perl several times in the last couple of years because SOAP:Lite was so easy to use to write 'foreign' clients to Java and Smalltalk web services that I was working on.
I have not seen the book, but the fact that one author wrote SOAP:Lite is a good sign.
Anyway, his work saved me a lot of effort in testing my stuff.
-Mark
I don't agree with the article
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It is easy to criticize. I use OS X about 80% of the time, Linux/KDE about 15%, and Windows 2000 about 5%. OS X, in my opinion, gives the best desktop experience.
Any desktop uses a spacial metaphor for data - however, for me, the desktop is just a holding area - short term memory, if you will.
I do like the idea of other means of filtering: LifeStreams seems like a good idea: being able to filter based on time and document type (for example).
Anyway, it is a free world - I will stick with OS X.
This seems like a "sort of" restatement of Kolmogorov Complexity.
Roughly, Kolmogorov Complexity is a measure of randomness - the measure is how long a computer program needs to be to reproduce data (pardon an oversimplification).
-Mark
My take on the future of AI
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I have been interested in AI since reading Bertram Rafael's great book "Mind Inside Matter" in the mid 1970s, and I have been fortunate enough to get to spend about 40% of my time since the mid 1980s doing AI related work professionally.
My view of AI has really changed over the years. I used to be a "symbols guy" - basically thinking that manipulation of symbols would somehow lead to "real AI" - the problem with this approach is that while abstract symbols may have meaning to the humans who write symbolic AI systems, the systems themselves have no such grounding.
I had the opportunity to participate for about 18 months on a DARPA neural network advisory panel - this experience (along with developing the SAIC ANSim neural network product) really switched my point of view.
I now believe that when "real AI" does happen (and let's not hold our collective breaths on this one:-), it will happen through self organization and development. At the Webmind Corporation, I was working a tutoring environment that would allow humans to interact with what we called "the baby Webmind" - interesting stuff, but the company went out of business.
When "real AI" does happen, I believe that it will seem very alien to us.
-Mark
PS. I have a free web book AI tutorial (using Java) on my web site - help yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Since SMP is a build option, it would be trivial to generate a source tree without it (right?).
I know that this sounds a little cowardly (but not anonymously so :-) but it would take away some of Microsoft's and SCO's attack on individual users of Linux.
-Mark
However, my Java code is portable. Same goes for LispWorks Common LISP: build once and deploy on all of the OS platforms that I am interested in. Python code is portable.
So, Bray's argument should be don't use proprietary APIs.
I do agree that writing web services avoids lockin problems. I hardly ever write standalone GUI apps anymore - everything is either a web service (SOAP, XML-RPC, or XML over HTTP) or has a web based front end.
-Mark
I make the effort to point out the pros and cons of spending more time - then let my customers decide what they want.
However, one thing that I do (for the quick jobs), is to send my customer a very short email (after agreeing on how the project will be done) summarizing our agreement to do a "quick as you can" project. Then, at the end of a project, I re-send the same email - remind them what they agreed to!
The same technique should work if you are an employee at a company.
Sometimes it is correct to do a "quick as you can project" - other times it is better to go for maximum quality. A quick project should produce correctly running code, but will be more difficult to maintain and modify in the future.
-Mark
I just fixed the license in the books themselves - thanks.
If people are not living in crowded, overpopulated environments, then yes, by nature people are generous by nature.
I will try to make it simple for you: try comparing how people interact in a small town versus in a very large city: in a small town, people talk to strangers, generally friendly, etc. It seems that in large cities, in crowded environments, people are still friendly, but there is definitely a barrior.
If you have ever travelled to non-industrialized areas and interacted with non-industrialized people, then you would now what I am talking about.
By nature, people really are good.
I used to publish my free web books as Open Content, but I switched over to a CC license also (BTW, I was CC's 'featured commoner' last week - a real honor, because CC is a great group.)
By nature, people want to share, and the CC licenses and agenda helps a lot.
-Mark
However, the real point of the article is that in an increasingly linked world, it is more important than ever to be good world citizens.
Lord Rees Moag and James Davidson make this point in their book 'Sovereign Individual": large countries become increasingly vulnerable to small countries and organized groups because of the threats of cyber attacks, etc.
