If Katz's overview is accurate - and I'm sure it is - I'm afraid. Very afraid. I'm a corporate IT guy who works on technology strategy - or is supposed to anyways. I've spent the better part of the last 3.5 years trying to soothe the ambitions of company executives who read Wired (and other such junk) and believe the hype. You know the type - deep in technolust, shallow grasp of technologies' limitations, the hippest executive on the block, has the title with the 'e' suffix, and utterly convinced that 'Web-enabling' the business is the future.
With the dot-com implosion and the resulting Internet hangover, my job has been a lot easier the last while. It seems my company has begrudingly come to realize that the Web is just another channel and other set of technologies on which to transact. However, books like Weinberger's tend to fan the flames of Weblust and bolster such executives' deep belief that the Web will, indeed, change the World.
*sigh* I despair. The Web is wonderful. I like the Web. My kids like the Web. My wife likes the Web. It's good at some stuff, it's bad at some stuff. If anything, it's made us more impatient with the World (i.e. I want that information now!!). But in the end, I don't believe it's changed my own context in the world too much. I still play with my kids, chat over the fence with my neighbours, scratch my ass when it's itchy, and wonder what tomorrow will be like.
For the Web pundits who lurch zombie-like towards the wonderfully Webby tomorrow, could their real dilema be that they cannot function in today's world?
A couple of the BIG reasons my organization has eschewed the ASP option are:
data security aside, the model makes it difficult to get 'your' data into a warehouse from the ASP's site (this is a big deal)
the good ASPs provide effective means for customer companies to administer security access to the ASP application(s). However, this also means that (typically) users need an explicit logon to the ASP - which is disruptive to user workflow process, etc. Standard authentication and authorization models just are not in place yet in the IT world.
These may sound somewhat trivial, but in my business (banking) data and process ownership are crucial.
The article makes an interesting argument and it's probably valid to a point - if you mostly rely on search engines for your surfing. I find, however, that my behaviour is dependant on whether I want a specific site or just general info (e.g. on a topic, product, etc.). When a specific site is what I need, then I typically try to 'guess' the URL. After a few tries I'll fall back to a search engine (and curse at what a pain it is - which is kinda pathetic for sure).
For commercial sites, I think site naming is still important and it's a matter of branding. Google may take away one's attention to naming at first, but once you find a site you want to re-visit, naming is still important.
This is really nothing new. Here in Canada, some universities are using similar techniques to ferret out term-paper cheats. There is a company (can't remember the name) that offers this service which, basically, compares a student's paper to a number of ready-to-buy papers one can find on the Web, etc. If the 'similarity index' reaches a threshold, the student's paper is flagged for further investigation by the teacher.
Anyways... I have no particular problem with finding cheats. Learning the social skills and dynamics of group software development is one thing, but outright cheating is quite something else. When I think back to my school days, those who were pathological in their need for 'help' on their assignments were the ones typically over their head and/or in the wrong profession. Weed them out!
...and a car safety problem is caused by bugs and, yes, there are liability issues as well. My point about 'quality' was illustrative only. If a manufacturer can go through an ISO900x process to gain some kind of recognized standard of quality, then surely we could consider a similar ISO-like process where software safety is concerned. This doesn't negate the liability issues, but provides a credible framework in which software vendors can mitigate potential liability issues if they so choose (or suffer more dire liability consequences).
I cannot even imagine how a mandatory scheme would work in terms of criteria, process, remedies, etc. Using the auto industry as an example, we have government standards/regulations vis a vis car safety, we have government testing processes, we have mandated manufacturer testing, we have independant testing and verification, and a slew of consumer watchdogs to try and keep us informed.
