I think this headline at ComputerWorld says it all:
India Aims to Tame Soaring IT Wages
Apparently, companies are starting to look elsewhere for cost savings. Give those spots 6-24 months, then: rinse, repeat.
As always, the best answer is to hire the best employees you can.
Looks like the marketing department at Fox is very, very slow on the uptake. After seeing Sony take damage from their CD rootkit fiasco, it's been reported that they are shipping DVD's with similar copy-protection schemes:
The Settec Alpha-DISC copy protection system used on the DVD contains user-mode rootkit-like features to hide itself. The system will hide it's own process, but does not appear to hide any files or registry entries. This makes the feature a bit less dangerous, as anti-virus products will still be able to scan all files on the disk. However, as we note in our article on rootkits, it's not that uncommon for real malware to only hide their processes.
Our message to software companies producing any software (not just copy protection products) is clear. You should always avoid hiding anything from the user, especially the administrator. It rarely serves the needs of the user, and in many cases it's very easy to create a security vulnerability this way.
What is it that people say about doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result?
Mark Baker is right - BPEL wasn't really built for the web, and I seriously doubt that it'll be a player in the future. It reeks of all the same things that were wrong with the plethora of CORBA services back in the day - overly complex gunk that no one wants to figure out.
We are in the process of getting ObjectStudio 8 ready for early access - if having a look at that (and getting us feedback) is of interest to you, then send me email. I intend to push out a screencast on this later eventually, but in the meantime, here are a few screenshots. First, ObjectStudio running inside VW - click through for a larger image:
Now for the cool stuff - I loaded the OLE support into ObjectStudio, using the ObjectStudio tools, and then loaded a demonstration - hat tip to Mark Grinnell (our lead OST engineer). Here's what the ObjectStudio launcher looks like after loading those - a little unfamiliar to VW users:
Now, launching the IE demo - that pops up a window with the IE HTML control embedded in it. Again, you can click through for a larger image:
Now, that's running inside the ObjectStudio image, which itself is running inside VisualWorks. Which means that - once this is ready (and I need to emphasize that we at early alpha levels right now) - you'll be able to make use of this as either an ObjectStudio or a VisualWorks developer. Very cool stuff. Here's the ObjectStudio code, seen in the Refactoring Browser (again, click through for a larger image):
Via Tim Bray I ran across David Sifry's latest post on the state of the blogosphere. The most interesting take away is what Tim highlighted - the "magic middle":
The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.
That's a much larger group of people commenting on things than you could find 15 years ago via traditional media outlets. Instead of the handful of voices on talk radio or in small publications, we now have this large (and growing) set of communities. That's a big change, IMHO.
Chris Pirillo thinks that partial feeds protect against spam usage of your content:
Heh. Yeah. That's what happens when you give 'em full RSS feeds, dude. Can't have it both ways, and I think you're finally seeing the frustration that many of us realized well over a year ago. I told you that full RSS feeds are idealistic, and that partial feeds are the easiest way to protect yourself from scraping and whatnot.
Umm, not so much. Scraping HTML is trivial - For sites I really want to read, but can't be bothered to visit in a browser, I create a local (file) feed. Then I add that to BottomFeeder. If you think the spammers aren't already doing that, you aren't thinking hard enough :)
Here's a funny picture - the trees are budding, and snow has piled up using the buds as "baskets":
We got over a foot of the white stuff on Saturday/Sunday, and we went out to enjoy it. Today, schools were closed, so my daughter and a friend went back to the local hill - I went with them, because I really like sledding. I remembered to take a few pictures today - here's one of my daughter partly buried - she and her friend wanted to make it look like a sledding accident:
Here's another one of the same thing, while I was at the top of the hill:
Then I took two shots of the girls heading down the hill on the toboggan:
Bob Congdon has a post up on the difficulties of cleaning up external resources in Java if exceptions get thrown while they are in use. He points to a C# feature that ensures that such resources will be finalized, the using statement:
using (TextWriter tw = File.CreateText("log.txt")) {
tw.WriteLine("Foo");
// Other stuff
}
Apparently, the compiler expands that. In Smalltalk, we don't need a language feature for that - we have the #ensure: method. It looks like this:
stream := 'someFile' asFilename writeStream.
[stream nextPutAll: 'Foo'.
"other code here"]
ensure: [stream ifNotNil: [stream close]].
#ensure takes a block (closure) as an argument, and will execute regardless - if there are exceptions inside the block it's sent to or not. It's a very clean way to make sure that necessary code runs, when you aren't particularly concerned with the exact nature of any exceptions that pop up.
Mark Baker quotes Patrick Logan from the service-oriented architecture list:
I ran a short experiment with some folks recently testing interoperability among various WS-* toolkits. What a pain. Very little time was available for actual business value. Then we replaced those WS-* toolkits with simple HTTP clients and servers. After a relatively short amount of time learning the specific APIs we were very soon spending nearly all of our time on business value. We paused periodically to examine what we'd lost by moving from WS-* to pure HTTP. We've yet to identify one thing of importance to us.
Heh. We've been here before - with the OMG and CORBA. Interop problems, confusing specs - the whole nine yards.
