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Sergey Brin and Larry Page may never have read The New Society, but the corporate culture they’ve created is quite close to its author’s vision

Maybe the most important thing is not the benefit for employee but the respect, which make people feeling as members of the organization.

Google (GOOG) turned out quite a dazzling display of data recently when it released its third-quarter results: Profit jumped 46%. Revenue soared 57%. The company’s shares shot up $6.14, to more than $639 each, on the news. But it’s another set of figures that most impresses me: 17, $0, and 20%.

These refer, respectively, to the number of cafés at Google’s Mountain View (Calif.) campus; what it charges employees for all the meals and snacks eaten there; and the amount of time it encourages its engineers to carve out each week to tackle company-related projects that interest them personally but aren’t part of their core assignments.

More than any enterprise I know of, Google has built a working environment that can only be described as Druckerian—early Druckerian, to be precise.

Beginning with some of his first major writings in the 1940s, Peter Drucker wanted “work to reflect social values like opportunity, community, solidarity, and individual fulfillment, not just business values like cost and efficiency,” explained the late management philosopher’s biographer, Jack Beatty.

Of course, plenty of companies (as well as other types of organizations) espouse these tenets, and many observe them to varying degrees.

The difference is that Google applies them to the fullest, and not simply through its much-vaunted list of perks, which includes—in addition to free gourmet food and the encouragement to dream—on-site haircuts and oil changes (which aren’t gratis); medical checkups; subsidized exercise classes; film series and lectures; gatherings for all sorts of hobbyists; shuttle-bus service throughout the Bay Area; parties and family events; weekly TGIF “town halls” and schmooze-fests where top executives Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt are regularly present; and hefty cash rewards for referring someone to work for the company or when buying a hybrid car.

A Self-Governing “Village”

Indeed, more than any one of these things, it’s the overall atmosphere that the Internet company has cultivated—Google’s gestalt—that puts it in step with Drucker’s early belief that “the corporation is not only an economic tool but a social institution.”

More specifically, his industrial-age vision called for the establishment of a “plant community” in which line workers would govern many of their own affairs and, in doing so, reap rewards that went well beyond their paychecks. Drucker, in his 1949 book The New Society, wrote of workers’ demand “for good and close group relationships with their fellow workers, for good relations with their supervisors, for advancement, and above all, for recognition as human beings, for social and prestige satisfactions, for status and functions.”

At Google, there is no “plant” per se. But employees use language strikingly similar to Drucker’s when describing their high-tech home. “It’s like a village,” says Dan Ratner, a mechanical engineer who joined the company about two years ago.

The lunches and dinners served at Café Pintxo, a tapas joint, the pan-Asian Pacific Café, and any of the other eateries around Googleplex (as headquarters is known) are supposed to be pretty terrific. But what most whets Ratner’s appetite is the camaraderie and brainstorming that occur between bites.

It is not uncommon, he says, for a mealtime conversation to develop into a serious collaboration, often involving fellow employees he may never have met before. Once that happens, Ratner is likely to be off and running, using his 20% time to zip to Home Depot (HD) (where he can charge Google, without managerial approval, for basic supplies), build a prototype of his idea with some of his colleagues, and begin measuring its effectiveness.

A Dividend-Yielding Culture

The best innovations find their way in front of a supervisor and, if they make the cut, can ultimately win formal project status and funding. The ones that aren’t so hot fade away—usually very quickly. “It’s a real competitive place,” Ratner says. “It’s not all touchy-feely.”

Google won’t disclose what it spends on its myriad employee benefits, and a spokeswoman says that, in spite of the company’s computational prowess, it can’t quantify their effect on productivity. Clearly, however, the culture yields dividends. Among the projects that have emerged from 20% time are Gmail, Google News, and the Sky feature on Google Earth.

For Ratner, though, even the ideas that flame out have a tremendous value. The mere act of pursuing them, he says, speaks to “the entrepreneur, the artist” that tends to reside in many of Google’s 15,000-plus employees. It fulfills the “need in every human to create,” he adds.

What If the Going Gets Tough?

It must be noted that all of these offerings are relatively easy to provide when almost everything seems to be going without a glitch and the financial picture is so bright. Should Google’s swagger give way to a big enough stumble—as has happened with countless other firms that once seemed invincible—its commitment in all these areas will surely be tested.

Over time, Drucker himself gave up on the notion of a “plant community,” convinced, sadly, that most companies were consumed with the bottom line and little else. It also became more difficult to promote the corporate-community paradigm with job security in the U.S. and elsewhere growing ever more elusive. By the late 1980s, he had begun to look toward the nonprofit sector as the one that “gives people a sense of community, gives purpose, gives direction.”