Translating this to the software world, frankly, makes my head explode just thinking about it. Consider:
the handful of auto manufacturers vs. the thousands of software houses who would potentially be safety-regulated
the cut-and-tried 'goal' of a car (transportation) vs. the many, many 'goals' of the many, many pieces of software to be certified
the bureaucracy (public and private) required to make this work
I can see, perhaps, a public standards body to which software vendors could choose to submit their products. In this scheme the government could award some kind of 'certification label' that a vendor could use on their packaging, etc. indicating it's 'safe'. That would at least enable the marketplace to decide the importance of government certification.
However, we'd still be left with the niggly questions of what 'safe' is and how we might determine 'safeness'. Maybe this akin to 'quality' certification along the lines of ISO9001/2 processes(??).
Ya know... When I hear about the XBox (or any other home-u-tainment product) is gonna do X once add-on Y hits the market, I can't help but recall my first stereo circa 1975. It was once of those integrated jobbies that did everything in one box, but did nothing particularly well.
I just can't help thinking thinking that if I want the capabilities of a TIVO, DVD player, game console, etc. then I would just go to the manufactures would DO this stuff well and buy a TIVO, etc. etc.
The XBox might be a fantastic piece of tech, but MS doesn't have a particularly good record in the consumer electronics market.
You make an interesting point, but the 'obscure languages' angle cannot work in a typical corporate IT environment. In this world you need to deal with legions of meatball programmers peppered with a few alpha-geeks to set direction. The realities here are:
software change is constant
organizational change is constant
code development is a business process
The only way to deal with all this is to ensure that a hive mentality is enforced where coding standards and methodology are King. This ensures that, from a purely technical perspective, all code looks (somewhat) familiar to all programmers and new programmers can be put to good use in fairly short order.
Sounds boring (and maybe evil) - sure. But this has been my experience and observations at more than a few large development sites.
I like the points you make. Any reference I make to '15 year-old experts' is metaphorial only! I agree that growing up with tech is a totally different life experience. I'm in my late 30's and, to me, landing on the Moon was something I witnessed at a tender age and a fact of life. My father, however, still marvels at this. Same event, different life experience.
The only beef I have with the original posting is this notion that somehow folks your age are pulling the levers and us older folks aren't catching onto this fact. I think this is a horrible Hollywood cliche that does a disservice to us all. We all experience and use the Net in our own way - much like many blind people will describe the same elephant in a different way. To say that one population of users is somehow running the show is simplistic.
Youth brings an enthusiastic perspective on weaving technology into the fabric of everyday life. Older folks work much harder at that, but bring a perspective of how we might apply new tech to old problems. Even this is simplistic, of course.;)
C'mon... this smug, technocratic view of the impact of the Net on the World is beyond reality and should be left in the domain of a Wired magazine article (you know, the People magazine of the technology world).
Granted, the Net has had a disintermediary effect and 15 year-olds (or anyone) can participate equally, but I think The Book overestimates the impact. Provocative premises sell books and maybe encourage dialogue, but that's about it.
Think about why info you find on the Web is less trustworthy than info you might find in the Old Media world. In Old Media, you have publishers and editors with established credentials, shareholders, legal frameworks, and bricks-and-mortar presence somewhere. In all, you have an Entity that gets some amount of your trust (think CNN as a Brand). A medical book produced by Old Media is inherently more trustworthy than an posting on a newgroup (at least it outta be).
The Net experts you find these days (i.e. the 15 year-olds with expertise in CourtTV procedings) are really just the Pamphleteers of old - standing on their street corners with homemade tracts and hoping someone might pay attention. The Net has simply provided lots more street corners.
So please.... enough of how the Net will/is/has changed the world by making all information accessible and free. I still need the mechanisms of Name, Editor, Brand, and Recognized Authority for a lot of the info I need - and I suspect you do too. I'd still like to hear what the 15 year-olds have to say, but it's just more info to score and syntesize into my own Big Picture.
