Meng Wong definately has a point analyzing the current problems with the email system. But I don't think all those changes he sees coming up will affect the SMTP mail system. Default deny and whitelists would break the free-spirit character of the mail network, banning people from communication who are already limited in their freedom of speech. This was also the main point brought up against most of the anti-spam proposals we have seen over the last year or two.
What I think will come is some kind of "trusted mail" protocol, with its own servers and clients apps. Everyone participating will have to register and prove his identity, and there will be measures to prevent people (at least mostly) from forging identities. Just making sure the thief is caught should be enough to scare them off. But this system has to be so strict it won't hit home in a rush. I expect it to be an alternative messaging system for geeks at first, then drifting slowly towards a business-only communications system, until finally it will become an accepted alternative to classical smtp mail.
Once companies see that there is a reliable system that can also be used to reach customers without putting them at risk for phishing attacks, they will happily jump on that train. Of course, there has to be a global registry, but if it works out for domain names and ip addresses, then the community can surely establish something similar for identity verification.
And maybe we also get some bonus addons, like standardized attachment wrapping, unicode character sets in the headers, more detailed header entries and having to implement just one identification protocol between clients and servers.
Not just another virtual machine nobody needs. Perl6 is also a consequent implentation of language development paradigms. Java started some of it with its so called "platform independent" VM. Microsoft jumped on that train with DotNet and its intermediate language for the CRL. Perl6 bundles those ideas together, gets rid of hierarchy constraints inherited from the old OO drafts, and adds complete costumizability to syntax and grammar while trying to keep the number of built-in functions as small as possible.
No other language does make it so easy by now to adapt the language itself to the needs of the special environment. You could for example write a module that forces strict inheritance to all of your objects, or implicitly puts all variables and values into a protected memory range, or dump your current program state onto a disk, everything within the blink of an eye.
Other implementations of introspection, like Java's Reflection API, provide the needed self-awareness of the code and the means for dynamic object handling up to some point, but that point reached, things tend to get rather ugly. Perl5 provided some "dirty hacks" for a part of that, but couldn't cover everything without breaking compatibility and, most of all, performance.
Still Perl6 won't be the sole answer to every question - as allways TMTOWTDI. But it's certainly interesting enough to keep an eye on it.
It seems that stagnating IT salaries aren't a U.S. phenomenon at all. Here over in Germany they have been nearly stuck for the last few years. Living costs have gone up by 15 percent (if you look into your shopping baskets instead of government statistics) over 5 years, when IT salaries only rose by close to two percent and year. If you focus on IT companies it looks even worse, as the average is pushed upwards by IT jobs in companies in other operational fields that are bound by collective agreements.
I'm tempted to state that things can only go upwards, but then there's this old saying:
From the darkness there was a voice: "smile and be happy, it could go worse."
And I smiled and was happy, and it went worse...
To be honest, I don't think things will change too quickly, with all that globalization going on around, companies outsourcing a lot of work to countries with lower labour costs, mass layoffs at the so-called "global players" and people still flocking into IT studies like lemmings. For most of us this will mean "watch the market, specialise, be patient", and not the "have an idea in the morning, push it over lunch, get wealthy in the evening" that seemed so easy to accomplish just years ago.
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Meng Wong definately has a point analyzing the current problems with the email system. But I don't think all those changes he sees coming up will affect the SMTP mail system. Default deny and whitelists would break the free-spirit character of the mail network, banning people from communication who are already limited in their freedom of speech. This was also the main point brought up against most of the anti-spam proposals we have seen over the last year or two.
What I think will come is some kind of "trusted mail" protocol, with its own servers and clients apps. Everyone participating will have to register and prove his identity, and there will be measures to prevent people (at least mostly) from forging identities. Just making sure the thief is caught should be enough to scare them off. But this system has to be so strict it won't hit home in a rush. I expect it to be an alternative messaging system for geeks at first, then drifting slowly towards a business-only communications system, until finally it will become an accepted alternative to classical smtp mail.
Once companies see that there is a reliable system that can also be used to reach customers without putting them at risk for phishing attacks, they will happily jump on that train. Of course, there has to be a global registry, but if it works out for domain names and ip addresses, then the community can surely establish something similar for identity verification.
And maybe we also get some bonus addons, like standardized attachment wrapping, unicode character sets in the headers, more detailed header entries and having to implement just one identification protocol between clients and servers.
Not just another virtual machine nobody needs. Perl6 is also a consequent implentation of language development paradigms. Java started some of it with its so called "platform independent" VM. Microsoft jumped on that train with DotNet and its intermediate language for the CRL. Perl6 bundles those ideas together, gets rid of hierarchy constraints inherited from the old OO drafts, and adds complete costumizability to syntax and grammar while trying to keep the number of built-in functions as small as possible.
No other language does make it so easy by now to adapt the language itself to the needs of the special environment. You could for example write a module that forces strict inheritance to all of your objects, or implicitly puts all variables and values into a protected memory range, or dump your current program state onto a disk, everything within the blink of an eye.
Other implementations of introspection, like Java's Reflection API, provide the needed self-awareness of the code and the means for dynamic object handling up to some point, but that point reached, things tend to get rather ugly. Perl5 provided some "dirty hacks" for a part of that, but couldn't cover everything without breaking compatibility and, most of all, performance.
Still Perl6 won't be the sole answer to every question - as allways TMTOWTDI. But it's certainly interesting enough to keep an eye on it.
It seems that stagnating IT salaries aren't a U.S. phenomenon at all. Here over in Germany they have been nearly stuck for the last few years. Living costs have gone up by 15 percent (if you look into your shopping baskets instead of government statistics) over 5 years, when IT salaries only rose by close to two percent and year. If you focus on IT companies it looks even worse, as the average is pushed upwards by IT jobs in companies in other operational fields that are bound by collective agreements. I'm tempted to state that things can only go upwards, but then there's this old saying: From the darkness there was a voice: "smile and be happy, it could go worse." And I smiled and was happy, and it went worse... To be honest, I don't think things will change too quickly, with all that globalization going on around, companies outsourcing a lot of work to countries with lower labour costs, mass layoffs at the so-called "global players" and people still flocking into IT studies like lemmings. For most of us this will mean "watch the market, specialise, be patient", and not the "have an idea in the morning, push it over lunch, get wealthy in the evening" that seemed so easy to accomplish just years ago.