I passively monitored Apple’s much anticipated announcement yesterday via a TechCrunch live feed. Apple makes a lot of brilliant products, and their announcements have a big impact, so it's beneficial for anyone in this industry to keep interested.
The TechCrunch show consisted of a couple of people monitoring the twitter feed of someone actually invited to the event while incompetently dealing with technical challenges like “show a graphic” or “don’t abruptly inject a floor audio feed without warning”.
One of the hosts demonstrated why so many of us have an automatic skepticism about the critical reception of new Apple products: As the picture of the product came onto their feed – carried down from the mountain by Jobs – her reaction was “Uhhhhh....it’s gorrrrrrrrgeous!”
Her observation is only shared by the truly faithful, though surely the rest of the Apple herd will inevitably come around. You can be sure that going forward this nondescript rectangle will become the new benchmark of product beauty.
Everything that follows will either be ugly in comparison, or declared a rip off. I just discovered a digital photo frame beside me which I sadly must report is a rip-off of the pure, blessed genius of Apple.
We now know that the iPad is essentially an iPhone with a larger (low resolution, 4:3 ratio) screen, minus voice. Clearly it runs an ARM-derived processor, with performance likely very similar to a Snapdragon 1Ghz. Apple is talking a big game about the A4 system on a chip (saying things like “Intel is looking to do this with their Atom”, ignoring all that came before to pretend that they lead the pack. It's like coming in last in the marathon yet talking about how you finished before next year’s winner), so it would be interesting to see it put to the test against, for instance, the Tegra 2.
One other feature of the iPad is that you can change the background. Apparently that’s a pretty big deal.
The iPad seems to be the continuation of Apple’s platform royalty play, and may be subsidized in the same way that Microsoft or Sony sell their consoles. With this device Apple is going upscale, moving beyond the repackaged web pages and novelty water cooler apps that overwhelmingly dominate the app store. Getting a cut of magazines and books and even more media will surely pad their pockets.
To repeat what I said before, Apple and Sony would be a perfect union. Their modus operandi is virtually identical. Aside from the common quest to act as the troll under the bridge collecting a toll, they share a profound propensity for endlessly reinventing things that came before, cluttering their devices with proprietary plugs and connectors and cards and slots.
The iPad puts into focus why Apple has been so vigilant about maintaining their strict ecosystem command and control of the iPlatform. While some points were debatable with the iPhone (and were cause for much stupidity when otherwise intelligent technical commentators made ridiculous excuses for the restrictions and limitations of the platform, trying to sell some piss water as lemonade), with the iPad it’s clear that it’s for the same reason that the console makers lock down their platform, though the lame excuses are already being doled out.
It certainly isn’t to benefit the consumer. We had shades of this years back as Microsoft built out the trusted-computing platform, and one feared possibility at the time was that we'd end up with a dominant platform where software had to pay a fee and pass a gatekeep ("DENIED! Competes with Excel!"). Thankfully the massive chill was unfounded, or the objection was so loud that it discouraged that initiative.
Alas, the iPad is real. The faithful are pouring forth to tell us that it’s the end of netbooks. It’s the end of eReaders. It’s the future of computing! While usually it’s the Mac faithful that preach the message, in this case it’s the tech media that is pouring on the unabashed praise with no critical perspective. They’re all afraid of posting something negative, only to be mocked when Apple inevitably succeeds. They point nervously at the Slashdot summary of lore.
As Jobs creepily says during his demonstration, “It’s that easy.” Then again Jobs also told us that it will be the “best browsing experience you’ve ever had”, while showing us the device rendering websites like the NY Times, sans Flash or other accoutrements, much slower and less usably than it takes for virtually any PC, including higher resolution, vastly more capable $400 netbooks, to do the same.
“Flash is so yesterday! HTML 5 is the future!” you say. I agree with you, at least if you’re talking through a wormhole from about two or three years in the future, and with a vastly more powerful device. JavaScript and the canvas element can almost yield usable Flash similes on a PC many magnitudes more powerful than this device. Even just for video it’s grossly premature, though Apple will be overjoyed if you’re restricted to their little ghetto, paying your toll while thanking them for it.
Alas, such is the pure innovation of the sort that only Apple can bring us.
As a reader-of-my-blog exclusive, I want to let you all into some secret iPad specifications I stumbled across.
http://www.tabletpc2.com/Review-HPTC1100.htm
I knew I couldn’t fool you. That’s actually a tablet PC from 6 years ago. It’s a follow-up of tablet and hybrid PCs that existed since the turn of the century (and of course supermarkets and science centers have had touch screens, including the revered multi-touch, for much longer. Am I the only one who finds that people endless pinching and unpinching on the screen look positively ridiculous?)
