Oh, to be a time traveller and go back 10 years before the Windows 95 release....
Yeah, I'd buy lots and lots of MSFT.
...the same features we delivered seven years ago
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
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· Score: 4, Funny
Fast forward 10 years and what has changed?
The IE dev teams blogs (nay, boasts!) about tabbed browsing in IE7 -- saying nothing of the fact that tabs are years old.
MS brags and boasts about Monad, which is still vaporware, but it sure will be the best shell ever -- saying nothing of the fact that this has been available forever in *nix.
I'm sure we can come up with more. In the end, MS is very good at marketing. People just love their koolaid.
TFA may have been about OSS growing in usage and acceptance, but make a claim that a closed tech is growing right alongside it and get modded off topic.
Functional Programming is -- for me -- on the rise too. I predict a rise in FP in general.
That said, ASP.NET is growing too. I work for a government consulting company in Northern VA. Most people here only know.NET. The biggest propronents are, naturally, the client-server VB-SQLServer guys who were dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Now that they must create web apps, they think ASP.NET and all its ungodly web controls are the cow's milk (or the kitten's mittens, if you prefer).
Their rationale? Well, besides coming from MS, many of our projects are hosted on a government network. If you use their boxes, you must use what they installed. That is, Cold Fusion 5 (a monstrosity if I ever saw one) and now.NET.
If your project does not require one of their servers (that is, you install your own server or the project springs for new hardware), you can install whatever you like. I have a java app running on the same network.
One of the largest projects we host on that network is being re-rewritten from VB-SQLServer (it also has a web piece in CF5) in.NET by an old stored procedure (T-SQL) guy. This implementation has to be done entirely in web services. He's drank too much of the kool aid.
In java, there seems to be an entire community that's shunned the over-engineering of EJBs and went with POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). Why? It just works. It's simple. In my observation, the.net crowd doesn't believe in POCO (Plain Old C# Objects). Everything has to be a webservice or somehow use xml.
They'll learn (or they won't). Doesn't matter much to me. I've already started using a functional programming language for my java apps. Much, much shorter programs, flexibility out the wazoo, and you don't have to write 10 lines just to get "Hello World" from Standard Out. The secret is the Rhino javascript from Mozilla. It will be included by default in Java 6. Apparently I'm not the only one tired of verbosity.
In a nutshell, do the simplest thing that could possibly work in the fewest lines of code and the least amount of mental constructs using the highest level language you can get away with. Tune for performance only after you've perfected how it works.
In a nutshell, languages themselves vary in power. No one disputes that. All things being equal, you should generally choose the most powerful language you can all the time. As we move more and more to server-hosted software, your choice of language is incredibly important because a) it's your choice, not forced on your by being the language of the OS and b) it can be a huge competitive advantage.
Matz (Ruby's creator) acknowledges ripping off ideas from Lisp (but putting a friendlier face to it). Python is Lispy. Javascript has been called Lisp in C's clothing. These are all functional languages, or can be used functionally.
Graham noted how all languages are trending more towards Lisp in terms of features (see the essay linked above). Want further proof? C# 2.0 is getting lexical closures. Innovation from Microsoft! These were available in Lisp for 30 years, javascript for 10 (since it was created), they're in Perl 5, Ruby, I can go on...
If languages continue to become higher and higher level, wouldn't we need to investigate this weird AI language from 1958 and see what features it doesn't have in order to do more meaningful research? 'cause these days, all the "new" features of today's languages are decades old...
... they wouldn't need this kind of thing. It's kind of like Paul Graham when he mused about his competitors and how it didn't really matter whether they knew he was using Lisp or not because, in the words of Robert Morris: "If they were that smart they'd already be programming in Lisp."
If a business was smart, they'd already be using open source as a competitive advantage. Google knows about servers and handling load. Your local PHB does not. Your PHB wants to buy Windows Server 2003. Google customized their own Linux distro.
I know enough to follow the really really smart people, like the ones at Google.
"The goal remains for us to separate spammers from their money," Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith told Reuters
He then added, "We do this by certifying all zombie machines through the Microsoft Genuine Advantage program. Only licensed copies of Windows will be used to send spam."
Stallman -- as he usually does -- wrote a well-opinioned piece, but it's money that influences politicians. Stallman doesn't have any, and the FSF not nearly enough to stop M$ or others.
The patent system will change when enough big companies get tired of it, like IBM's recent call for patent reform. IBM has the money to push these kinds of issues. Stallman does not.
The only way to get Firefox to 25% is to keep broastcasting about it as often and as loudly as possible. The more often it's written about, the more people will hear about it, look it up, download and install it, and eventually get us to 25%+.
