Will 2010 be remembered as the tipping point when Software Architecture became "composite" instead of monolithic? Five years after the first official mash-up was published? Critical building blocks are still worked on, like OAuth, while new types of clients are appearing almost daily. It seems now that the momentum behind composite applications is inescapable
He said China could also influence the value of other world currencies because they have a “chronic trade surplus”, which means the Chinese have a lot of foreign currencies. “They control not only their own currency but actually the entire global currency system,” he said.
Writing in the Financial Times, Mr Soros added: “Whether it realizes it or not, China has emerged as a leader of the world. If it fails to live up to the responsibilities of leadership, the global currency system is liable to break down and take the global economy with it.”
 secretGeek (@secretGeek)10/7/10 7:14 AM Good software requires an anthropological shift. Programmer as embedded observer in real environment. Undercover coders. |
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secretGeek (@secretGeek) 10/7/10 7:16 AM The norm today is to extract the supposed user out of their environment as an SME. But we *never* get the real users. It's terrible science. |
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secretGeek (@secretGeek) 10/7/10 7:20 AM If the business can afford to hand you a user as an SME then there's a strong chance that it's not the most valuable user. |
 Michael Tamburro (@mtamburro)10/4/10 4:36 PM My iPhone app made the Wall Street Journal! http://bit.ly/bf7OLM "you can instantly crowd source a question and get speedy, honest results" |
Open the Terminal application on a Mac and what do you see? A noble and worthy Unix “shell”, a program that geeks use to interact with the OS. Terminal uses the bash shell (for Bourne Again Shell. Created by Brian Fox, bash is based on the sh shell, which was invented by Stephen Bourne. Unix mavens love their word-play acronyms).
And now we have the Apple iOS, an OS X derivative that uses bits from the same kernel.
"...addressing technical debt is really a risk decision for IT executives,” said Curtis. “I can invest in fixing some of the structural quality problems now, or risk that they result in outages, breaches, or other problems that can cost far more than addressing the underlying technical problems. In any event, technical debt represents waste, resources I could have invested in developing new competitive functionality rather than reacting to emergent problems.”
via Cast Software
Any economic collapse is a psychic collapse. Once people stop believing in the economy, it ceases to function. A question of more-than-academic interest nowadays, then, is: Why do they stop believing?
One important school of thought focusses on governments' ill-advised decision, during the 1920's, to peg their currencies to gold. When its currency's value is defined as a fixed amount of gold, a nation's supply of money is limited by its gold reserves. That's a defense against inflation, but when faith is failing, inflation isn't the problem. To get people buying, loaning and investing, governments inject cash into the system (as the United States did with the stimulus plan, which, as far as it went, seems to have worked).
I believe part of the problem is a matter of confusing passion with lack of objectivity. Bobby Fischer - one the greatest world champions ever - was insanely passionate about chess. However, he was very objective about evaluating his position while playing. As a matter of fact, objectivity was one of his greatest virtues as a chess player.
Various execs fail to appreciate this distinction when they encounter strong passion. They don't quite get that one can be very passionate about a profession without affecting his/her objectivity with respect to the task to be carried out. Programming is a domain where this kind of failure takes place fairly frequently.
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