Perhaps he abandoned the model of workplace-as-social-institution too soon. Then again, who could have guessed that the world’s most forward-thinking company in 2007 would have so boldly adopted a concept that Drucker framed more than half a century ago?

Original post on http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/oct2007/ca20071025_180348.htm

Here is a great article about the performance comparison of different browser. For me it will be more interesting to see how JavaScript works on mobile browsers.

In The Day Performance Didn’t Matter Any More, I found that the performance of JavaScript improved a hundredfold between 1996 and 2006. If Web 2.0 is built on a backbone of JavaScript, it’s largely possible only because of those crucial Moore’s Law performance improvements.

But have we hit a performance wall? Is it possible for browsers to run JavaScript significantly faster than they do today? I’ve always thought that just-in-time optimizing (or even compiling) JavaScript was an unexplored frontier in browser technology. And now the landscape has shifted:

1. Apple’s WebKit team just announced a great new JavaScript benchmark, SunSpider.
2. The browser market is more competitive than it has been in years, with Opera 9.5, Firefox 3, Safari 3, and IE 8 all vying for the coveted default browser position.

Perhaps browser teams will begin to consider JavaScript performance a competitive advantage. The last time I looked for common JavaScript benchmarks, I came away deeply disappointed. That’s why I’m particularly excited by the SunSpider benchmark: it’s remarkably well thought out, easy to run, and comprehensive.

It’s based on real code that does interesting things; both things that the web apps of today are doing, and more advanced code of the sorts we can expect as web apps become more advanced. Very few of the tests could be classed as microbenchmarks. It’s balanced between different aspects of the JavaScript language — not dominated by just a small handful of different things. In fact, we collected test cases from all over the web, including from other benchmarks. But at the same time, we avoided DOM tests and stuck to the core JavaScript language itself.

It’s super easy to run in the browser or from the command line, so you can test both pure engine performance, and the results you actually get in the browser.

We included statistical analysis so you can see how stable the results you’re getting really are.

Maciej Stachowiak, a member of Apple’s WebKit team, graciously explained what each subsection of the benchmarks do in the comments:

SunSpider is the best JavaScript benchmark I’ve seen, something we desperately need in an era where JavaScript is the Lingua Franca of the web. I was so excited, in fact, that I ran some quick benchmarks to compare the four major players in the browser market:

• Windows Vista 32-bit
• 4 GB RAM
• dual-core 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU
• all browser extensions disabled (clean install)

What surprised me here is that Firefox is substantially slower than IE, once you factor out that wildly anomalous string result. I had to use a beta version of Opera to get something other than invalid (NaN) results for this benchmark, which coincidentally summarizes my opinion of Opera. Great when it works! I expected Opera to do well; it was handily winning JavaScript benchmarks way back in 2005. The new kid on the block, Safari, shows extremely well particularly considering that it is running outside its native OS X environment. Kudos to Apple. Well, except for that whole font thing.

If you’re curious how each browser stacked up in each benchmark area, I broke that down, too:

If you need greater detail– including variances– you can download my complete set of SunSpider 0.9 results as a text file.

If I’ve learned anything from the computer industry, it’s that competition benefits everyone. Here’s hoping that a great JavaScript browser performance showdown spurs the browser teams on to better performance in this increasingly crucial area.

Original post on http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001023.html

This post is for those who think Google is still a search engine and wonder why news sites constantly talk about new Google features while Google’s homepage still looks the same. Here’s a list of my favorite Google updates from this year that should be useful even if you don’t use Gmail, Google Docs and you don’t have a Google account.

1. Play videos from Google Search
Google lets you play videos from YouTube and Google Video directly from the search results pages. That means you can search for a song, an artist, a TV show and play videos just by clicking on “watch video”. E.g.: Mika.

2. Better translations
This year, Google moved to its own statistical translation system, which provides better translations, improves faster and it’s easier to scale to new languages. You can access the service if you click on “Language tools” at google.com, from translate.google.com or if you translate search results from foreign languages.

3. More recent web pages
Google indexes web pages faster so you can find them minutes after they’re published. If you want to restrict your search to recent pages, there are more options in the advanced search that let you find pages first seen by Google in the past 24 hour, past week and other intervals.

4. Find geographical information
Google Maps is more than a search engine that finds local businesses, shows maps and directions. It’s also useful to find content related to a certain place through mapplets or directly from the search box. Find photos, videos, books and maps from the web.

