Steve Ballmer on "home based" PR:
Question: Do you have an iPod?
Answer: No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children--in many dimensions they're as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this dimension I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.
It's a nice thought, but a tad unrealistic. Witness this (rather old) post from Scoble.
Here's a talk I'm seeing at a lot of conferences - something to address the widespread worry about offshoring of IT sector jobs. Personally, I'm skeptical of governmental programs to "address" the "problem" - this is nothing new. Take textiles, for instance. Between the 18th and 21st century, that industry moved from France to the UK, on to New England, then off to the US south, on to Latin America, and now to Asia. In all that time, there have always been high value textile jobs in all the "losing" areas.
I also wonder about the supposed gap between comp sci graduates and the job market; in general, the market tends to solve those problems by itself. Put another way, I'm wary of solutions that chase ill defined problems. The bottom line is, costs in the IT sector are dropping inexorably, as they have in other industries that have globalized. There's no way to get around the existance of highly trained, rapidly industrializing populations in places like India, China (etc).
Also, I wonder if one of the problems isn't the uptick in demand for credentials before hiring into a development position. When I got into the business in the late 80's, it was quite common for people to get into software development who did not have software related degrees. I certainly didn't; most of the people who worked where I first worked didn't have software degrees either. Good comment from a professor in the room on this: no one has a shared understanding of the term "software engineering", if you go across university departments, industry, etc.
Here's a good consensus - the difficulty arises in attempting to have developers over there (wherever the offshoring location is) and the managers here (US, UK, wherever). The difficulty is that there are communication difficulties that add huge overhead to such projects. Project management in general is bad in the software field; adding a large communication disruption into that already poor discipline just makes things worse. IMHO, the companies that ought to worry are software development firms (like Microsoft), who will, over time, find that new firms in India (etc) will be at least as effective as they are, but with lower costs. The company that isn't actually in IT, but has IT needs won't be nearly as impacted.
Update: Bernard has posted some of the preliminary outputs from the session. First, Laura Hill's preliminary notes are here. The audio of the session has been posted here.
I participated in a fascinating discussion forum this morning - Laura Hill and Bernard Horan (both of Sun) organized a "fishbowl" on the topic of distributed workplaces. That works like this - there were 7 chairs arranged in a circle in the center of the room, with a large ring of chairs around them. There were 6 of us in that center ring, and discussion kicked off with our opening statements on distributed working (which we had submitted previously). From there, it was an open discussion under the following ground rules:
What that means is that people are entering and leaving the bowl regularly. We got participation from nearly the entire audience, and the conversation ranged over a lot of stuff: whether remote working is desirable, whether it works for anyone, how you can manage agile development, how you do communication.
The talking really focused on communication - both on tools (IM, NetMeeting, IRC, phone), and on the practice - how often, ad-hoc or planned, how often you need face to face meetings, that sort of thing. It was a good time, and a good discussion. In know that Laura and Bernard were taking notes and recording the session, so if any of that comes online, I'll link to it.
If you ever have a chance to hear Dave Thomas give this talk, run, don't walk. He gave a great talk on the "received wisdom" that too many of us in the software industry follow. Chief amongst those, of course, is declarative typing. I can't summarize the whole talk - he was funny, and his slides were amusing. If Dave is speaking at a conference near you, go.
Well, it's been a great 3 days, even if I spent most of them jetlagged after traveling to London from Maryland by way of Los Angeles :) For people who like the notion of an unconference - you want to attend SPA 2007. These folks were doing a "conference for particpants" before anyone else had the idea. I'll be back next year, and I intend to arrive earlier.
Via Mike Gunderloy, I found this amazingly evil piece of work: a "Mass Blog Installer" tool. Witness the brave new spam world being ushered in by the people behind this - they start off sounding like they offer a valuable service:
f you have been hosting on Blogspot, you know how fast your blogs can disappear.These days Blogger is deleting blogspot hosted blogs ... and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. They are also blocking posts through the API with 'Captchas' and saving them as drafts all in an effort to stop the abuse of their service. Unfortunately, your hard work ends up down the drain. What can you do to save your work and stop the carnage?
Sounds good, right? Until you read down and find out what's going on:
That's right - Google can't delete your blogs if self hosted. I have tested Blogger blogs hosted on my own domains and have not once been shut down or stuck with a post captcha. Now that I have the Blog creation process automated, it is a piece of cake to crank out 100s if not 1000 blogs in one day. After many months of testing and posting, all blogs are intact and generating traffic.
