My Audible.com renewal came up and I decided to take a hiatus until after Christmas. However, an offer of a free audio book was too tempting and so here I find myself listening to "Wolves of the Calla", another book in Stephen King's long Dark Tower series. Somewhere in the first chapter of the book, one of the characters observes that Americans like their genres cleanly segregated, with science fiction apart from romance, etc. Perhaps this was true 20 years ago or so, but I think nowadays the genres are blending. The Dark Tower series itself is a good example. Is it horror? Science Fiction? A western? There are lots of other examples.
I always enjoy Baseline Magazine. In particular, I enjoy their case studies, where they examine some project's reasons for success or failure. In this month's magazine, there's a great story about Yahoo.com's attempt to confront Google, and how Yahoo, once the leading search engine, is rapidly losing ground to its rival.
Also in the story is a plug for a new book by Steve Souders, Yahoo's Chief Performance Engineer. The book is called "High Performance Web Sites" and is published by the venerable O'Reilly Press, and in it Souders argues that the biggest performance cost is rendering time on the browser. I think this is a very interesting concept and probably very applicable to the web reports that I am now spending most of my working time creating.
Back at the end of October eWeek reported that many users regard Windows Vista as "eye candy" and a "skip version". I have to say that I see that too. Folks are unclear about the benefits of migrating to Vista, but have clear conceptions of potential harms, including excessive hardware requirements and onerous DRM and anti-piracy restrictions. My understanding is that it can be difficult to convince Vista to work on a virtual machine which is in direct conflict with the desire of many enterprises to consolidate servers using virtual environments.
Whatever follows Vista might not have better luck. As found on Slashdot, PC ownership in Japan has been rapidly falling mostly due to the increasing capability of cell phones and video game consoles. So goes Japan, so goes the world? Why use an all-inclusive operating system like Vista when you can use something specifically adapted for the task at hand?
This afternoon I happened across an article entitled "10 career killers to avoid" in ComputerWorld. I'm a sucker for articles like this as I like to see if others agree with my technology predictions. In this case, the article is not about the future prospects of specific technologies, rather it advises one to have long term plans. My recommendation for IT folks looking to develop a long term viability plan is to 1) develop an understanding of the business so that they can offer intelligent suggestions for the uses of new technologies, which they will 2) know because they watch trends and keep their 3) javascript, HTML and web services skills up to date. Oh, database skills are important too, as there will be mountains of data to wade through.
Web skills, IMHO, are an excellent bet as all those IPhones and GPhones and whatever else will use some derivative of a web browser to access data via web services.
The big question in my mind right now is how Microsoft Dot Net will fare against Java in the middle term. Most software job postings in eastern PA in the last couple of months seem to be java-related. I'm not sure yet if this is a long term trend or just a normal fluctuation.
The problem I see with Java is that there are lots of variations. Sun doesn't do as good a job as Microsoft in documenting their runtime, and there's a lot more stuff to know between the user and the hardware with LAMP technologies. At this point, I suspect most problems can be solved more quickly with DotNet than with LAMP and this time advantage offsets whatever cost difference is involved with O/S and development software licenses. Microsoft is watching security issues keenly and addresses most very quickly. Should Linux reach the adoption level that Microsoft has now, what organization will ensure that security holes are quickly patched and the patches distributed?
Microsoft could still shoot itself in the foot. It's happened before and it could happen again if, for example, Microsoft decided to force Vista adoption.
I always enjoy Baseline Magazine. In particular, I enjoy their case studies, where they examine some project's reasons for success or failure. In this month's magazine, there's a great story about Yahoo.com's attempt to confront Google, and how Yahoo, once the leading search engine, is rapidly losing ground to its rival.
Also in the story is a plug for a new book by Steve Souders, Yahoo's Chief Performance Engineer. The book is called "High Performance Web Sites" and is published by the venerable O'Reilly Press, and in it Souders argues that the biggest performance cost is rendering time on the browser. I think this is a very interesting concept and probably very applicable to the web reports that I am now spending most of my working time creating.
Back at the end of October eWeek reported that many users regard Windows Vista as "eye candy" and a "skip version". I have to say that I see that too. Folks are unclear about the benefits of migrating to Vista, but have clear conceptions of potential harms, including excessive hardware requirements and onerous DRM and anti-piracy restrictions. My understanding is that it can be difficult to convince Vista to work on a virtual machine which is in direct conflict with the desire of many enterprises to consolidate servers using virtual environments.
Whatever follows Vista might not have better luck. As found on Slashdot, PC ownership in Japan has been rapidly falling mostly due to the increasing capability of cell phones and video game consoles. So goes Japan, so goes the world? Why use an all-inclusive operating system like Vista when you can use something specifically adapted for the task at hand?
This afternoon I happened across an article entitled "10 career killers to avoid" in ComputerWorld. I'm a sucker for articles like this as I like to see if others agree with my technology predictions. In this case, the article is not about the future prospects of specific technologies, rather it advises one to have long term plans. My recommendation for IT folks looking to develop a long term viability plan is to 1) develop an understanding of the business so that they can offer intelligent suggestions for the uses of new technologies, which they will 2) know because they watch trends and keep their 3) javascript, HTML and web services skills up to date. Oh, database skills are important too, as there will be mountains of data to wade through.
Web skills, IMHO, are an excellent bet as all those IPhones and GPhones and whatever else will use some derivative of a web browser to access data via web services.
The big question in my mind right now is how Microsoft Dot Net will fare against Java in the middle term. Most software job postings in eastern PA in the last couple of months seem to be java-related. I'm not sure yet if this is a long term trend or just a normal fluctuation.
The problem I see with Java is that there are lots of variations. Sun doesn't do as good a job as Microsoft in documenting their runtime, and there's a lot more stuff to know between the user and the hardware with LAMP technologies. At this point, I suspect most problems can be solved more quickly with DotNet than with LAMP and this time advantage offsets whatever cost difference is involved with O/S and development software licenses. Microsoft is watching security issues keenly and addresses most very quickly. Should Linux reach the adoption level that Microsoft has now, what organization will ensure that security holes are quickly patched and the patches distributed?
Microsoft could still shoot itself in the foot. It's happened before and it could happen again if, for example, Microsoft decided to force Vista adoption.
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