James Governor has noticed the same thing that many of us have - Blogger is the cesspool of the blogosphere, providing a huge number of the splogs that are out there. Yes, servives like Feedster could do a better job of filtering; but they wouldn't have to if Google just did some basic gatekeeping:
So far my evidence is just a quick snapshot, rather than something I have measured. But suffice to say of the spam blogs crudding up technorati for me, Blogger was the source of more than 50% of the total. Some myspace, one Wordpress.
Maybe its just me, but to my mind causing pain at registration, and growing the splogosphere faster than anybody else, just ain't right. So Adwords is open to clickfraud, and now Blogger is emerging as the spam bloggers friend... Come on Google you can surely do better. Why not put some of those geniuses to work solving existing customer problems rather than inventing the future behind the GoogleWall?
One of my larger appetites over the last few years has been history - I've been reading a large variety of books, and those books have been concerned with a many different periods and countries. I've read about World War I, World War II, the middle ages - and I've always been fascinated by the US Civil War.
Recently, I've focused on something that has more relevance to current events - the history of the Islamic world, and the Crusades. I haven't studied this topic in any depth, so I would hardly call myself more than passingly informed at this point. To get some feeling for the Crusades, I read "The Crusades: A History" (second edition), by Jonathan Riley-Smith. I'll have to read other sources to get a wider view - this one is an overview of Crusading within the Catholic church, starting with the First Crusade in 1097, and ending with the fall of Malta (and the Hospitaller Knights) to Napolean in 1798. It's a broad view, and the sections on the active missions to the Middle East jump around a lot. As well, following the various noble family lineages gets to be very hard - there were parts of the book I had a lot of trouble getting through.
Still, it was a good introduction, and I intend to look for more source material; I'd be interested in any recommendations. After that, I was interested in learning more about the history and ideology of Islam - I've heard good things about Bernard Lewis, so I picked up two short books:
I've gotten about halfway into that first one, and yes, I do intend to seek out other sources. I still read plenty of "trashy" action novels, mostly while flying. I've found that I like learning about history more though; I'm enjoying Grant's Memoirs right now, for instance. One thing I found interesting there - he consistently referred to the Union forces as the National Army, rather than using the terms Federal or Union. Interesting, but I have no way of knowing whether it was peculiar to him, or to the time he wrote the book (the mid 1880's). I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in the US Civil War.
Bryce Kampjes has announced a new UK based Smalltalk group. Check here for more information, and to join the mailing list.
Well, looks like the calendar finally remembered what season it was - we got a significant snowfall last night. The most amusing aspect of it was the weather guy on channel 2 (Baltimore), Norm Lewis. He had initially said that this was going to be a non-event, leaving us with 2 inches of slushy snow. Then last night, he was trying to hang on to the tatters of that prediction, by saying we'd see the "low side" of 6" - 10" - this when everyone else was saying 8" - 12". Anyway, here's a picture I grabbed last night:
Not a great picture, but that's the quality of my camera phone. Now the results, as of 11:30 this morning, when the snow had long since stopped:
The roads are clear - it's been well above freezing for days before this storm. So there's just driveway clearance and sledding to look forward to.
Doc Searls got a comment on his take that there aren't any "gatekeepers" in the blogosphere:
...to be told that a page sitting out on the end of the Long Tail is somehow equal to that sort of megaphone, because everybody could *in theory* read it. They won't, and to say otherwise starts to become downright cruel.
To which Doc responded:
I have this idea that the blogosphere is the one place in the world - or perhaps an entirely new world, or a part of a new world, created on the Net - where there is no need for class, for caste, for gates or keepers of anything.
I have a simpler answer: Life isn't fair. Some people have more traffic than others, and - like any other medium - first movers got something of an advantage. There's really nothing that can be done about it.
Rogers Cadenhead points out the downside of user scripts in a network application - they can run amok and actually cost people money:
A Radio UserLand user on Comcast in Monterey, Calif., is apparently a big fan of Cole. His copy of Radio keeps requesting that 5.5-megabyte podcast over and over, as frequently as every 10 seconds. In the last week alone, he's consumed 12.13 gigabytes of my server's bandwidth by downloading the file 2,365 times.
I don't know why this is happening -- it could be a bug in Radio UserLand or a UserTalk script run amok, either by accident or by design. The fact that it's coming from a fixed IP address suggests it's not malicious.
Never mind the tool in question - it doesn't really matter...