As this article points out, with the free flow of information, small groups can share information and form larger political and action groups.
Not to be political, but I was against the recent Iraq War because I think that it is a very bad idea to alienate other countries when we largely depend on the global "dollar standard" for hoarding money and purchasing oil to prop up our economy. I am a more than a little concerned that our turning our backs on the UN will cause us all kinds of problems in the future. (BTW, the US has vetoed 35 UN security council resolutions ssince 1970 - so, it was not so atypical for Russia, France, and Germany to threaten to veto one of our resolutions.
-Mark
Seriously, the hardware seems OK - the salesman said that they had sold a lot of this model (totally made in China, with a Chineese Linux that immediately got replaced with a fresh SuSE install) - and no returns so far.
Anyway, I love cheap commodity hardware! That said, I wouldn't mind a dual G5 system.
-Mark
Yeah, some of my friends have kidded me about the same thing :-)
I guess the point about a $199 box: in my case, this is not a mission critical deployment. I like to run a few Java server side public demos - if the $199 box crashes, until I buy a new one, I can switch IP addresses to another box, and be back up quickly.
A disposable server is not a good idea from a save-the-envionment point of view. However, it took me less than 30 minutes to set up SuSE Linux and my Java server side demos - I am unlikely to have to touch this system for a long, long time.
But, your point is well taken: a quality component system (or a $500 Dell server) migth end up being cheaper if the cheap system fails quickly.
-Mark
There does seem to be a sense of angst in the presentations: just about everyone seems to gripe about the economy. As a long time holoder of Sun stock (ouch!), I can feel their pain. On the other hand, recently a top Micorosft exec was complaining to me about the value of his stock options - everyone is feeling the heat in this industry.
While I have always liked Sun hardware, they are having their lunch eaten on the low end. For example: I just had to replace a server - I went to Frye's and bought a Chineese built Linux PC for $199; after reinstalling my prefered SuSE distro, I have what appears to be a reliable (and very low power use) server - close to free.
It is difficult to compete with Linux and cheap hardware.
Sun does make the point that soon there will be more sales of Java enabled cell phones and PDAs than PCs - still, I don't see how they can make much money in that product space.
-Mark
- Free Java/AI web book at my web site
It seems odd to me that a company that has so much cash and such high profit margins requires mandatory fast growth, but then I am a humble programmer, not a financial guy :-)
The whole idea goes against my basic philosophy of "take what you need and leave some for others". Not to go off on a huge tangent, but in the western world, greed seems to far outweigh issues like building an enjoyable and productive career. As Josepgh Campbell used to say "follow your bliss"...
That said, Balmer probably has some fun with Microsoft :-)
-Mark
-Mark
One of things that makes older more mature languages like Common Lisp (and perhaps Smalltalk) nice to work with is a feeling of both having really solid implementations and not breaking legacy code.
I like the idea of boxing and generics, but, these changes will affect old code (probably?) and the platform in general.
My vote would be to freeze the Java language (perhaps after 1.5) and concentrate on the following:
I would not like to see Java become a language designer's playground.
Because of great infrastructure software like servelt/JSP containers, (perhaps EJBs :-), XML utilities, solid web services support, etc. Java is a great platform.
Leave it alone (the sooner the better) except for improvements in the implementation.
-Mark
With Java, I have free servlet/JSP containers (Apache Jakarta Tomcat), a free EJB container when the use of EJBs makes sense (JBoss), simple SOAP support (Apache Jakarata Axis), lots of XML/XSLT tools, etc.
The commercial Lisp vendor that I use does not directly support web services (every few months I propose to them that they hire me to write such support :-)
Again, good questions!
-Mark
One answer is that it is not fading (too much :-)
There are several fine commercial Lisp development systems and many fine/good free Common Lisp compilers.
You are right though - relatively few programmers seriously use Lisp. This does not bother me in the least. Personally, I always like to use the right tool for a job. Choosing the right tool also involves issues like "can I find a programmer to maintain this code", etc.
I used Common Lisp recently on a commercial product that I developed - I was only planning on selling "shrink wrapped" executables and the algorythms that I used were tricky (for me at least) to figure out - so using Lisp seemed like a good choice.