Of course it was far more expensive than the coming iPad. It weighed more too, and had a much shorter battery life.
Then again, it was probably faster than the iPad. It was completely open and could run hundreds of thousands of very rich applications (applications not gimped to a smartphone). It also had lots of standard expansion ports and capabilities.
The market generally didn’t care for it or its ilk because the only people who really wanted a screen like that are inventory takers at Home Depot. Most of the demonstrations of it were laughable.
Despite all of Bill Gates’ prayers before he went to bed, the format floundered. They're trying once more to make it stick.
Of course that device used a screen technology that required a stylus. Apple is into the capacitive touch screen technology, so maybe that is super new and innovative for a device like this?
No, it isn’t unique. That touchscreen device came out before Apple’s very first iPod (you know the one. It was the “me too” music player that saved Apple from dying at the hands of a failed computer business — though some gimmickry with the iMac kept it on life-support for a while longer — which they’ve since rebirthed by rebadging PC components, amazingly fooling the faithful into believing that these somehow came from the premium bin).
The iPad isn't innovative. Everything it does has been done many times before. Claiming that its restrictions are a benefit are like saying North Korea has a more refined sense of freedom.
Executing well is not innovation. Apple executes very well indeed, and they put incredible care and attention into their products. That is hugely laudable and worthwhile, but it isn’t innovative.
As to predictions that the iPad will take over the eReader market, while it may come to pass it ignores precedent.
People don’t read books on LCD screens for the simple reason that people couldn’t accept that as a substitute for print when they wanted print. That led to the creation and adoption of e-Ink, mirroring how actual reflective print works. I have no doubt that a lot of teary-eyed iPad adopters will tell us that it’s the cat’s meow, but we’ve been down this path many times before. Yes, even with IPS screens.
That’s Apple innovation for you. If standards change for your product, how can you fail?
Of course, all of this is for naught. Apple has a precedent of going into markets with products that cost more while doing less, and achieving remarkable success. So this is my final cry before I smile and nod politely as told about how Apple invented IPS display technology, the ARM reference processor, flash memory, and so on. The leader is truly wise and great.
In March of last year I wrote about replacing the home NAS with a custom-built Linux box.
Almost a year in and the device has served the purpose well, providing a solid foundation for a connected home. I’ve been very satisfied with the change.
The only downsides of the unit are the higher power consumption (averaging around 38W), and the groan of the two fans inside: the power supply and chipset fans. The audible part isn’t really an issue given that it’s stashed away, but considering that a probable failure point on most new electronics is the fans, it becomes a reliability concern.
I junked a laptop because of an impossible to repair broken fan. I’ve lost several video cards for the same reason.
I can even hear the irritating whirring of my blu-ray player’s fan (do not buy the Samsung BDP1600. The thing is complete junk even without factoring in the noisy fan trying to upstage the even noisier optical unit. Speaking of junk, the Sony alpha-200 is another garbage product that made me regret ever turning my back on Canon).
As promised in the original entry, I got around to replacing the power supply with a PicoPSU 90W unit, which was basically a plug and play swap.
In my original entry I estimated a 4-8W power reduction, which turned out to be an underestimation. With this PSU the power consumption dropped a whole 10W, going down to a constant 28W (only slightly spiking under load), making me feel a little less enviro-guilt. There’s still the noisy chipset fan, but that’ll be another project.
The case was built around the expectation of a power supply fan exhausting heat, so some extra natural ventilation was required. With that the sensor readings now hover at low operating levels.
Economically this is a change that will not pay off. From NCIX the new PSU cost me $73.49 all in. Given a savings of 0.01kWh per hour, and a fully loaded electric cost around $0.16/kWh, it would take 5 years for the 10W to pay for the change.
It would be nice if all power supplies were mandated to be efficient (they aren’t for most devices because they know it plays zero part in your purchasing criteria. It’s unfortunately one of those areas where legislation is really the only effective solution), because right now inefficiency is the standard. Of course environmental choices don't always yield the expected results.
In July of last year I wrote about choosing a new smartphone to replace the MotoQ that I had been using. While the MotoQ served a good tour of duty, it was seriously showing its age and was falling behind in the empowering mobile revolution.
While I’d been using variants of Windows CE since before the turn of the century, Windows Mobile was obviously lost in the wilderness. Not only was each equipped device essentially abandoned right after being released, the clearest sign that Microsoft lost the plot could be seen in PocketIE, where the preloaded bookmarks to various Microsoft Mobile pages led to 404 errors.
The team moved onto something new and shiny and had no concern at all for the existing base. Microsoft has a very short attention span to products that don't earn them Windows Office type revenue numbers, so it wasn't a surprise.
