Monthly Archives: November 2006

sobre el hipertexto

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tim berners-lee no invento el hipertexto per se; ni siquiera invento su primera aplicacion computadorizada practica.

berners-lee se baso en varios antecedentes historicos, uno de los cuales data de julio de 1945; es un articulo que aparecio en la revista The Atlantic Monthly llamado “As we may think”, de un tal Vannevar Bush (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush).

si, hubo miembros de la familia bush que se dedicaban a cosas menos nauseabundas. el articulo en cuestion esta aca: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

este bush analiza la estructura del conocimiento humano y propone la automatizacion del acceso al mismo, mediante un sistema que nunca se implemento: el memex (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex)

“Su nombre responde a la contracción de “Memory Expander” de Vannevar Bush. Se trata de un dispositivo, ideado por el autor pero nunca materializado por nadie, en el que se almacenarían todo tipo de documentos. Este dispositivo constaría de una mesa con palancas que buscaría mecánicamente archivos microfilmados que serían posteriormente proyectados en unas pantallas translúcidas. El aparato incluiría también una opción para que el usuario pudiera tomar anotaciones en los márgenes, de manera que el usuario se convierte, a su vez, en autor. Vannevar Bush fue el primero en describir el funcionamiento del Memex en su libro As we may think en 1945.” Continue reading →

Commentaire a propos de “Thai IT Minister…”

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J’ai vu de réactions similaires dans le monde corporate en Suisse, et cela tient au discours que Microsoft (et d’autres vendeurs) passent aux responsables d’IT. Il faut dire aussi que le project manager moyen dans notre profession n’a jamais écrit du code (avec un peu de chance il a écrit du QBasic au debut des années 90) et, grâce aux nids douillets que sont les grandes boîtes, choississent des postures conservatrices et myopes. Donc, la vision qu’ils ont du monde open source est déformée, puisqu’ils ont une vision déformée de l’IT tout court. Vision qu’il rétroalimentent lors de leurs congrès et meetings, dans lequels ils se donnent mutuellement la raison de leur ignorance absolue.

Une grande entreprise est un système social qui, ayant atteint une certaine masse critique, génère suffissamment de moyens pour financer sa propre inefficacité. Le marketing fait le reste. Certains état nationaux en font de même.

http://kosmaczewski.net/2006/11/17/thai-it-minister-open-source-buggy-full-of-holes-by-osdircom/

Thai IT Minister: Open Source Buggy, Full of Holes, by OSDir.com

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http://osdir.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=9500

From the So is Thailand dept.: In his first “meet the press” session as ICT Minister, Professor Sitthichai Pokai-udom put forth his radical vision for 3G in Thailand, condemned open source for turning out buggy, useless software and promised to make the civil servants in the ICT Ministry proud of their organisation once again.

… “With open source, there is no intellectual property. Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain. If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated,” he said.

Apart from Linux, he claimed that most open source software is often abandoned and not developed, and leads to a lot of low-quality software with lots of bugs.

bangkokpost.net

“Zune”, yuck!

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I have not seen a “Zune” player yet, but I know I do not want to. Just a cheap copy of the iPod that has more restrictions than anything else, uses an awkward “points” system, and last but not least, is not compatible with Vista. Not that I care particularly, but it made me laugh :)

The iPod and the Zune are dramatically different products. Not that they look different (actually the Zune is a direct rip-off of the iPod with a larger screen) but they have been conceived in different ways, with different objectives. And this is what ultimately will decide the “winner” of this “war”. Continue reading →

The war is over and Linux won, by Dana Blankenhorn

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http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=837

A new IBM-sponsored study on Linux sent me by Joe McKendrick, our SOA expert, goes a long way toward explaining the big Oracle and Microsoft moves regarding Linux.

The war is over and Linux won. (The original Linux penguin was created by Larry Ewing. This particular bird lives at the LWN Penguin Gallery.)

The truth of the assertion is in a chart near the back of the report. It shows that 83% of companies expect to support new workloads on Linux next year, against 23% for Windows. The move is slower for larger enterprises, but the direction is clear.

At least in the server world, Linux has won.

Web servers and database servers remain the dominant applications, but development environments are now among the most popular systems in production, meaning the trend toward Linux and open source applications should accelerate.

Over two-thirds of the respondents said they will increase their use of Linux in the next year, and almost no one said the opposite.

So if Microsoft is doing a slow take-over of Novell, and Oracle is bringing out its own stack, these are understandable defensive moves, a re-arrangement of forces if you will. Because the war is over and Linux won. And in business that means it’s on to the next war.

Virtually anything

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What’s the hot word these days? Virtualization. Even December 2006′s issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal talks about it. Even Jason Dixon talks about it.

So what’s the big deal? Basically the capacity to run different software environments from a single hardware platform, and as such, to streamline operations in diverse and critical fields such as quality, testing, learning, process integration, you name it. Using virtual machines, you can:

  • Set up different environments for testing applications simultaneously using different operating systems, either automatically or using ;
  • Create standard learning environments for your teams, or your clients, to test new software packages, and to have an easier cleanup/setup cycle before the next training starts;
  • Have environments for legacy operating systems, for which you have to maintain compatibility even if you do not own the original hardware any more.

And it all started with emulators; those little applications that eventually grow bigger and bigger and were purchased by big companies with big press releases and all the fanfare. But it all boils down, at some level or another, to this:

Mac OS 7.5.3 (on Basilisk II) Power64
BeOS Personal Edition (!?!?, on Virtual PC 7.0.2) Windows 2000 SP 4 (on Virtual PC 7.0.2)

PS: The image library that does these cool effects is Lightbox JS 2.02.