Posts by Dominic Cioccarelli 7 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2008
This kind of article is completely misleading. Anyone will be able to quote some data over some period of time that contradicts global warming. The fact is that burning hydrocarbons does have an effect on the planet: not only in terms of increasing temperatures but also in terms of decreasing reserves on non renewable energy sources. Arguing that we can continue our profligate existence at the expense of oil is counterproductive: not only does it ignore the effect of climate change but it also encourages the consumption of non renewable energy sources.
Whilst we may well be able to replace our dependancy on oil and coal for power production, we will always rely on it for long distance air travel and manufacture of plastics. Arguments against limiting the consumption of fossil fuel not only ignore climate change but they also (more importantly) ignore the fact that once we have no access to cheap hydrocarbons we will face serious problems when it comes to air teavel and manufacture of plastics.
Whilst it is true that there maybe a decline in sales of desktop hard drives, don't forget that these same three hard disk manufacturers also build the hard drives that go into servers and storage devices. With more people untethering their mobile devices from their desktops, they will be increasing their reliance on "cloud storage". A cloud may sound very abstract, but concretely the data bust be "stored" somewhere, and this somewhere is a hard disk.
I would think that the hard drive manufacturers will simply see a shift in where their technology is used.
Cheers,
Dom.
"Microsoft has provided email, web browsing, and music in Windows on handsets right up there with everyone else and it has built market share. Windows Mobile worked for business users, and Microsoft kept up with the competition."
Possibly, but only when when it worked.... Windows Mobile would have to be the most bug ridden, unresponsive and counter-intuitive platform I have ever seen. It stalls, freezes and has so many permutations (which may or may not work with different pieces of hardware) that simple upgrades to the OS are rarely an option. Support seems to lie somewhere between MS and the hardware vendors, with neither filling in the blanks.
A common OS for a PC is one thing, bringing the lowest common denominator to an evolving industry like the mobile phone / pocket PC market is not a good idea and (at least in the case of MS) has not been properly thought through.
Dom.
"Sun should have cut R&D a long time ago, and if it had, maybe Wall Street would not be so heavy on its back these days."
I disagree. Wholeheartedly. If this economic crisis tells us anything it is that Wall Street is wrong. There is no way in the world that Facebook should be worth more money than Sun. Sun did the right thing. If all companies only aimed to please the stock market then we would still be in the stone age. Wake up people!
Ok, so we will have the ability to run x86 apps in a browser. But then we will need APIs to make it useful. And if we want to have "browser neutral" applications, which GUI will we choose (so that users are not confronted with something entirely different for each app)?
It seems that Sun has already struggled with all these questions in the past, and succeeded somewhat. It has addressed the issues of security, cross platform GUI and provides a host of APIs all in what would appear to be a more elegant solution (processor independent, not just platform independent).
If I were Google I would help Sun with the big area that it has failed: deployment. Java can work well on the client side, but Sun have made a big mess when it comes to browser integration and compatibility. It is not that difficult, Adobe get it right with Flash (how many flash runtimes do you have on your PC?). Sun have even made some good efforts of late (Java kernel) but the response is all too confused. Sun is a company which develops good technology but can't package it properly for the intended audience. Google is a company which gets the packaging aspect just right.
We seem to see this all the time in IT circles: a technology matures to a point where it is just about usable and then someone throws their hands in the air and starts again in an opposite direction only to end up at the same point 5 years later.
Think how XML-RPC was first portrayed as being a much simpler solution compared to the "overly complex" CORBA. After it became SOAP and then web services and we added all the required WS extensions (security, asynchronous transactions, messaging, etc.) I would argue that it is no less complex than CORBA was. And we lost over 5 years in the process.
Sometimes we would be better of fixing existing technologies which are "almost there" rather than blindly starting again...
Dominic.
I agree with CTG's comment that "HTML was not designed for applications, end of story" although I'm not sure that this precludes using the browser to display other forms of content.
AJAX and frameworks which work within the limitations of HTML and JavaScript are bound to create clumsy and ugly applications (at least from a code perspective). From what I can see, JavaFX (and Flex for that matter) pursue the cleaner option of using the browser as a vehicle to display rich content by adding to the capabilities of the browser (using the Java and Flash plug-ins respectively).
The concept of enhancing the browser to support complex user interfaces and asynchronous data access is something that I tried to encourage in an Open Source project called UIDL (http://www.uidl.net/) which actually pre-dates JavaFX. In any case, I think the approach of using a scripted version of Java for the front end is spot on, so I'm hoping that JavaFX is successful.
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