5. Free 411 in the US
GOOG-411 lets you find a local business and connect to it by calling to 1-800-GOOG-411. The service is free and doesn’t have human operators.

6. Trends in search results
If you wonder what are the most interesting searches at the moment, try Google Hot Trends. The data is updated every hour and shows the queries that had the most spectacular evolution. For now, Google Hot Trends is only available for the US English version of Google.

7. Explore the sky
Google Earth 4.2 lets you switch to the sky mode and explore stars, constellations, galaxies, find information and high-resolution images.

8. Find faces in Google Image Search
You can restrict image results to faces by going to advanced search and selecting “faces” in the content types section. Google’s face detection is really good and you can use this new option when searching for people.

9. Go mobile
Most Google’s services have a mobile version and they should be available by going to google.com on your mobile phone (or google.com/m on your computer). There’s an unified interface for iPhone, a great mobile version of Google Maps that finds your location even if you don’t have GPS and a mobile YouTube.

10. Download StarOffice for free
Of course, you can always get OpenOffice, but Google lets you download for free a more business-oriented version that normally costs $70. The price is that you need to install Google Pack, collection of applications recommended by Google. You can still choose the software you want to install and it’s easy to uninstall Google Pack while still keeping StarOffice.

Original post on http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/best-new-google-features-that-dont.html

In Web 1.0, a small number of writers created Web pages for a large number of readers. As a result, people could get information by going directly to the source: Adobe.com for graphic design issues, Microsoft.com for Windows issues, and CNN.com for news. Over time, however, more and more people started writing content in addition to reading it. This had an interesting effect—suddenly there was too much information to keep up with! We did not have enough time for everyone who wanted our attention and visiting all sites with relevant content simply wasn’t possible. As personal publishing caught on and went mainstream, it became apparent that the Web 1.0 paradigm had to change.

Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.

These tools, the interfaces of Web 2.0, will become the frontier of design innovation.

The evidence is already here with RSS aggregators, search engines, portals, APIs (application programming interfaces, which provide hooks to data) and Web services (where data can be accessed via XML-RPC, SOAP and other technologies). Google Maps (in beta) provides the same functionality as similar competing services but features a far superior interface. Flickr’s interface is one of the most intuitive and beloved around. Del.icio.us offers personal and social functionality, and reaches far beyond its own site. Interfaces like these are changing the way we store, access, and share information. It matters very little what domain content comes from.

Web 2.0 has often been described as “the Web as platform,” and if we think about the Web as a platform for interacting with content, we begin to see how it impacts design. Imagine a bunch of stores of content provided by different parties—companies, individuals, governments—upon which we could build interfaces that combine the information in ways no single domain ever could. For example, Amazon.com makes its database of content accessible to the outside world. Anyone can design an interface to replace Amazon’s that better suits specific needs (see Amazon Light). The power of this is that content can be personalized or remixed with other data to create much more useful tools.

There are six trends that characterize Web 2.0 for designers. In this introductory article we’ll summarize each of those trends and give brief examples. In upcoming articles we’ll explore each trend in more detail.

Writing Semantic Markup: Transition to XML

One of the biggest steps in realizing Web 2.0 is the transition to semantic markup, or markup that accurately describes the content it’s applied to. The most popular markup languages, HTML and XHTML, are used primarily for display purposes, with tags to which designers can apply styles via CSS.

These markup languages are not semantically dead, however. Designers can describe content, but only to the extent that it fits within the (X)HTML tag set. For example, designers can mark up content as headers, paragraphs, list items, citations, and definition lists using the <h1>, <p>, <li> , <cite> and <dl> tags, respectively. For some simple documents, these tags are adequate to describe content effectively. For most documents, however, there is no way to accurately describe the content with the (X)HTML tags we have available. In Web 2.0, this description is not only possible, but also critical.

Though HTML and XHTML give us only a glimpse of what it means, there is one technology demonstrating clearly the power of semantic markup. RSS is an XML format for syndicating content. It is an easy way for sites to tell people when there is new content available. So, instead of browsing to your favorite site over and over again to see if something is new, you can simply subscribe to its RSS feed by typing the RSS URI into a feed aggregator. The aggregator will periodically poll the site, notify you if something is new, and deliver that content. It’s a real timesaver.

Providing Web Services: Moving Away From Place

During the early years of the Web, before content had semantic meaning, sites were developed as a collection of “pages.” Sites in the 1990s were usually either brochure-ware (static HTML pages with insipid content) or they were interactive in a flashy, animated, JavaScript kind of way. In that era, a common method of promoting sites was to market them as “places”—the Web as a virtual world complete with online shopping malls and portals.

