IBM has had many bad products over the years, but I wouldn't say Notes/Domino is one of them. A lot of people bitch about having to use Notes, but in my experience that comes down to three problems:
Most people are mainly using Notes as an e-mail client, and as an e-mail client it has an unfamiliar, somewhat inconsistent interface that can be annoying to people who are accustomed to other programs. But Notes is actually a lot more than just e-mail, and enterprises don't buy it because they need e-mail. Technical types often have nothing to do with it except send e-mails (badly), but over on the sales and marketing side of the office, you'll often find people using shared calendaring, shared address books, and various custom databases. For this purpose, there's lots of compelling tech in Notes.
Notes took a long time to get up to date with the look, feel, and features of (for example) modern Microsoft applications. Along the way, many Notes shops decided it wasn't really worth upgrading to the latest version of the client, because the current version did everything they needed. As a result, a lot of people who are familiar with Notes are really only familiar with an old version of the client, and a lot of those... eeeyyuuuggh.
In the process of trimming their Notes budget, many organizations have let their Notes/Domino developers go. Either they retired, or changed jobs, or just moved on to more lucrative programming disciplines. As a result, a lot of the custom applications built on Domino suffer from bit rot, and many just plain don't work anymore. So they're there, running on a server, but nobody uses them and Notes is relegated to pretty much just being an e-mail client. (See point 1.)
Taken on its own merits, however, Notes/Domino really is an innovative product, especially when you consider its long history. Parts of it seem a bit long in the tooth these days, but Notes still has lots of customers.
the isolated Pocket PC was almost completely useless.
An isolated Pocket PC may have been completely useless, but try telling that to Palm. You know, the company that pioneered the PDA category that Microsoft was forced to play catch-up in? The company that made "PalmPilot" a household word and the butt of many yuppie jokes, even long after they changed the name of the actual product? The problem with Palm, of course, is that it basically sat down and stopped innovating when it was on top. These days, the most widely-known Palm handset is the Treo, and Palm didn't even create those itself. But I'd rather be a has-been like Palm than a never-was like Microsoft.
P.S. But it's sort of true; one reason I loved my Palm so much is that I could use it with a Ricochet wireless modem in my area.
I'm guessing you're too young to have been around when the majority of home computer users had dot-matrix printers, which used a ribbon. When I was in high school, my school bought an HP LaserJet II printer, which had 300dpi resolution. It was amazing looking. Nowadays a couple hundred bucks will get you a printer with twice as much resolution, but back then you couldn't get documents looking that sharp without spending thousands of dollars. Resolution matters, even for text.
That said, the iPad's screen resolution is 132ppi, while the Kindle's is 170ppi. Books on the iPad will not be higher resolution than those on the Kindle.
In my mind the only durability argument that holds at all is that in the advent of the total downfall of our civilization paper stands a much better chance than bits. But even paper wouldn't do very well if, say, we have a large-scale nuclear war.
No, there's another argument that holds water, and you made it yourself. One of the key benefits you cite -- "the ease of copying digital media" -- is not a given. If publishers continue to insist on locked-down DRM-encumbered formats, they essentially reserve the right to remove a work from "print" at a snap of their fingers. You can't read your one Adobe e-book; I'm sure there are other people who have lost access to entire libraries due to this same effect. This is not a limitation of digital per se, but of the choices publishers make around digital.
If the carriers are "jealously guarding" their location data, how come every time I pull up Google Maps on my non-GPS BlackBerry it can figure out where I am to within a block or so? Either this patent is for a technology Google had figured out a long time ago, or else the carriers aren't as worried about having "a lock" on this data as TFA makes it sound.
Java threads don't necessarily scale to multiple processors. From what I understand, one of the particular areas of optimization is garbage collection. You might be able to write multithreaded Java applications like it's nothing, but if the JVM itself doesn't handle stuff like garbage collection gracefully, you stand to take a big performance hit.
They really glossed over a lot of this stuff in today's presentation, though. The Java stuff was almost like reading off a list. Expect to hear a lot more in the months to come.
No, they didn't say anything about cutting things out of Netbeans. Just that they want to add more stuff.
