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Thursday, May 09, 2002 |
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How IBM (and Open Source) Won eBay [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters] 10:17:51 PM 
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BEA Implements New Web Services Standard. BEA's Weblogic Workshop is the first implementation of Java Web Services tags -- a new file format standard aimed at making development of Web services much easier. [O'Reilly Network Articles] 10:16:58 PM
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Bertrand Meyer provides a far better analysis than I did about multiple languages in .NET in this month's Software Development Magazine. "Of course, the [.NET] languages involved have their own models, which may differ significantly from the .NET object model. That's to be expected: Otherwise, they wouldn't really be different languages, just a different syntax and minor variations on a single language theme. To a certain extent, this characterization could be applied to C# and Visual Basic .NET; one may claim that these two are, deep down, just one language, now that VB has become an OO language. But it's definitely incorrect if we consider the entire set of .NET language players." He goes on to point out that "Managed C++ is very close to C#, in spite of what the default Microsoft descriptions would have you believe." And I'm sure when Java.NET comes out it will be too. [Joel on Software]10:16:35 PM
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NYT. Satellite Pirates. Very interesting article.
>>>In the past few years, satellite TV piracy has become a multimillion-dollar industry in the United States, with as many as one million households, by some estimates, illegally obtaining programming from the nation's two big satellite providers, DirecTV and EchoStar. <<< >>>"It's like heroin," said Joann Kolonelos, a dealer at DSS Pirate, a satellite piracy store in Windsor whose clientele has been approximately one-third American. "Once you have access to all those channels, all those movies, you can't give it up."<<< >>>Satellite piracy is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison for dealers and one year for viewers, in addition to fines. But many scoff at the idea of getting caught.<<< So, 1 m American who have pirate cards could serve one year in jail? Wow. >>>Last year DirecTV hired five law firms to mail cease-and-desist letters to American addresses obtained from raids on dealers. To date it has mailed over 7,500 letters. "We are going after the users," Mr. Rissler said. "We are trying to teach them a lesson."<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:13:38 PM
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Ask Merrill Lynch. Bruce Steinberg, chief economist ML. This is an excellent overview of the economy. The spectacular 8.6% gain in the first quarter follows an upward revision of the 4th quarters productivity to 5.5%. Productivity gains are widespread across the economy and up 4.3% over a year ago (far above our long-term 2-2.5% growth rate in the 90s). As Bruce points out: productivity is key to living standards, growth potential, inflation control and corporate earnings. Here is some more data:
>>>Productivity is pro-cyclical, usually strongest during early recovery periods. In that sense, recent productivity performance is not that unusual. But in prior recessions productivity declined or, at best, was flat. In the most recent recession, productivity continued to grow right through the recession. So the productivity acceleration is coming on top of an already strong base.... We won't see another quarter as strong as the first, but we do believe productivity will grow at a 4% rate or better during the rest of the year. If so, earnings should be up strongly, despite a lack of pricing power, and inflation should be a no show. <<< This is phenominal data and points strongly to something at work here we don't have a handle on (I think it is adoption of computer automation). Earlier analysis showed that the strong productivity gains we made in the 90's weren't widespread. Only 5 of 70+ industries experienced productivity growth in the 90's. Most of it was in the computer industry (65% a year as of 1998). My fear was that we would need to go through a long period of adjustment before computer automation percolated throughout the rest of the economy. That was apparently unfounded. Companies are learning to use computer automation faster than I anticipated and the results speak for themselves. The mini recession actually accelerated the trend. What does this adoption of computer automation mean, long-term? Our economy may be in the process of aligning itself with Moore's Law. The closer the alignment, the faster the acceleration of productivity. Alignment means that advances in computer technology (price/performance) will have an ever greater impact economy wide productivity. It's clear that we won't likely have an economy where productivity doubles every 12-18 months, but are trend productivity growth rates of 10%+ possible? I think they are. In that scenario, we all get very rich, very fast. A "long boom" on steroids. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:12:37 PM
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Radio's RSS writer is now user-extensible. The RSS writer in Radio is now officially user-extensible. "Before generating the RSS, we check user.radio.callbacks.writeRssFile," Dave writes today. Excellent. This will open the floodgates for all sorts of useful metadata experimentation. We'll see Radio UserLand sites emitting RSS 1.0, and others extending RSS .9x. It's not the format that matters to me, it's the experimentation. ... [Jon's Radio] 10:07:27 PM
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Radio 8: Multi-Author Weblog Tool.  [Scripting News]10:02:57 PM
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Digitizing Your Dead Trees? [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters] Ok, when I met with a publisher trade group three years ago, I told them they had time to come up with a compelling way to sell their wares on line -- at the time there was no reasonable way to take a book at make it digital and there still wasn't a compelling way to read books on a computer. Looks like the interest is mounting... Demand draws a supply. will the publishers meet the demand with a technology of their choosing or will they wait (as the record companies did) until consumers figure out a way to create their own supply? of course, some of their demand has already slipped away to other supplies -- lots of people produce text consumables straight to web... 9:59:20 PM
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jabberconf blaggplug. A little Q and A from DJ Adams:
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Managing Images With a Web Database Application. Learn how to create a Web application to upload, store, and retrieve image files using PHP and MySQL. [O'Reilly Network Articles] 9:45:07 PM
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I.B.M. Likely to Eliminate 9,000 Jobs. I.B.M. plans to trim its payroll by roughly 9,000 workers by the middle of this year, an industry executive close to the company said. [New York Times: Technology] 9:41:23 PM
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Reuters: VeriSign, AOL partner on encrypted IM. Is there demand for AIM inside the enterprise? Do enterprises need somebody else to authenticate their own employees? [Hack the Planet] 9:39:26 PM
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A couple links from the Fed on home buying in the Bay Area: A letter from 2000 noted that there was a similarity between the pattern of boom in stocks and house prices. A letter from 2002 attributes the unusual stability in house prices in the Bay Area despite the drop in the stock market and the recession to consumer expectations of a mild recession followed by a return to strong economic growth. The first article noted that SF Bay Area had a much larger concentration of publicly traded high-tech companies than anywhere and that the consequent growth in wealth had also been substantially higher. While I don't doubt that this area still has some substantial residual of that wealth floating around, a lot of it has to be gone. The second note notes with concern that the firmness of house prices might be based on backward looking projections ("it has always gone up before"). It seems to me that this is the kind of thinking that leads to bubbles. Talking to people around the office, there seems to be an expectation that options will begin appreciating as they did during the boom. This seems unlikely to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if that also plays a role in the stability of housing prices. Even though the economy show signs of recovery in general, high tech is still hurting. 9:11:32 AM
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1. "Against Depression, A Sugar Pill is Hard to Beat" (15.2 points) [( blogdex : recent )] 8:24:29 AM
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Last update: 9/29/2003; 6:49:20 PM .