In the late 90s and especially the first few years of the 21st century, the advent of XML technologies and Web services began to change how sites were designed. XML technologies enabled content to be shareable and transformable between different systems, and Web services provided hooks into the innards of sites. Instead of visual design being the interface to content, Web services have become programmatic interfaces to that same content. This is truly powerful. Anyone can build an interface to content on any domain if the developers there provide a Web services API.

Two great examples of the shift away from place to services on the Web are Amazon.com and eBay, both of which provide an immense amount of commercial data in the form of Web services, accessible to any developer who wants it. An interesting interface built using eBay’s Web services is Andale, a site that tracks sales and prices to give auction sellers a better idea of what items are hot and how much they’ve been selling for.

Remixing Content: About When and What, not Who or Why

Associated Press CEO Tom Curley made an important and far-reaching keynote speech to the Online News Association Conference on Nov. 12, 2004. In it he said, “… content will be more important than its container in this next phase [of the Web]… Killer apps, such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as TiVo—to name just a few—have begun to unlock content from any vessel we try to put it in.”

Curley was specifically addressing journalists and the media industry, but this insight applies equally to the design profession. Web design during Web 1.0 was all about building compelling places (or sites) on the Web. But content can no longer be contained in a single place—at least not without going against the nature of the social Web and locking up your content in a secure site.

Web design in Web 2.0 is about building event-driven experiences, rather than sites. And it’s no coincidence that RSS is one of the key building blocks. RSS feeds enable people to subscribe to your content and read it in an aggregator any time, sans extraneous design.

Searches can also be mixed with RSS to let people subscribe to content via topic and tag RSS feeds (from PubSub or Feedster, for example). These so-called “future searches” not only let people mix content from various sources, but end up being yet another way for users to bypass a site’s visual design.

Because content flows across the Web in RSS feeds and can be remixed along the way, Web designers must now think beyond sites and figure out how to brand the content itself.

Emergent Navigation and Relevance: Users are in Control

As a result of the remixing aspects of Web 2.0, most content will be first encountered away from the domain in which it lies. Thus, much of the navigation that is used to reach a specific item might be far removed from the navigation specifically designed for it. This “distributed” navigation might come in the form of a feed reader, a link on a blog, a search engine, or some other content aggregator.

One of the side effects of this is that the sources of and pathways to useful information will continually change, and users won’t necessarily know where to go to find it. Fortunately, content aggregators have a built-in answer for this—they can track what people are doing. By recording what pieces of microcontent are most often visited, aggregators can use past user behavior to predict what users will find most relevant in the future. This is very apparent in Daypop, Del.icio.us, and Blogdex feeds. What people have found relevant in the past is likely to be useful in the future.

With relevance decided within these third-party interfaces, users might even be able to read content without ever visiting the domain it comes from. Navigation schemes, as we know them, will be used less. The most traveled navigation paths will emerge from user behavior instead of being “designed” specifically for it.

Adding Metadata Over Time: Communities Building Social Information

One feature of Web 1.0 that seemed to change everything about publishing was the ability to make changes to the primary publication at any time. There are no “editions” or “printings” on the Web like there are in the print world. There is simply the site and its current state. We are used to this paradigm now, and an optimist can hope that Web content will only get better with time: metadata will be added, descriptions will get deeper, topics more clear, and references more comprehensive.

What we see happening in Web 2.0 is a step beyond this, to where users are adding their own metadata. On Flickr and Del.icio.us, any user can attach tags to digital media items (files, bookmarks, images). The tagging aspect of these services isn’t the most interesting part of them, though. What is most interesting are the trends we see when we put together everyone’s tags.

Let’s say, for example, that we tag a bookmark “Web2.0” in Del.icio.us. We can then access del.icio.us/tag/Web2.0 to see what items others have tagged similarly, and discover valuable content that we may not have known existed. A search engine searches metadata applied by designers, but Del.icio.us leverages metadata applied by folks who don’t necessarily fit that mold.

Shift to Programming: Separation of Structure and Style

In Web 1.0, there were two stages to visual Web design. In the early years, designers used tricks like animated GIFs and table hacks in clever, interesting and horrible ways. In the last few years, CSS came into fashion to help separate style from structure, with styling information defined in an external CSS file. Even so, the focus was still on visual design—it was the primary way to distinguish content and garner attention.

Enter the Web 2.0 world, which is not defined as much by place and is less about visual style. XML is the currency of choice in Web 2.0, so words and semantics are more important than presentation and layout. Content moves around and is accessible by programmatic means. In a very real sense, we’re now designing more for machines than for people. This may sound like we’re in the Matrix, but in the words of Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, “Web 2.0… is about making the Internet useful for computers.”

