Monday, 5 August 2002

Going home Do you know what I do? I don't read such articles, work hard and try to become better and better. People which are excellent in der job are always required. At the worst I loose my job, then I will become a Dive Master in the Caribbean and do exclusive dive trips with rich people. [Gerhard Froehlich] That'd be polite for "Get a Life", right? OK, going home now. :) 7:35:25 PM

Old news CNet.  This article basically says that ANY free product you us online is going to go away eventually.  Don't belive the hype that says otherwise.  So select the product you are willing to pay for today or get slammed (which basically means that if you invest lots of time into a free product it is going to eventually gouge you). [John Robb's Radio Weblog] It is kinda obvious why John posted this one. He works for a company competing with open source compeditors. Face it, CNet is playing to Microsoft's FUD tune. Open source software can't go away. There are too many CD's and backup tapes sitting around with the source on them. That, and given perl/python/java/c/c++ source code a modern coder can port/re-implement on top of the next OS to come along. Given just 5 year old binaries, from say an Atari Jaguar, and the binary files that go with said application, how are you going to get at the data? Oh jeez. I am preaching to the converted on this one. I shouldn't rant, but this FUD makes me sad. It's so old. In fact, I suspect you could nearly compare it sentence for sentence with something Bill Gates wrote to a bunch of hackers building 8088 based boxes that became the PC industry ... *sigh* 7:32:08 PM

Site Map Generation How would you generate a site map? I am contemplating abusing my much-aligned web spider as the collection agent, but I am trying to figure out how to supply this information to the user. Obvious first pick is some radial map akin to the google-browser thingey I posted a while ago, and the other is javascript folding heirarchial menus. This is to present 8000+ pages, so the heirarchy is non-trivial ... 6:26:02 PM

A view to windward The IT rust belt... Do you live to code? If you don't and that's your job, move on. Bob Lewis, InfoWorld columnist, forsees doom for the million U.S. programmers. I must agree. [a klog apart] Do you honestly believe that this applies to just programmers? Do you believe this just applies to the IT industry? Where I currently work is in the middle of outsourcing everything to India. I spoke with my Dad about what happened the last time everyone tried to outsource coding to India. India wound up with a large number of cobol coders (writing cobol that no one in the western world could understand) and the rest of the world moved on to mini's and pc's. The real lesson here is one that hasn't changed in the IT industry since it started. Expect your current job to be obsolete in 18 months. You must always be searching for the next opening. The new tech. The next approach. Figuring out how to sell this to the uncountable hordes of late adopters. But you already instinctivly know this. You read 'blogs. 5:57:59 PM

NEC Green PC NEC's new Desktop has Transmeta processor. I forgot to mention, this is the first desktop PC sold with a Transmeta processor. You know, the one sold by that Linux guy (Linus Torvalds). It must kill him that we ship Windows XP and Windows 2000 on it. [Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog] Unless NEC has done something bone-headed, it will be running Linux by the weekend. I'd happily run a fanless Transmeta based desktop PC. The quiet would be great. (The most CPU hungry thing I run is Eclipse.) About the only thing i'd bitch about is the disk size. 20G? I think 120G would be more appropriate. But getting whisper quiet 120G disks would probably be hard ... 5:44:43 PM

Sun ONE One size fits all. Scott McNealy: "[Sun ONE] is scalable from smart card to supercomputer; runs on every microprocessor, runs on every device; has no viruses; one software distribution and provisioning mechanism; one development environment; one security model." [...] [Be Blogging] And this is a good thing? I really want to run the same code on my watch as on my laptop. Not. 10:48:11 AM

Killing the Xbox slowly Xbox Security Keys Changed [Slashdot] As reverse engineering the Xbox security keys forced NVidia to dump a chunk of chips, the easy way to kill the Xbox is just to keep reverse engineering the security keys. The continual write downs of dead chip stock will force NVidia to stop supporting the platform ... 10:01:46 AM

A possible blogged future The real tragedy of recessions is not all the money lost due to de-valuing assets (it was all paper money, right?), but the large amount of the workforce who have nothing to do. Many people have written about recessions, why they happen, and why they are good for the economy. My personal take on recessions is that they are very crude forms of feedback. If your company can't deal with a recession, you obviously made some dud decisions. The reason I see that it is very crude is that there is no solid feedback as to which decisions were duds. Thus we get spectacles like RIAA that is blaming fall in sales on pirated content, when in fact the market is trying to tell the RIAA that we want a different form of service from them. Now, if blogs expand to the point where groups of people can self organise, with consumers stating a demand on their blogs, designers proposing solutions on their blogs, and manufacturers implementing from this blog'versation, we can move beyond recessions. I'm not saying that life will suddenly get easier without recessions. In fact it will be a constant recession. Recessions are the marketplace informing the manufacturers that something is wrong. A blog based economy will always be informing everyone that what they are doing is wrong, in some way. But at least the feedback will be more informative. Hopefully, this tighter feedback loop reality will be less lossy. I can hope, anyway. 8:14:32 AM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.

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