Umm...hate to burst yer bubble, dude, but a lot of the engineering experience that went into Apollo and Shuttle designs was Canadian. A lot of Canadian aerospace engineering talent cut their teeth on the ill-fated Avro Arrow eventually made their was into the US space program. The Arrow, designed during the cold war, was a fighter jet years ahead of its time. The Canadian government mysteriously shit-canned the project, but it's a well-accepted theory in Canada that pressure from the US military was largely responsible for this (they did not want such advanced military tech freely available outside the US at this time).
You make some good points. I would tend to disagree on the whole Swing performance issue, though. True, Swing is piggy in its cycle consumption, but this is being offset by beefier hardware to the point where I'm not sure I care about this too much anymore. At my company (large N.A. bank) we run quite a number of Java client apps (e.g. a call center desktop) and performance is fine.
Anyways, the real point of my note is regarding the demise of JavaOS. I happened to be working with IBM labs at the time IBM had pitched in to bring JavaOS to market. The reason JavaOS died (according to my peers at IBM) were:
JavaOS was targetted at network station types of devices (IBM was developing their own) and not home-computing devices
IBM came 'round to thinking the underlying o/s did not need to be Java - just a really peppy *nix variant with really good Java support
Sun did not (or does not) have the client o/s experience and needed IBM to pull it off. IBM's vision of *nix-powered NCs (which they brought to market) effectively killed JavaOS.
Of course, there were likely other political intrigues here...
Here's a recipe for you all. Can you guess what it makes?
re-brand OLE, COM, DCOM, VB, and a slew of other old products (otherwise known as 'tarting up the whore')
throw in a touch of SOAP (Yum!)
give the world a new useless language called C#
mix liberally with target-marketing and the usual MS FUD and misdirection
Give up? It's called.NET kiddies! Besides SOAP, where the hell is the innovation here? That's ok though, Miguel. You go ahead and get C# working on Linux 'cause we all need a retarded cousin to play with the great Java support the Open-Sourcers have come to love.
Seriously, though. Why would Ximian waste the effort giving.NET a seal of approval when it has so much unfinished business on other products? There is nothing in.NET that MS has tried before with little success. This MS's modus operandi; rebrand the crap you already have and add a pinch of new stuff.
Oh, and for those folks arguing that MS is going to hand over pieces of.NET to the standards bodies - which is somehow better than what Sun does with Java - get a grip and read your history books. MS trots out this hoary old promise with some regularity. The way it works is this: find an international standards committee that is strapped for cash and respect, give it cash and MS designs, stand back and let the validation wash ovr Redmond.
Really people. This validation of.NET is just about the stupidest thing I've heard all year (next to the *nix kiddies who claim no one is using Java anymore...).
Um...Dude...Brian Tobin is not the Premier of Newfoundland anymore. He's been in Federal Cabinet for, like, a year or so (Minister of Labour or whatever...). Furthermore, he's touted as Uncle Jean's hand-picked sucessor.
Dudes... Open-sourcing.NET is gonna be like trying to nail Jello to a wall. This MS 'concept' is as much about marketing as it is about technology. Using their tried-and-true modis operandi,.NET is a re-branding of their existing junk - ASP, IIS, etc. etc. As a technology, it's about proprietary Passport interfaces and the like.
I've been working pretty exclusively in Java for about 3 years now in corporate IT environment (with previous experience in Fortran, Cobol, Smalltalk, C/C++, Assembler, etc.). I've done fat client apps, browser-based apps, and comms middleware - so I think I have a pretty decent picture. To address your questions:
Portability - means write-once-test-everywhere (as it should!). I've moved pure Java from NT to OS/2 to *nix to os/390 without rework. Results may vary of course.
Public Code - tons of code available all over the damn place. Gamelan, IBM Alphaworks, Sourceforge, and a zillion other sites....
Rapid Development - the double-edged sword. I agree that Perl's terse style allows for rapid development, but you have to balance off against maintainability (esp. in corp. environment). If you like text-editors and terse syntax, Perl is likely the winner. If you like (fairly) economical syntax/construction and the option of IDE development - go with Java.
