Cloud computing: A catchphrase in puberty
That's a stark realization for a budding young social network developer: Web 2.0 runs on cash, not hugs. Who would have thunk it?
Energy-efficient computers powered by sunshine. This will be an instant hit. There will be greenhouse gas output dashboards with neat little Ajax widgets. You'll have calculators to figure out how much to pay for carbon offsets each month. Don't believe me? Follow the money. "Green" technology is the most efficient, modern way to capitalize on liberal guilt. You also get to pass it off as altruism. Combine that with a web development community that runs on self-satisfaction and you've got a recipe for profit. Best of all, you can squeeze money out of an investor for this by making him feel ashamed to be a person of means.
What started as a noble cause has finally finished its devolution into a racket.
Hadoop: When grownups do open source
Comparatively, very few people actually use Hadoop in practice, and those who do don't write about it. Why? Because they're adults who don't care about getting on the front page of Digg.
In other words, this project is virtually useless in every way, aside from getting the author a quick beatoff from the blogosphere. It's a half-baked implementation of an algorithm from Google, it's written in Ruby and it integrates with Rails. That's so warm and fuzzy it could turn Clint Eastwood gay.
Sun may or may not be about to obliterate Oracle and Microsoft
I don’t know about you, but every time I have to program with threads and shared resources, I want to remove my face incrementally with a salad fork.
Transactional memory is nothing new. Like most suspiciously ideal things, it originated in academia, where professors would explain their ideas starting with spitefully impractical phrases like “imagine a machine with infinite memory…,” and students like me would put on our best display of counterfeit interest.
End result to you and me is win, and copious amounts of it. It lets us program like I did in the snippet above without giving a thought to how things get done. Plus, it’s a hearty fuck-you to that guy on your team who is eerily good at using threads and locks. That reign of passive aggressive nerd dominance is over. He’ll have to find something else to be better-than-everyone at, and Kendo doesn’t count, Poindexter.
Google releases serialization scheme
XML, like a venereal disease, spreads from developer to developer by direct contact.
Google’s engineering team, overgrown with developers from academia, has left this as an exercise to the reader. This isn’t so much a shortcoming as it is another opportunity for you, the developer, to swing your dick around. You get to write a multithreaded RPC system with connection pooling and load balancing and all that shit.
Think of how scalable that shit’s gonna be. You’ll put a real hurt on all that imaginary load your system is taking. Then, you get to go home and fuck the prom queen.
If you want to do it, writing your own RPC layer isn’t a herculean task. I managed to hack something together on top of Tomcat in a couple of hours. It didn’t make me feel as manly as I hoped it would, so to supplement, I suggest you have two cigars, a glass of Maker’s Mark, no ice, and a copy of The Godfather trilogy within reach.
Since the release of protocol buffers, the tech blogosphere (long regarded as the dominant scholarly force of the internet) has been chattering. Of course, none of these bloggers have actually used protocol buffers in any code that matters to anybody, but as you know, that is no reason to prevent the offering of a strong opinion on the matter. If you work with a pretentious little shit, you know this phenomenon all too well.
I have had three week's worth of laughter compressed into an hour here. Go read each column completely.
Previously here:
Ted Dziuba Has A Blog Thank You Jesus!
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