Oh the joy - automated splog creation. This might be why I'm seeing more splog results showing up in my search feeds. These tools are so very proud of themselves, too:
I was shocked at the power of creating a blog network. This shot my AdSense income up to an amazing $135 per day only one month later. I can also report that the sites and blogs have been holding their traffic and income as I write this letter.
This is like that classified ad jerk you see on late night TV, but scamming Google AdSense. They even realize that what they are doing is slimy; that becomes clear when you read the rest of the letter. Ponzi was clearly born in the wrong century...
One of the most interesting things I saw at this show was the change in mindset about development. Last year, dynamic languages were interesting, but the main thoughts were still on Java. This year? Completely different. In talk after talk, and in side conversation after side conversation it became clear that Java is regarded - at least by the attendees of this show - as a thing of past. Oh sure, it's still in use, and it will remain in use for a long while. It had no champions though, and plenty of people expressed the thought that Sun's release of 1.5 was the straw that broke the camel's back - the level of complexity being grafted onto the language was just too much. Heck, mention the phrase "Java Generics" at this conference and you were likely to hear snickering.
In a post about the new MS Office, Runar mentions Pollock:
Previously there has been focus on how Pollock will make sure the GUI looks good, by ensuring screen updates do cause flickering. Pollock definitely also need to have focus on drawing speed.
Pollock is not really even in beta yet. We are closing in on the first supported release (see the roadmap here) - and here's the thing - don't worry about the performance issues. Our developers have been focused on the "heavy lifting" thus far, and, even before they get to serious optimization (and optimization is a large part of the internal roadmap), they know of a number of things which, when optimized, will make performance improve a lot.
We don't follow the theory of premature optimization here - we want to get the big things right before we focus on the rest of it. Rest assured, Pollock will be fast when it's ready to walk out the door.
I managed to get to Heathrow early this morning, and I thought I'd have time to get a quick update - the airport has T-Mobile WiFi, and I have a pay as you go account. It works fine in the US, so I refreshed the browser and followed the directions. Sure enough, there's a pull down menu for non-UK users, and I was able to select T-Mobile US. Logging in brought me to an unhelful "general error; try again later" message. The same thing happened last Monday on my way in, so it's not just a one time thing. Do they actually support roaming?
Well, the good news about this plane trip is that I had a project to do that killed most of the travel time: updating the intro course for VisualWorks to VW 7.4. In the prior release, we moved packages into the base, which makes the beginning view of the product different: Instead of seeing categories in the left pane of the browser, you see packages and bundles. I've updated the materials to reflect that.
Next, I'm going to have the online tutorial materials sent to me, so that I can do the same updates to that stuff.
Sheesh, maybe EVDO is the way to go. In London (where sadly, EVDO would not be helpful), t-mobile wouldn't let me roam. In JFK, at terminal nine, I had a weak WiFi signal that got me t-mobile access for a few minutes, and then dropped dead. Finally, here at Logan (yes, my routing makes no sense), I find that Comcast provides the WiFi, but they provide no way for me to login as a Comcast user (apparently, Massachusetts and Maryland are independent Comcast fiefdoms. Fitting, in a way, since I've been reading about the 12th century of late). Sigh.
Learn From the Experts on How and Why to Use Cincom Smalltalk
CINCINNATI, Ohio -- March 30, 2006 -- Cincom Smalltalk engineers will present at the upcoming Smalltalk Solutions Conference to be held April 24-26, 2006 in Toronto, Canada. Some of the discussion topics include cryptography, object-relational persistence and web applications using Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks.
A few of the Cincom Smalltalk Engineers presenting at Smalltalk Solutions include:
Alan Knight -- Tutorial: Using GLORP
GLORP is an open-source library for object-relational persistence. It includes some very sophisticated mapping and performance features, and current plans are for it to be incorporated as the core mapping layer in a future revision of Cincom Smalltalk's database toolset. This tutorial is designed to give an introduction to the concepts, capabilities, and best practices using GLORP.
Martin Kobetic -- Cryptography for Smalltalkers 2
This presentation will introduce cryptographic hash functions and public key algorithms and discuss some of their applications and practical aspects. The talk will include demonstrations using the Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks security library.
James Robertson -- Building a Blog Server: A Smalltalk Web Application
This session will go through the process of building, maintaining, updating and scaling a Smalltalk web application server and show the ancillary areas of the technology XML, RSS, XML-RPC. Also discussed will be the ease of modifying a Smalltalk server in place, without taking it offline and the transition from single user to multi-user – all without downtime.
Visit the Cincom Smalltalk booth 1133 in the exhibit hall and receive a copy of the non-commercial version of Cincom Smalltalk Winter Edition.