"How do you know the vast majority of users are sighted on a PC? There are literally thousands upon thousands of users who are using a PC, who are legally blind or entirely blind. One of my colleagues uses 25+ point fonts because he can't see anything smaller than that, and he reads 8" from the screen."
Yes, there are many thousands, tens of thousands even, of blind, partially blind, and color blind web surfers. There are hundreds of millions of sigted users. Blind people are a minority group.
Section 508 to the rescue!
We cannot discrimate against people, says the US Gov't, so they mandate all gov't sites and applications be Section 508 compliant. I know more about color pallettes than you do, because a color blind person will not be able to read all the text. Blind people can't read it at all.
I've used JAWS. It sucks. It's awful. It's the worst browsing experience I've had in my life. And it could be made so much better for a blind person if JAWS had a DHTML capable browser built in.
Instead of "skip nav" like I mentioned above, why not present a non-visual menu for the screenreader? "Press 1 for My Profile" and DHTML renders that section (via innerHTML, CSS, etc.) dynamically. We could easily shuffle the user to that new DIV complete with its own non-visual submenu (Press 2 for Password, Press 3 for Listserv, etc).
But now? Blind users have to guess what is primary navigation and what is secondary. There is no easy way to group them to make it obvious that a section of links is secondary navigation.
DHTML, Javascript, and CSS built into JAWS could make for a much more accessible solution than we have today.
Is anyone really browsing the web from their cell phone? PDA? The resolution and functionality in these things are terrible. We have a decade of hard experience behind us building good web browsers. Let's build one into devices that want to surf the web.
The same goes for screenreaders. I have to make my applications Section 508 compliant everyday because we're a gov't contractor. It sucks. If Mozilla and IE know what elem.innerHTML is and can render it, why can a screenreader not work like a real goddamned web browser? Then it too would know what my elem.innerHTML is and can read it accordingly aloud to the non-sighted user.
There are real 508 problems for blind folks. Implementing a "skip nav" hidden link to bypass the multitude of primary navigation links is standard. If we can pass the user around the page like that, why not include more dynamic pieces in the page and present a non-visible menu for blind people? "Press 1 for My Profile, Press 1 for... blah blah blah". As they press a button, *javascript and dhtml* take them around the page, reading more parts of the menu.
In my mind, a very accessible app would be more like a phone VRU to a blind person. But what's the problem? JAWS doesn't know shit about a page beyond html markup. It was only in the past few years that they managed to handle nested tables well. So blind people are lost when it comes to even Section 508 compliant websites, because screenreaders as they exist today suck.
Rich web applications (a la GMail, Google Maps, Flikr, Backpack, and other AJAX style applications) are a rennaissance of web programming. They are increasing usability at the expense of accessibility. The vast majority of users are sighted and on a PC. I don't think the solution is to code down to the lowest common denominator, but to build up the other dumber clients of web apps.
The entire second page of the article talks about scripting languages, specifically Javascript (in browsers) and Groovy.
1. Kudos to the Groovy authors. They've even garnered James Gosling's attention. If you write Java code and consider yourself even a little bit of a forward thinker, look up Groovy. It's a very important JSR (JSR-241 specifically).
2. He talks about Javascript solely from the point of view of the browser. Yes, I agree that Javascript is predominently implemented in a browser, but it's reach can be felt everywhere. Javascript == ActionScript (Flash scripting language). Javascript == CFScript (ColdFusion scripting language). Javascript object notation == Python object notation.
But what about Javascript and Rhino's inclusion in Java 6? I've been using Rhino as a server side language for a while now because Struts is way too verbose for my taste. I just want a thin glue layer between the web interface and my java components. I'm sick and tired of endless xml configuration (that means you, too, EJB!). A Rhino script on the server (with embedded Request, Response, Application, and Session objects) is the perfect glue that does not need xml configuration. (See also Groovy's Groovlets for a thin glue layer).
3. Javascript has been called Lisp in C's clothing. Javascript (via Rhino) will be included in Java 6. I also read that Java 6 will allow access to the parse trees created by the javac compiler (same link as Java 6 above).
Java is now Lisp? Paul Graham writes about 9 features that made Lisp unique when it debuted in the 50s. Access to the parse trees is one of the most advanced features of Lisp. He argues that when a language has all 9 features (and Java today is at about #5), you've not created a new language but a dialect of Lisp.
I am a Very Big Fan of dynamic languages that can flex like a pretzel to fit my problem domain. Is Java evolving to be that pretzel?
