Industry Misinterpretations Episode 16: Predictions

I haven't listened to the podcast yet,  but no mention of Linux on the Desktop as an alternative path "up" from 2000/XP?  I guess that hype burned twice as bright and half as long.

Anyway, we can talk about the Mac as an "alternative path up" when Apple licenses OSX out.  Until then, fughetaboutit.

The "serious" pushback on the copy protection "madness" is only interesting in the blogosphere world.  The rest of the world could care less.

Now that I've listened to the podcast...

I noticed that you kind of left yourself an out regarding that prediction - specifically "C-style languages".  One thing about JRuby is that Sun executives are now reduced to running the company by what blogosphere world thinks - not a good sign.  Sun is late to the party as usual, and really needs "official" alternative languages on the JVM, but they're fooling themselves if they think there is going to be some big uptake of JRuby.  Ain't gonna happen.  The whole dynamic typing languages "revival" is not happening (and this is from someone with a couple different Scheme implementations sitting in front of him).  

You really have to look at what Microsoft is doing - and especially Microsoft research.  Haskell, F#, and even some of the stuff going into C# 3.0 is the future.  As far as Java is concerned, "Java Joe" (read all about him at JavaLobby) doesn't even want closures, so they are in no way capable of handling something kind of complicated like Ruby.

What the JVM desperately needs is something like Boo (boo.codehaus.org) - a wrist friendly, type-inferenced language that has the ease on the eyes of Python, with dynamic typing if you want and a little macro system. 

Comment by James Robertson

On Macs - All I figure is that Macs will start getting considered - not there will be grand movement. On DRM - I think you misread things, badly. Take a look at the Zune/PlaysForSure debacle, for instance. I wouldn't want to be one of the poor schmoes who bought into the first MS DRM scheme, only to see it abandoned. Likewise, why should I trust them on the new one?

I don't know why Macs would be considered anymore this year than last year.  Nothing will have changed.    I've got a Unix background, so personally I would love to have a Mac that I can dual-boot with Windows.   I'll pay the hardware tax to run OSX, but I'm still not happy about the choice on the notebooks, which is basically all I buy these days.  And now that Vista is about to be released to the general public, there's probably less of a reason to get Macs then say 2 years ago.

I'm admittedly ignorant about DRM issues.  But considering that I'm a bit of a tech geek, I would suppose that the vast majority of people are even more ignorant than me.  Can I play mp3s on Vista?  I don't really care about Zune.   And considering that most people don't care what b.s. laws that the government throws at them (in the name of safety or whatever crap reason), it's doubtful that they'll care about any DRM on Vista.   And I suppose Macs will or do have their own DRM mechanism.  Hell, OSX is a DRM product.

"And now that Vista is about to be released to the general public, there's probably less of a reason to get Macs then say 2 years ago."

 Why?

The Apple site is now reading "The first 30 years were just the beginning. Welcome to 2007."

Apparently MacWorld 2007 is going to announce a bit of something next week.