The Long Strange Trip to Java

A interesting personal account of the birth of Java by Patrick Naughton.

Hegemony

Hegemony is a great word. I think my first significant exposure to the word came when reading Ender's Game . Now I use the word all the time. Favorite usage: "Blah blah Microsoft hegemony blah blah."

Modern Man

I'm currently eating freshly baked Grands biscuits, drinking Gatorade , and watching American Idol . I'm nothing if not a modern man. :)

Sunset

p. Cringely has an interesting column about the dire straights that Sun Microsystems is in: bq. Even Java is becoming superfluous. Java is the Dan Marino of software. Just as the former Dolphins quarterback, Java affected the world so much that history cannot be written without its mention. But nonetheless, neither Java nor Dan ever won the big one. p. I wish Sun would stop suing Microsoft and instead use that money to encourage developers to produce killer Java apps. DVArchive , a Java Swing app, just released a new version. On message boards, end users were asking where to go to download the JRE. That's the kind of support Sun needs. Forcing MS to bundle Java with Windows is a waste of time if there are no Java apps that people want to run. It's all about the apps - if you build it, they will come.

Google buys Blogger

Google bought Pyra , the company behind Blogger.

Ben Hammersley sums things up nicely:

Google lives or dies on fresh links - and processing the million or so weblogs will give them an awful lot of fresh links a day. No matter where you host your Blogger based blog, the posting will still go through a machine on Google's network: it'd be easy peasy to scrap each posting for URLs and add them to the spider-now list. Not every link, perhaps, but if a certain number of bloggers link to the same thing in a certain time, Google grabs it. It's a distributed early warning system for Google's spiders. One million zeitgeist monitors just signed on to Google's staff. A bargain for them, whatever the cost.

Read the rest of his post here .

(Thanks to NSLog for finding this quote.)

esr

Eric Raymond gave a talk at work yesterday. He was an excellent speaker - informative, entertaining, and unassuming.

One of his points was that the factory model of software is a delusion (sorry, Metrowerks). Eric's argument drew on the concepts of use value and sale value. The use value of software is its value as a tool which allows you to accomplish some task. The sale value is the value of software as something which can be sold to others (e.g. at a retail store). Most people assume that sale value is proportional to use value. According to Eric, this is not true.

Consider the following: RandomProduct sells at CompUSA for $200 on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the producer of RandomProduct discontinues the product. On Thursday, RandomProduct is in the discount bin at CompUSA for $10, even though the product still has the same usefulness as it did two days ago. Eric claimed that this is because the price a consumer is willing to pay for software is determined by the "expected future value of vendor service". Thus, the software industry is a service industry. Eric went on to explain how software publishers screw consumers when they operate under the false presumption that they are in a manufacturing industry. For example, you want to have your best people doing the things that make you money. In a manufacturing model, this means having your best people pump out code like there's no tomorrow, while those who can't cut it get sent of to man the support desk. Hence, the crappy support prevalent in the software industry.

Although I'm inclined to agree with Eric's argument, I still have some doubts. It seems as if the same argument could be applied to just about any product, thereby making every industry a service industry. Still, he only had an hour or so to speak, and this was just one of many topics covered, so I'll give him a chance. I just ordered a printed copy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar from buy.com (yes, it's all available on his website, but I hate reading from a monitor).

The Animatrix

The first Animatrix short is out. The animation is great, and the storyline is pretty good. Just one question - what kind of machine would start counting at 01? The name of the machine nation should definitely be 00. :)

Yatta

Sometimes I get depressed and lethargic. But whenever this happens, I feel rejuvenated in 4 minutes, 12 seconds. How is this possible? By watching the Yatta video, of course! You can download the video here (60 MB, DivX).

While watching this video you can't help but stand up, dance, and feel good to be alive. All I need is one piece of leaf! When I stand up straight, IT FEELS GOOD!

Bye-kyu!

The Whistles Go Whoo!

KRON has a hilarious report on tailpipe whistles. I love to make fun of cars with bogus "Type R" badges and huge spoilers, so this report was of interest to me. But beyond the humorous subject matter, this video showcases the next Internet fad - Bubb Rubb. A quote: "Some neighbors say it's way too loud. That's only in the morning: you're supposed to be up cooking breakfast! It's like an alarm clock. Whoo-hoo!"

After you're done watching the video, listen to this MP3 on repeat. Then go buy a shirt . Whoo Whoo!

(Thanks to Shlonglor for the info)

WMWNMNW

I needed a car for co-op, so I bought my Grandma's Ford Contour (she doesn't drive anymore). It's basically a brand new car, with only 5,000 miles on it. I decided to get custom plates for the vehicle, and that led me to think about a feature on thesmokinggun.com last year. It was about license plates that motorists had complained about (for inappropriate content, etc). The most hilarious compliant was from a Wisconsin state trooper who complained about someone who's plate was "WMWNMNW". Sure, it doesn't mean anything, so it's not offensive, but it's totally unreadable.

Just for kicks, I checked to see if the plate was available in Ohio. It was, so I decided to get it. I've already received many comments about it. While I was stuck in traffic a few weeks ago, the guy next to me honked his horn and motioned for me to roll down my window. He didn't look dangerous, so I did. He yelled over to me, asking what the plate meant. I told him that it didn't mean anything, it was just meant to be unreadable. He laughed, I smiled, and we both rolled up our windows and sat in traffic for another 10 minutes.