Cincom Smalltalk enables software developers to build applications quickly and efficiently, including scalable browser-based and client-server systems. Cincom Smalltalk delivers significant productivity over Java™, C#, C++, or Visual Basic®, allowing developers to bring their products to market significantly faster.
For nearly 40 years, Cincom has delivered innovative software and services that enable thousands of clients worldwide to simplify the management of complex business processes. We empower our clients to outperform their competition by providing ways to increase revenue, control cost, minimize risk and achieve rapid ROI.
Cincom serves clients on six continents including BMW, Citibank, Boeing, Northwestern Mutual, Federal Express, Ericsson, Penn State University, Milacron, Siemens, Rockwell Automation and Trane. For more information about Cincom's products and services, contact Cincom at 1-800-2CINCOM (USA only), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com or visit the company's website at www.cincom.com.
Media Contact:
Suzanne Fortman
Cincom Systems, Inc.
Marketing Manager
949-722-8928
sfortman@cincom.com
Note to self: Never accept the kind of routing that I did yesterday. I finally got back to BWI just before 7 pm local time - which meant, beginning with the cab ride, I had been in transit for 19 hours. Even after more than 12 hours of much needed sleep, I still feel like I have tennis balls in my ears...
James McGovern on Java and Scripting:
With scripting support, Java will continue to grow by leaps and bounds and may even be the death of other languages delegating them to second-class citizenship. Other features that many of the conference attendees will be talking about that matter include discussions around clustering support, native platform GSS/Kerberos integration, Support for the Simple and Protected GSS-API Negotiation Mechanism (SPNEGO) and the ability to integrate enterprise applications into management consoles via the JMX protocol.
Fascinating. I wonder what his reaction to the SPA 2006 conference would have been. The feel there was that Java was very much not the way to the future.
The common theme I'm hearing is Werner (and the other Amazon employees who commented here, and elsewhere that I'm seeing) want numbers. They want statistics. Proof. Science.
Where I gave them stuff like " blogging doubled sales at Stormhoek winery, according to its CEO." Or "Munjal Shah, CEO of Riya, says blogging is very important to his new company." Or "Axosoft raised more than $14,000 in just a few days with nothing more than a few links on some blogs." Or " Foldera got more than one million signups for its service in 17 days by doing nothing more than talking to six bloggers." Or, a tailor in the UK saw his sales go up by 10x by doing a blog. That probably wasn't well enough communicated, or it wasn't the kind of answer that would convince Werner. That means I need to go back and do some more homework or at least learn to communicate better while being interrupted by an executive with strongly formed opinions.
Here's the thing - you won't be able to find "hard numbers" for blogging and ROI. Not now, probably not ever. How many hard numbers do you find for any CRM effort? That's what blogging is, really - Customer (or Prospect) relationship mangement. It's a way to communicate with a wider audience than you can via more traditional marketing outreach efforts. Have we ever found solid ROI numbers for those more traditional efforts? I don't think so - best I can tell, we try to track down initial leads that came via marketing, and then marketing takes credit for anything that's even remotely related to a marketing campaign.
I'm not trying to knock marketing efforts with that. It's just that marketing is very hard to measure objectively. Sales is easier - either a sales person did or did not close a sale. At the end of the year, there's a real number to look at, and there are previous years to compare to. Sure, it's still a little fuzzy, because sales gets impacted by things out of their control. My point is, marketing measurements are even less objective, and I don't really see a way to firm them up. Which takes me back to blogging. It's another aspect of customer/prospect outreach, and - for all the same reasons - hard to get solid numbers for.
Rogers has switched to Atom, and his switch surfaced a subtle bug in BottomFeeder. The Atom 1.0 support built on the older 0.3 support, and it turns out that a hack I used back then to find feed links was problematic in Atom 1.0. That's fixed now, and the update is online (for the 4.2 development build only)
Well, look at this - Microsoft has gone ahead and worked around the hacks at Eolas, who wanted to get paid off for their ability to fool patent office staff. They claim to feel bad for users. Sure. And I'm the Queen of Romania, as Dorothy Parker once said:
Eolas Technologies says the decision by Microsoft to modify its Internet Explorer browser at the expense of a seamless user experience is a "disappointment" and a "shame."
It's a shame that these morons haven't gotten lost in the jungle too. Their COO is apparently miffed:
"Microsoft is apparently of the position that this [IE modification] helps their litigation position. I can't comment on the specifics of whether that's true or not. Our position remains the same. We are ready to have reasonable discussions on licensing the technology," Swords said.
