Understanding email's special power
Let's try a thought experiment. Suppose that some malign force knocked all the internet mail servers permanently offline, but left everything else intact. How would we cope?
Let's try a thought experiment. Suppose that some malign force knocked all the internet mail servers permanently offline, but left everything else intact. How would we cope?
Travelling on vacation this week, I was pleasantly surprised a few times by technology. On its first jaunt far from home, my new cellphone made my watch obsolete by sensing time zones and automatically adapting.
I’m not a printer-oriented kind of guy. I own printers, of course, but can go weeks without using them. For more than 20 years I’ve been creating information flows that rarely, and increasingly never, get rendered onto 8.5 x 11in pages.
There is an ongoing controversy in the XML world about the use of a feature called namespaces.
In 1998 Graham Glass was CTO of ObjectSpace, a Dallas-based vendor of a popular ORB (object request broker) known as Voyager.
Software systems are among the most complex of the artifacts that our species creates. In the design, use, and evolution of such systems, a dynamic tension exists between what I have come to call the core and the periphery.
The first server I connected to the internet sat on the floor of my office, close enough so I could hear -- and feel -- its response to heavy load. It seems weird to admit that I relied on those sensory cues, but I've talked to enough system administrators to know I'm not alone. The sounds of a working machine enable the pattern recognition engine in your brain to create a baseline -- and to detect deviations from it -- in ways that are effortless, automatic and incredibly efficient.
The technology executive at a leading software vendor recently told me that he spends a lot of time wondering how open source projects can possibly work. “You take out the internal combustion engine, yet somehow the car still runs,” he said.
The notion of a "browser war" sounds so last-century. It's over, Microsoft won, we've moved on to bigger and better things -- like service-oriented architectures.
Programmers spend time and effort translating between objects represented in high-level programming languages, such as Java, and structures stored in relational databases.
My local bank is switching from one online bill-payment system to another. I'm looking forward to the new system, which will be an improvement on the current one, but I wasn't expecting this:
The emerging focus on service-oriented architecture (SOA) is creating a fleet of buses. I'm hearing names such as enterprise service bus, universal web services information bus, enterprise information bus and message bus.
I've begun exploring a set of interrelated themes that Andy Singleton has identified under the rubric of "IT deflation": a global pool of talent, a surplus of software components (often freely available), and the research and communication skills necessary to translate these resources into IT successes.
Scripting languages such as Perl and Python are more productive than conventional languages such as Java and C# — except when they aren't. Likewise, Java and C# are more robust than their scripting cousins — except when they aren't.
In July 2001 I attended a historic session on .Net at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego. David Stutz, who recently and spectacularly left Microsoft, spoke first.