For various reasons I did not want an iPhone (we don’t need another restrictive and innovation crushing Microsoft scenario playing out, and I want to develop for the device without embracing the whole cult), despite it being the easy choice. I opined in the first entry that Android seemed to have a very bright future ahead, which is a prediction that seems quite obvious now given that it is the platform of so many incredible devices recently released or on the horizon.
The future is so bright for Android that the robots have to wear shades.
The options in Canada were (and remain) limited, so I went with an HTC Dream (G1) given that it had a keyboard and otherwise had largely the same specs as the newer HTC Magic, aside from what seemed like a minor difference in memory capacity.
I have to confess to being disappointed with the device.
Functionally it is amazing, and even with Android 1.5 the platform is simply brilliant. When everything operates correctly I am over the moon with the device.
The problem is that everything didn’t operate correctly. For whatever reason the device seems to be horrendously overloaded, so even with virtually no apps installed and nothing beyond the base system running, most actions are plagued by obnoxious pauses, even on a fresh start-up.
I stopped using brilliant apps like Weatherbug because they seemed to make the situation worse.
Alas, my long term plan was always that I would buy one of the newer, faster phones when they came to market, while using the starter device for development purposes until that time. If an unlocked Nexus One or Droid/Milestone worked on Rogers’ wireless band, I’d grab one of those when it was a possibility.
Nonetheless, I was pleasantly surprised recently to find that Rogers was offering all HTC Dream owners a free HTC Magic for $0, with the caveat that your term length pushes out. Given that Dream owners can only possibly be 6 or 7 months into their term, that isn’t that tough of a demand. I am on a very reasonable family plan that allows me 5GB / month (which I seldom use more than 1% of), so I feel fairly future-proofed with that foundation and for me it was all win.
So the next day a Magic arrived in the mail and moments later I was up and running with it. With the SIM card removed my existing Dream still works on wifi, where it can browse the web and play media and respond to emails and take pictures, and I can of course put another card in it and continue using it online. I’ll likely install Cyanogen on it now.
Quite pleased about that.
The most shocking thing, though, is that this Magic is much more responsive. It has the same processor as the Dream, so that doesn’t explain the difference. If I had to guess, I’d point to RAM, which on this device comes in at 288MB, compared to the 192MB in the Dream. For comparison both the Droid and the iPhone 3GS feature 256MB of RAM.
The extra headroom over the base OS seems to make all the difference in the world. On the Magic I can see that the free memory is usually less than 90MB, even on a fresh start-up, which notably would put it over the limits of the Dream.
HTC and Rogers claim that they’ll release Android 2.1 for this device in the near future, which makes me especially pleased.
Great move, Rogers. The new HTC Sense update and free month of data is icing on the cupcake.
Back in June I wrote about Web Workers, a fantastic new method to move processing out of the UI thread. To support the entry I posted a variation of the SunSpider benchmark I named Moonbat.
Safari kicked Firefox around in this benchmark. I just tried it with the just released 3.6, and it doesn’t look like much has changed: FF 3.6 does 10 iterations with 4 threads in ~11 seconds, Chrome does it in 2.6 seconds, while Safari leads the pack at 2.3 seconds.
Alas, web worker performance isn’t a critical factor in choosing a browser (my favourite browser remains Firefox), but it would be nice to see it moving in the right direction.
Got the cable bill — a bill that pushes into the $250 range per month these days — to find a surprising $11.25 "internet overage fee". Apparently I used 67.5GB last month, while my limit is 60GB. The Steam sales, several purchased HD movies and a couple of on-demand games for the kids on the 360, added to the normal internet usage apparently really added up to a very atypically throughput-intensive month.
I'm not going to cry many tears about it, even though I do think $1.50 a GB is a bit absurd (in an average month I doubt I use 10GB, so now I almost feel obligated to max it out), given that I think by usage pricing would lead to a far better, more open, more honest system for everyone.
.NET/Microsoft detractors got an early Christmas present recently when the London Stock Exchange, under a relatively new CEO, decided to dump their .NET/SQL Server –based trading platform, TradElect, to replace it with the product of a being-acquired company.
On
Slashdot, news of this was submitted and accepted as “London
Stock Exchange Rejects .NET for Open Source”, with the
statement that “The switch is a pretty savage indictment
of the costs of a complex .NET system.” The Digg submitter went
with the title “London
Stock Exchange dumps Windows for Linux” — which they took
directly from the linked article — with the description “Fed
up with Windows' failures, one of world's major stock exchanges is
joining many others in making the switch to reliable
Linux“.
The heavily-linked columnist in both cases is a guy who has been riding this "LSE dumps Windows!" horse for a while now. It has certainly provided him with lots of quality incoming visitors, drawing in those looking for validation, and angry hordes baited by his trolls. Encouraged on he seems to be accelerating the unsubstantiated hyperbole.