Here, let me translate: "Microsoft didn't want to pay us off for our non-invention, but we're still ready to extort money from them if they feel stupid".
Carl Gundel is speaking to the NYC STUG about Liberty Basic:
I've been invited to demonstrate and speak about the new version of Liberty BASIC I'm working on. The venue is the New York City Smalltalk Users Group on April 6th, a Thursday evening. The reason this group invited me is because Liberty BASIC is developed in a version of Smalltalk so it's an interesting project for other Smalltalk developers.
I've been given permission to invite Liberty BASIC users to come also for a sneak peek. The meeting will be held a couple of blocks from Madison Square Garden. I'll post more details about the meeting place when I have them.
I hope we have have a few members of the Liberty BASIC community join us.
For the varying attempts at humor, check out:
I'm sure more will stumble along during the day, but those ought to bring a giggle or two
Keith Ray notices the comments to this Mini-Microsoft post (542 of them when I looked). If even a handful of those represent the thinking of developers on the Windows team at Microsoft, then they have a huge, huge problem on their hands. I've said before that I thought Microsoft had coded their way into a mud filled corner with Windows; all those years of thinking that everything belonged in the OS have finally come home to roost.
Heck, the EU and US authorities shouldn't worry about what MS bundles; they ought to encourage more of it. The more coupling MS introduces, the worse it gets for them, and the better things look for Apple.
The Omaha Dynamic Languages group is meeting April 4th. For details, see Blaine's blog.
I've just uploaded a new dev build of BottomFeeder - this integrates the last few rounds of bug fixes I've done. I still have a few things to do for the 4.2 release, but it's starting to come together.
Time to catch up on my log posts, which I missed with the travel of the last week and a half. First up: BottomFeeder downloads from 2 weeks ago, which ran at a rate of 275 a day:
| Platform | BottomFeeder Downloads |
| Windows | 545 |
| Sources | 489 |
| Update | 290 |
| Linux x86 | 171 |
| Mac X | 111 |
| Mac 8/9 | 97 |
| CE ARM | 89 |
| Solaris | 36 |
| HPUX | 32 |
| Linux Sparc | 23 |
| AIX | 17 |
| Windows98/ME | 11 |
| Linux PPC | 8 |
| SGI | 3 |
| Source Script | 3 |
| ADUX | 2 |
| CE x86 | 2 |
Next: The weekly HTML page accesses:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 67.7% |
| Internet Explorer | 17.1% |
| Everest/Vulcan | 4.2% |
| MSN Bot | 3.8% |
| Other | 3.6% |
| Google Bot | 2% |
| Megite | 1.6% |
I love one week anomalies like that sudden jump in Mozilla accesses. Anyway, on to the RSS tool accesses:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 26.2% |
| BottomFeeder | 18.7% |
| Net News Wire | 8.9% |
| BlogLines | 7.9% |
| Other | 9.4% |
| Safari RSS | 4.8% |
| Internet Explorer | 3.6% |
| Google Feed Fetcher | 3% |
| RSS Bandit | 1.8% |
| NewsGator | 1.8% |
| Magpie | 1.6% |
| Planet Smalltalk | 1.6% |
| SharpReader | 1.5% |
| JetBrains | 1.1% |
| BlogSearch | 1.1% |
| MSN Bot | 1% |
| News Fire | 1% |
| Liferea | 1% |
| Java | 1% |
| FeedFlow | 1% |
| Everest/Vulcan | 1% |
| Feed Demon | 1% |
Still a lot of tool diversity there.
Still catching up, the logs for the last week. BottomFeeder downloads proceeded at a 266 per day clip; the details:
| Platform | BottomFeeder Downloads |
| Windows | 519 |
| Sources | 436 |
| Update | 391 |
| Linux x86 | 132 |
| Mac X | 126 |
| CE ARM | 91 |
| Mac 8/9 | 78 |
| Solaris | 29 |
| HPUX | 22 |
| AIX | 13 |
| Linux Sparc | 10 |
| Windows98/ME | 7 |
| Linux PPC | 5 |
| SGI | 2 |
| ADUX | 1 |
| CE x86 | 1 |
| Source Script | 1 |
On to the HTML Pages:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 60.2% |
| Internet Explorer | 18.8% |
| MSN Bot | 1.3% |
| Everest/Vulcan | 3.8% |
| Other | 13.9% |
| Megite | 1% |
| Google Bot | 1% |
Looks a lot like the previous week. Finally, RSS tool accesses:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 24% |
| BottomFeeder | 16.8% |
| Net News Wire | 9.7% |
| Other | 11%% |
| BlogLines | 7.9% |
| Safari RSS | 4.4% |
| MSN Bot | 4.3% |
| Internet Explorer | 4% |
| Google Feed Fetcher | 3% |
| RSS Bandit | 2.2% |
| NewsGator | 1.7% |
| Planet Smalltalk | 1.5% |
| Magpie | 1.4% |
| SharpReader | 1.1% |
| JetBrains | 1% |
| BlogSearch | 1% |
| Liferea | 1% |
| News Fire | 1% |
| Java | 1% |
| Feed Reader | 1% |
| Feed Demon | 1% |
That looks a lot like the previous week as well.