What does this mean for Web designers? It means designers have to start thinking about how to brand content as well as sites. It means designers have to get comfortable with Web services and think beyond presentation of place to APIs and syndication. In short, it means designers need to become more like programmers. Web 2.0 is a world of thin front ends and powerful back ends, to paraphrase Bezos.

Summary

The effects of Web 2.0 are far-reaching. Like all paradigm shifts, it affects the people who use it socially, culturally, and even politically. One of the most affected groups is the designers and developers who will be building it—not just because their technical skills will change, but also because they’ll need to treat content as part of a unified whole, an ecosystem if you will, and not just an island.

To summarize, these are what we see as the six main themes covering design in the Web 2.0 world:

1. Writing semantic markup (transition to XML)
2. Providing Web services (moving away from place)
3. Remixing content (about when and what, not who or why)
4. Emergent navigation and relevance (users are in control)
5. Adding metadata over time (communities building social information)
6. Shift to programming (separation of structure and style)

Our purpose in this column is to analyze those themes and figure out what Web 2.0 means for designers. We’ll explore the new technologies that are making it happen, take a closer look at the new interfaces that demonstrate its power, and ponder the social effects it has on the people who use it.

As we move along, we hope that designers who may be wary of the promises of new technology help us focus on the practical aspects of this one, the subtle but real changes that Web 2.0 is having (and will have) on design.

Mobile technology: Crossing mobile phones with social-networking sites would help people find friends, and potential friends, nearby

IMAGINE you are a woman at a party who spots a good-looking fellow standing alone in a corner. Before working up the courage to talk to him, you whip out your mobile phone. A few clicks reveal his age and profession, links to his latest blog posts and a plethora of other personal information. To many, this sounds like a nightmare. But to those building so-called “mobile” social networks, it is nirvana: linking virtual communities such as Facebook or MySpace with the real world. The idea is not new, but so far such services have not gained much traction. They have to be able to pinpoint people in order to work, but satellite positioning does not work indoors. More importantly, it is hard for such a service to gain critical mass: why join, if it does not already have many users?

A new generation of mobile social networks may have found ways to overcome these barriers. One is Aka-Aki, a start-up based in Berlin. Users of its service download a small program onto their mobile phone. The software then uses Bluetooth, the short-range radio technology built into many mobile phones, to check whether any friends or other members with similar interests are within 20 metres. If so, the program pulls down the person’s picture and whatever information he or she is willing to reveal from the firm’s website.

This works because each Bluetooth radio chip has a unique identifying code that can be used to look up a person’s information. To overcome the chicken-and-egg problem, Aka-Aki has made its software work on most phones and offers what amounts to free text-messaging between members in order to encourage take-up. In addition, Aka-Aki is also a web-based social network with a twist: to express their interests, members can create virtual stickers and share them with others, which then makes mobile matching easier.

Aka-Aki is still testing its service, which currently has only about a thousand members. How it will make money is unclear. But it does not take much imagination to see how the Aka-Aki approach could lend itself to advertising. Billboards or shops, for instance, could in effect become members of the network, and beam special offers or messages to other members as they pass by. (Already, Facebook’s advertising model allows companies to set up profiles for their products, which can then become “friends” with other members.)

If mobile social networks do take off, they are likely to do so first in Europe, rather than tech-happy California or mobile-crazy Japan. This is, perhaps surprisingly, thanks to regulators. European operators are required to keep mobile phones more open to software downloads, with the result that they can run programs such as Aka-Aki’s. (Google is pushing for more open handsets based on its new Android platform, but the first phones will not appear until the second half of 2008.) Many mobile phones in Europe also come with Bluetooth, because drivers there need it for their wireless headsets: talking directly on a mobile phone while driving will earn you a hefty fine in most countries.

Then again, Europe’s predilection for privacy could still emerge as a big barrier. Aka-Aki, for instance, has so far refrained from adding one feature that might cause quite a stir: the unique Bluetooth identifier could also be used to tag people, for instance, with unflattering comments. This would even work with non-members, as long as their handsets had Bluetooth switched on. Those wanting to remain incognito in this brave new world might soon have to turn off their mobile phones when arriving at a party.

Original post on http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10202690

Develop good computer discipline, and your system will stay up indefinitely. Adopt bad computer practise, and your system is in danger of falling apart at the seams.