Let’s take a moment to go back in history for a bit.
Microsoft made a Really Big Deal about the LSE originally switching to this custom, Accenture-built, SQL Server 2000/.NET-based solution. This was sort of Microsoft’s coming out party, in a way saying “look, we’re big boys too! No more pull-ups for us”.
When the LSE had a very public failure on one of the biggest trading days in history, the detractors were screaming “I told you this would happen!” until their throats were sore, despite the cause of the failure never having been publicly detailed.
Failures have happened on every platform, most commonly as a result of application failure. To automatically assume the worst of a novel solution simply because it is atypical is the thought process of annoying simpletons, anxiously and eagerly hoping to try to pin any fault on anything that doesn’t fit their vanilla perspective of how things are supposed to work.
“The software must have failed because Bob went with HP instead of IBM!”
“The payroll system miscalculated. It must be because they moved it to Linux from Solaris!”
So what really happened with the LSE?
Accenture built a very expensive, custom solution for the LSE, purportedly costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $65 million dollars. To operate this custom in-house (albeit designed by Accenture out-of-house) system the LSE built up a considerable technology workforce.
The worldwide recession hits and the LSE takes some financial hits. A swarming mass of competitors in Europe, many running off-the-shelf, superior systems that they’re paying less for, go live.
A new CEO takes over and immediately starts to swing the axe. He makes specific comments in the press about the high IT costs of the organization; both of the large number of technology workers in London, and the continuing significant payments to Accenture to finesse the TradElect platform.
He undoubtedly observed that all of this custom work hasn’t gained them any unique advantage in the relatively commodity task that they performed. In some ways it’s like writing and maintaining your own in-house operating system – if it doesn’t give you some advantage, and actually puts you behind as everyone else pools resources on a solution, then why would you do that?
So they go on the market for a replacement, eventually deciding to go with the product of a Sri Lankan company. The price is right, and the lure of low-priced Sri Lanken talent is enticing enough that they buy the whole company.
In the end they have switched from an extravagant, custom-developed solution built by a notoriously expensive consulting company, and a workforce of expensive talent in the West, to a basically off-the-shelf solution that has been subsidized to its current state by other organizations, in the process getting some low-paid talent in South-East Asia.
The new product isn’t open-source, and it runs on a range of non-open-source UNIX platforms. The Oracle database system it uses is the antithesis of open-source.
What about this story has anything to do with open source?
The LSE doesn’t think it has anything to do with open source, or even necessarily Linux.
Where this story gets legs among the zealots is that the LSE plans to deploy the new product on Linux, given that the underlying operating system in many cases has been commoditized. Who wouldn’t?
Zealots cheering on trolling columnists like Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols do the profession harm. Now this nonsense is going to be parroted by people who don’t know better, making them look worse for it, for years to come.
I love Linux. I love open source. And you know I also am even quite fond of .NET and SQL Server. I detest fanatics, fanboys, and hysterical columnist that distort or invent reality to get themselves hits.
I grabbed "Dirt 2" for the xbox 360 recently, looking for an accessible late-night gaming distraction from coding.
The game is a stunning technical achievement, and it is amazing what they squeeze out of the almost half-decade-old era hardware of the device.
What makes the game spectacular isn't specific to some mystical art of console gaming, however, but is simply great software design and execution. While many in "mainstream" development (business processes, websites, etc) consider game development foreign to what they do, it's all just algorithms and code: One person does financial projections and another does particle effects, differing less than many imagine
The game was so excellent that
I decided that I'd try to find who the talent behind it was, my
quest thwarted because this game, like many recent releases by
large game studios, has an apparently anonymous development team.
My search for credits has yielded only a listing of artists
responsible for the songs in the game.
It would be great if there was an industry credits site similar to imdb, where you could find out the people responsible for games and applications: I can easily discover who did the foley mixer work on Joe Dirt, but can't discover the team behind Dirt 2 after a lot of digging. Maybe I'll make one.
I did find a "studio tour" video, in which the only person deemed worthy of naming was the "Senior Executive Producer". Maybe if I finish the game I'll discover who did the magic to make this game happen. I'd like to read how these guys operate and do what they do, because they are clearly successful at their craft, and I imagine they'd have interesting things to say.
Are they just cogs in the gears of CodeMasters? Crank it and a great game pops out, quality determined only by your Senior Executive Director in charge of North American Marketing?
Are we past the era of superstars like John Carmack? Are we into an era where everyone is nameless "team players"...unless of course they're in senior management/marketing, in which case their contributions and name will be heralded everywhere.