End of the week log time - let's have a look at the BottomFeeder downloads - up from last week, at 248 per day:
| Platform | BottomFeeder Downloads |
| Windows | 618 |
| Sources | 314 |
| Update | 271 |
| Linux x86 | 135 |
| Mac X | 111 |
| Mac 8/9 | 100 |
| CE ARM | 68 |
| Solaris | 33 |
| HPUX | 22 |
| Windows98/ME | 19 |
| Linux Sparc | 18 |
| AIX | 11 |
| Linux PPC | 7 |
| CE x86 | 5 |
| SGI | 4 |
| Source Script | 3 |
| ADUX | 1 |
Heh. I still have people downloading that ancient (3.2 based) Alpha build. On to the HTML blog page accesses:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 44.2% |
| Internet Explorer | 30.1% |
| Everest/Vulcan | 9.8% |
| Google Bot | 6.6% |
| MSN Bot | 4.5% |
| Other | 2.7% |
| Nutch | 1.1% |
| BottomFeeder | 1% |
I've carved some of the bigger pieces of "other" out. Looks like there's a new crawler out there that isn't that well behaved. On to the RSS tool usage:
| Tool | Percentage of Accesses |
| Mozilla | 23.8% |
| BottomFeeder | 17.5% |
| BlogLines | 8.7% |
| Net News Wire | 8.6% |
| Safari RSS | 5% |
| Google Feed Fetcher | 4.7% |
| Other | 4.2% |
| Everest/Vulcan | 4% |
| Internet Explorer | 3.4% |
| SharpReader | 2.5% |
| RSS Bandit | 2.4% |
| Planet Smalltalk | 2% |
| BlogSearch | 1.5% |
| NewsGator | 1.5% |
| NewsOutlook | 1.5% |
| Magpie | 1.4% |
| MSN Bot | 1.2% |
| JetBrains | 1.2% |
| Feed Reader | 1.1% |
| Liferea | 1% |
| News Fire | 1% |
| Feed Demon | 1% |
| Google Bot | 1% |
| Java | 1% |
Between BlogLines and Google's Feed fetcher, it looks like the amount of aggregation going to online readers is rising. It will be interesting to see what happens when IE 7 and its integrated RSS reader goes into widespread use.
Scoble busts Slashdot (and others) who reported that Vista won't run on anything but really high end hardware:
I use Vista on a machine (a Toshiba Tablet M205) that can’t display Glass and Vista runs just fine, thank you very much! Geez, what do we have to do to get some accuracy in reporting here?
I was tempted to post on that, but thought it sounded "out there".
In all the hype about Vista, just once I'd like to see Scoble address PVP-OPM - how does that do anything other than screw me over? Instead, I see this:
So, when I introduced Windows Vista, I didn’t bring a script. I didn’t check with the marketing department on the “talking points” that I should cover. What did I do? I invited Chris Pirillo to come and have a conversation with me about Windows Vista. At the end I had several requests for betas, and lots of compliments.
It's nice that people seem to like it. I'd really like to hear some justification for the nastier side of it though.
Dave Zatz has a commenter who thinks that HBO's request for copy never doesn't matter, because it's for video on demand:
Don’t suppose you guys actually read this through… it’s asking that SVOD services be set as “Copy Never”. It’s not asking that normal broadcast TV be marked this way. Because VOD is Video on Demand, there’s no reason to record it to your DVR, you simply order it from the VOD screens. The reason for this is because HBO, and the cable provider can get metrics on activity as well as charge for certain events over and over. Currently with Comcast, when you pay for HBO as a premium channel for normal broadcast, you also get HBO VOD free.
Hey Andrew - either you haven't actually used Comcast's on demand feature, or you really, really like shoddy services. As I said earlier today:
We've used HBO On-Demand to catch up on shows we like on HBO, but we usually run them through the ReplayTV. Why? Because the on-screen controls HBO offers are horrid, and hard to use. The replay offers a better experience, so we use that.
But hey, apparently you're just fine using shoddy services instead of nice ones you already own, because... well, I don't know why. There are plenty of reasons to record VOD to a PVR - the primary one being the crap controls offered.
Heh. "What about the Children" finds its way into the Little League set:
The Lowell Spinners say if Little League and other youth leagues agree to change the name of their Yankees teams to the Spinners, they'll pay for the new uniforms.
The Spinners are a Class A affiliate of the Red Sox, archrival of the Yankees.
Spinners' general manager Tim Bawmann says children in New England are often devastated when they are assigned to be on a team called the Yankees.
I don't know. I think I'd be devastated to have to play under the name "Spinners" :)
Peter Williams addresses the threading issues raised by Tim Bray here - I commented on that awhile back, here. I like Peter's take:
The threading issue is the one that interests me the most. I think that Mr. Bray is right that hardware threading is quickly becoming an important issue. In the near future most machines will support significant levels of true, hardware level, concurrency. But I think the shared memory native threading model that Java has is completely untenable.
Even vm (green) threads, which are well understood and have nice uniform semantics are difficult to use correctly. Once you throw in the vagaries of native threads you have morass of complexity that is practically unbearable. Worst of all, the usefulness of most of the techniques we have to help manage software quality, like automated unit tests and continuous integration, are inversely proportional to the number of threads in the application.
The thing you want to consider is which resource is more expensive - the hardware or the people-ware. Computers and networking equipment are only getting cheaper. People, on the other hand, are not having an easier time grokking multi-threaded code as time goes by. Which problem is easier to solve? Running more processes on the multiple CPUs/cores present, or getting people to accurately and safely thread applications within a single memory space?
The most important thing to keep in mind here is that, in the long run, it is always better (read: cheaper) to use extra computing resources to make problems more tractable for the humans in the system. For example, we have garbage collectors because it is cheaper to buy a slightly more powerful computer than to have you developer waste time managing their own memory. I am not sure what the best solution to highly concurrent hardware is but I am quite positive it is not Java style threading. My gut tells me that none of the approaches I know for apparent concurrency are going to work well for a highly concurrent application on highly concurrent hardware. If that is the case we will see something new and different as soon as the cool hardware gets into circulation.
That kind of work is one of my higher level priorities for Smalltalk as we move into the future. Java's "answer" is a complete non-answer, as far as I'm concerned.