Recently announced, Munich has choosen Debian
on
Debian Sarge Coming Soon
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Munich, if you didn't know, is making a much publicized switch from Windows NT to Linux. They recently (April 18, 2005) announced to use a customized distribution of Debian for the 14,000 city desktops.
Using Rhino http://www.mozilla.org/rhino -- which already has the E4X functionality in the runtime -- you can stuff like this (using an html document as my sample xml):
And behold there was a Great Light, and He saw that it was good.
Of course you do not want to blindly eval() source from client-side javascript. Duh.
The Python JSON parser I linked to is very small, very fast, and handles None/null and true/True for you.
I did, however, have to edit the parser. I've found that client-side javascript does not like single quoted values when eval'ing a json string, so I modified the Py-JSON parser to change all values to double quotes.
JSON is vastly superior for this task than XML parsing.
AJAX is great, but parsing XML always sucks. The XmlHttpRequest object also has a property called ".text", which returns the text value of the data.
Set your content type to "text/javascript" and you can send data over the network and have it be perfectly legal and ready to use. NO XML PARSING!
JSON (JSON.org) just happens to be legal Python syntax... which makes me think...
hmmm.... Google has a huge server farm and is renowed for using Python... Google Maps talks client/server using Javascript, not xml... Python and Javascript shared JSON sytax for serializing objects... hmmm...
It is a very efficient combo: Python, Javascript, JSON, mod_python.
There's still a market, believe it or not
on
Netscape 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My wife works at the EPA where they have an IMB/LotusNotes/Netscape solution on all desktops. She's running Netscape 7, I believe.
I, personally, question the time and money required to put out a new version of Netscape when there's a perfectly kickass Firefox to use, but my opinion is moot. There's still a market for Netscape, albeit a small one.
...has a job. Naturally this guy would disagree with Linus. He's got nothing else to do. I, too, would strongly disagree if someone casually dismissed the past three months of my life.
Where do you work?
I'm unemployed. For the past three months, I've spent almost all of my time working on this security flaw -- investigating how serious it was, contacting all of the affected vendors, explaining how this should be fixed, et cetera. I simply haven't had time to go out and get a job -- and I decided that making sure that this issue was properly reported and fixed was far more important than earning some money.
Have you noticed the essays he's written? They all trend in the direction of this most recent essay. I say he's rather encouraging.
His points over many essays are nearly always the same, but looked at from different angles:
do hard work (and work hard)
hang around with smart people
don't follow trends, blaze your own trail
start with good ideas
spend as little as possible
the internet leverages your investment
your biggest investment is time
Tech matters (as do languages and platforms)
He did it (started a successful company and sold out). All of his essays encourage you to as well.
I cannot understand why anyone on this site does not like what he has to say. He's saying the time has never been better to start a business, keep your costs low and make better technology your advantage, and he's entirely encouraging with his style of presentation.
I, for one, thank Paul Graham for his insight into something I want to do.
Oh, and if you didn't know this nugget of wisdom: Find and listen to someone who has done what you want to do. Don't listen to the masses. Listen to someone's who's done it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'd buy lots and lots of MSFT.
The IE dev teams blogs (nay, boasts!) about tabbed browsing in IE7 -- saying nothing of the fact that tabs are years old.
MS brags and boasts about Monad, which is still vaporware, but it sure will be the best shell ever -- saying nothing of the fact that this has been available forever in *nix.
I'm sure we can come up with more. In the end, MS is very good at marketing. People just love their koolaid.
not allowing posting at all is one good way to keep jackasses like me from typing "frist prost"
Javascript can be used functionally, even if it is not the quintessential functional programming language, like Scheme or Lisp.
But to show off Javascript's power, here's a Lisp interpreter written in javascript: Lisp in JS
Way to go, slashdot mods!
That said, ASP.NET is growing too. I work for a government consulting company in Northern VA. Most people here only know .NET. The biggest propronents are, naturally, the client-server VB-SQLServer guys who were dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Now that they must create web apps, they think ASP.NET and all its ungodly web controls are the cow's milk (or the kitten's mittens, if you prefer).
Their rationale? Well, besides coming from MS, many of our projects are hosted on a government network. If you use their boxes, you must use what they installed. That is, Cold Fusion 5 (a monstrosity if I ever saw one) and now .NET.
If your project does not require one of their servers (that is, you install your own server or the project springs for new hardware), you can install whatever you like. I have a java app running on the same network.
One of the largest projects we host on that network is being re-rewritten from VB-SQLServer (it also has a web piece in CF5) in .NET by an old stored procedure (T-SQL) guy. This implementation has to be done entirely in web services. He's drank too much of the kool aid.