As a mostly unrelated aside, the "all contributors are equal, but some are more equal than others" policy reminds me of a conversation I once had with a peer, during which they bragged about how their workplace followed a policy that strongly discouraged fancy-pants work titles (e.g. no lead architect, senior developer, etc). My appreciation for that egalitarian workplace dissolved, however, when I learned that the speaker had granted themselves a lofty, important sounding title, as did the other senior members, and they failed to see the hypocrisy in it.
Sidenote: The website for the game is mildly offensive to Canadians. They decided that the landing page would require you to first select a country, with the options being the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain, the UK, Italy, France, and the USA.
As a Canadian I'm left not knowing which I'm supposed to pick. Maybe I'm supposed to pick the UK to get words with superfluous 'u' still intact. Maybe I'm supposed to pick the US just because of proximity? Two of those countries (the Netherlands and Belgium) are significantly smaller than Canada, so I have to guess it's a hybrid language/proximity thing.
Lots of websites pull this cheap navigation technique and it's lame. Often a US flag really means "English", other times a Union Jack means English. Nationality and language aren't the same thing, so it's a lazy tactic, made especially confusing when both appear together.
Then again, if I recall correctly the old Codemasters site worked by having you select on a world map, where all of North America was labeled "United States of America". Us Canadians get accustomed to it.
Back in 2001, I posted an amateurish essay on micropayments, written from my perspective as a willing-to-pay consumer that hoped to continue to enjoy quality content while the online advertising market collapsed.
Embarrassingly it got picked up by Slashdot and was put up as the awkward counterpoint to an earlier article by Clay Shirkey, in which the author competently, with research and everything, argued against the concept.
Arguments were had and forgotten, and we all moved on. Lots of great content disappeared from the web, advertisers got more and more desperate, often malicious, and a long and horrible content drought ensued.
Eventually Google came onto the scene, bringing advertising to the little guy, and the content market was reborn on the back of Adsense.
Clay was held up as the victor, or more correctly was considered the only contender, and has been used for citations countless times since, unquestionably proving the non-viability of any small-transaction system. I came across just such an article moments ago, as I do several times a month.
Was Clay right? Are people really psychologically unable to handle small payments? Is the idea of small-cost subscription packages for websites an unworkable model, or do people just say that because they like imagining that they're having a free lunch?
Lots of people seem to think so.
Then again, lots of people thought the Earth was flat, terrible things would happen when we passed the speed of sound, it would be impossible to full-text index the internet or to search it economically, and so on.
Take a moment to consider that there have been 2 billion iPhone apps sold, with a current average price hovering around a dollar. There are predictions that the average price will rise in the coming years, to a magnificent $2.37 by 2013.
This is for generally small, disposable apps that often do little, but because the cost is small and the transaction surprisingly well lubricated by the iTunes process, a lot of people just click "buy" and enjoy the experience. Look at Atwood himself — using him as an example given that he comes into play in the article I referenced earlier — who said:
My total bill for 3 screens worth of great iPhone software applications? About fifty bucks. I've paid more than that for Xbox 360 games I ended up playing for a total of maybe three hours! About half of the apps were free, and the rest were a few bucks. I think the most I paid was $9.99, and that was for an entire library. What's revolutionary here isn't just the development ecosystem, but the economics that support it, too. At these crazy low prices, why not fill your phone with cool and useful apps? You might wonder if developers can really make a living selling apps that only cost 99 cents. Sure you can, if you sell hundreds of thousands of copies:
That's impossible! Clay Shirkey says so! Or at least that's what people often interpret him as saying.
iTunes doesn't just service the iPhone app market. Aside from its start selling music (usually sold by the track), countless people are avoiding advertisers and buying network television content via the services. Marginally small amounts, but low transaction costs, technology, and the ease of purchase makes it a viable market.
iTunes doesn't own this nickle-and-dime market, though.
I enjoy the occasional bout of gaming on the xbox 360, and it takes every opportunity it can to try to get me to partake of tiny little purchases, some as low as $0.40. Want a game-specific theme? Want some bling for your avatar? Want that car before you've "earned" it? Want this amateur community game? Come on, it's just a couple of points from some nebulous points pool that you can spend simply by pressing A a couple of times, and when it empties you just add a bunch more.
Of course, all of this naturally leads to the semantics of what a "micropayment" is, and inevitably people will argue that a micropayment must be paying sub-pennies by the page, or the KB, or the image, or whatever. That isn't the spirit of it at all, however, and instead the origins of micropayments were easy to accommodate payments of amounts that were traditionally uneconomical to gather. In my mind iTunes absolutely supports micropayments the theory, because prior to that service it simply wasn't possible to sell applications for $1 or less. There was a fairly lofty minimum threshold below which it wasn't worth your time.
That is no longer the case within certain spaces.