Here's how to kick up adoption:
But we're still missing the crucial piece to convince the corporate world to ramp up the work-from-home option. I think I've come up with it: technologies to erase the last vestiges of stigma around working from home:
The work channel: A new, high-def Web and satellite channel showing people working 24/7 at their PCs, in cubes, in conference rooms, at companies like yours. Bolted onto the new Windows Vista (or Mac OS X) desktops, this uncloseable window would be your constant reminder that everyone else is hard at work -- and you should be, too.
National grooming ID system: Much like the emergency broadcast system, this nationwide, mandatory-participation remote sensor and dashboard network would allow your co-workers and managers to know your personal grooming status at all times during work hours. Showered? Teeth brushed? Good job shaving, or half-hearted?
Home-office noise cancellation appliance: This industrial-strength, software-upgradeable device would selectively cancel out distracting noise from leaf blowers, screaming kids, Coldplay, whatever. (Actually, the Coldplay feature could have broader applications, in my opinion.)
Web-based alimentation management system: Much like TiVo's home media option, this would be controlled remotely by your spouse or manager -- hopefully not the same person. Basically, it's a huge remote locking system for key distractions like the refrigerator and pantry, tied into a wide-area sensor network to monitor stealth end runs to the local convenience store, and it would work in concert with ceiling-mounted chocolate and pistachio or cashew nut detectors, much like today's smoke alarms.
So that's it. Let me know your thoughts. Gotta run, I hear a dog barking. I mean, I'm getting called into a meeting.
Heh.
Looks like HBO wants to make us all watch their content live. I don't think they realize that what this actually means - a drop in the raw number of people watching their content, period. From Ars Technica, HBO's new filing with the FCC asks for:
By way of refresher, the analog hole legislation breaks broadcast content into four “Technical Content Protection Responses,” each with increasingly stringent restrictions. At the bottom is No Technical Protection Applied, meaning that the programming would be treated like every other transmission today. From there we move to Copy One Generation Content and Copy Unlimited No Redistribution Content which would allow limited recording and copying. HBO’s proposal would put its programming into the category of Copy Prohibited Content, which makes copying and recording of any kind verboten.
See, here's the problem. As PVR's spread, people find that they want to watch more and more of their content through them. We now have 4 different devices recording content from TV. We've used HBO On-Demand to catch up on shows we like on HBO, but we usually run them through the ReplayTV. Why? Because the on-screen controls HBO offers are horrid, and hard to use. The replay offers a better experience, so we use that.
People who have PVR's now are not likely to drop back to live TV. Other than sports, I watch almost everything through one of our PVRs. If HBO gets their wish, I'll simply stop watching HBO content, because I can't be bothered to watch it when it's convenient for them. I doubt I'll be the only one, either.
I'd guess that SGI's woes are not good news for intel and their rapidly fading hopes for the iTanium:
SGI issued its most ominous regulatory filing to date, warning that a bad 2006 could force the former high-flyer into bankruptcy.
In order to improve its business, SGI will consider measures ranging from axing or selling off product lines to pursuing "a strategic partner or acquirer." The hardware maker will basically look at anything and everything to remain a going concern.
SGI has been one of the last backers of the chip - that looks to be ending.
I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I'm speaking at Smalltalk Solutions 2006 - I'll be going over the various issues I've had with this blog server, and how I've addressed them. See you there!
Sam Gentile (quoting Andy Hunt, co-author of "Programming Ruby") on Ruby:
When people ask me what attracts me to Ruby, I have two answers:
First, more than any other language I’ve used, it stays out of your way . You don’t have to spend any effort “satisfying the compiler” as you would in C++, or even Java. These languages have an awful lot of noise and verbosity. You get used to it of course, but it’s pretty wearing over time.
Second, I can type in an absurd amount of code in Ruby and have it work the first time. Not 2-3 passes resolving any syntax issues, not 4-5 passes tracking down a bug or two. It just works. Ruby’s not perfect, by any means, it’s got dark corners to the language just like every other language. But it has a lot fewer of them. For the great majority of projects, the great majority of the time, it just works."
I'd say exactly the same thing about Smalltalk, and the syntax is more lightweight: 5 reserved words, 2 operators. Try it yourself!
Here's an excellent post on development and tool choices - don't take the stupid no for an answer when the subject of Smalltalk comes up. The post in question is about Lisp, but the same answer applies:
As if a programmer can't think for himself. When you don't have any additional budget at all and you think Delphi would fit the current problem, then you are out of luck. You have to pay for Delphi. Same goes for some other tools. So you have to find another way to solve your problems.
There's a strictly Java only policy at the shop you are working? Don't waste your time thinking about how cool it could be to quickly code something in Ruby.
But when the only reason holding you back using Common Lisp is the doubt if other programmers could pick up when you leave, or support you in maintaining the code …
He explained his thinking in a prior post:
Every now and then I read a Usenet posting or blog entry about the somewhat frightening question from management: "Will someone else be able to work on your Common Lisp code?"
Then most people explain why they had to say "no".
You all know the reasons why they think they have to give this answer. But are the reasons really valid?