Speed - never a problem with Java in my experience. Standard hardware configs are way powerful these days. Just not something I think too hard about anymore (doesn't mean I write bloated code, though).
Hope this helps. In the end, I choose Java because it is a very nice balance of strong OO syntax, good packaging options, and VERY strong industry support. However, it's not the best tool for everything (today). There are times when C/C++ (for example) makes more sense (i.e. when you have to do something very close t othe hardware). However, I find that 90% of what I need I can do in Java.
Dude... I, too, am a time-traveller who remembers the nirvana-like experience of leaving my punch card machine and paper-tape machine for the simplicity of a terminals and, eventually, desktop PCs.
While having all that power on your desk is seductive, it's been a management nightmare in large organizations. Given the choice between managing software distribution to 10,000 PCs versus 10,000 net-terminals (sucking from a few servers), I'll scrap the PCs anyday!!
Unfortunately, the net-terminal evolution has not been very successful for typical corporate-drone environments. This is why the PC software industry has worked semi-hard at making PC management more net-terminal-like - think Novell ZEN, Windoze terminals, etc.
As a Canadian who'd love to boast the "right" to broadband access, I cannot. This national pipedream will not happen. Why? Because the whole idea is nothing but political ploy that has nothing to do with the noble goals espoused in the cited report. Consider:
the Federal Minister involved here, Brian Tobin, is a bullshit artist who is spreading taxpayer dollars around by the bucketfull (Net access is only a bullet on a longer list of pipedreams). His goal is to grease the wheels on his chances to succeed Prime Minister Chretien when he retires (within the next few years).
the report was produced by a panel of private-sector executives (think cable, telephone, suppliers, etc.) and career government patronage appointments. Can you say 'lucrative government contracts'?
fact is, people in remote communities (i.e. natives) have FAR more serious issues than Net access. Watchdog groups will be watching this one closely.
Hope this doesn't sound too cynical. Notwithstanding the fact that Canadians are the largest users of the Net (according to some UN report), people need to see this bogus ploy for what it is. In Canada, if the government is proposing something that sounds too good to be true, you KNOW there's an ulterior motive!
What is (or should be) the policy of paid analysts and consultants when they're doing research paid for by parties with a vested interest? How should this scenario be declared to the Readership?
In determining IDG's numbers, were stats culled from corporate entities or was there any attempt to include 'personal' Linux servers attached to the Net?
In the case of personal Linux servers, would't it be interesting to comment on their numbers and mere presence as a direct result of Linux availability? Put another way, how has Linux server availability impacted the shape and accessibility of the Net as we know it today?
Big Media...ya right. The problem with Suck and every other high-quality failure is revenues! Until someone figures out a way to make advertising 'pay' on the Web, this scenario is destined to repeat itself. Like traditional media, advertising dollars pay the rent - not subscription fees. If Time magazine or your local newspaper tried to fund itself via subscription fees, the huge sucking sound you'd hear would by customers running for the door. The Web is no different.
No matter how good the content, it's getting tougher to find advertisers willing to put a ton of dough into Website sponsorships. Lots of top-notch writing and lots of top-notch web design costs money. Sure there are e-zines out there running on a shoestring, but they are largely aimed at small niche communities and run by volunteer labour (or at least eschew profit-making).
Advertising on the Web is inherently difficult. In printed media (for example) the advertisment is going to sit on the page until you're done reading the page. This paradigm does not hold too much water in the electonic format. So until there is a compelling advertising model and supporting technology for the Web, professionally-produced 'magazine' content will be difficult to keep alive.
18 years ago I finished college and got my first programming gig at a manufacturing company. We wrote (almost) exclusively in Fortran on a Prime mini (anyone remember PrimOS?). Anyways, Fortran rocked back then for writing mathematically complex apps for shop-floor controls - scheduling for shipping and manufacturing runs, inventory analysis and projections, BOM component tracking and the like.
