The Silicon Alley Insider shows a nice alternative to the Kindle… I like the approach of the two side-by-side color screens that closely emulates a standard magazine.
Do you remember the names CompuServe, Prodigy, etc.? An interesting story in ComputerWorld about “On-Line 1.0“… I recall being a major user of CompuServe back in the 1990′s before the world wide web. It was a great way to get software patches without having to wait a week for the snail mail with a diskette.
An interesting observation in TechCrunch: “Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!”
This is an interesting development for information technology… A $100 server that could do to servers what netbooks did to notebooks. With the Marvell SheevaPlug, you get a hardware/software server that is about the size of a power adapter. Believe it or not, it includes 512MB of RAM, USB 2.0, gigabit Ethernet, etc., with the power requirements of a nightlight.
This could make the IT networks very interesting…
Most Product Data Management systems are built on top of the ubiquitous relational databases… An article on ReadWriteWeb discusses the future of relational databases versus the emerging key value stores (e.g., SimpleDB, CouchDB, etc.). The conclusion suggests that relational databases and key value stores aren’t really mutually exclusive and instead are different software tools for different business requirements.
Here is an interesting article that provides the 25 best open source alternatives to enterprise applications (e.g DimDim over Webex, SugarCRM instead of Seibel, Zenoss over HP OpenView). It’s worth taking a look…
In addition, there is a web site called Open Source as Alternative that provides additional comparisons.
An interesting article from Bjarne Strostrup, one of the creators of the C++ programming language. He talks about high school education and gives advice to working developers:
“Serious programming is a team sport, brush up on your social skills. The sloppy fat geek computer genius semi-buried in a pile of pizza boxes and cola cans is a mythical creature, best buried deep, never to be seen again.”