Ahh, the wages of being a complete jerk in public: Rogers Cadenhead has switched over to Atom. The various technical issues that cannot be resolved in RSS have been dealt with in Atom, and even erstwhile allies like Rogers have moved on. I've never updated my Atom feed here, but perhaps it's time to do so.
How mad would you be if the power company turned off your power for several hours without warning, or if you woke up in the morning to find that you couldn’t take a shower? Pretty mad I imagine. I was just a little bit annoyed last night because my flickr backup wasn’t working. I couldn’t have retrieved anything from S3 if I had wanted to, but thankfully I didn’t need (or want) to.
What if I were building out a Carson -style startup using S3 for storage? That would have been 7 hours of downtime for my app too. Hopefully the beta testers weren’t too pissed off. Hopefully I wasn’t showing a demo of it to anyone.
This is why some of the hype over services like these are over-blown. You simply cannot build a business on a service over which you have no control. That control doesn't need to be physical, of course - lots of things are manufactured from parts that come from all over (just in time manufacturing). You think companies that build that way don't have service level agreements in place with their suppliers?
Having a child get into middle school is an excellent way to learn just how much you've forgotten. I taught math at the secondary level years ago, and yet - when my daughter came to me with some simple (7th grade) geometry problems, I discovered just how much had leached out of my brain over the years. Use or lose it applies pretty darn well to knowledge.
On the other hand, I have a tool at my disposal that past generations of parents didn't - the web and search engines.
I managed to pare my reading list down some while I was on the road - I finished three of the books I've been plowing through:
The first two are part of my continued history reading - the Wedgwood book is both deeply fascinating and deeply disturbing. If ever there was a time for the phrase "All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing", it was that era in Central Europe. Throughout the petty kingdoms that then made up Germany, there were multiple possible paths to peace throughout the time of that war; none were ever taken, as there was always temporizing or possible princely advantage.
The second book was really interesting. Taken from contemporary Arab chronicles, it shows how the deeply split Arab world saw (and responded to) the crusades. The short answer is, they did not respond well, initially. The Islamic Empire had long since split up into multiple independent feifdoms, and many of them were at war when the Europeans first arrived. It's an eye opening account, especially if you've only ever seen the history from the Western side.
The third book was far lighter, but - ironically enough- I had more trouble getting into it. I first started reading it a year ago, and put it down. The story is actually quite interesting, but it's slow to develop. It picked up speed at the halfway point though, and I really liked the sections on the non-humans. There's some good commentary in the book on what can happen when you think the horizons are closed, and everything that can be discovered has been. In that sense, the book reminded me somewhat of "Infinity Beach", by Jack McDevitt.
Next up, I'm switching gears a bit - I've just received "Freakonomics", by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. We'll see how that goes.
It's reassuring to know that Microsoft isn't the only company out to hose me off for not having the "correct" technology mix - the new hi-def DVD players are going to ship with the same kind of stupidity embedded: If you don't have the right cable, then you'll get a downgraded picture. So like PVP-OPM, you'll have:
These people can all go... somewhere. I see no reason to replace my perfectly good HD capable TV, and Hollywood's fantasy fears about piracy aren't convincing me. When you have a product that doesn't give me the finger, let me know.
Smalltalk Solutions 2006 is coming up fast - the show starts in 3 weeks. There's still plenty of time to register - and don't forget to contact us about the STIC discount! Registrations gets you into all of the talks, both LW/NW and StS - including tutorials. For instance, Blaine's got an interesting sounding talk:
Smalltalk has a highly reflective and lively environment that can be used to augment traditional unit testing. It allows us to do things that are only dreamed about in other environments. We can easily question and interrogate code or any aspect of the system. It is not hard to implement tests to ensure code correctness, enforce metrics, and scrutinize resource allocations. You can be creative and take the stance of using tests to stop and minimize the cost of change. There is a large variety of characteristics that can be tested, from run-time correctness to code quality. This presentation will give real world concrete examples in Smalltalk.
