Architecture astronauts take over • Hacker News Board

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#21

Post by DaniFong » Thu, May 01, 2008, 5:19 AM UTC

iamelgringo wrote: post #15

I actually found the most interesting part of the article towards the end: Joel's really upset that MSFT and GOOG are picking up all the top CS grads, despite Joel's great internships and Aeron chairs. And, he's also upset that the starting salary for a CS grad is now pushing 6 figures. I'd actually wager that the true cream of the crop is primarily interested in starting their own companies and cashing out early. It…

In my experience (largely on the CS theory, math, and physics side of things), a large portion of the cream of the crop just wants to do research -- at least coming out of their undergrad, anyway. The numbers change fairly quickly after a few years of grad school.

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#22

Post by danielrhodes » Thu, May 01, 2008, 5:21 AM UTC

Synchronization is going to be really useful when the majority of applications moves online and there are no files to synchronize anymore. ;-)

Just another example of Microsoft denying the future. If they could sue the Internet for jeopardizing their current business model, they would have probably tried by now.

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#23

Post by zach » Thu, May 01, 2008, 5:49 AM UTC

There is a kind of obsession here, one concerned with fabricating narratives and strategies for their own sake.

Bill Gates used every CES keynote in recent memory to go on about the "digital decade" and pose "in the year 2000" scenarios. Of course, this was all after The Road Ahead, a vision book which famously had a shorter shelf life than a bag of potato chips.

Apparently he's not the only one at Microsoft who suffers from this peculiar affliction. All these strategies for a digital millennium and manifestos for an online services marketplace or whatever are laughable. Particularly amusing is how they always find a way to drag every Microsoft business group into their vision. Suddenly, you're supposed to believe that Halo 3 is an embodiment of Microsoft's comprehensive cloud computing paradigm.

Kudos to Joel on calling them on it so entertainingly.

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#24

Post by maximilian » Thu, May 01, 2008, 7:48 AM UTC

dhouston wrote: post #2

we beg to differ that sync/sharing isn't a killer app ;)

I wish you guys would include me in the beta! I've been tooling around with JungleDisk which hasn't been working (which sucks!). I'm a grad student so I have a lot of back and forth between school and my computer and I'm always syncing files back and forth through email (which is such a pain!). File syncing is a big deal for me. The fact that you guys do version control sorta by default is awesome. I've been thinking about how you guys do that, and I think I know how, but I'll keep it to myself as you probably wouldn't comment or confirm it anyway. (so nobody steals your thunder).

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#25

Post by mtts » Thu, May 01, 2008, 8:13 AM UTC

danielrhodes wrote: post #22

Synchronization is going to be really useful when the majority of applications moves online and there are no files to synchronize anymore. ;-) Just another example of Microsoft denying the future. If they could sue the Internet for jeopardizing their current business model, they would have probably tried by now.

Exactly, or, to put it another way: right now synchronization is yet another way to share files either with someone else or with yourself, and there's already hundreds of methods for doing that, and once everyone starts using web applications exclusively, it'll be a non issue.

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#26

Post by mtts » Thu, May 01, 2008, 8:15 AM UTC

muerdeme wrote: post #3

This is laughable to me. I've muttered more obscenities trying to deal with synchronization problems between computers than with anything else I can think of. I want all of my media everywhere. Is that so wrong?

You and, well, maybe everyone here and, uhm, maybe everybody at reddit and slashdot and then, well, nobody else.

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#27

Post by aston » Thu, May 01, 2008, 8:30 AM UTC

maximilian wrote: post #24

dhouston wrote: post #2

we beg to differ that sync/sharing isn't a killer app ;)

I wish you guys would include me in the beta! I've been tooling around with JungleDisk which hasn't been working (which sucks!). I'm a grad student so I have a lot of back and forth between school and my computer and I'm always syncing files back and forth through email (which is such a pain!). File syncing is a big deal for me. The fact that you guys do version control sorta by default is awesome. I've been thinking…

Max! You don't have your email in your profile...Shoot us an email.

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#28

Post by neilc » Thu, May 01, 2008, 9:27 AM UTC

michaelneale wrote: post #20

watmough wrote: post #8

That is absolutely vintage Joel. And he's right. Ray Ozzie and the rest of MS should have realized by now that the only thing that really works is building something. Give us something to criticize. Look at YUI. It's not great in places, but at least it works, and it there, and available to play with, and fun, and cross-platform. It's coming to something when the most interesting thing out of MS is probably F#, and P…

Simon Peyton-Jones and his work on Haskell is very interesting.

He's also at MSR -- the folks at MSR are doing lots of very interesting work.

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#29

Post by simplegeek » Thu, May 01, 2008, 10:32 AM UTC

Ok, but he's not pointed out a solution. I guess MSFT has lost the battle and solution is to admit it and they should work on their strengths. There is a whole lot of potential in there. I mean look at Vista & IE 7 ;( Even though .NET powers some heavy-traffic websites but the framework is still catching up. LINQ is somewhat cool but they're giving out MVC in (ahem) 2000 and 8.

Re: Architecture astronauts take over

#30

Post by ks » Thu, May 01, 2008, 12:30 PM UTC

mtts wrote: post #25

danielrhodes wrote: post #22

Synchronization is going to be really useful when the majority of applications moves online and there are no files to synchronize anymore. ;-) Just another example of Microsoft denying the future. If they could sue the Internet for jeopardizing their current business model, they would have probably tried by now.

Exactly, or, to put it another way: right now synchronization is yet another way to share files either with someone else or with yourself, and there's already hundreds of methods for doing that, and once everyone starts using web applications exclusively, it'll be a non issue.

Web applications will not solve our synchronization problems

Example: You want to send a mail using Yahoo Mail where you attach a document created with Google docs. When you created that document you wanted to use an image from Flickr. That's 3 different services that needs to be synchronized. What happens when you add other web applications.

When/if people move to web applications, the synchronization problem moves with them.