As far as JDeveloper being the "strategic" platform, it sounds like that has more to do with the efforts Oracle will take to package it as more of a turnkey platform. Kurian mentioned integrating Hudson with JDeveloper, for example. I don't think there will be anything stopping you from using Netbeans as your primary environment if you don't mind setting up some more stuff yourself. JDeveloper is supposed to be the preferred choice for large teams in enterprise environments.
As for Glassfish, that, too, will continue to be developed. As with Netbeans, Oracle wants it to be a solid reference J2EE implementation, while WebLogic will be the "strategic" platform. The distinctions between those two products are wider than between Netbeans and JDeveloper, so I think it speaks for itself. Kurian specifically called out some of the nice features of Glassfish, and said that they plan to continue to support it as a "rapid development and deployment environment."
Ellison re-iterated that it is not competitive, but complementary with Oracle. They plan to increase investment in the business. No specific announcements about development direction or how Oracle plans to package it (no mention of an "Unbreakable MySQL," for example).
I think in this case the Journal is mistaken. Ellison just talked about this issue minutes ago, and he castigated the press for reports the Oracle plans to lay off "half Sun's workforce" (or similar). He says Oracle plans no such thing, and in fact he will be hiring 2,000 new employees, which will be more than it plans to lay off as a result of this acquisition.
All of it was mentioned, with the exception of the C, C++, and Fortran compilers.
I don't remember specific plans for Solaris, other than that it will be the OS running a lot of the Oracle appliances they're talking about.
Various Java news. Integrating HotSpot with JRocket. Unifying the programming models/API for Java SE and Java ME. Java SE 7 will include support for multi-core and better support for multiple [non-Java] languages.
Netbeans goes forward as a "lightweight" dev environment, while JDeveloper is the "strategic" platform. Netbeans will get improved support for scripting, dynamic languages, and mobile.
OpenOffice.org will continue as a separate business unit. As with everything, Oracle is bragging that it plans to boost investment in it. They mentioned an Oracle Cloud Office based on OpenOffice.org, which aims to offer the same experience on the desktop, Web, and mobile (as Microsoft is talking about with Office 2010).
I think doing something to get rid of the whole HTML thing would be a giant improvement; just display things straight into a window from application code like we currently do with C++ applications, instead of mucking around with a intermediate markup language.
Perhaps I can interest you in a little platform called Flash?
No worries, by comparison my award-winning suburban high school in California had a population of around 1,500 students (over four grades). It's probably much larger now that California has sunk to the bottom of the education rankings.
The school only has 230 students. I have a hard time believing they'd need 192 servers whether they used Linux or not.
And BTW, as long as you're standing on my lawn, may I remind you that my own high school's expenditure on servers was exactly zero? How's that for savings?
This is the guy whose product we're talking about. He wants to explain himself. If you think he tried to use Slashdot to advertise his product, you don't have to mod him up, but if you mod him down to -1 then he'll drop below a lot of people's thresholds and they won't even see that he tried to participate. That's not being fair.
Everyone always wants me to have labels on the graphs. I don't put them there unless you roll over the data, because I want you to see the patterns in the data without bias first.
Why? The only reason for that would be so you could go, "Whoaahh, it's crazy looking." You've proven that. Anonymous data with no points of reference has no meaning. If you honestly think your graph has more value to the viewer than this graph from 1880 showing the population of Sweden over time, I think you're kidding yourself.
It is actually pretty simple and makes it quite clear what is going on
That's debatable. I've argued that it could be much, much clearer.
Finally, I am not interested in producing graphs which show you everything "at a glance". Use a pie chart for that. I am making graphs which facilitate a deeper understanding of larger amounts of data than Tufte dreamed of showing using his 2D paradigms.
Careful. If you're trying to get into the data visualization business, it's a bad idea to make it known that you're completely ignorant of Edward Tufte.
For starters, anyone who knows the slightest thing about Edward Tufte knows that he hates pie charts. So he would never say "use a pie chart for that."