I don't think so. It is the job of a programmer to work with different tools. Programming languages are such tools, among others. It is expected that a Java programmer can learn the Eclipse IDE within a few days even if he was a long time user of Netbeans. A programmer has to use many tools he wouldn't choose by himself. Do you think most of them really like writing their e-mails at work with Outlook? :-)
If the other developers can't pick up the language used to write an application in, then I'd say that you hired the wrong developers. Unless you work for a vendor, shops that work exclusively in one language are very, very rare. Heck, our staff, in developing the Smalltalk products, has to work in C, C++, and C# (VM, browser plugins, .NET interop). They also need to do minimal work in Java (SOAP/CORBA/etc interop).
Planet Squeak has some news on the Smalltalk front: A new (Spanish Language) book on Squeak, by Diego Gomez Deck.
Ralph Poole has some complaints about Microsoft:
I am sick of Channel 9, Robert Scoble, and the self-congratulatory Microsoft bloggers who mask their lack of solutions with betas and “naked conversations”. Yes, I do think that Microsoft needs to connect with its customers, but vacuous conversations among the "A" listers does not yield products that have value. How hard is it to create a portal in which people can keep up with their RSS feeds? How hard is it to create a browser that has tabs, is secure, and performs well? How hard is it to create a webmail platform that connects to Outlook? Does it take a visionary like Ray Ozzie to see that the read/write web is evolving quickly before everyone’s eyes? Why aren’t Microsoft’s customers even more demanding than they are? Is it because we are so satisfied with the applications that have evolved over the years that we are willing to wait for Vista and the next version of Office?
Well, it's harder to do any of those things when you've spent the last decade building up cross dependencies between all of your products. Why do you think Vista is late, and has nothing (other than a gift to the DRM lovers) new in it? Because they are working in a huge ball of mud that is hard to push in any direction.
This is why, unlike a lot of people, I wasn't worried about MS bundling everything under the sun. I knew that eventually, they'd hit this brick wall.
Via Doc Searls, I see that BellSouth is making some headway in the "Tony Soprano" approach to network access:
BellSouth's new business model, a slightly more polite form of the kind of extortion practiced by Tony Soprano, is starting to pay off. The company says it is in negotiations with several Web sites willing to pay extra fees to BellSouth for more bandwidth than it provides to other sites.
BellSouth says that it shouldn't have to bear the cost of providing bandwidth for big sites like Google. Instead, the sites should pay for them. But BellSouth ignores an inconvenient fact --- it doesn't bear those costs; its customers do. So BellSouth gets to double-dip.
If BellSouth is finding that network access costs more, they need to up their subscription charges - not silently screw over their customer base by making the net worse.
EGM interviewed Bill Gates about the upcoming Nintendo Revolution:
In the discussion with EGM, Gates expressed his doubts over whether or not Nintendo was taking the right steps with its audience. Gates concern however, is not dumbfounded. Because of the unique controller, the Revolution will tend to require somewhat unique games that are designed to be enjoyed using a different method of control and interaction. What this means for developers who were planning to bring games across platforms is yet unknown.
From the interview, Gates said:
"Sometimes that makes them incredibly right and sometimes that makes them incredibly wrong. They're certainly making a different bet in terms of how much they're putting into the graphics this time. I do think there is a question as to whether they can get outside the young age bracket at all. That's been tough for them."
Well, there's a parallel query they might ask Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo has been profitable with their consoles for years now (even though their market penetration is smaller than Sony's and MS'). How long can those two continue to attack the same demographic while losing money on every console sold?
Bob Congdon asks a few questions about the impact Eclipse is having on the market for development tools:
Eclipse is a terrific Java IDE. Its plugin architecture is superb. And it's free. Apparently that "free" part is having some negative consequences. According to The Register, Borland is dumping their Java and Windows IDE business to focus on the software delivery lifecycle. Why? Borland has been badly hit by the rise of "free" software tools, notably the open source Eclipse Foundation . Another article from The Register asks can IntelliJ IDEA can survive the Eclipse onslaught? IntelliJ IDEA originated a lot of Java refactoring features. Now they're available for free in Eclipse. That's great for developers. But what about tools vendors? One of the goals of Eclipse is to provide a platform for vendors to add their own value. But is it a good thing when Eclipse provides these same features for free and, as a result, forces vendors like Borland (and possibly Jetbrains, the developer of IntelliJ) to abandon the tools market?
Well, the interesting thing about Eclipse - to me - is the funding. It's an IBM project for all intents and purposes, and the net effect it's having is to drive Java development tools from the market. An interesting side note on that - I had a call with an analyst grouyp recently, and they told me that the overall vendor revenues for tool sales was up (and growing) - excluding the Java segment of that space, which was down, and sinking.
The amusing part for me is watching the way people react to all this. Microsoft gives away internet explorer, having the unsurprising effect of hurting Netscape - bad. IBM gives away Eclipse, having the unsurprising effect of hurting Java tool vendors - no problem. Apparently, you can inoculate yourself from charges of predation by open sourcing the software in question.
Charles Miller on how the anti-piracy warnings really, really suck:
And by forced, I mean I’m quite literally not permitted to skip it if I want to watch the movie. Thanks to the User Operation Prohibition requirements of the DVD Digital Rights Management system, the DVD consortium prohibits my DVD player from skipping this patronising advertisement no matter how many times I’ve seen it before.
And after you get told over and over again that you wouldn't steal a movie, you think:
“Yes, I would. I’d steal it in a second if the stolen version allowed me to fast-forward past the <expletive deleted> adverts.”
