I normally don't comment on the rants of Robert Cringely because I find his rhetoric to be too "over the top" manipulative for my tastes.
However, a recent piece of his, entitled War of the Worlds: The Human Side of Moore's Law motivated me to blog about it here.
Not that I actually agree with his main premise which is that the Internet is going to replace primary education. It's not going to replace schools anymore than it replaced any of the other institutions that pundits have predicted it would replace including newspapers, television, or the family unit. It has and will, however, supplement, augment, and transform all of those institutions.
My experience working with offshore software development houses and in discussions with my peers in academia regarding distance learning lead me to the conclusion that the Internet cannot replace the psychological need to relate to humans in close physical proximity no matter how much money is saved by not having to have everyone together in the same room.
The Internet can, however, reduce these location driven costs because you can have a very effective group even when everyone isn't in the same room all of the time. They need to get together to meet periodically. They need to hang out a little bit. Then they can go back home and continue to work together over the Internet. Productivity can be higher than when they never physically meet at all.
What is your opinion? Are we "under attack" in some kind of culture war or is this just the next phase in human development?
Monday, March 24, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Cell Phones and the World Wide Wireless Web
I recently ran across an article on the Ten Most Disruptive Technology Combinations which included the combination of cell phones and wireless internet access as the number one combination. The article mentions how this convergence blurs the lines between work and play and that is forcing telecom monopolies to open up their networks.
Within the past year, I upgraded my cell phone which included an Internet package. I thought that I would cancel the package pretty soon but I am still willing to pay $20 per month per phone for the privilege of unlimited web and email. I must admit that this is a compelling technology.
So, compelling that I added a mobile edition to my online publication about what affects that technology and the media have on culture.
Authoring web pages for mobile devices is sort of a Back to the Future experience for me. It's all about a small download to a device with limited interactive capabilities. The version of HTML is hyper modern but there are a lot of elements that you cannot or should not use including script, tables, and images. You should also limit links to the navigation within your site.
Summer Update: I have started a new technology company which also includes a mobile edition.
Within the past year, I upgraded my cell phone which included an Internet package. I thought that I would cancel the package pretty soon but I am still willing to pay $20 per month per phone for the privilege of unlimited web and email. I must admit that this is a compelling technology.
So, compelling that I added a mobile edition to my online publication about what affects that technology and the media have on culture.
Authoring web pages for mobile devices is sort of a Back to the Future experience for me. It's all about a small download to a device with limited interactive capabilities. The version of HTML is hyper modern but there are a lot of elements that you cannot or should not use including script, tables, and images. You should also limit links to the navigation within your site.
Summer Update: I have started a new technology company which also includes a mobile edition.
Friday, March 14, 2008
The Return of the Semantic Web
About a month ago, I blogged on how the semantic web was having a hard time getting any traction. I mentioned then that the Reuters News Agency was starting to endorse it. Now it appears that Yahoo is also starting to embrace the semantic web through the announcement that they will begin to parse certain microformats with their search engine. Perhaps it is premature to count the semantic web as DOA. I hope so.
Some of you may have noticed that, technically speaking, microformats are not really a part of the semantic web specifications. To me, the semantic web is all about marking up content in a machine understandable way such that the semantic context of searchable content is also specified and searchable.
As the project leader for an open source content publishing system, this is great news for me. I would love to add RDF Site Summary and microformat support to improve the SEO features of this project. There is no reason to add these features unless the popular search engines start using them. I wish that Google would make a definitive announcement of what microformats and/or RSS modules that their search engine would support. Right now, it appears that they are supporting hCard, hAtom, XFN and FOAF.
What is your opinion on this? If you are a content publisher, then what SEO enhancement features and formats would you like to see in your software? The most viable contenders seem to me at this time to be hCard, hCalendar, FOAF, and DC.