Second, contrary to your assertion, Tufte advocates for extremely data-rich graphics wherever possible. He does not advocate abridging large data sets out of laziness. He does, however, advocate data compression when it will reveal data, and he does not like "wasted ink." Your graphs appear to have miles and miles and miles of plotted data -- none of which is identifiable without mouse interaction -- but relatively few points of interest. As you scroll through the data set, half your movie seems to feature the text "empty" hovering in midair above the graph. In other words, your dataset may indeed be large, but your visualization of it is not particularly informationally dense.
Finally, until such a time as your product can reach out of my flat-screen monitor and tweak me in the nose, you're every bit as tied to a "2D paradigm" as Tufte is. All you're doing is making it possible to adjust what is plotted in real time. Tufte would probably argue that it's better to get the plot right the first time. Allowing viewers to take their time to absorb a lot of data points is fine, but they shouldn't have to waste their time fiddling around with the plot to reveal those data points.
You want complaining? How about this: This visualization is terrible.
The video took five minutes to watch and most of it was him rolling over the bars in the 3-D chart so you can see what each of the lines means. If that's supposed to be a useful visual aid, I'll eat my hat. It's bad enough that you have to manually roll over every data element to figure out what it is; scrolling through the graph seemed dead slow. I hope that's not a limitation of the product itself.
Simple labels on the axes of the graph would have been nice. Far be it from anyone to try stick little flags next to the lines to represent different countries. Hell, just color-coding them in a totally arbitrary way would have made the graph easier to read.
BTW, a quick look at the Glasshouse site reveals all their output looks pretty much just like this demo. And there's no evidence that you can export one of their rudimentary 3-D graphs to "pretty it up" in a real 3-D app. Instead, their raison d'être appears to be allowing you to run around looking at these graphs... in Second Life.
I'm sorry, but if you're doing something like plotting fractals, for example, where visual similarity to patterns is the whole point, I can forgive you for coming to the conclusion that "it's crazy looking." If what you're doing is trying to provide a visual to aid in the interpretation of data, then the visual should -- y'know -- aid interpretation. A glance at this graph, on the other hand, reveals nothing; not even what it's supposed to represent.
In summary, Edward Tufte will be rolling in his grave when he dies from looking at this graphic.
Maybe it's more profitable now to buy gold or other commodities and wait out the tax climate instead of investing. Maybe bonds now make more sense. You're less likely to risk your money in certain parts of the economy when there will be less profit from it.
Nothing Buffet says disagrees with that. That's called investment strategy.
But what makes you think higher capital gains taxes will favor the bond market or the commodities market over the stock market? Capital gains don't only apply to stocks. In the commodities market, in particular, there are few opportunities for long-term capital gains, which are the only kind that are taxable at the 15 percent rate now.
"Safer" investments have lower returns. You're claiming people will favor safer investments -- less profitable ones -- because taxes are higher. In other words, you're arguing that when people lose more of their earnings to taxes, they will want to decrease their earnings, rather than increase them. That not only explicitly contradicts Buffet's opinion (and I trust his opinion, based on 50 years of experience, more than I trust yours), but it also defies common sense.
Buffet is a guilty dipshit, he feels bad for being rich. He's also stupid, I don't care how rich he is.
Class A shares in Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet's investment firm) trade for $105,000 apiece. That's 190 times the price of a share of Google stock. I don't care how rich they are, nobody gives that kind of money to someone stupid.
Am I the only one who found the five minutes of this video to be about as interesting as listening to a stoned person describe the cracks on the ceiling?
You designed the visualization, buddy. If it's "freaking crazy looking," rather than yielding any useful insight, then obviously you did not visualize it in a meaningful way. You failed, in other words.
But as an earlier poster noted, this is just a Slashvertisement for the visualization tool in question. No doubt it will be quite effective on the kind of people who talk as slowly as the guy in the video.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. It might be a policy at your company, but a look at California's Web sites shows there's still a clear overtime exemption for "employees in the computer software field." Governor Schwarzenegger clarified the law in 2008, by specifying that any software developer who is paid a minimum of $75,000 is exempt. So maybe they just changed the salary range at your company, and rather than divide developers into exempt and non-exempt ones, they decided to treat them all as non-exempt.
Because of the way game development works, you are almost certainly going to have a crunch time, and probalby a pretty heavy crunch time near the end.
Could outsourcing help?