Yeah, this DRM stuff is really encouraging the behavior you want...
Did someone activate the flux capacitor? Barry Manilow is at the top of the album charts!
Scoble wonders why there's always a discrepancy between the number of reported search results and wht you actually see coming back. I think he's kidding here:
Why aren’t there any truth in advertising laws for search engines?
But seriously; why the discrepancy?
Borland is getting out of the application development space:
CUPERTINO, Calif. - Feb 08, 2006 : Borland Software Corporation (NASDAQ NM: BORL), today announced aggressive plans to drive its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) business forward. As part of that plan, Borland has agreed to buy Segue Software Inc. (NASDAQ CM: SEGU), the Massachusetts-based provider of global software quality and testing solutions. In addition, Borland announced plans to seek a buyer for the portion of its business associated with the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), including the award-winning Borland Developer Studio (Delphi®, C++Builder® and C#Builder®) and JBuilder® product lines.
I guess this counts as a move "up the food chain". Borland never escaped from the standard developer license model, and there's simply no way to make money that way in the long term. It gets harder and harder to get anyone to pay support fees, so you have to maintain a rapidly expanding base of new license sales year in, year out. That's simply not sustainable - thus this move on their part.
This is the last batch of photos for today - Suzanne should be sending me the pics she took of some of our staff from a meeting we had in Cincinnati last week, and I'll post those when I get them.
Did someone mention sockets?
Sames is the lead on Pollock and all that flows from it. Between him and Vassili, the VW GUI is in good hands
Sean is moving VisualWave forward, and pitching in wherever else we need him. In between lightning strikes, of course.
Yuwei is our database lead, and is responsible for all the great work that's been going on there of late - both in OST and in VW.
Dave has been in our support group, but has been pitching in on Store and databases of late
Yes, there's more where that last batch came from:
Diane handles Store
There he is, Mr. VM
Kevin is pushing Pollock with Sames, and plugging the holes in the existing GUI before we get there
Len was the lead on Opentalk, and a lot of what's there is his vision. He's now helping Bruce fill the holes in over in documentation-land
Mark Roberts is the guiding hand behind the Smalltalk Doc effort, as well as doing his part on the documentation itself
Martin is the team lead on protocols/Opentalk, and also master of our security frameworks
There were more photos from the meeting; I just ran short of time when I pushed up that last post. Here are a few more:
Alan Knight, Web Toolkit, GLORP, Deployment - you name the thing that needs fixing, Alan's got his keyboard on it
Mr. VisualWorks Support
Bob is the glue that holds the product and the team together.
That part of the product will be documented someday, according to Bruce Boyer
Installation and Packaging are Dave's gig
Doc Searls relates the gist of a conversation between an internet radio aficionado and the RIAA - which explains a lot (to me, at least) about what the RIAA is after: control:
Internet Radio guy: We're on the same side here. We promote artists and sell records. Our station plays deep cuts from the industry's catalog. We put lists of every artist and song we play up on the Web with links to online stores where listeners can buy the CD. We help fight piracy and increase record sales. Why are you trying to kill us?
RIAA guy: You don't understand. We're in the blockbuster business. We don't care about the rest of the catalog. We pay a lot to make and promote blockbuster artists. We have a system for that. You're not in it.
This is why the RIAA hates the iTunes store so much. Never mind that it exposes a large variety of music for sale - in many cases, music that would otherwise not be sold (the same way that Amazon exposes a wider array of books and authors). They dislike the static price, because it puts the consumer in charge of popularity. Instead of "insta-bands" (think "The Monkees", or "Milli-Vanilli", or, more recently, Kelly Clarkson), we get the general public buying what they like after sampling it. That generates an ongoing popularity list that the industry itself doesn't control. Instead of paying radio stations to put "the next big star" into the rotation, they have to actually deal with audience demand.
Boy, they don't like that. They don't like that at all. It's the same dynamic that the movie industry has been dealing with for a long time. TV made basic inroads in the early days, but poor quality signal and the limited number of channels (growing up north of NYC, I had access to more channels than a lot of people: 9). Then came cable. Then came the cable explosion, and VHS, and DVDs. Now we have home theater and 500 channels, with on-demand viewing driven by PVR's.
The movie industry hasn't adapted that well (witness the declining numbers), but they haven't gotten to the same place that music is in: yet. Network bandwidth makes it easy to download music quickly, but that's not true of video content at this point. Which is why you see the level of panic in the music industry peaking, while the MPAA hasn't been quite as aggressive. The music industry sees that the future arrived yesterday, and they'd like nothing better than to sue and legislate it out of existence. Doc's quote makes that very clear.
I figured I'd post some of the pictures from the team meeting - here's a small sampling:
Our engineering manager, Claude Poole. Is it obvious that he's just spent two days herding cats?
The question you have to ask yourself is, why was I smiling so broadly? :)
Our marketing manager, Suzanne. She's a force of nature
Could you ask for a better business partner than this?
Someone just asked John about the OS X Aqua VM!
Why is Kim Thomas so happy? She's at the meeting, instead of dealing with support issues!
Just don't ask Sherry about the plugin API for Mozilla on non-Windows platforms :)
Steve is the man behind an awful lot of the things that make the system tick. If he doesn't know the answer, no one does.
Tamara Kogan is responsible for the network clients and the Web Services implementations.