On the other hand, I make most of my living writing (or getting customers started with) Java server side stuff - using Java and web standards helps insure the value of the resulting project (with source code) over the long haul.
A few months ago, I had to do some tricky coding - I used Smalltalk to get the algorithm right - then rewriting in Java was trivial.
BTW, I enjoy using different programming languages.
-Mark
When I have to code in Java (most of the time), I try to keep my applications as short as possible by first developing and testing low level class libraries to support a project - once these are tested, I find it easier to write much shorter application programs that I can tweak easily.
Still, I find Common Lisp to be my most productive language (Smalltalk is pretty good also :-).
-Mark
The company founder Bob Beyster is a great guy (I used to crew for him on his sailboat - fun!).
I also feel that the management of SAIC is extremely honest; I never worry about an Enron or Health South type financial crisis for SAIC. When I was an active employee, I heard stories of people getting fired for even a wiff of questionable activity.
-Mark
The original article may not apply to me: I always do business in my own name (in contracts and payment).
If you want to incorporate and do business under a company name, then I would suggest a trip to your City Hall and ask a few questions.
-Mark
I run a business out of my house as a (tax wise) "sole proprieter". On my tax forms, I combine both consulting fees and products sold as income for my business. (I am also an author, but that income is tracked separately.) For consulting, no sales tax needs to be collected; for products, simply keep tract of which sales occur in your state (this might change!).
Not to give them a plug, but I use PayPal for all product sales and small consulting jobs - a yearly dump of payments makes doing my taxes fairly easy (actually, I print out the yearly report fairly often - just to have hard copy).
Since the economy basically sucks and the IT industry is in the tanks, it is great to be able to work out of your home to save money.
Anyway, I am not making much money (compared to a few years ago), but I am happy and having lots of fun.
-Mark
Not to make too big of a shameless plug, but my www.knowledgebooks.com stuff tries to be sort-of competitive with Inxight (although I have just been working on this stuff about 1/3 time for a few years - I will acknowledge that they have a head start :-).
I really believe that most people will routinely use what I would call information appliances - systems that basically remember our entire digital lives and provide ways to quickly find information based on topic, time of creation/modification, linked from other similar data or experiences, etc.
One huge problem that I have as a developer (as I have recently talked about on my blog) is that if you are not Microsoft and can not peek inside proprietary data and file formats, then you have a difficult time writing software that runs in the background and has access to everything that you are doing on your computer. Storage, information retrieval, backups, etc. are all solveable problems, but proprietary data formats used by > 90% of the desktop market are a major problem.
One possible idea would be integration with OpenOffice and live with a small market share.
-Mark
I am fairly much addicted to my iBook (a great X Server for using my Linux server) and I do hope that Apple stays in business. Really, Mac on the desktop and Linux on the servers - perfect :-)
I am dubiouss about this purchase however.
-Mark
I have not seen the book, but the fact that one author wrote SOAP:Lite is a good sign.
Anyway, his work saved me a lot of effort in testing my stuff.
-Mark
Any desktop uses a spacial metaphor for data - however, for me, the desktop is just a holding area - short term memory, if you will.
I do like the idea of other means of filtering: LifeStreams seems like a good idea: being able to filter based on time and document type (for example).
Anyway, it is a free world - I will stick with OS X.
-Mark
Roughly, Kolmogorov Complexity is a measure of randomness - the measure is how long a computer program needs to be to reproduce data (pardon an oversimplification).
-Mark
My view of AI has really changed over the years. I used to be a "symbols guy" - basically thinking that manipulation of symbols would somehow lead to "real AI" - the problem with this approach is that while abstract symbols may have meaning to the humans who write symbolic AI systems, the systems themselves have no such grounding.
I had the opportunity to participate for about 18 months on a DARPA neural network advisory panel - this experience (along with developing the SAIC ANSim neural network product) really switched my point of view.
I now believe that when "real AI" does happen (and let's not hold our collective breaths on this one :-), it will happen through self organization and development. At the Webmind Corporation, I was working a tutoring environment that would allow humans to interact with what we called "the baby Webmind" - interesting stuff, but the company went out of business.
When "real AI" does happen, I believe that it will seem very alien to us.
-Mark
PS. I have a free web book AI tutorial (using Java) on my web site - help yourself.