I'm serious! We're always decrying the evils of offshoring and other outsourcing, but which would you rather do: allow some Indian coders to hack out the last-minute changes from this afternoon's meeting, or lose your marriage?
Hollywood movies also have "crunch time" during post-production, especially on big blockbusters with lots of special effects. What happens is that you get movies with end credits a mile long, because they include the names of everybody in every FX studio in Hollywood. They part out the work all over town, because there's no other choice. One studio can not handle the work.
Is this impossible in the videogame industry? Really impossible? I can't help but wonder whether the fact that videogame studios name themselves things like "Rockstar Games" might be symptomatic of an attitude that's prevalent in the industry. Maybe it's time to stop acting like "rock stars" and admit that you're working professionals just like anybody else, and that you need more manpower to meet your company's ambitions?
Slashdot Mirror
IBM has had many bad products over the years, but I wouldn't say Notes/Domino is one of them. A lot of people bitch about having to use Notes, but in my experience that comes down to three problems:
Taken on its own merits, however, Notes/Domino really is an innovative product, especially when you consider its long history. Parts of it seem a bit long in the tooth these days, but Notes still has lots of customers.
the isolated Pocket PC was almost completely useless.
An isolated Pocket PC may have been completely useless, but try telling that to Palm. You know, the company that pioneered the PDA category that Microsoft was forced to play catch-up in? The company that made "PalmPilot" a household word and the butt of many yuppie jokes, even long after they changed the name of the actual product? The problem with Palm, of course, is that it basically sat down and stopped innovating when it was on top. These days, the most widely-known Palm handset is the Treo, and Palm didn't even create those itself. But I'd rather be a has-been like Palm than a never-was like Microsoft.
P.S. But it's sort of true; one reason I loved my Palm so much is that I could use it with a Ricochet wireless modem in my area.
Are you saying AP style is preferred these days?
I'm guessing you're too young to have been around when the majority of home computer users had dot-matrix printers, which used a ribbon. When I was in high school, my school bought an HP LaserJet II printer, which had 300dpi resolution. It was amazing looking. Nowadays a couple hundred bucks will get you a printer with twice as much resolution, but back then you couldn't get documents looking that sharp without spending thousands of dollars. Resolution matters, even for text.
That said, the iPad's screen resolution is 132ppi, while the Kindle's is 170ppi. Books on the iPad will not be higher resolution than those on the Kindle.
In my mind the only durability argument that holds at all is that in the advent of the total downfall of our civilization paper stands a much better chance than bits. But even paper wouldn't do very well if, say, we have a large-scale nuclear war.
No, there's another argument that holds water, and you made it yourself. One of the key benefits you cite -- "the ease of copying digital media" -- is not a given. If publishers continue to insist on locked-down DRM-encumbered formats, they essentially reserve the right to remove a work from "print" at a snap of their fingers. You can't read your one Adobe e-book; I'm sure there are other people who have lost access to entire libraries due to this same effect. This is not a limitation of digital per se, but of the choices publishers make around digital.
Interesting. Well, to you and Profane MuthaFucka, I'm on T-Mobile (USA).
If the carriers are "jealously guarding" their location data, how come every time I pull up Google Maps on my non-GPS BlackBerry it can figure out where I am to within a block or so? Either this patent is for a technology Google had figured out a long time ago, or else the carriers aren't as worried about having "a lock" on this data as TFA makes it sound.
Java threads don't necessarily scale to multiple processors. From what I understand, one of the particular areas of optimization is garbage collection. You might be able to write multithreaded Java applications like it's nothing, but if the JVM itself doesn't handle stuff like garbage collection gracefully, you stand to take a big performance hit.
They really glossed over a lot of this stuff in today's presentation, though. The Java stuff was almost like reading off a list. Expect to hear a lot more in the months to come.
No, they didn't say anything about cutting things out of Netbeans. Just that they want to add more stuff.
As far as JDeveloper being the "strategic" platform, it sounds like that has more to do with the efforts Oracle will take to package it as more of a turnkey platform. Kurian mentioned integrating Hudson with JDeveloper, for example. I don't think there will be anything stopping you from using Netbeans as your primary environment if you don't mind setting up some more stuff yourself. JDeveloper is supposed to be the preferred choice for large teams in enterprise environments.