Every time you notice that something is easier to work with, Vassili was probably at work
I pointed to this article by Brandon Werner a few days ago, but I thought it deserved more attention. First things first - don't let his title mislead you about Cincom Smalltalk; I addressed longevity here a few weeks ago. Bottom line: Cincom is doing a lot of work on both ObjectStudio and VisualWorks. So anyway, let's take a look at some of the high points he brought up:
If you visit their website, you’ll find an active community, conferences and seminars (Smalltalk Solutions Conference looks cool), and even a Smalltalk Digest. Their Smalltalk products are available for free for non-commercial use, and can be downloaded here. Amazingly, there are versions of Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, Solaris and other unixes (ObjectStudio is Windows only, tsk tsk). In fact, the complete system that Cincom has deployed around Smalltalk is breath-taking in it’s completeness.
It includes such 21st century enterprise features like:
- VisualWorks Application Server - with it’s own servlet container and JSP or ASP tags and tag libraries
- Store - Not the best named feature, it’s a complete code management and control application
- VisualWorks itself - with code refactoring and other goodies
- Opentalk - Webservice interoperability with SOAP and UDDI
- Strong Database Integration - table to object integration for all major databases (except MySQL.. a big hole). Hibernate like and powerful.
- Object Engine/Virtual Machine - What it says, a powerful VM that allows for neat immutability that allows for object sharing across VMs as well as better garbage collection algorithms.
Needless to say when I first downloaded it from Cincom’s website after playing with Squeak a great deal, I had no idea I was downloading what amounted to a complete J2EE-like application environment. I didn’t even know it existed. There is a lot to play with, and I’m impressed Cincom has done so much work on the Smalltalk platform.
Yes, the VisualWorks environment in Cincom Smalltalk is a large, enterprise class platform - and we manage it with a much smaller team than Sun allocates to Java, or than Microsoft allocates to .NET. Something to do with higher productivity, perhaps.
I do need to add a few clarifications to the above. MySQL: It's on our radar, and we hope to have support out in the next major release. There are a lot of other priorities on our plate though; in the meantime, there's an implementation in the public store that you should be able to make use of.
The last point about sharing objects across VM's needs clarification as well. We are in the process of delivering 64 bit platforms now, and those new VM's will - when they come into full support - offer shared perm space. That's a reference to one of the zones of memory managed by the VM. The upshot is, objects that are shared (like the base class libraries) will be shareable across mutiple running Smalltalk images. That will give multi-image application servers a smaller footprint on the server, and help with overall scalability. So we don't have that last bullet point yet, but it's coming.
That plays right into the "for now" part of Brandon's title though: we just got done with a set of planning meetings, where we talked about the roadmap for our products. As I write this, engineering is still working on the technical plan that will implement the long term vision. I'll be updating our roadmap to match that over the next few days.
Something else I need to address: Brandon gives us a "tsk, tsk" for the Windows only nature of ObjectStudio. There's an interesting back story to that, actually. Cincom acquired ObjectStudio before VisualWorks, and had a Solaris and HP port almost ready to go when VW came in the door. We dropped those, since VW was (and is) already cross-platform. However, there's nothing wrong with ObjectStudio being Windows only - it has much tighter integration to Windows as a result, and unlike VisualWorks, delivers a few things that are fairly far out on the VW roadmap:
Additionally, we are in the process of doing some work that will make it a whole lot easier for VW developers to access ObjectStudio functionality, and vice-versa. I don't want to get into too much detail about this yet; we are almost ready to give early access to a few interested parties, so that we can get feedback on our direction. It's exciting stuff though, and the engineering team is pretty pumped up about it.
There's another aspect of the article I want to address: the worry about Ruby that Brandon expresses:
It’s hard to predict where the product will be going in the future however, especially with Ruby gaining so much momentum. In fact, as oddly highlighted by Cincom’s Smalltalk Digest itself, a Smalltalk User Group in Omaha, Nebraska recently decided to merge with the Ruby Users Group. This is probably a good indication of where Smalltalk programmers will be going in the future, and it might make Cincom’s Smalltalk an even harder sell to the young hacker evangelists that a language needs to rise above the fray.
Heck, we see this as a good thing. Most Ruby developers have heard of Smalltalk, but haven't necessarily seen it. Ruby has some very nice things going for it, but so does Smalltalk. Having the two communities interact and share experiences is absolutely positive - I expect many Rubyists to look at Smalltalk, and more exposure is great.
We have great plans for our products, and those plans should keep us busy for a long time to come. We have a growing customer base, and an uptick in interest in dynamic languages - that's only going to help us out down the road. I'd say the future looks bright - I'm going to go grab my shades :)
The team is having technical meetings the rest of the week here, but I'm on my way home. It's been a good two days, with a lot of useful talk. I now have significant updating of our roadmap documents to do - I'll be updating what's here over the next couple of weeks. I also plan to explain more of what's happening in the next major release of ObjectStudio - there's some very, very interesting stuff happening there, of interest to ObjectStudio and VisualWorks developers both. Stay tuned!
I received a suggestion from Alan on speeding up parcel loads for BottomFeeder awhile back. I hadn't had time to look at it until just now, but I just tossed together some simple tests. Mind you, I haven't done a solid test on this yet, but the initial results look promising. Here's what a basic parcel load looks like:
Parcel loadParcelFrom: 'someParcelFileHere.pcl'.