Logging In

Good Practise - Login to a user account. There is rarely a need to login to root. On the rare occasion that there is, before you login, be sure that you have removed the Ethernet cable so that the machine is isolated from outside.

Bad Practise - Many people are under the impression that they are safe to go on line logged into root if they have booted a LiveCD. Not so. The LiveCD gives you access to the hard drive. If you have access, so too does the hacker and by being in root you give the hacker access to your entire network. You may argue that you have only one machine and that it is virgin territory, so what does it matter?

Virus, Trojan, worm, root-kit: heard of these?

When you go on line logged into root, the hacker can leave one of these presents on your hard drive, and you would never know it. You could install your shiny new PCLOS release, set it all up just how you like it and one day, phut! Your system may not boot, perhaps the hard drive is inaccessible and you cannot login. So many horrible things can happen. Perhaps the worst of these is a hacker hi-jacking your system and using any personal information they can find in myriad nefarious ways. When you login to root and go on line, you give your machine away.

Original post on http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/200610/page13.html 

Is Java a “Ball and Chain”?

These are curious times just now for Java. In one and the same month, Steve Jobs stands up, and declares – referring to language support on the new Apple iPhone – “Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.” And in the same month a company like Backbase, whose AJAX JSF Edition is aimed at “Java developers who want to leverage the JSF standard by creating a next generation rich component-based AJAX presentation tier,” wins a ‘Technology of the Year Award 2007′ in the category ‘AJAX Toolkits.’

So, is Java toast, history, finished, a sucked orange…or does it have plenty of “legs” yet, and Jobs’s remark was just a temporary techno-backlash such as all programming languages must resist from time to time?

Bruce Eckel, who has since 1986 has published six books and over 150 computer articles, views this backlash as inevitable, foreseeable almost:

“This backlash has only been necessary because of Sun’s death grip on the idea of ubiquitous, omniscient Java. It was admirable once, but a language only evolves if its designers and advocates can acknowledge problems. Pretending that a language is successful in places where it’s not is just denial.”

But the Jobs declaration strikes as some as being a little incongruous.

“Am I the only one that finds this interesting since the format Apple is supporting for HD content is BluRay, which uses Java for all the interactive menus or BD-J discs,” notes Danny Mavromatis. In other words, Jobs “is supporting a next-gen format which supports a technology that he claims nobody uses anymore.”

Jobs’s remark was made in an interview with New York Times technology correspondent John Markoff, but there must be more than a suspicion that it was calculated to help generate exactly the kind of massive publicity that will be necessary if Apple is to come anywhere near selling the 10 million iPhones that Jobs was predicting for 2008.

Richard Sprague offers a cautionary tale:

“I remember the lessons I learned working with the Newton team many years ago.  I was in Apple’s marketing department at the time and we did this big fancy user study which basically proved that nobody would buy the thing at the price and functionality we were building.  So what did we do?  We shoved it into the market anyway because it was “cool”.  Cool is great, but you still need to make phone calls.”

Back to Eckel, though. Here is his take on a major flaw in Java versus AJAX:

“So Java has been around for 10 years and applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web. I think the main reason for this is the installation problem, another area of Java that wasn’t well thought-out. In fact, why do we like AJAX?

It’s clearly not because JavaScript is so easy to work with — JavaScript cross-platform problems are the reason people have avoided it in the past. AJAX is popular because we know that the necessary software for the client side is already installed.

Someone had to figure out how to deal with the cross-platform issues for JavaScript first, but if JRE installation was trivial, everyone might have just created Java applets. But they didn’t, applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got excited about AJAX instead. So AJAX became the favored technology for RIAs.”

According to Eckel, the obvious contender, instead of Java, for building RIAs is Flash, and Flex in particular.

“It’s clear that we can’t wait for Sun to fix all of Java’s problems,” he writes. ”Open-sourcing Java might, eventually, have a huge impact on repairing Java’s deficiencies. For example, work on the JMF might get resurrected. Maybe installation issues will even be fixed someday. The possibilities might be limitless, but if you need to solve problems now, then the solution is to hybridize parts of the language.”

By way of explaining this concept of “Hybridizing Java,” Eckels explains that in fact we do this already:

“You don’t insist on using a Java database for an application; you use a specialized system like MySQL or Oracle. Sun is directly supporting the development of JRuby for hybrid Java/JRuby programming. We are seeing other special-purpose languages arise to solve specialized problems. Why insist on using a Java library for UI if a specialized system solves the problem better?”

Let’s give the last word to Steve Benfield, veteran technologist, who summarizes what he calls his “technology lineage” as PowerBuilder -> Silverstream -> J2EE -> AJAX -> Flex.