Some of you may have noticed that, technically speaking, microformats are not really a part of the semantic web specifications. To me, the semantic web is all about marking up content in a machine understandable way such that the semantic context of searchable content is also specified and searchable.
As the project leader for an open source content publishing system, this is great news for me. I would love to add RDF Site Summary and microformat support to improve the SEO features of this project. There is no reason to add these features unless the popular search engines start using them. I wish that Google would make a definitive announcement of what microformats and/or RSS modules that their search engine would support. Right now, it appears that they are supporting hCard, hAtom, XFN and FOAF.
What is your opinion on this? If you are a content publisher, then what SEO enhancement features and formats would you like to see in your software? The most viable contenders seem to me at this time to be hCard, hCalendar, FOAF, and DC.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Metcalfe's Law
A friend of mine recently emailed me this announcement with the comment "use this with idea and get rich." Although the announcement of an iPhone SDK is new, this is not a new trend. Companies such as Facebook, Google, and Yahoo have all signed up to a degree to the following model.
- Technology company reinvents itself as a technology platform company.
- Productizes its application tier with a public facing API.
- Markets to developers encouraging them to consume their API and "get rich."
- Takes advantage of subsequent buzz to build brand.
Friday, February 29, 2008
The Art of Project Design
I recently ran across this blog entry on the art of project design. As a longtime director of software development, I believe it to have some very sound advice.
This blogger discourages the use of MS-Project. I am not a big fan of MS-Project either. The biggest reason why I avoid MS-Project is the differentiation of planned versus actual and the fact that an event that is completely out of the control of the end user, namely the passing of time, is what triggers the change in status from planned to actual. Once a task begins, your options of editing it become severely limited.
This blogger uses MS-Excel instead to create his project plans. I prefer GanttProject. I tried Open Workbench recently but was not a fan, primarily because it lacked support for a task hierarchy.
But that wasn't the most important advice from this blogger. Much more important is his admonitions to focus on features and not phases, to build the best features first, to deliver every two months, and to collaborate with your business partner. I gave some very similar advice recently in one of my own posts.
This blogger discourages the use of MS-Project. I am not a big fan of MS-Project either. The biggest reason why I avoid MS-Project is the differentiation of planned versus actual and the fact that an event that is completely out of the control of the end user, namely the passing of time, is what triggers the change in status from planned to actual. Once a task begins, your options of editing it become severely limited.
This blogger uses MS-Excel instead to create his project plans. I prefer GanttProject. I tried Open Workbench recently but was not a fan, primarily because it lacked support for a task hierarchy.
But that wasn't the most important advice from this blogger. Much more important is his admonitions to focus on features and not phases, to build the best features first, to deliver every two months, and to collaborate with your business partner. I gave some very similar advice recently in one of my own posts.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Say a Little Prayer for the Semantic Web
Earlier, I had blogged about SPARQL. The feedback I got was along the lines of asking why I was bothering about that since RDF never really took off. Well, it is true that adoption of RDF is pretty weak. I guess that means the semantic web is not really ready for the main stream yet.
Too bad, really, because the problem that RDF was invented to solve is both interesting and compelling. It is the problem of context sensitive search. Wouldn't it be nice if you could write a search query that differentiates between Huckabee the politician, the store chain, or the movie? Maybe this problem isn't serious enough to bother with the trouble of authoring anything as onerous as an RDF document because google is already doing some special parsing tricks to provide some pre-canned context sensitivity. For example, if you google movie: Huckabee, then you see only movie reviews with the word Huckabee in them. That's not exactly what was wanted but it is closer. You can do similar stuff with define: and stocks: but this is not a complete solution to the problem of context sensitive search. In the world of google these are called search operators.
But perhaps it is still premature to declare RDF as dead. The CEO for the Reuters news agency has talked up RDF in a recent interview. They have even introduced a cool tool for generating RDF from textual content. There's nothing like a cool tool to generate traction in the world of protocol adoption. However, this tool still has a little ways to go before it is going to be of much use. I pointed the tool at another blog entry of mine (Data Access Strategies), just to see what it would do.