See you in Toronto!
It's the end of the sports drought for me - I've never followed basketball or hockey, so once football season wraps up, it's just dead until April. It's back to baseball though - the season is finally starting. If the Yankees pitching staff can hold up, they'll do fine - but that's a big if. When your ace is only two years younger than I am, it's not a positive sign, IMHO.
I will vote for whoever, Democrat or Republican, promises to get rid of Daylight Savings Time. In the alternative, I will vote for whoever implements my wife's plan whereby Fallback occurs on Monday morning at 8am and Spring Forward occurs on Friday afternoons at 4pm.
Heh.
Rogers points out that the movie industry can be every bit as stupid as the music industry:
Six studios have begun selling movie downloads this week on Movielink . Purchased movies can be kept forever for computer viewing and burned to DVD but can't be watched in DVD players. There's also a limit on the number of computers that can view a movie, and the service and site require Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.
Prices for new movies are higher than DVDs -- Nicolas Cage's The Weather Man sells for $27 on Movielink and $22 on Amazon.Com . So you're getting less convenience at more cost, though no one had to package, ship or stock the movie.
Hmm. I can pay extra for something that I can't watch on my HD capable, 51" TV? Or I can pay less and watch it there. I think the morons at Movielink need to look up the phrase "value proposition".
Update: Sheesh, I missed the best part. Not only is MovieLink Windows specific, it's IE specific. Here's the text you get in Firefox:
Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must use Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, which supports certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies.
Click here to get the latest version of Internet Explorer. We do not support Mozilla or Netscape. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
So it's a useless service that only runs in the least capable browser on the market. All that and you can't use your stock DVD player. Such a deal!
Bryce Kampjes announces a Smalltalk party in London (UK), April 8:
We're holding a Smalltalk party in London on Saturday the 8th, this Saturday. Stephan Taylor will be talking about software process. The same Stephan Taylor that wrote "Pair Programming with the Users". Oli Bye will be demoing SqueakNOS, Smalltalk running as it's own OS. And I'll be talking about Exupery, a JIT for Squeak.
There are details here.
Hmm - I don't like the look of this weather info for my area:
That's a severe T-Storm warning, and a Tornado watch. Swell :/
Update: A few minutes later, the sky went from daylight to this - and we even got a little hail.
Patrick Logan is pleased that OOPSLA will be in Portland this year, and notes an interesting symposium on the day before the formal conference start:
The day before OOPSLA will be the Dynamic Languages Symposium.
Maybe OOPSLA is worth attending again.
I've been mostly ignoring the hype about the dangers of Avian flu, but I think I might start perking my ears up now that I've been reading "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History". It's a nice background on the run up to the epidemic - the situation of medical science in the US at the time (only just out of the dark ages), and the people who made it that way. That's followed by a description of the how the flu spread - it was greatly helped by the US mobilization for the war. The huge military cantonments that were built for new draftees were ideal breeding grounds.
The scary part of that pandemic was how many young people got killed. Normally, flu kills the weak - the very young, the very old, and those who have compromised immune systems. That one killed people in the prime of life, and the reasons are truly terrifying: apparently, the body's immune system went into overdrive against the virus, and killed the lungs as an unintended side effect. Not in a pleasant way, either - the descriptions sound reminiscent of the symptoms of Ebola.
In most respects, this book is scarier than any horror flick...
This is very cool - Gabe Rivera, the guy behind memorandum, has started up a version of the tracker for baseball. There's already a tech tracker and a politics tracker - now there's one for baseball fans. I am so subscribed :)
BitWorking demonstrates that RSS is not the only point where personal politics enter the syndication space; witness this post on Atom 0.3 vs. 1.0
Financial Times has an article up about the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray war, and seems to be of the opinion that this war is a bad thing for consumers. I disagree - we have two potential paths here, and while Blu-Ray has some technical advantages, the HD-DVD format is going to be vastly cheaper in the near term. What consumers will get is an actual choice as to what they value more. Better than the industry deciding by fiat, IMHO.
My suspicion is that cost will win out in the short term, and that will end up driving the long term. Here's the relevant detail from the story:
And so, the war is on. Toshiba, which has recruited Microsoft and Intel to its camp, is in the middle of a 40-city US tour to promote its HD-DVD format and hopes to steal a march on the competition by shipping the first $499 players to retailers later this month.
