The Financial Times reports that music industry execs want to raise the price for music downloads. Steve Jobs is furious. Idiots. They Just Do Not Get It.
See also this article (in German).
Thomas Themel points to an interesting discussion currently going on over at the RISKS forum, about component architecture and software reuse, started by Paul Robinson. Actually nothing new under the sun, but nevertheless quite interesting.
Speaking of software components, have I mentioned my C++ Portable Components lately?
Digibarn reports (via Scripting News) the sad news that the original father of the Macintosh and pioneer of human(e) computer interfaces, Jef Raskin, passed away on Saturday, February 26, 2005.
Jef Raskin is best known as being the visionary who started the Macintosh project at Apple Computer. He is also author of The Humane Interface, a book containing lots of wisdom on human-computer interaction. His last project was The Humane Environment (THE), recently renamed Archy.
My weblog will be moved to a new sever over the weekend. If all goes well, the new site will be up and running on Monday and the address will be http://www.obiltschnig.com. Please update your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions!
Note: new comments won't make it to the new server.
UPDATE: Done!
This week I spent two amazing days at the Embedded World 2005 exhibition in Nürnberg, Germany. Maria and Angelika went with me to help out on the marketing side (thanks!), and they also had a lot of fun collecting all the goodies they could get :-)
We met a lot of nice and interesting people and also managed to give away some of my company folders.
Marian from Carnica Consulting invited us to the QNX Night 2005, which took place Tuesday evening at the Barfüßer, a restaurant and brewery in the center of Nürnberg. Great food, great beer, great people and a lot of fun. And, much to my surprise, I met my friend Peter, who, by pure coincidence, was in the city that same day and even had dinner in the same restaurant.
On Wednesday we did some sightseeing in the city, including a visit to the Neues Museum, which, besides an interesting exhibition, features a great architecture.
EWeek has a story about AMQ (no website yet), an open source messaging middleware/protocol developed by JPMorgan Chase & Co. and other key players in the financial sector. What is really interesting is that, according to the article, they want the system to be implemented in C/C++, with interfaces to Java and .NET. And I always thought all the hope for C/C++ in business technology is gone since everyone jumped on Java. Seems like a great opportunity to me. I hope that they soon come up with a website with more information about this.
Finally, after many months of work, the first public release of the C++ Portable Components is available for download starting today. Have a look at it!
UPDATE: As of Feb 25, an updated release is available. Building from the command line under Windows now works and more samples are included.
There is lots of rumble in the blogosphere about the current state of the Simple Object Access Protocol. Much of it caused by the recent rise and success of RESTful web services. James Governor sent out a wake-up call to tool developers. Tim Bray a few months ago complained about the proliferation of WS-* standards. Carlos E. Perez posted an interesting article, pretty much summing up what's going on. And I have written a few not so nice sentences about it (here, here, here and here).
For me, SOAP was pretty much dead on the day I tried to convince three different SOAP+WSDL implementations (.NET, Java, C++), all claiming to be standard-compliant, to successfully talk to each other (without restricting myself to simple data types). After many hours of tweaking the C++ implementation (the one I had control over), it somehow worked, at least if you restricted yourself to the lowest common denominator of all three. And I am not event talking about all that WS-* stuff here. Just plain basic SOAP. All this emerging WS-* bloat is only adding insult to injury.
My favorite horror scenario that my cynical mind came up with is running the complete WS-* stack over a binary encoding of XML. So we can finally end up with a new CORBA that is significantly more complex than old CORBA, without offering any real advantages over the old one. I am even tempted to say that the whole WS-* stuff was never intended to bring any significant value to enterprise computing. Its sole purpose is to tie developers to the toolkits of a few powerful vendors. As once you have Indigo in the house, it will be very hard to replace it with something different.
In my opinion, the outlook for SOAP is not so bright. The major reason being that developers simply will not like it. As I said earlier, developers usually reject technology that they do not fully understand. Colorful GUIs in the form of wizards won't change that. The second reason is that very few of the technologies designed by standardization groups ever became successes. Remember OSI networking. Remember CORBA. Remember XML Schema.
I am convinced that SOAP and WS-* will be replaced by something different. It might not be REST or XML-RPC, but it will be a technology in the same spirit. Time will tell.
Just wanted to try out Microsofts AntiSpyware tool. Well, before you are actually granted the privilege to download the damned thing, you have to download and run a bloody Windows Genuine Advantage (GenuineCheck.exe) application. Well, the name of it says it all, only that the advantage is apparently for Microsoft, not for its customers. GenuineCheck does some mysterious things and then displays a six character code that you have to copy and paste into a Web form to continue the AntiSpyware download process. User friendliness brought to new heights...
The spyware check is now completed, and, surprise surprise, no spyware has been found on my system. Must have something to do with the fact that I do not use Internet Explorer or Outlook.
Joel Spolsky writes about usability issues with MS AntiSpyware, as well as why it is a Bad Thing™ that MS gives it away for free. He is dead on.
Interesting and somehow frightening thoughts by Mitch Kapor and other luminaries.