What it generated could do little more than identify the following from the article as industry terms; web application server, web application development framework, ruby utilities, django utilities, rapid web application development, business application software development, operational systems, and web application developer frameworks. Not very intelligent, eh? It did correctly identify Martin Fowler as a person but incorrectly identified VB.NET as a company. To give you a basis for comparison, I went to the bother of authoring an RDF of that article myself. That document won't do you much good unless you are comfortable with RDF or have an RDF editor. As I hinted at before, RDF is kind of complicated. Here is a picture of what that RDF looks like when viewed as a resource graph.
Here is a PDF of the graphical version generated by RDF Gravity.
Here's hoping that Reuters continues to work on making this tool better. There is also a recently published extension to the very popular RSS format that allows you to add more context sensitive tags to your site maps. Here's hoping that takes off too.
Too bad, really, because the problem that RDF was invented to solve is both interesting and compelling. It is the problem of context sensitive search. Wouldn't it be nice if you could write a search query that differentiates between Huckabee the politician, the store chain, or the movie? Maybe this problem isn't serious enough to bother with the trouble of authoring anything as onerous as an RDF document because google is already doing some special parsing tricks to provide some pre-canned context sensitivity. For example, if you google movie: Huckabee, then you see only movie reviews with the word Huckabee in them. That's not exactly what was wanted but it is closer. You can do similar stuff with define: and stocks: but this is not a complete solution to the problem of context sensitive search. In the world of google these are called search operators.
But perhaps it is still premature to declare RDF as dead. The CEO for the Reuters news agency has talked up RDF in a recent interview. They have even introduced a cool tool for generating RDF from textual content. There's nothing like a cool tool to generate traction in the world of protocol adoption. However, this tool still has a little ways to go before it is going to be of much use. I pointed the tool at another blog entry of mine (Data Access Strategies), just to see what it would do.
What it generated could do little more than identify the following from the article as industry terms; web application server, web application development framework, ruby utilities, django utilities, rapid web application development, business application software development, operational systems, and web application developer frameworks. Not very intelligent, eh? It did correctly identify Martin Fowler as a person but incorrectly identified VB.NET as a company. To give you a basis for comparison, I went to the bother of authoring an RDF of that article myself. That document won't do you much good unless you are comfortable with RDF or have an RDF editor. As I hinted at before, RDF is kind of complicated. Here is a picture of what that RDF looks like when viewed as a resource graph.
Here is a PDF of the graphical version generated by RDF Gravity.
Here's hoping that Reuters continues to work on making this tool better. There is also a recently published extension to the very popular RSS format that allows you to add more context sensitive tags to your site maps. Here's hoping that takes off too.
Friday, February 8, 2008
The Top 20 Proprietary Tools That Drive You Poor and Their Open Source Alternatives
Occasionally, I write here to advocate the use of OSS. I ran across a blog entry recently that recommends open source alternatives to popular proprietary tools. I made some open source recommendations for developers but never spelled out the proprietary tools that these were intended to replace. I thought that I would do that here.
| OSS Alternatives To Proprietary Tools | |
| Proprietary | Open Source |
| VSS, SOS | Subversion |
| IIS | Apache |
| Weblogic | Tomcat |
| VS.NET | Eclipse |
| SQL Server | MySql, PostGreSql |
| Sharepoint | Plone |
| Essbase | Mondrian |
| Internet Explorer | Firefox |
| Microsoft Outlook | Thunderbird |
| Maya | Blender |
| Cakewalk | Lillypond |
| Goldwave | Audacity |
| Half-Life | Nexuiz |
| Vista | Ubuntu |
| Photoshop | GIMP |
| Illustrator | Inkscape |
| Microsoft Office | Open Office |
| Microsoft Visio | Dia |
| Magic Draw | Umlet |
| ERWin | ddt |
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