After 4 years of this I moved to a large bank where, inevitably, Cobol was king on the mainframe. I still work at this bank and, incredibly, my Fortran skills were called upon just 2 years ago (moving from Java back to Fortran was akin to the Enterprise slingshotting around the Sun to travel back in time!). We have a Cobol module (like a DLL for you young'uns) that calculates a type of interest using Log functions. Long story short, I wrote a Fortran module to get at Log libraries and statically linked it inside the Cobol module to provide a much faster calc routine.
Maybe Fortran is old, but amazingly it's still in use in lots of places.
P.S. For all you greenhorns out there clucking your tongue and predicting (hoping for?) the end of Fortran's cousine Cobol, please understand that there are still billions of lines of Cobol in the world being developed by thousands and thousands of programmers (more than there are Java programmers). Cobol is aimed at business apps, period. You know - Common Business Oriented Language? It's a tool for a specific kind of task, plain and simple. Unfortunately, too many people advocate a one-size-fits-all approach to software (when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail).
I work in a large corporation where my job is to help set and implement multi-year technology strategies. One of our fundamental principles is to exploit 'open' technology standards whereever possible (Java, IP, browsers, etc.). The underlying goal in this is to avoid vendor lock-in and give us room to maneuver.
We run quite a bit of our internal admin function on a browser, so here's my problem with the whole Netscape fiasco. Since they abandoned the browser business (had to be prior to the garbage that is Communicator 6.0!) my choices for a corporate-standard browser are pretty limited. I have a lot of Win32 desktops (arrghhh!!) and I'm pretty much stuck with IE. Whether you like Netscape or not, at least we had a veneer of mainstream competition for the browser.
I have the current dilema of moving 10,000+ desktops off OS/2 over the next few years. Since browsers play a factor in deciding the new o/s we'll use, what are my options? I'm serious folks! I'd love to consider some flavour of Unix client, but I need a standards-compliant browser from a reputable vendor that will provide support if I need (I don't mind paying!).
So, I think the Netscape debacle (for me) is all about erosion of choice - especially for large corporations that are fairly conservative about who they bet the business on. Tell me I'm wrong folks!
A really sad little drama, really. Corporations these days want their employess to act like entrepeneurs. This, of course, is code for employees to take on responsibility for their own training, career management, etc. so that the shareholders don't have to. This is otherwise known as getting something for nothing.
Juxtapose this amusing trend with the Japaenese BSOD over their staff's faces and things really start to get bizarre.
Feels like the making of a William Gibson novel...
Slashdot Mirror
With the dot-com implosion and the resulting Internet hangover, my job has been a lot easier the last while. It seems my company has begrudingly come to realize that the Web is just another channel and other set of technologies on which to transact. However, books like Weinberger's tend to fan the flames of Weblust and bolster such executives' deep belief that the Web will, indeed, change the World.
*sigh* I despair. The Web is wonderful. I like the Web. My kids like the Web. My wife likes the Web. It's good at some stuff, it's bad at some stuff. If anything, it's made us more impatient with the World (i.e. I want that information now!!). But in the end, I don't believe it's changed my own context in the world too much. I still play with my kids, chat over the fence with my neighbours, scratch my ass when it's itchy, and wonder what tomorrow will be like.
For the Web pundits who lurch zombie-like towards the wonderfully Webby tomorrow, could their real dilema be that they cannot function in today's world?
These may sound somewhat trivial, but in my business (banking) data and process ownership are crucial.
For commercial sites, I think site naming is still important and it's a matter of branding. Google may take away one's attention to naming at first, but once you find a site you want to re-visit, naming is still important.
Anyways... I have no particular problem with finding cheats. Learning the social skills and dynamics of group software development is one thing, but outright cheating is quite something else. When I think back to my school days, those who were pathological in their need for 'help' on their assignments were the ones typically over their head and/or in the wrong profession. Weed them out!