Which again brings us to the possibility of micropayments for websites that hold actual value: People need to quit pretending that micropayments are some disproven, unworkable theory. There are a lot of us who simply abhor advertisement or economic coersion in all its forms (as you saw in the prior entry, the moment someone adds commission links to what is purportedly a subjective review, my opinion of their credibility drops precipitously, and I'm suddenly wondering if they actually liked the product, or if they just fumbled around for something and pushed the first thing they found, using it to effectively tax the readership indirectly and terribly inefficiently), and who aren't cheap bastards. If you have a site of value, and if there were a trustworthy, credible and lubricated system like iTunes for Websites, the idea could have legs.
In an earlier, more naïve era of my career, I had three software development “heroes”: Jamie Zawinski , John Carmack and Joel Spolsky.
Jamie Zawinski grabbed my attention because he was at the center of the internet revolution, right in the bowels of Netscape from the outset, and had established a pattern of posting surprisingly pragmatic comments that defied convention.
It was extraordinary to read someone openly critical of their own organization, especially without it being retracted or redacted the sobered-up or calmed-down next day, and where the author didn’t hide behind anonymity.
Jamie let us commoners see the sometimes ugly mechanics behind the curtain. He also revealed a very interesting workplace that was foreign to the gray-walled cube world that most of us lived in.
This was at a time when Microsoft
really had almost unthinkable dominance over the industry, so to
hear Jamie discuss the travails of cross-platform development was
like going out of bounds at a tourist resort. Seeing what the
brochure didn’t show you.
An SGI box? IRIX? How exotic!
Another of the kings, John Carmack, was blessed with “F-you money” from the incredible success of some of his earlier projects, along with a proven abundance of intelligence and skills, so he too had the luxury of entertaining a surprisingly realistic and pragmatic perspective. He was a principal driver of the evolution of GPUs and gaming hardware, and you can owe thanks for some of the capabilities of your console or dual-GPU rig to his desire to make shooting things in first-person shooters hyper realistic.
Carmack was also one of the original “bloggers”, regularly posting lengthy “blog entries” by repurposing the UNIX finger facilities.
Joel Spolsky is a bit of the odd-man out in this trio. While he did have the requisite first-initial, he wasn’t known for extraordinary technical acumen (beyond having worked on Excel in some earlier life), but hear me out, please.
Joel ascended to Kingship – at least in my personal hierarchy of industry royalty – just after the dot com crash, when CMM factory-line initiatives started to become the mythical silver-bullet: This was an era awash with articles gushing about the amazing adoption of CMM5 among offshoring firms.
Many organizations were striving to reduce software development to an assembly line of easily interchangeable cogs, both of code and people, achieving a utopia where the process would become perfectly predictable and repeatable if only you filed enough forms.
Joel spoke up for developers when most were absurdly blaming the .COM collapse on dual-monitors, Aeron chairs, and inflated developer egos, as if taking developers down a notch and having them sit on a cold rock would have made selling kitty litter online a good idea.
He was essentially an enlightened pointy-hair blogger, and while I wouldn’t look to his blog for technical advice (Wasabi!), he really understood developers and the process of getting software built. And he was willing to risk his own nest egg and put his money where his mouth is, having since built a reasonably successful company in Manhattan that most of us should be envious of.
What made these three really stand apart in a sea of cheap advice-givers and pundits was that none of them were writing to get a job or even necessarily to keep one. Joel made his own bank while the other two were of such technical esteem that they had little to worry about professionally regardless of what they might say.
They weren’t coerced into railing off the latest buzzwords and best practices, deferring to the latest silver-bullet best practice pattern-based UML diagramming system 3NF data warehousing factory built on a n-tier service-oriented, aspect-oriented, polymorphic framework so that they can get the approving nods from the nervous masses and clueless PHBs.
They didn’t worry about offending a boss who held some sacred cow that if only you did it the way she read on some best practices blog, everything would be fabulous, at least until that initiative fails and you move on to the next cure-all.
The three kings were just saying it like they saw it, which was and still is rare.
Eventually Joel ran out of things to talk about and switched his blog to mechanically regurgitated repeats; Carmack got lost endlessly perfecting the noble quest of simulating head shots when he wasn’t reaching for the stars; and Zawinski decided to engage in endless battles with the city of San Francisco over his money sink of a late-night dance club (if you read his blog about DNA Lounge early on, you could almost smell the contractors taking this dotCOMinaire for a ride).
I was delighted to see Joel return from effective blogging retirement, and my enthusiasm exploding when I saw that it was a post about Zawinski!
A royal duet!
Okay really Joel was selling a book – like his partner-in-crime Atwood, he seems to be motivated to post by Amazon Affiliate bucks these days, credibility undermined by that kickback – however he chose the Zawinski chapter as his pitch, talking admiringly about how practical and “get ‘er done” (paraphrased) jwz was about his craft, doing so with a present tense that betrays a certain blissful ignorance about Jamie’s career path since.