Sony, meanwhile along with Philips and Pioneer persuaded Dell, the world’s biggest personal computer maker, and most of the Hollywood studios, to back the rival Blu-ray format it began developing more than a decade ago. Its players are expected to go on sale a few months after HD-DVD and will cost twice as much. Yet the Sony coalition believes its technology is superior. It is also hoping to secure a boost from the November launch of the PlayStation 3 video game console, which has been fitted to play Blu-ray discs and is expected to fly off the shelves.
Unless Sony and its partners can find a way to drop that price, I suspect that the 2X factor will be a killer. The fact that the Blu-Ray will ship in the PS3 won't matter so much IMHO - I seriously doubt that the PS3 will displace the stock DVD player from the stereo component stack. Next Christmas, when the real sales battle starts to pick up, prospective buyers will see one thing: the respective price tags. Technical superiority simply won't trump a 2X difference. If you disagree, step into the Wayback machine and ponder the mid-80's sales figures for plain old DOS IBM clones versus the Macintosh.
Now, I could be wrong - one of the critical backers Sony has (so far) is the movie industry. If the market has tons of Blu-Ray disks, and only a relative handful of HD-DVD disks, things might go the other way - even with the price differential. It will be interesting to watch this play out.
Advance Registration for Smalltalk Solutions 2006 ends April 23rd - the day before the conference. There's a lot of great stuff this year, including the Toronto location with LinuxWorld/NetworkWorld. For instance, Giorgio Ferraris is talking about RAD in Smalltalk - using Cincom Smalltalk:
Smalltalk is an extremely productive environment, this presentation is about a framework for VisualWorks Smalltalk, that allows the development of standard data entry applications at a speed close to using a 4GL, but with an application strongly based over an object-oriented architecture, so, when the play will became hard... The talk is an updated and enhanced version of the one from Smalltalk Solutions 2005. Similar concepts have also been used in the development of Java and C# frameworks. The intended audience is developers and managers facing the day to day dilemma of building fast or building well. Experience in building business applications (in any language) is required.
See you in Toronto!
Doc Searls got a photo of the same storm I blogged about last night. He used a real camera, so his photo is a lot more impressive.
The New York Times got a little over-excited in their description of the "new world of software" offered by web componentry - take this, for instance:
Indeed, blocks of interchangeable software components are proliferating on the Web and developers are joining them together to create a potentially infinite array of useful new programs. This new software represents a marked departure from the inflexible, at times unwieldy, programs of the past, which were designed to run on individual computers.
Hmm - I've seen that promised before - in fact, every new buzzword fad that crosses the industry promises it. The initial hype surrounding Java, for instance, promised a world of interoperable Java components everywhere. What I really like is their quote from Tim Bray, followed by the Times reporter's description of XML:
"These tools are changing the basic core economics of software development," said Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems and one of the designers of a powerful set of Internet conventions known as Extensible Markup Language, or XML, which make it simple and efficient to exchange digital data over the Internet.
Angle brackets to the rescue, apparently. The main gushing is over services like S3, and the various Google applications and Yahoo applications that can be wired together using Http APIs. That's cool, sure - but you can't really base your company's future on the free implementation, because you'll end up at the mercy of whatever outages they have - I wrote about that the other day. There's also an over-abundance of confidence in a single business model - the online application that's supported by contextual ads:
Early examples of the trend were tiny companies with significant ideas, like the consumer Internet software start-ups Flickr, a Web-based photo-sharing site, and Del .icio.us, which makes it possible for Web surfers to categorize and share things they find on the Internet. Both were acquired last year by Yahoo.
That's all funded by things like Google's AdSense - and it seems to me that there's a major correction coming in that market, based on the burgeoning threat of click-fraud. Especially when the ultimate vendor seems to benefit from the fraud (not by propagating it, more as a side-effect). Eventually, the people buying ads are going to start wondering exactly what it is they are paying for. When that happens, the business model behind a lot of the free services out there are just going to implode.
Of course, no article like this is complete without some mention of how this new trend is going to save us all from offshoring:
Even more striking is the suggestion that a broad transformation of software development might reverse the trend of outsourcing to India, where highly skilled but low-paid programmers are plentiful.
Hmm - if this trend is leading to more easily funded startups, with people working out of their homes, then how exactly does that "reverse the trend"? If distance and location end up mattering less, then cost would be one of the leading factors in any funding decision, seems to me. Not so, say the experts:
"Transforming the economics of software development completely transforms the rationales for outsourcing," Michael Schrage, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher, wrote in the current issue of CIO magazine.
Given the argument being advanced in this article, I don't see how. If I can hire people from anywhere, and they can build me a new application by mashing up pre-existing components using net APIs - why wouldn't I just go with the lowest cost provider of the programming expertise? Either Schrage hasn't thought that through, or the Times decided not to add his further thinking on the subject. As I read the article, that assertion makes no sense.