In java, there seems to be an entire community that's shunned the over-engineering of EJBs and went with POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). Why? It just works. It's simple. In my observation, the .net crowd doesn't believe in POCO (Plain Old C# Objects). Everything has to be a webservice or somehow use xml.
They'll learn (or they won't). Doesn't matter much to me. I've already started using a functional programming language for my java apps. Much, much shorter programs, flexibility out the wazoo, and you don't have to write 10 lines just to get "Hello World" from Standard Out. The secret is the Rhino javascript from Mozilla. It will be included by default in Java 6. Apparently I'm not the only one tired of verbosity.
In a nutshell, do the simplest thing that could possibly work in the fewest lines of code and the least amount of mental constructs using the highest level language you can get away with. Tune for performance only after you've perfected how it works.
See Beating the averages for a well-written and thoughtful essay.
In a nutshell, languages themselves vary in power. No one disputes that. All things being equal, you should generally choose the most powerful language you can all the time. As we move more and more to server-hosted software, your choice of language is incredibly important because a) it's your choice, not forced on your by being the language of the OS and b) it can be a huge competitive advantage.
Matz (Ruby's creator) acknowledges ripping off ideas from Lisp (but putting a friendlier face to it). Python is Lispy. Javascript has been called Lisp in C's clothing. These are all functional languages, or can be used functionally.
Graham noted how all languages are trending more towards Lisp in terms of features (see the essay linked above). Want further proof? C# 2.0 is getting lexical closures. Innovation from Microsoft! These were available in Lisp for 30 years, javascript for 10 (since it was created), they're in Perl 5, Ruby, I can go on...
If languages continue to become higher and higher level, wouldn't we need to investigate this weird AI language from 1958 and see what features it doesn't have in order to do more meaningful research? 'cause these days, all the "new" features of today's languages are decades old...
If a business was smart, they'd already be using open source as a competitive advantage. Google knows about servers and handling load. Your local PHB does not. Your PHB wants to buy Windows Server 2003. Google customized their own Linux distro.
I know enough to follow the really really smart people, like the ones at Google.
He then added, "We do this by certifying all zombie machines through the Microsoft Genuine Advantage program. Only licensed copies of Windows will be used to send spam."
Stallman -- as he usually does -- wrote a well-opinioned piece, but it's money that influences politicians. Stallman doesn't have any, and the FSF not nearly enough to stop M$ or others.
The patent system will change when enough big companies get tired of it, like IBM's recent call for patent reform. IBM has the money to push these kinds of issues. Stallman does not.
The only way to get Firefox to 25% is to keep broastcasting about it as often and as loudly as possible. The more often it's written about, the more people will hear about it, look it up, download and install it, and eventually get us to 25%+.
Yes, there are many thousands, tens of thousands even, of blind, partially blind, and color blind web surfers. There are hundreds of millions of sigted users. Blind people are a minority group.
Section 508 to the rescue!
We cannot discrimate against people, says the US Gov't, so they mandate all gov't sites and applications be Section 508 compliant. I know more about color pallettes than you do, because a color blind person will not be able to read all the text. Blind people can't read it at all.
I've used JAWS. It sucks. It's awful. It's the worst browsing experience I've had in my life. And it could be made so much better for a blind person if JAWS had a DHTML capable browser built in.
Instead of "skip nav" like I mentioned above, why not present a non-visual menu for the screenreader? "Press 1 for My Profile" and DHTML renders that section (via innerHTML, CSS, etc.) dynamically. We could easily shuffle the user to that new DIV complete with its own non-visual submenu (Press 2 for Password, Press 3 for Listserv, etc).
But now? Blind users have to guess what is primary navigation and what is secondary. There is no easy way to group them to make it obvious that a section of links is secondary navigation.
DHTML, Javascript, and CSS built into JAWS could make for a much more accessible solution than we have today.
The same goes for screenreaders. I have to make my applications Section 508 compliant everyday because we're a gov't contractor. It sucks. If Mozilla and IE know what elem.innerHTML is and can render it, why can a screenreader not work like a real goddamned web browser? Then it too would know what my elem.innerHTML is and can read it accordingly aloud to the non-sighted user.
There are real 508 problems for blind folks. Implementing a "skip nav" hidden link to bypass the multitude of primary navigation links is standard. If we can pass the user around the page like that, why not include more dynamic pieces in the page and present a non-visible menu for blind people? "Press 1 for My Profile, Press 1 for ... blah blah blah". As they press a button, *javascript and dhtml* take them around the page, reading more parts of the menu.