Joel labeled Jamie the “Duct Tape Programmer”, which was a description that Jamie took as “damning with faint praise”. Joel has long been against architectural astronauts, so he seemed to excitedly hold up Jamie as the successful counterpoint.
Perhaps “duct tape” is a bit of a metaphorical overreach, causing many to envision some Tim the Toolman ‘Ar ar ar’ hack. Pragmatic or practical probably would have been more accurate, though it would have made for a less contentious entry.
Never mind that Jamie worked within extremely tight timelines, using technology far less advanced than what we have now.
Joel’s entry raged across the social news sites, with the regular suspects popping out of the woodwork to declare it a grievous offense to all that is all that is good in the world of software development. Lots of blog replies parroting the standard best practices appeared, their authors clearly hoping that their boss and any future employers will see how studious and diligent of worker bees they are.
The people who are the most certain about software development patterns, practices, and technologies are usually the people who have the least reason to have such certainty.
I’m going to be a bit trollish while I go to the extreme and say that many of the oft-quoted leaders of the field, responsible for much of the unquestioned wisdom-bites, have little to demonstrate why they’re in a position to preach.
The revered Fred Brooks, author of the Mythical Man-Month, came into a position of considerable influence largely by leading a project that was by most accounts a massive failure. That would be fine if there was but one way to fail and he found it for the benefit of all, but there are an infinite number of ways that a project can fail.
Of course you must learn from failures, but my experience has been that the explanations for failure are often a worse-than-useless distractionary tactic: When a team technically fails to accomplish what they set out to do, expect the post-mortem to be full of nonsensical misdirection about how everyone and everything else is to blame.
How many post-mortems include the statement “I grossly overestimated my own capabilities”? I suspect few.
Steve McConnell is another well-known author in the field, revered for his software development books (though many strangely overlook After the Gold Rush, where McConnell knee-jerk responds to the dot COM collapse by advocating an ill-considered licensing system for software developers), but his professional experience seems to be limited to working on TrueType at Microsoft, and some nebulous software development at Boeing, after which he took on the role of telling the world how software should be developed. Now he consults with pointy-hair bosses to unknown outcomes.
Don’t get me wrong, I have both of them in the bookshelf behind me, and read and greatly enjoy their opinions (Brooks’ observation about second systems is more profound and important, I think, that the over-quoted man-month snippet), but really, let’s keep some perspective and stop using it like they’re the incontestable word of truth.
I read them critically and with an open mind, not taking it as the voice from an all knowing deity, but instead the perspectives of a couple of guys drawing from their experiences.
Of course, the esteemed Fred Brooks
and Steve McConnell exist in a realm far above most silver-bullet
cheerleaders in our industry. These successful authors actually
dirtied their hands with actual software development, refactoring
their opinions over the years into refined perspectives. I select
them merely as “absolute best case” examples.
More commonly the people who most ardently advocate certain practices and approaches have achieved little, usually having nothing to back their conviction but self-interest and a desire to look like they know what they’re talking about, having associated their id with “correct” approaches.
They just clutch onto whatever they hear is proper and start repeating it like a novelty birthday card repeatedly opened. They’ll tell you that should develop like an ecommerce site, despite not being an ecommerce site; like you’re NASA, despite not being NASA; like you make the software for a pacemaker, despite actually making an ebay auction sniping tool.
Why do I hear the word “pattern” from mediocre or non-developers more than I hear about it from experienced developers, always stated as some sort of conclusive statement?
Why do we accept that a chimp-level of software development skill is acceptable for maintenance programmers, capable of understanding only the most infantile code that is carefully decorated with “Coding for Dummies” comments?
Why is “We should use UML” the desperate last-ditch fallback of failing teams everywhere?
Unit testing, or the more early-loaded TDD, can be great, but it isn’t a panacea and is an extremely poor substitute for actual craftsmanship.
Moving beyond the non-developers giving their unwanted opinion on how software should be built, the other class of destructive noise is the advocacy of silver-bullet methodologies during the honeymoon period.
Great, you built a sample app on RoR/Haskell/Scheme/python or whatever else is the cure-all platform that profoundly changed your world view.
Here’s a nickel. Go build a real app then tell us how revolutionary it is now. I don’t discount the advantages, but advocacy based upon toying around is of little use to real projects. Extrapolating it up is foolhardy.
Oh look, another guy telling us how switching to the Dvorak keyboard layout made him regular and makes his code smell like cinnamon. Here’s someone saying that they slept 4 hours a night by taking 20 minute catnaps, proven out over their two day sample period. This guy says that having a 400x200 single-app screen on a netbook made him a perfectly focused coder. Here’s a dieter who is certain that they’re onto an incredible, beats-the-laws-of-thermodynamics diet now that they’ve followed it for a whole six hours.
The fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” has significant relevance to the software development field. To quote the plot summary from Wikipedia
An emperor of a prosperous city who cares more about clothes than military pursuits or entertainment hires two swindlers who promise him the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they tell him, is invisible to anyone who was either stupid or unfit for his position. The Emperor cannot see the (non-existent) cloth, but pretends that he can for fear of appearing stupid; his ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they dress him in mime. The Emperor then goes on a procession through the capital showing off his new "clothes". During the course of the procession, a small child cries out, "the emperor is naked!" The crowd realizes the child is telling the truth. The Emperor, however, holds his head high and continues the procession.
Too often the software development industry suffers for lack of someone crying out. We often just go along with it, listening to the declarations of non-developers and maintenance programmers as if they speak unquestionable truth, all while discarding any counterexamples as mere aberration (“Well not every team has superstars you know! We aren’t all John Carmack!”).
Everyone withholds contrary, pragmatic “Well it isn’t quite so cut and dry…” opinion lest they look like a “hack” to a present or future employer or nervous, cargo-cult embracing peers, smiling politely while the never-coded, overconfident guy acronym drops about things he doesn’t understand in the daily stand-up.
The more you know, the more you’ve experienced, the less obvious the world becomes, and the more hesitation before offering up opinions. The less ease there is to criticize the path of others when it has yielded obvious success.
Opinions come quickly to experts and morons. Few of us are experts.
Jamie Zawinski had unique conditions under which he unquestionably succeeded. Many, with the seeming clarity of hindsight and the ability to project whatever imaginary timeline one desires, will look back and comment on how the codebase got rewritten, purportedly twice, and how eventually the product was squashed, stomped out of relevance by Microsoft (before being reborn as the game-changing Firefox), using that to draw the absurd conclusion that if it were produced “properly” at the outset, today we’d all be using Netscape 9. Then again, maybe it would have followed the disastrous arc of Chandler.
The road that leads to most successful apps is often an ugly, brutish affair filled with compromise and folly, risk-taking, detours-followed, and shortcuts pursued. That isn't to justify them, or to diminish alternative approaches, but we should always keep our minds open, being less quick to defensively guard whatever we're selling as the cure-all this week.
What I’d like to read more about are the success stories, and less about the professional pundits telling everyone how it ought to be done.
Of course here’s where we get into a common paradox that exists in most industries: The successes are usually off enjoying their success and wealth, less inclined to toil away their days writing blog entries extolling their "dart toss" method of architecture. We’re left with the conversation being dominated by the people who don’t actually make software at all, telling us how grand they could make software, if they ever actually did, by following their sure-win magic formula. The conversation boards are overrun with the people who actually have so little to do that they spend their time describing the ideal way that everyone else should write software.
Parallels can be drawn with the financial world, where the snake-oil salesmen pitching the ways to make money are usually doing so because their only way of making money is pitching how to make money (Want to know the secret to making big money? Send me $5, and I’ll tell you that it’s to get people to send you $5 to learn the secret of making big money). The guys actually making the money are off making the money.
This brings us full circle back to Joel’s recommendation of the book. A book that serves as one of the few opportunities we have to really read how projects succeeded, straight from the source.
It’s good if only to let the successes have a voice in the conversation.
Google released an update of their web
browser yesterday, bring
Google Chrome to version 3. This release offers a number of
improvements and new features, and pushes JavaScript performance
even further into the stratosphere, keeping up the horse race
between Chrome and Safari.
One improvement that has gone largely unnoticed is that 3.0 brings Web Workers to Chrome (of course it already had it in Google Gears fashion, however now it's in the standard, cross-browser form), so you can run the web worker benchmark I previously put up and see Chrome 3 blazing a path. I'll update the comparison charts to include this browser shortly.
This means that web apps using Web Workers for enhanced performance on multi-core machines, or more importantly for better GUI responsiveness, now function on Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, leaving just Internet Explorer and Opera as the hold outs.
I really appreciate how quietly Google updates their browser when you already have it installed. No user-disrupting fanfare or attempts to use the opportunity to push new toolbars or side products on you (which, I suspect, drives the frequent updates to many products. I uninstalled NoScript way back after having the update notice seemingly every other day for what seemed to be the most trivial extension possible, each update bringing you to the advertisement riddled website where it incidentally told you that they made some sort of irrelevant non-update. That was before the notorious battle between NoScript and Adblock, where the former again was motivated primarily by ad impressions). Of course this model gets much more debatable once changes include major functionality changes, or breaking changes, however as is it's a seamless way of delivering updates, where each version simply improves and adds to what is there.