Ultimately, what puts the larger vendors at risk isn't the web, or Ajax, or software components - it's a couple of different things. In the case of Microsoft, it's simply their size, and the way they've been building software. By trying to bundle everything into Windows, they've created a huge, unmaintainable ball of mud that no one understands. Realistically, they need to do what Apple did with OS X - throw it all away and start over. I'm not sure that they have the intestinal fortitude to do that though, and they'll end up suffering for that.
Sun? Their problem is even simpler. By introducing Java a decade ago, they commoditized their entire market. Sun's business was built off selling proprietary hardware at profitable prices. What Java did was destroy most of the rationale for buying Sun hardware. Why buy from Sun when you can "deploy anywhere"? When Sun wonders why commodity intel boxes have overtaken them on the server side, they can have a look at the Java division for their answer.
As to IBM, they've adapted to the emerging software trends better than either MS or Sun. They had the disease that Microsoft is suffering from in the 80's, and they seem to have learned from that painful experience.
So is this a new world of software components that "changes everything"? I don't think so. During the 90's, Microsoft Windows was the OS on the vast majority of desktops, and they crreated a working component model - COM. A large set of components emerged that could be wired together by end developers building Windows applications. Which is to say, we've been here before.
Update: Dare Obasanjo has a much more concise summary of the article:
I've heard that it's hard to take newspapers seriously because when they write about things you are knowledgeable about they get it wrong. John Markoff does an excellent job of proving that old saw right.
About the size of it
Have a look at this thread on tech.memeorandum - developers sure don't like it when the dread term "user" is applied to them. No, "users" are those poor saps who have to deal with the applications we throw over the fence. Having the shoe land on our feet makes it all different, somehow.
"The Sopranos" may be fiction, but it sure sounds like Paulie is advising the thugs at the RIAA on tactics - in a settlement discussion with an RIAA goon, a college student relates the following:
But as much as I tried to argue that I was in as unique a situation as someone with medical expenses, there was no getting through. Bowie even had the audacity to say, “In fact, the RIAA has been known to suggest that students drop out of college or go to community college in order to be able to afford settlements.”
"That's a nice college education you got going there, kid. We wouldn't want anything to happen to it".
There's still time for Advance Registration for Smalltalk Solutions 2006. There are lots of great talks - say you aren't that familiar with Smalltalk, and would like to know where it's being used, as well as how and why? Well, Martin McClure of Gemstone is covering just that:
What do people actually do with Smalltalk? This fast-paced survey with demonstrations visits uses of commercial, open-source, and research Smalltalk technologies in commerce, government, education, entertainment, and manufacturing. We'll see uses of Smalltalk large (hundreds of gigabytes) and small (less than 100K bytes), running on or embedded in a wide variety of hardware. The short demonstrations -- totaling more than half the seminar time --will include a virtual juggling system and the Seaside web application framework.
See you in Toronto!
Well, I got taken in by the spam job on our Wiki yesterday. 15 or so pages were modified, and I didn't see anything when I eyeballed them - so I left them alone. As it happens, there was a ton of pharmaceutical spam buried in each modified page, using a hidden div. I hadn't noticed, but one my colleagues did and fixed things.
I have a script I use for mass restoration when this sort of thing comes up; I guess I should have used it. One more nasty trick to keep an eye out for...
HDBeat is reporting that the PS3 will be selling for around $600:
That's what a few French websites are reporting, apparently stated by Sony Europe boss George Fornay in a radio interview. That would convert to roughly $613 American dollars and make the PS3 the most expensive videogame console out by quite a bit. He apparently confirmed that the Playstation was delayed to work out Blu-ray copy protection issues (that we still haven't seen a final design for the controller, system or a finished game does not appear to have been a contributing factor), and that it should launch in the range of 499 to 599 euros. He justified the high price by saying it was cheap for a platform capable of reading Blu-ray discs.
That will be interesting to watch. For one thing, they'll be losing $200 to $300 on each console sale - and that's way more than Microsoft is losing per console (never mind that Nintendo is in the black on per console sales). Additionally, $600 gets above the level of "easy disposable" income spending - it gets into the "we'll have to talk about it" level of spending for families.
Take the GameCube, for instance - it started at $150, and now goes for $99. At either level, there are a lot of middle income people willing to buy on impulse at that level. At $600? That goes beyond impulse for most middle income folks, IMHO. It's going to be a tough launch, IMHO.
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