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How can you tell the differnce between a fad and an advancement?
Instead, you should look for the stuff that came out of academia 20 years ago but was rejected as unfeasible, useless, or just plain idiotic. Then keep an eye on economic trends that change the assumptions that made those discoveries useless. If you keep in mind a large enough set of rejected technologies and a large enough set of economic changes, eventually you'll find a match between them.
Some examples:
The architecture, performance, and programming techniques for early microcomputers mimicked 1950s mainframe technology. Many of the features of PC OSes were considered incredibly backwards at the time - no multitasking, segmented memory, assembly language coding. Yet this primitive hardware cost perhaps 1/10,000th of a 1950s mainframe and fit on a desk. This opened up a whole new market, one that was willing to put up with buggy software, single-tasking, and limited functionality.
Java consists mostly of poor implementations of ideas from the 1960s and 1970s. Garbarge collection was invented in 1960; object orientation in 1968; monitors in 1978; virtual machines in the early 1970s. Yet Java targetted the PC, Internet, and embedded device market that had previously been limping along with C/C++ and assembly. To them, these innovations were new, and performance of devices was just barely improving to the point where they were becoming feasible.
HyperText was invented in 1960- actually, you could argue that Vannevar Bush came out with the concept in 1945. But there was no easy physical way to put together large amounts of information, so Ted Nelson's Xanadu project went nowhere. Fast forward to 1991: the Internet had linked together most research institutions, and PCs were becoming powerful enough to support graphical browsing. When Tim Berners-Lee put the WWW up, there was a ready infrastructure just waiting to be expanded. And the rest is history.
PC video has been around since the mid-1990s: I remember recording onto a Mac Centris 660AV in 1993. Flash has also been around since then, as has the Internet. Previous attempts to combine them failed miserably. Yet YouTube succeeded in 2005, because a bunch of factors in the environments had changed. People were now comfortable sharing things online, and many people now have broadband access. Cell-phone video makes it really easy to record, without expensive equipment. And the rise of MySpace and blogs made it really easy for people to share videos they'd created with their friends.
For routine programming, the GoF Design Patterns book will be more helpful to you than algorithms books. But if you really want to learn more about algorithms, check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Jon-Kleinberg/dp/0321... As for programming languages, the java + eclipse combination is excellent.
Also, check out this refactoring book: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Design-Existing-...
Real advances only come when new _ways_ of doing things appear. And for that, just reading tech news is enough. For example, the Table Top PC.
The only really two significant areas where algorithms can still make a difference are in video manipulation / object recognition, audio manipulation and artificial intelligence.
But you'll find that in those areas, advances are usually very complex and difficult to monetize.
It's much more effective to just look at advances in hardware, and figure out what you can do on a software level to take advantage of this hardware.
But even better, look at the internet, and watch as data opens up. Use that data to create new things.
I'm going to say something heretical here: I don't think entrepreneurs should base their companies off the latest advances in computer science. Problem is, many of them are really "bleeding edge", and even the researchers themselves don't know all the implications for them. Nobody has a clue where they might lead, or if anyone will ever find them useful. Instead, you should look for the stuff that came out of academi…
Having strong networking knowledge is very useful and can be applied to cool areas of growth such as the Internet and mobile devices. I took a graduate level course in networking as an undergrad and it was one of the best decisions I've made.
If you want to teach yourself, I recommend the following books:
Computer Networks by Andrew Tanenbaum - This book is from 2002, but is still considered the Bible of Networking. It covers all of the advanced topics and is great as a reference. You can pick it up used for cheap.
TCP/IP Socket in ____ by Michael J Donahoo - This is a series of books that cover network programming in different languages. There is a C/C++, Java, and C# version of the book that I know of, but there might be more now too. These books are very concise and to the point and teach you everything you need to know to write advanced network programs.
I'm going to say something heretical here: I don't think entrepreneurs should base their companies off the latest advances in computer science. Problem is, many of them are really "bleeding edge", and even the researchers themselves don't know all the implications for them. Nobody has a clue where they might lead, or if anyone will ever find them useful. Instead, you should look for the stuff that came out of academi…
Was there image support in HTML in 1991? I thought NCSA Mosaic introduced the IMG tag later, apart from any standards process. I think the only thing graphical about browsing in 1991 was that the NeXT browser could do header, bold and italic.
The reason that GUIs helped so much is that you could click on a hyperlink and it'd take you directly to the page. There are often lots of hyperlinks on a page: it's very cumbersome to navigate between them with the keyboard. (Trust me, I spent a year using Lynx over a 2400 baud modem before we got a real Internet connection. ;-)). And any interface like that locks out the vast majority of potential users, who don't want to remember that 'g' lets you go to a url or arrows select or that you hit space (or was it enter?) to follow a URL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was there image support in HTML in 1991? I thought NCSA Mosaic introduced the IMG tag later, apart from any standards process. I think the only thing graphical about browsing in 1991 was that the NeXT browser could do header, bold and italic.
No, there was no image support in the original HTML. TBL wanted image tags that opened the image as a new document; Marc Andreesen and Mosaic pushed it through as an inline element. The reason that GUIs helped so much is that you could click on a hyperlink and it'd take you directly to the page. There are often lots of hyperlinks on a page: it's very cumbersome to navigate between them with the keyboard. (Trust me, I…
For routine programming, the GoF Design Patterns book will be more helpful to you than algorithms books. But if you really want to learn more about algorithms, check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Jon-Kleinberg/dp/0321... As for programming languages, the java + eclipse combination is excellent.