“If you are a Java technologist who thinks anything Flash isn’t enterprise ready,” Benfield states, “then you need to reshift your thinking.” He adds:

“We started using Flex 3 months ago and are rocking and rolling – life is good. We can quickly build the GUI we want, integration to our J2EE/Spring/hibernate back end is seamless, and we anxiously await Apollo so we have a full desktop app.”

Like I said, these are curious – and challenging – times just now for Java.

Original post on http://jdj.sys-con.com/read/331264.htm

Rich Skrenta, who created the first computer virus (Elk Cloner), co-founded the Open Directory Project, and co-founded online news site Topix, may have bitten off the biggest challenge of his career - taking on Google. In search.Skrenta left Topix last June. He started his new company, Blekko, almost immediately, along with five others from the Topix core team. They raised $2 million in seed funding in September from Baseline Ventures, two early Googlers (David DesJardins and Jeremy Wenokur), and the founding team.

The company is still deep in stealth and, apparently, working out of a garage in true startup style (see image below). The Blekko website, which today has nothing on it except a picture of a puppet created by Skrenta’s daughter, isn’t even close to having a landing page up, let alone the final product. But eventually Skrenta says they’ll launch a full scale search engine to compete with the big guys.

Skrenta, who’s very media savvy, won’t say much about how he’s going to tackle search (he’s not a fan of PageRank though:“PageRank wrecked the web. Google is the cause of all of this. and Google is going down with it.”). He says they are looking at improvements on the back end (indexing and query serving) as well as the user search experience itself. Beyond that, he says we have to wait. And it might be a long wait at that. The company, Skrenta says, may not have a public prototype available until 2009.

Normally an entrepreneur announcing they’re taking on Google with a six person team and just $2 million in funding would either be laughed at or ignored. In Skrenta’s case, he has proven himself more than once as capable of taking on big challenges and winning. This will be a company to watch, and speculate on, in 2008.

There are other promising search startups out there. Powerset, Cuill (we’ll be hearing more about them soon) and the upcoming Wikia Search Engine are all yet to launch. Mahalo is growing fast (but still tiny). Can anyone unseat Google? Perhaps not any time soon. But you don’t have to get much market share to be a huge winner in this space - every 1%, they say, is worth a cool billion dollars.

Original post on http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/02/the-next-google-search-challenger-blekko/

As Eclipse came out it was a revelation for me. It was lean, fast and came with refactoring. These time there was nothing comparable. The commercial “enterprise” tools were overbloated with unnecessary functionality - at the same time essential things like refactoring just didn’t work. Eclipse was the solution and the escape. I actually managed to convert many developers from using e.g. Visual Cafe or JBuilder to Eclipse. Netbeans these days was actually not usable (for me). There were many developers who really liked Netbeans 3.X - but I cannot understand this. Eclipse was just times better. I even tried ForteJ - a commercial variant of Netbeans these days, but some really strange concepts like “mounting Jars” instead of setting up a classpath maked me to go away. I even used Eclipse in official Sun courses on Solaris - the students liked it. What I liked and still like in Eclipse is the puristic IDE, which can be easily extended. It was the directly opposite to the commercial, overblown enterprise tools which were used these days. I switched completely to Netbeans since about version 5.0, not because it is better, but more complete for my needs. I’m working as a consultant, so I had several installations of Eclipse installed, everyone was adjusted for the particular customer. The “plugin hell” begun. I spent to much time to install everything I needed, Netbeans comes with everything I need - and in 99% of all cases my projects could be easily opened by other developers. In Eclipse world there is a lot of overlapping functionality, which is good and bad at the same time. E.g. commercial plugins like MyEclipse overlapp partially with WTP and are/were incompatible with others like EMF. I spent more and more time to figure out such interferences . However I still like the puristic approach of Eclipse and the complete “out-of-the-box” Netbeans experience and started to search for parallels.

The Eclipse model works very like Linux. You have a base, compatible system which can be easily extended, but if like to have more comfort, you should rely on distributions. And Eclipse is working in similar manner. There are already many Eclipse distributions (Yoxos, Codegear, Easyeclipse, Myeclipse) which provide a compatible set of plugins, which can be used for a certain purpose and safe a lot of installation time. However the chances are high, that there will be some fraction moving a project created from one distro to another (Just like porting one linux application between different distros), and you are already somehow dependent on the distros as well.

