rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Thursday, 8 August 2002

"Buy, Lie and Sell High". How investment banks sold the American economy down the river. [Salon.com] Fascinating article and Brett has his own thoughts. For me the best quotes were: Mills argues that the bubble in Internet and technology-related stocks that developed in the U.S. and international stock markets during the late 1990s was evidence, not of the "irrational exuberance" of ordinary investors, but of a complete ethical collapse on the part of major investment banks, brokerage houses and even the Federal Reserve. ie the nut of the problem was that investment banks were never in it for the long term. And Mills' thoughts for the future? Would it happen again? Very hard question. Two or three things. I think [the Internet bubble] was something that the financial markets or institutions liked. In my book, I quoted one industry insider as saying that the problem wasn't the bubble -- it was its aftermath. So there will be tremendous incentives to try to do the same thing again. No matter how much people are now wringing their hands and saying, "Oh, we have a hangover. We shouldn't have done that." The reality is that there are tremendous incentives to try to repeat it because it was so successful for them. Scary. 12:20:28 PM  comment []      It's official - I'm not on dope. Charles did have some insightful comments about Open Source beyond his green clouded view though. His view is that Open Source is best for infrastructure and tools - on top of which you can build commercial applications. Examples include Apple with Darwin under OSX, IBM with Linux under DB2 and Websphere, and uhm, Atlassian with Webwork, OFBiz and OpenSymphony under JIRA. Interesting! Open source is great for commoditising things that deserve to be commoditised - the implementations of standards and protocols, areas of computing where innovation has slowed or stopped, and the building of tools that can be used to build other tools. Closed source vendors could also learn a lot from open source. They're mostly Cluetrain-style lessons. The first lesson would be "Don't lie to your customers". Keep an open bug database. Let people know early what you're working on, and when their pet problem is likely to be fixed. Don't just shovel new releases into the trough under a cloud of hype. Great thoughts mate! 12:09:31 PM  comment []      JSR 109: Web Services Inside of J2EE Apps. Over the past few years, J2EE has emerged as the dominant standard for serving up information on the Web. JSR 109 is one of the latest specifications to expand J2EE support into new areas, effectively defining how a J2EE application server could be expanded to provide native support for deploying, managing, and accessing Web services in a standard fashion. After using Glue this all just looks far too complicated for very little gain. I hope TME can support JSR 109 within Glue without losing any of that beautiful simplicity. 11:55:46 AM  comment []      Edsger Dijkstra passed away a few days ago. He will be best known for his (aptly named) Dijkstra's Algorithm (for graph traversal) and: ... for his wit, eloquence, and way with words, such as in his remark "The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim"; his advice to a promising researcher, who asked how to select a topic for research: "Do only what only you can do"; and his remark in his Turing Award lecture "In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind." 11:53:02 AM  comment []      Anthony has a new blog called All Things Java - added to the Java and J2EE Weblogs list. 11:25:41 AM  comment []      The happiest victim of theft. Ever. Thief gambles with stolen debit card. Wins [The Register] I always said that gambling was good for your health and mental happiness! 11:23:12 AM  comment []      Copyright bill will create vigilantes: critics: American movie, recording and software executives could be prohibited from entering Australia or extradited to face criminal charges if a copyright protection bill before the US Congress passes into law. Crazy stuff! 11:19:48 AM  comment []      OSCache plugs: we got a mention in the JavaWorld article "Rumble in the Jungle - J2EE vs .NET" as the vendor neutral caching framework, this thread on comp.lang.java.programmer gives OSCache top billing (well, sort of ), and if your french is good, Mise en oeuvre de OSCache looks interesting 11:00:51 AM  comment []