Musings on tech

This is a copy of some casual emails fired off. To be safe, I thought I'd post them on the web, where no one will read them. The emails are flippant, and it should be assumed that there is exaggeration and tongue-in-cheek aspects, so shouldn't be taken too seriously.


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to Madpole, from Eadon



Google is evil with all this annoying "intelligence" they're building into their search engine. With MS they made intelligence so bad they had to get rid of it (no clippy in office anymore) but google can make intelligence just good enough that it is REALLY annoying, and you can't switch it off.



as for captchas - yes, huge subject. I was thinking that when AI evolves to the point of being smarter than us at going on the web, and they're close, then the web will be UNUSABLE.



Related topic - captures - if they get any harder, I'll have to download a captcha-solving computer program or firefox plugin that will use AI to help me read the damned captchas. And preferably fill them in for me so I don't have to type the bastards.



I wonder if google are harvesting all these captures mistakes to make their AI even better, every capture you solve makes google more powerful. It's the google equivalent of Matrix using humans as battery/power sources.



computers/internet/phones getting worse every year! Harder and harder, in some ways.



Enteprise computing - no one knows what the devil that is anymore. 15 years ago it was EJBs. Then Spring came along and hibernate. And Lamp. And all this microsoft shit that the governments are bribed into using. And now clouds. And MQ this, and tivoli that.



As for (SOAP-y) Web Services - they failed spectacularly compared to the hype! You don't hear SOA as much in job ads, I just realised! SOA architects wanted? Not so much



No one knows any more how to write software. And to solve that problem, they invent the "Cloud". Oh christ. Now now have virtual machines inside clouds inside virtual machines. No one knows where the operating system stops, starts, ends or where it hits the silicon chips.



At work now, I have all these remote desktop virtual machines with passwords and usernames, and I just can't remember them, can't keep track of them. Before there were 3 servers. Now there are hundreds and hundreds and help!



I'm stressed out! I can't find anything, don't know what VM to use, don't know what is hosting what. HELP!



And everyone is saying Cloud! cloud! and what happens the other day? Yahoo say, oh, we're going to kill Delicious. Great! Put stuff on the cloud, then watch as they kill it in a few years.
We're doomed.



- Eadon



------------------------------- FROM MY PAL, MADPOLE --------------



-) Google App Engine for Business is currently in preview.

-) Each application costs $8 per user, up to a maximum of $1000, per month.



You are raving about mobile revolution and rightly so. But why is SAP so expensive? Because kids CANNOT do it at home hehehehehe... why iphone jobs don't pay top rates? Because kids CAN do it at home.... ;-)



True, anybody can write Google App Engine apps - and doesn't have to pay ANYTHING for it (as opposed to annual £60 for iOS privilage)... but Google Enterprise is another kettle of fish all together... and it is heavy.. VERY HEAVY hehehehe... paying $8 per user per month for the app I wrote myself is not a trivial matter... and that doesn't include data storage and other costs... ;-)



And here is the potential reason, App Engine Enterprise currently in review, nobody knows anything about this stuff and only very rich companies can afford to find out hehehehe... and they employ the first wave of Google and ex-Google experts to train their stuff in this Magic.



It all reminds me very much of SAP... the exclusivity of the knowledge is worth top bucks.



On another hand, as already mentioned, on personal level, this is yet another experience for me to prove that I am not interested... I am pleasingly amazed with myself how little I care about all this, how, when I trawl through all this jargon trying to find snippets of useful information I keep thinking: "this is not who I am, this is not what I want to do - I'd rather meditate, go for walks and read some spiritual books"....



It is total, abstract bollocks. And I am not trying to "catch up" with technology any more, I am not excited about opportunities because, being older and more experienced, I know that I am a humpster on the wheel, and every time I think I am starting to catch up, the wheel starts to spin faster... and it is totally senseless and useless experience.
- Madpole
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to Madpole, from Eadon



Virtual machines were all the rage in 96 and they became huge and now no one notices them. and now people are thinking, hey cloud! 5 years later, another IT game.



It reminds me of web services / SOA - all these tools, like aqualogic and weblogic integrator. Those tools terrified me. I thought, shit this stuff is so abstract. It's not writing java any more, it's xml config files sending xml files, and there are xml wrappers around other xml standards, the whole mess is terrifying!



I mean, if the thing doesn't run, it's not a case of, oh, the code doesn't compile, let's look at the compile errors and hack the code till it compiles. Oh no, it's oh sugar, the thing doesn't work, and log files are full of meaningless shit.