Now, in my tests, I used the BGOK parcel (not for any specific reason; it was just a parcel that I didn't have loaded already). So, here's the small script I used for testing. I used code I already had in the PatchFileManager package so that reload exceptions were already caught. The basic code there looks like this:
[[Parcel loadParcelFrom: parcelFile] on: Parcel
parcelAlreadyLoadedSignal, CodeStorageError
do: [:ex | ex resume: true]]
on: DuplicateBindingsError
do: [:ex | ex resume]
That handles the kinds of exceptions that come up on parcel reload, and normally result in a dialog box. With that said, here are the actual tests, with timings:
mgr := UpgradeManager new. one := Time millisecondsToRun: [Parcel loadParcelFrom: '$(VISUALWORKS)\parcels\BGOK.pcl']. wrappedInitialLoad := Time millisecondsToRun: [SystemUtils modifySystem: [Parcel loadParcelFrom: '$(VISUALWORKS)\parcels\BGOK.pcl']]. reload := Time millisecondsToRun: [mgr actuallyLoadParcelFrom: '$(VISUALWORKS)\parcels\BGOK.pcl']. reloadWrapped := Time millisecondsToRun: [SystemUtils modifySystem: [mgr actuallyLoadParcelFrom: '$(VISUALWORKS)\parcels\BGOK.pcl'.]].
The initial load took between 650-680 milliseconds (labeled "one" above). I ran that a few times on clean image starts. Trying the clean load wrapped with SystemUtils modifySystem: [], I got runs that varied between 450-470 milliseconds. Not tons faster, but if you start a system by initially loading a bunch of parcels, it would add up to real savings pretty fast.
Then there's parcel reload - the one labeled "reload" above, which is the way I deliver upgrades in BottomFeeder. That ran around 1600 milliseconds each time I tried it. That's a lot slower than clean load (you have relinking of the system, so that's not unexpected) - but the win came on the wrapped reload - that dropped down to around 1300 milliseconds. Again, not tons, but it adds up if you have more than one incoming update.
With these results in mind, I'm going to create a 7.4 based build of BottomFeeder, and do some testing with these changes. Looks like I could get a cheap win.
Chris Anderson says that the blockbuster movie is dead, because people are watching in more niches:
It's not that people aren't watching films and listening to music, it's that they're watching different films and different music--we're just not following the herd to the same hits the way we used to. I'd guess that most of the decline in box office is due to the rise of the DVD, not a loss of interest in movies. Likewise for music, where the ubiquitous white earbuds suggest that music has never been a bigger part of our culture, despite the fact that CD sales are back to mid-90s levels.
Well, there's definitely some truth to that - there are a larger variety of entertainment choices, and they've been expanding for years - TV, video games, DVD's. However, I think he's calling death prematurely. There have been some actual "everyone goes" blockbusters - The LOTR movies and the "Harry Potter" flicks, to name two. "Chronicles of Narnia" comes to mind as well. The issue, I think, is that Holywood doesn't seem to want to make the kinds of movies that will break out big. Which is fine - it's their money, not mine. I think there's a path to success they could take more often though, and they simply don't want to.
Ed Foster goes back to the well on bad customer support:
Ever since HP instituted its no-recovery-CD policy for some PCs, one thing has always puzzled me. Why would HP do it when any money saved on its Windows OEM deal with Microsoft would surely be spent several times over on the additional support costs, not to mention the bad will of frustrated customers? Recent gripes suggest that one answer might be that HP thought it could charge customers for that support.
"I had to pay HP for system recovery CDs because I wanted to reload everything when my computer was malfunctioning," one reader wrote. "My computer is over four years old, so of course it is no longer under warranty. I could not get the computer to recognize the recovery CDs that HP sent me, so I had to call the HP tech number again. Now HP wants to charge me $45 to tell me how to make the recovery CDs they sent me work. They said this happens a lot with these CDs."
This is an attempt to build out revenues from a perceived cost center - support. The difficulty is, it actually breeds resentment, angry customers - and, with the ability of the net to amplify word of mouth - lost future sales. The question management needs to ask itself is the one that can't be easily quantified: how many future sales are you willing to sacrifice in order to generate a few pennies in support? Sure, the pennies are quantifiable. They are also irrelevant to your long term health.
This is good news for us "Lost" fans:
Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who is currently a writer and supervising producer on ABC's hit SF series Lost, told SCI FI Wire that the current season will end with more than the standard 22 hours of TV.
Time to keep the ReplayTV healthy :)
Here's one take on blog comments:
Say you read a lot of blogs and you're a compulsive commentor (commentator?) on said blogs. You start having difficulty keeping track of which entries you've vastly improved by adding your witty or poignant prose in the comments section. You may be in need of a tool like coComment.
Here's another, from the same blog, next post:
Let's face it. Blogs aren't a conversation. They're a soliloquy. It's just that, sometimes, the audience yells back at the actor.
We have a conflicted view in the blogosphere over this. On blogs with a low flow of comments, they tend to be useful - but as the volume of comments increases, the ratio of signal to noise just gets worse - just as it did on Usenet, Slashdot, and Digg. Pretty much, it's just the way online communities operate.
|
| Subscribe to WebVelocity |
| Visit this group |