...and a car safety problem is caused by bugs and, yes, there are liability issues as well. My point about 'quality' was illustrative only. If a manufacturer can go through an ISO900x process to gain some kind of recognized standard of quality, then surely we could consider a similar ISO-like process where software safety is concerned. This doesn't negate the liability issues, but provides a credible framework in which software vendors can mitigate potential liability issues if they so choose (or suffer more dire liability consequences).
Translating this to the software world, frankly, makes my head explode just thinking about it. Consider:
I can see, perhaps, a public standards body to which software vendors could choose to submit their products. In this scheme the government could award some kind of 'certification label' that a vendor could use on their packaging, etc. indicating it's 'safe'. That would at least enable the marketplace to decide the importance of government certification. However, we'd still be left with the niggly questions of what 'safe' is and how we might determine 'safeness'. Maybe this akin to 'quality' certification along the lines of ISO9001/2 processes(??).
I just can't help thinking thinking that if I want the capabilities of a TIVO, DVD player, game console, etc. then I would just go to the manufactures would DO this stuff well and buy a TIVO, etc. etc.
The XBox might be a fantastic piece of tech, but MS doesn't have a particularly good record in the consumer electronics market.
You make an interesting point, but the 'obscure languages' angle cannot work in a typical corporate IT environment. In this world you need to deal with legions of meatball programmers peppered with a few alpha-geeks to set direction. The realities here are:
The only way to deal with all this is to ensure that a hive mentality is enforced where coding standards and methodology are King. This ensures that, from a purely technical perspective, all code looks (somewhat) familiar to all programmers and new programmers can be put to good use in fairly short order.
Sounds boring (and maybe evil) - sure. But this has been my experience and observations at more than a few large development sites.
The only beef I have with the original posting is this notion that somehow folks your age are pulling the levers and us older folks aren't catching onto this fact. I think this is a horrible Hollywood cliche that does a disservice to us all. We all experience and use the Net in our own way - much like many blind people will describe the same elephant in a different way. To say that one population of users is somehow running the show is simplistic.
Youth brings an enthusiastic perspective on weaving technology into the fabric of everyday life. Older folks work much harder at that, but bring a perspective of how we might apply new tech to old problems. Even this is simplistic, of course. ;)
C'mon... this smug, technocratic view of the impact of the Net on the World is beyond reality and should be left in the domain of a Wired magazine article (you know, the People magazine of the technology world).
Granted, the Net has had a disintermediary effect and 15 year-olds (or anyone) can participate equally, but I think The Book overestimates the impact. Provocative premises sell books and maybe encourage dialogue, but that's about it.
Think about why info you find on the Web is less trustworthy than info you might find in the Old Media world. In Old Media, you have publishers and editors with established credentials, shareholders, legal frameworks, and bricks-and-mortar presence somewhere. In all, you have an Entity that gets some amount of your trust (think CNN as a Brand). A medical book produced by Old Media is inherently more trustworthy than an posting on a newgroup (at least it outta be).
The Net experts you find these days (i.e. the 15 year-olds with expertise in CourtTV procedings) are really just the Pamphleteers of old - standing on their street corners with homemade tracts and hoping someone might pay attention. The Net has simply provided lots more street corners.
So please.... enough of how the Net will/is/has changed the world by making all information accessible and free. I still need the mechanisms of Name, Editor, Brand, and Recognized Authority for a lot of the info I need - and I suspect you do too. I'd still like to hear what the 15 year-olds have to say, but it's just more info to score and syntesize into my own Big Picture.
Umm...hate to burst yer bubble, dude, but a lot of the engineering experience that went into Apollo and Shuttle designs was Canadian. A lot of Canadian aerospace engineering talent cut their teeth on the ill-fated Avro Arrow eventually made their was into the US space program. The Arrow, designed during the cold war, was a fighter jet years ahead of its time. The Canadian government mysteriously shit-canned the project, but it's a well-accepted theory in Canada that pressure from the US military was largely responsible for this (they did not want such advanced military tech freely available outside the US at this time).