Netbeans model on the other hand is similar to the Mac or openBSD (with Application Packages) experience. You get not only the base system, but the extensions from one source as well. So the amount of Netbeans plugins/extensions is significantly slower, because everything what you really need is already part of the basic download. Although I prefer Linux over Mac and work with Windows (another story), in the IDE space I enjoy the easy of installation and compatibility between different Netbeans projects. I’m even able to work with daily builds easily - no additional installation of plugins is required. I actually have only few plugins installed on top of Netbeans 6.0 Web & Java EE “edition” (UML, Maven and JavaFX), everything else what I need comes with the download. What I also enjoy now is the pace of development in Netbeans land. It reminds me at the early eclipse days, when I looked forward to every new milestone and installed it immediately. It’s a lot of fun.

In Netbeans 6.0 even the Profiler and Visual Pack are part of the main download, so you can rely on such functionality as well. In Netbeans 5.5.X days you had to download an additional “Pack” for this purpose. The Netbeans extension mechanism is intuitive as well. You can use the search option to find an extension, without knowing from which URL it is actually downloaded (e.g. the UML-support is a good candidate). Even the update mechanism works similar to the Mac. Instead of downloading a new version from netbeans.org, a small icon appears which lets you install the patches incrementally. It works well so far (the first patch for Netbeans 6.0 is available through this channel).

Btw. you can use Netbeans without the extensions as well. Then the download takes only 21MB (just check out the Java SE edition) and the startup of netbeans becomes lightning fast. Btw. if you like to find more about the “out of the box Java EE 5 power” - in Munich at 24.01.2008 I will give a talk about Java EE 5, Patterns, Architectures with (but not about) Netbeans 6.0.

Original post on http://www.adam-bien.com/roller/abien/entry/thinking_loud_about_eclipse_and

IBM’s uptight, starched-shirt image has survived for many decades, but the stereotype may finally meet its demise at the hands of a giant boulder and a meeting room up in the sky.

IBM is building a virtual world to help its employees collaborate, and while it’s not the first big technology company to do so, Big Blue may be unusual in that it decided not to mess with those silly laws of physics in its own virtual environment.

“Why do we need walls and ceilings to do a meeting?” asks Michael Ackerbauer of IBM, who is building the company’s virtual world, called the Metaverse. “We’ve had meetings under water and up in the air. Meetings are where you want them to be.”

There have been some mixed reactions to the unconventional model, Ackerbauer admits.

“Some are saying ‘wow, this is great, I’m ready to go.’ Others are scratching their heads,” he says.

Ackerbauer described the Metaverse project this week at Big Blue’s Manhattan offices, where IBM CIO Mark Hennessy was meeting with analysts and journalists to show off a range of technologies IBM uses to help its employees collaborate.

IBM’s two-year-old Metaverse project is in its early stages and it’s not clear just how extensively it will be used throughout the company, which has 372,000 employees worldwide. While a small subset of IBMers do real work in the Metaverse, some of Ackerbauer’s initiatives are simply experiments to see what’s possible.

That’s where the giant boulder comes in. The greenish rock is several times the height of the virtual world’s human inhabitants, who gather around the boulder like office workers chatting by a water cooler.

“You can kick this boulder about 1,400 kilometers,” Ackerbauer says. “We’re just coming up with goofy games on the fly. Let’s see how far we can kick it … what would it be like in zero gravity?”

Something useful will come out of this, Ackerbauer believes. If a few people from different countries gather around the boulder, they’re more likely to work together in the future, he says.

“There’s business value to making work fun and making them want to come in every day,” he says.

Ackerbauer and his team of 10 employees have learned both from massively multiplayer online games as well as Second Life. IBM interacts with customers in Second Life already, and owns plenty of virtual Second Life real estate.

The Big Blue Metaverse has a waterfall, amphitheater and an underground cave. Let’s just keep that cave a secret, though.

“I’m not supposed to tell where [the cave] is,” Ackerbauer says. “For our users, it’s like a very basic surprise, if you explore the world enough you’ll find that underground, there’s a place you can go run around.”

One IBM team in Europe is using the Metaverse on a regular basis because the members usually don’t see each other in person, according to Ackerbauer. But this past year’s work on the Metaverse was mostly as a proof-of-concept, to show IBM could build a secure virtual world inside its network. Over the next year, Ackerbauer says the goal is figure out how to deliver real business value to a wider population of employees.

Today, Metaverse conversations happen only with instant messaging and chat rooms. Adding VoIP is among next year’s initiatives.

“I’d say more people are still finding it a novelty than a business tool,” Ackerbauer says. “But … if you build enough tools that they can use, they will come.”

Original link from PC World http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/140756/ibm_virtual_world_defies_laws_of_physics.html