In my mind, a very accessible app would be more like a phone VRU to a blind person. But what's the problem? JAWS doesn't know shit about a page beyond html markup. It was only in the past few years that they managed to handle nested tables well. So blind people are lost when it comes to even Section 508 compliant websites, because screenreaders as they exist today suck.
Rich web applications (a la GMail, Google Maps, Flikr, Backpack, and other AJAX style applications) are a rennaissance of web programming. They are increasing usability at the expense of accessibility. The vast majority of users are sighted and on a PC. I don't think the solution is to code down to the lowest common denominator, but to build up the other dumber clients of web apps.
1. Kudos to the Groovy authors. They've even garnered James Gosling's attention. If you write Java code and consider yourself even a little bit of a forward thinker, look up Groovy. It's a very important JSR (JSR-241 specifically).
2. He talks about Javascript solely from the point of view of the browser. Yes, I agree that Javascript is predominently implemented in a browser, but it's reach can be felt everywhere. Javascript == ActionScript (Flash scripting language). Javascript == CFScript (ColdFusion scripting language). Javascript object notation == Python object notation.
But what about Javascript and Rhino's inclusion in Java 6? I've been using Rhino as a server side language for a while now because Struts is way too verbose for my taste. I just want a thin glue layer between the web interface and my java components. I'm sick and tired of endless xml configuration (that means you, too, EJB!). A Rhino script on the server (with embedded Request, Response, Application, and Session objects) is the perfect glue that does not need xml configuration. (See also Groovy's Groovlets for a thin glue layer).
3. Javascript has been called Lisp in C's clothing. Javascript (via Rhino) will be included in Java 6. I also read that Java 6 will allow access to the parse trees created by the javac compiler (same link as Java 6 above).
Java is now Lisp? Paul Graham writes about 9 features that made Lisp unique when it debuted in the 50s. Access to the parse trees is one of the most advanced features of Lisp. He argues that when a language has all 9 features (and Java today is at about #5), you've not created a new language but a dialect of Lisp.
I am a Very Big Fan of dynamic languages that can flex like a pretzel to fit my problem domain. Is Java evolving to be that pretzel?
You can read more about it here: Munich chooses Debian
var html = <hmtl/>
html.head.title = "my title";
print(html);
This prints as:
<html>
<head>
<title>my title<title>
<head>
<html>
Although this is a contrived example, I find the ability to access XML as native objects using dot-notation to be very convenient and useful.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1819422,00 .asp
Classic ASP apps can run under a .NET enabled server. EWeek should eat they dog food they're writing about.
Of course you do not want to blindly eval() source from client-side javascript. Duh.
The Python JSON parser I linked to is very small, very fast, and handles None/null and true/True for you.
I did, however, have to edit the parser. I've found that client-side javascript does not like single quoted values when eval'ing a json string, so I modified the Py-JSON parser to change all values to double quotes.
JSON is vastly superior for this task than XML parsing.
Set your content type to "text/javascript" and you can send data over the network and have it be perfectly legal and ready to use. NO XML PARSING!
JSON (JSON.org) just happens to be legal Python syntax... which makes me think...
hmmm.... Google has a huge server farm and is renowed for using Python... Google Maps talks client/server using Javascript, not xml... Python and Javascript shared JSON sytax for serializing objects... hmmm...
It is a very efficient combo: Python, Javascript, JSON, mod_python.
I, personally, question the time and money required to put out a new version of Netscape when there's a perfectly kickass Firefox to use, but my opinion is moot. There's still a market for Netscape, albeit a small one.
Someone's emotional state is affected by this sort of thing. You can't say it isn't so.
From the original article
** an aid whispers in Gates' ear **
"As I was saying, iPods are on the way out. Apple sucks. We're going to give you your MP3s on your phone..."
His points over many essays are nearly always the same, but looked at from different angles:
- do hard work (and work hard)
- hang around with smart people
- don't follow trends, blaze your own trail
- start with good ideas
- spend as little as possible
- the internet leverages your investment
- your biggest investment is time
- Tech matters (as do languages and platforms)
- He did it (started a successful company and sold out). All of his essays encourage you to as well.
I cannot understand why anyone on this site does not like what he has to say. He's saying the time has never been better to start a business, keep your costs low and make better technology your advantage, and he's entirely encouraging with his style of presentation.I, for one, thank Paul Graham for his insight into something I want to do.
Oh, and if you didn't know this nugget of wisdom: Find and listen to someone who has done what you want to do. Don't listen to the masses. Listen to someone's who's done it.
Or is your statement more broadly ignorant than that altogether where it's better to fire people outright than outsource?