You make some good points. I would tend to disagree on the whole Swing performance issue, though. True, Swing is piggy in its cycle consumption, but this is being offset by beefier hardware to the point where I'm not sure I care about this too much anymore. At my company (large N.A. bank) we run quite a number of Java client apps (e.g. a call center desktop) and performance is fine.
Anyways, the real point of my note is regarding the demise of JavaOS. I happened to be working with IBM labs at the time IBM had pitched in to bring JavaOS to market. The reason JavaOS died (according to my peers at IBM) were:
Of course, there were likely other political intrigues here...
Does their code throw exceptions?
That's not even funny.
Here's a recipe for you all. Can you guess what it makes?
Give up? It's called .NET kiddies! Besides SOAP, where the hell is the innovation here? That's ok though, Miguel. You go ahead and get C# working on Linux 'cause we all need a retarded cousin to play with the great Java support the Open-Sourcers have come to love.
Seriously, though. Why would Ximian waste the effort giving .NET a seal of approval when it has so much unfinished business on other products? There is nothing in .NET that MS has tried before with little success. This MS's modus operandi; rebrand the crap you already have and add a pinch of new stuff.
Oh, and for those folks arguing that MS is going to hand over pieces of .NET to the standards bodies - which is somehow better than what Sun does with Java - get a grip and read your history books. MS trots out this hoary old promise with some regularity. The way it works is this: find an international standards committee that is strapped for cash and respect, give it cash and MS designs, stand back and let the validation wash ovr Redmond.
Really people. This validation of .NET is just about the stupidest thing I've heard all year (next to the *nix kiddies who claim no one is using Java anymore...).
*sigh* I feel better now.
Um...Dude...Brian Tobin is not the Premier of Newfoundland anymore. He's been in Federal Cabinet for, like, a year or so (Minister of Labour or whatever...). Furthermore, he's touted as Uncle Jean's hand-picked sucessor.
Dudes... Open-sourcing .NET is gonna be like trying to nail Jello to a wall. This MS 'concept' is as much about marketing as it is about technology. Using their tried-and-true modis operandi, .NET is a re-branding of their existing junk - ASP, IIS, etc. etc. As a technology, it's about proprietary Passport interfaces and the like.
Does anyone REALLY want to port C# anywhere?
Hope this helps. In the end, I choose Java because it is a very nice balance of strong OO syntax, good packaging options, and VERY strong industry support. However, it's not the best tool for everything (today). There are times when C/C++ (for example) makes more sense (i.e. when you have to do something very close t othe hardware). However, I find that 90% of what I need I can do in Java.
Dude... I, too, am a time-traveller who remembers the nirvana-like experience of leaving my punch card machine and paper-tape machine for the simplicity of a terminals and, eventually, desktop PCs.
While having all that power on your desk is seductive, it's been a management nightmare in large organizations. Given the choice between managing software distribution to 10,000 PCs versus 10,000 net-terminals (sucking from a few servers), I'll scrap the PCs anyday!!
Unfortunately, the net-terminal evolution has not been very successful for typical corporate-drone environments. This is why the PC software industry has worked semi-hard at making PC management more net-terminal-like - think Novell ZEN, Windoze terminals, etc.
As a Canadian who'd love to boast the "right" to broadband access, I cannot. This national pipedream will not happen. Why? Because the whole idea is nothing but political ploy that has nothing to do with the noble goals espoused in the cited report. Consider:
Hope this doesn't sound too cynical. Notwithstanding the fact that Canadians are the largest users of the Net (according to some UN report), people need to see this bogus ploy for what it is. In Canada, if the government is proposing something that sounds too good to be true, you KNOW there's an ulterior motive!
My humble input:
Thank you for your time.