It's a disaster created by architects. They even put "architect" in an acronym for it, SOA service oriented architecture.



It doesn't work for most stuff, by most I mean, nearly all!



Ditto the "Cloud" - it doesn't work except for stuff that uses the web anyway, like online email.



Same thing. If it stops working, what can you do? Pay a consultant to fix it? yeah, and how's he going to do that, it's not even on your own foobar servers!



I saw a cloud article where MS were slagging off Google App engine and Amazon cloud and stuff, I thought, hmmm MS are scared of them! MS are trying to play this game. From my experience of TFS and MS Sharepoint (MOSS), which I hate with a vengeance, god help us all!



SAP was sane in principle, at least.



Yes, iphone apps, kids can write them, so low cost - exclusivity of knowledge, very excellent point! I had been expecting iphone devs to start costing the earth, and that wasn't happening. Your insight does explain it.



- Eadon



------------------------------- FROM MADPOLE --------------




Yeees... this refreshes my Java / xml memories hehehehe... and You are absolutely right... and it is even worse... because Web Logic, MQ, Web Sphere - all those monsters are installed on your network, belong to You, there is still certain amount of standard approach here... but Google.. gosh, yes, I am trying to do login, my workmate too... it doesn't work, and the thing is, that because everything Google is GLOBAL, single instance, we can debug, we can't see error messages because they maybe confidential, by trying to do simple login we are using Google Accounts Management... ALL accounts - all people in News Int, yours, mine, whole worlds - so of course it is not going to say what is wrong because that would be a security risk... so trial by error until You get it right, without understanding what really is going on and whether You accidently exposed all your company accounts to www... KRAZY!!!



But the thing my dear friend is that, yes, those trends came and went before... but Google, Google will make sure that they stay. I dunno - Google is like a tsunami... it has such momentum that it is practically unstoppable for the next good few years to come... and by then the damage will be irreversible....



And yes, I hate all this stuff, it just gives me a headache and I've been in this job for 2 months.. but haven't done anything yet... I just keep discovering more and more complexities without even grasping any of them... And I dream of being buried in a single script, one code file... rather than having to juggle 3,000 tools, editors, documentation etc just to get "hello world" working... ;-)

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New discussion:

to Madpole, from Eadon


Rumours are that Microsoft might well kill .NET. - And they want to discourage C++. They're looking into HTML 5 etc (probably their own twisted proprietary non-compatible version).
meanwhile google is looking at allowing native C++ code to run in the browser. Would be funny if the only way you could write C++ code on windows is to have it run in the browser. I mean, how ass backwards is that?



This world of virtual machines, clouds, browsers running native apps, it's all getting completely out of freaking control!



- Eadon

Socialist nutter

A funny thing happened to me this morning...

A funny thing happened to me this morning on my way to work. I was waiting for a train at Hucknall railway station when this dodgy geezer attempted to hand me a union leaflet, he walks up asks me if I know why the country has a huge debt?
"Yes, it's because we've just had ten years of Labour government" I point out. (Labour were the recent socialist government of the UK).
He denies this scientific fact and points to a graph of debt plotted against time in his union leaflet, which has a huge spike at around World War Two (a decoy from the Labour government's disastrous record).
I said, when did the last labour government get in, so he points to the graph and the debt is low at that point.
I pointed to the end of the graph, and showed him that his own graph proved that when Labour lost power they had burdened the country with a massive debt! His own chart proved it, he could not deny it!
The train arrived.
He protested, "Debt is still increasing you know!"
I said, "Yes, it is". (Which is unfortunate but true).
However my agreeing with him on this point paradoxically seemed to irritate him even more, possibly because it meant that I was using reason and facts, and not just being contrary.
He said, as I was boarding the train, "I hope you get made redundant!" and trudged away.
Not one to miss a chance of a well deserved put down, I said, sarcastically, "you're a nice fellow aren't you? You're a typical socialist, you hate everybody".
As the train drove past, I saw him on the platform, still trudging, presumably waiting to ambush more commuters. He didn't look very happy. Now that I think about it, he looked as miserable and dour as Gordon Brown.
Well, it made my morning, I can tell you. But this surreal encounter with the Union man was further proof that people don't learn, people do not understand economics and politics, they are blind to facts. And if this guy is paid to do so, then he is just a cynical salesman of left wing get-us-into-more-debt politics.