Deviant Abstraction

He states what he wants from his cell phone. A refreshing post to everyone in the industry.

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I wonder why when to get some tech data on MySQL you need to register on their website. It makes everything harder especially when you want to google their doc.

This is a classical example of an ungeek marketing department. Of course, it allows them to gather statistics on who reads what… But most of the data they ask is already given by my IP address.

The other example I have in mind is IBM. Even Microsoft does not ask for registration.

Update I did eventually register (I need it for my master’s thesis) but I received the doc three
four nine times by email. And I just needed to read one page. I hope they don’t send me a survey to evaluate it. Actually, I have set up a spam filter to avoid receiving any more times this white paper.

One example

A link to how the shut down menu was built in Vista… Besides this funny thing, no organisation has still been able to handle those huge software projects.

I wonder if building the pyramids was the same?

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How could I lived without it?

After discovering it, I immediately updated the websites according to my past experiences. (If you want more info please ask.)

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If anyone tries it, please let me know I didn’t know you could really buy some of them.

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This post is an excellent introduction to the Semantic Web Vision and current issues associated.

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Larry in this excellent post blogs about the issue between a language and its uses. He quickly describes the issue between a language and its domain specific attributes and point out how much the effort has shifted from language development to framework. He gives the example of Prolog between C to show how those languages work on different issue. (By the way, have you seen Prolog code in production?)

I could not agree more on this and his idea of the shift from single core to multi-core CPU. I would even add that OpenMP (or others framework) are clearly impractical: too complex to learn, to use and to debug. And not addressing all issues raised by distributed computing (ie: which consistency is needed?).

A language is a trade-off between specific use cases (ie: embedded system in Java) and a broad abstractions (ie: synchronized in Java). For instance, Erlang has not been embraced as a general language but solve the threading issue. Erlang is not seen as a good general language (for a lot of reasons).

No language offers yet powerful high and low level abstraction to manage multi-processor. You could use a framework (openMP) for those, but since it is a central feature of a modern language this needs to be in the language construct. It allows you to get more information on the context and build cleverer code.

Currently, I know only of Erlang, Java and Ada to offer some sort of high level concurrency management. But a developer is not an expert in distributed system. Most patterns of distributed codes is known (where to add a mutex, a guard condition, …) and could be added automatically by the compiler with the right language construct.

More to follow on this…

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“Man is not a good like the others” - Nicolas Sarkozy

From today’s Canal+ Zapping.

Google has just released a new service. It allows you to create your search engine quite easily. Here is my test one.

This is technically impressive. I need to test it further though.

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Sonos is a very cool music system. I will own some when I will get rich!

Joel Spolsky describes why this product is great and how it is built. Pretty cool article. Pure excellent applied marketing.

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