Big Media...ya right. The problem with Suck and every other high-quality failure is revenues! Until someone figures out a way to make advertising 'pay' on the Web, this scenario is destined to repeat itself. Like traditional media, advertising dollars pay the rent - not subscription fees. If Time magazine or your local newspaper tried to fund itself via subscription fees, the huge sucking sound you'd hear would by customers running for the door. The Web is no different.
No matter how good the content, it's getting tougher to find advertisers willing to put a ton of dough into Website sponsorships. Lots of top-notch writing and lots of top-notch web design costs money. Sure there are e-zines out there running on a shoestring, but they are largely aimed at small niche communities and run by volunteer labour (or at least eschew profit-making).
Advertising on the Web is inherently difficult. In printed media (for example) the advertisment is going to sit on the page until you're done reading the page. This paradigm does not hold too much water in the electonic format. So until there is a compelling advertising model and supporting technology for the Web, professionally-produced 'magazine' content will be difficult to keep alive.
Set the Wayback machine, Sherman.
18 years ago I finished college and got my first programming gig at a manufacturing company. We wrote (almost) exclusively in Fortran on a Prime mini (anyone remember PrimOS?). Anyways, Fortran rocked back then for writing mathematically complex apps for shop-floor controls - scheduling for shipping and manufacturing runs, inventory analysis and projections, BOM component tracking and the like.
After 4 years of this I moved to a large bank where, inevitably, Cobol was king on the mainframe. I still work at this bank and, incredibly, my Fortran skills were called upon just 2 years ago (moving from Java back to Fortran was akin to the Enterprise slingshotting around the Sun to travel back in time!). We have a Cobol module (like a DLL for you young'uns) that calculates a type of interest using Log functions. Long story short, I wrote a Fortran module to get at Log libraries and statically linked it inside the Cobol module to provide a much faster calc routine.
Maybe Fortran is old, but amazingly it's still in use in lots of places.
P.S. For all you greenhorns out there clucking your tongue and predicting (hoping for?) the end of Fortran's cousine Cobol, please understand that there are still billions of lines of Cobol in the world being developed by thousands and thousands of programmers (more than there are Java programmers). Cobol is aimed at business apps, period. You know - Common Business Oriented Language? It's a tool for a specific kind of task, plain and simple. Unfortunately, too many people advocate a one-size-fits-all approach to software (when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail).
I work in a large corporation where my job is to help set and implement multi-year technology strategies. One of our fundamental principles is to exploit 'open' technology standards whereever possible (Java, IP, browsers, etc.). The underlying goal in this is to avoid vendor lock-in and give us room to maneuver.
We run quite a bit of our internal admin function on a browser, so here's my problem with the whole Netscape fiasco. Since they abandoned the browser business (had to be prior to the garbage that is Communicator 6.0!) my choices for a corporate-standard browser are pretty limited. I have a lot of Win32 desktops (arrghhh!!) and I'm pretty much stuck with IE. Whether you like Netscape or not, at least we had a veneer of mainstream competition for the browser.
I have the current dilema of moving 10,000+ desktops off OS/2 over the next few years. Since browsers play a factor in deciding the new o/s we'll use, what are my options? I'm serious folks! I'd love to consider some flavour of Unix client, but I need a standards-compliant browser from a reputable vendor that will provide support if I need (I don't mind paying!).
So, I think the Netscape debacle (for me) is all about erosion of choice - especially for large corporations that are fairly conservative about who they bet the business on. Tell me I'm wrong folks!
I can't really figure out why anyone is surprised by all this. I mean, how else can you explain "The Pina Colada Song"?
Blows yer mind, don't it?
A really sad little drama, really. Corporations these days want their employess to act like entrepeneurs. This, of course, is code for employees to take on responsibility for their own training, career management, etc. so that the shareholders don't have to. This is otherwise known as getting something for nothing.
Juxtapose this amusing trend with the Japaenese BSOD over their staff's faces and things really start to get bizarre.
Feels like the making of a William Gibson novel...