As for Glassfish, that, too, will continue to be developed. As with Netbeans, Oracle wants it to be a solid reference J2EE implementation, while WebLogic will be the "strategic" platform. The distinctions between those two products are wider than between Netbeans and JDeveloper, so I think it speaks for itself. Kurian specifically called out some of the nice features of Glassfish, and said that they plan to continue to support it as a "rapid development and deployment environment."
Ellison re-iterated that it is not competitive, but complementary with Oracle. They plan to increase investment in the business. No specific announcements about development direction or how Oracle plans to package it (no mention of an "Unbreakable MySQL," for example).
I think in this case the Journal is mistaken. Ellison just talked about this issue minutes ago, and he castigated the press for reports the Oracle plans to lay off "half Sun's workforce" (or similar). He says Oracle plans no such thing, and in fact he will be hiring 2,000 new employees, which will be more than it plans to lay off as a result of this acquisition.
All of it was mentioned, with the exception of the C, C++, and Fortran compilers.
Maybe someone else can fill in more details.
I think doing something to get rid of the whole HTML thing would be a giant improvement; just display things straight into a window from application code like we currently do with C++ applications, instead of mucking around with a intermediate markup language.
Perhaps I can interest you in a little platform called Flash?
Haha, I'm right! I just looked at the school's Web page, and current enrollment is roughly 2,900 students.
No worries, by comparison my award-winning suburban high school in California had a population of around 1,500 students (over four grades). It's probably much larger now that California has sunk to the bottom of the education rankings.
The school only has 230 students. I have a hard time believing they'd need 192 servers whether they used Linux or not.
And BTW, as long as you're standing on my lawn, may I remind you that my own high school's expenditure on servers was exactly zero? How's that for savings?
Awww, man. I shoulda just wrote this one, saved myself some time.
This is the guy whose product we're talking about. He wants to explain himself. If you think he tried to use Slashdot to advertise his product, you don't have to mod him up, but if you mod him down to -1 then he'll drop below a lot of people's thresholds and they won't even see that he tried to participate. That's not being fair.
Everyone always wants me to have labels on the graphs. I don't put them there unless you roll over the data, because I want you to see the patterns in the data without bias first.
Why? The only reason for that would be so you could go, "Whoaahh, it's crazy looking." You've proven that. Anonymous data with no points of reference has no meaning. If you honestly think your graph has more value to the viewer than this graph from 1880 showing the population of Sweden over time, I think you're kidding yourself.
It is actually pretty simple and makes it quite clear what is going on
That's debatable. I've argued that it could be much, much clearer.
Finally, I am not interested in producing graphs which show you everything "at a glance". Use a pie chart for that. I am making graphs which facilitate a deeper understanding of larger amounts of data than Tufte dreamed of showing using his 2D paradigms.
Careful. If you're trying to get into the data visualization business, it's a bad idea to make it known that you're completely ignorant of Edward Tufte.
For starters, anyone who knows the slightest thing about Edward Tufte knows that he hates pie charts. So he would never say "use a pie chart for that."
Second, contrary to your assertion, Tufte advocates for extremely data-rich graphics wherever possible. He does not advocate abridging large data sets out of laziness. He does, however, advocate data compression when it will reveal data, and he does not like "wasted ink." Your graphs appear to have miles and miles and miles of plotted data -- none of which is identifiable without mouse interaction -- but relatively few points of interest. As you scroll through the data set, half your movie seems to feature the text "empty" hovering in midair above the graph. In other words, your dataset may indeed be large, but your visualization of it is not particularly informationally dense.
Finally, until such a time as your product can reach out of my flat-screen monitor and tweak me in the nose, you're every bit as tied to a "2D paradigm" as Tufte is. All you're doing is making it possible to adjust what is plotted in real time. Tufte would probably argue that it's better to get the plot right the first time. Allowing viewers to take their time to absorb a lot of data points is fine, but they shouldn't have to waste their time fiddling around with the plot to reveal those data points.
You want complaining? How about this: This visualization is terrible.
