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Ten predictions (2004)

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Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#301

Post by philsnow »

I came late to this thread, but I want to add an item to Stevey's list of "trust tests" for prediction #2, "someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications":

SOVEREIGNTY: I would strongly prefer outsourcing to large companies with C* executives, boards, and/or founders who really "believe" in the mission of the company, have complete financial control, and are generally unlikely to even need or want to sell out, and generally unlikely to ever be vulnerable to a buy-out.

When making investments of any kind in an entity that is made up of individuals, I'm increasingly wary of the cupidity of those individuals. Very soon I'm going to have to decide whether to send my kids to private schools or public schools (and switching costs are high, so I want to get it right the first time), and it strikes me that private schools may be less likely to change drastically over the course of 8-12 years than a public school.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#302

Post by coldtea »

jodrellblank wrote: post #276
huherto wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about bob?

I'm sure you're capable of filling in the pattern with yourself. I wasn't trying to show XML is as compact as JSON, only that it can be more compact than the claim "it's so verbose" made it look.

Yes. And then you have to find a way to parse that.

JSON always comes with ready made parsing.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#303

Post by coldtea »

friendly_chap wrote: post #44
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Thank god we dodged that bullet. I'm just glad people see XML for what it really is (useful, but not that useful). > Not really. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore. The problem is multi-threaded has never really took off, even with all the cores we have today. There is still no silverbullet to harnessing parallelism. > Apple's lap…

> useful, but not that useful + 1 > Apple's profits With all respect, I have hard time seeing Apple laptops outside the US. Not counting some fanboys who acquired the taste trough some snob blogs.

>With all respect, I have hard time seeing Apple laptops outside the US. Not counting some fanboys who acquired the taste trough some snob blogs.

Well, I see tons of Apple laptops in places ranging from France, to poverty striken Greece to SE Asia.

If you live in some Eastern European country, Latin America or Africa you might see way less. Macs are for the richer part of the computing buying public.

Worldwide Apple commands around 4-5% of laptop shipments, but in places like US and Japan that can get to 15-20%, and for specific categories like ultraportables it can get to 60%.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#304

Post by seanmcdirmid »

chc wrote: post #296
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Say you take $100 million in finance, so you are now $100 million in debt and you are probably not going to put the money in the bank, but spend it. When you spend (invest) the money, that is taken away from earnings and you can spend more than you earn thanks to the financing. Even if the company's valuation goes up because of these investments, they are still taking a loss now. You have to take a hit no…

> Say you take $100 million in finance, so you are now $100 million in debt Venture capital is not a loan; it's a purchase of equity. You are not in debt after taking money.

You are right. But the $100m is not earnings either, and you have to spend it, so your balance sheet is still negative for awhile.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#306

Post by jonpeda »

zanny wrote: post #259
dspillett wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. Not really. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore. A lot of things server-side are moving back towards multiple processes rather than threading, driven by "cloud" based scaling: if you code is designed to handle being spread over many nodes then why complicate things by having two concurrency models on the go at once (threads…

> (threads at host level, multiple processes spread over the hosts) Concurrent programming isn't all "jump off a cliff into the atomic and mutex lock sea and worry about deadlock or run everything in serial". There is a middle ground where you take apart the easily discretized parts of your task at hand, that have little or no communication between them, and thread those. For example, if you have a system to scrape a…

When people complain about threading, they are thinking about shared-mutable-state threading.

Obviously we will never have single-threaded systems, they would be blocking all the time.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#307

Post by jonpeda »

Ingaz wrote: post #286
Nursie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The XML things is quite amusing, given how far out of favour XML went. XML has now failed hard AFAICT. But I can agree the spirit of the prediction lives on in the form NoSQL and JSON.

XML is not about " " everywhere. XML, JSON, MUMPS are semantically equivalent.

XML is far more structured than JSON.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#308

Post by jonpeda »

justin_vanw wrote: post #191
rntz wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any infix notation on the linked page.

(car x) == (first x) (car nil) => NIL Shouldn't they say, for example: (eq (car x) (first x)) Sure, it's the same, both imply a test for equality or in this case an assertion of equality. However, '==' is not part of this language and there is reason to use it other than the alternative is less obvious and clear.

eq == ==

This is true in both infix notation and in prefix notation.

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#309

Post by [deleted] »

justin_vanw wrote: post #191
rntz wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any infix notation on the linked page.

(car x) == (first x) (car nil) => NIL Shouldn't they say, for example: (eq (car x) (first x)) Sure, it's the same, both imply a test for equality or in this case an assertion of equality. However, '==' is not part of this language and there is reason to use it other than the alternative is less obvious and clear.

[deleted]

Re: Ten predictions (2004)

#310

Post by jonpeda »

philsnow wrote: post #301

I came late to this thread, but I want to add an item to Stevey's list of "trust tests" for prediction #2, "someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications": SOVEREIGNTY: I would strongly prefer outsourcing to large companies with C* executives, boards, and/or founders who really "believe" in the mission of the company, have complete financial control, and are generally unlikely to even need…

> switching costs are high

Why? switching to private school is expensive. Switching from is not. In the public system, schools change every 3-5 years anyway.

" and it strikes me that private schools may be less likely to change drastically over the course of 8-12 years than a public school."

Why? public schools change slow and ploddingly, after long tedious debates.

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