The video took five minutes to watch and most of it was him rolling over the bars in the 3-D chart so you can see what each of the lines means. If that's supposed to be a useful visual aid, I'll eat my hat. It's bad enough that you have to manually roll over every data element to figure out what it is; scrolling through the graph seemed dead slow. I hope that's not a limitation of the product itself.
Simple labels on the axes of the graph would have been nice. Far be it from anyone to try stick little flags next to the lines to represent different countries. Hell, just color-coding them in a totally arbitrary way would have made the graph easier to read.
BTW, a quick look at the Glasshouse site reveals all their output looks pretty much just like this demo. And there's no evidence that you can export one of their rudimentary 3-D graphs to "pretty it up" in a real 3-D app. Instead, their raison d'être appears to be allowing you to run around looking at these graphs... in Second Life.
I'm sorry, but if you're doing something like plotting fractals, for example, where visual similarity to patterns is the whole point, I can forgive you for coming to the conclusion that "it's crazy looking." If what you're doing is trying to provide a visual to aid in the interpretation of data, then the visual should -- y'know -- aid interpretation. A glance at this graph, on the other hand, reveals nothing; not even what it's supposed to represent.
In summary, Edward Tufte will be rolling in his grave when he dies from looking at this graphic.
Maybe it's more profitable now to buy gold or other commodities and wait out the tax climate instead of investing. Maybe bonds now make more sense. You're less likely to risk your money in certain parts of the economy when there will be less profit from it.
Nothing Buffet says disagrees with that. That's called investment strategy.
But what makes you think higher capital gains taxes will favor the bond market or the commodities market over the stock market? Capital gains don't only apply to stocks. In the commodities market, in particular, there are few opportunities for long-term capital gains, which are the only kind that are taxable at the 15 percent rate now.
"Safer" investments have lower returns. You're claiming people will favor safer investments -- less profitable ones -- because taxes are higher. In other words, you're arguing that when people lose more of their earnings to taxes, they will want to decrease their earnings, rather than increase them. That not only explicitly contradicts Buffet's opinion (and I trust his opinion, based on 50 years of experience, more than I trust yours), but it also defies common sense.
Buffet is a guilty dipshit, he feels bad for being rich. He's also stupid, I don't care how rich he is.
Class A shares in Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet's investment firm) trade for $105,000 apiece. That's 190 times the price of a share of Google stock. I don't care how rich they are, nobody gives that kind of money to someone stupid.
Am I the only one who found the five minutes of this video to be about as interesting as listening to a stoned person describe the cracks on the ceiling?
You designed the visualization, buddy. If it's "freaking crazy looking," rather than yielding any useful insight, then obviously you did not visualize it in a meaningful way. You failed, in other words.
But as an earlier poster noted, this is just a Slashvertisement for the visualization tool in question. No doubt it will be quite effective on the kind of people who talk as slowly as the guy in the video.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. It might be a policy at your company, but a look at California's Web sites shows there's still a clear overtime exemption for "employees in the computer software field." Governor Schwarzenegger clarified the law in 2008, by specifying that any software developer who is paid a minimum of $75,000 is exempt. So maybe they just changed the salary range at your company, and rather than divide developers into exempt and non-exempt ones, they decided to treat them all as non-exempt.
Because of the way game development works, you are almost certainly going to have a crunch time, and probalby a pretty heavy crunch time near the end.
Could outsourcing help?
I'm serious! We're always decrying the evils of offshoring and other outsourcing, but which would you rather do: allow some Indian coders to hack out the last-minute changes from this afternoon's meeting, or lose your marriage?
Hollywood movies also have "crunch time" during post-production, especially on big blockbusters with lots of special effects. What happens is that you get movies with end credits a mile long, because they include the names of everybody in every FX studio in Hollywood. They part out the work all over town, because there's no other choice. One studio can not handle the work.
Is this impossible in the videogame industry? Really impossible? I can't help but wonder whether the fact that videogame studios name themselves things like "Rockstar Games" might be symptomatic of an attitude that's prevalent in the industry. Maybe it's time to stop acting like "rock stars" and admit that you're working professionals just like anybody else, and that you need more manpower to meet your company's ambitions?