Michi Henning's article The Rise and Fall of CORBA in the last issue of ACM Queue has led to some discussion, in the CORBA community and elsewhere.
Now Steve Vinoski (co-author with Michi of Advanced CORBA Programming with C++) has joined the discussion.
While Steve agrees with Michi on the standardization issues (members of WS-* working groups, pay attention!), he criticizes Michi for changing his opinion, U-Turn style, on the technical merits of CORBA, apparently for business reasons. After all, Michi's company sells a competitor to CORBA. Now, Steve still works for a company selling CORBA products (although he is not working on them anymore), so I think his opinion is not entirely unbiased, either.
Personally, I never liked CORBA that much. The only usable thing in CORBA, the remote method invocation stuff, can be done in a much simpler way (Java RMI, for example), the C++ binding is brain-dead and all the rest is committee-ware in the worst possible form.
Today the FIFA™ WM® 2006© begins. I'd just like to let you all know that I won't be part of that madness. I'll be watching Segway Polo games instead. Much more interesting to me. A sport for real men.
Dear Google,
I have been a satisfied customer of your services for many years. However, for a few months now I am feeling more and more dissatisfied with the level of your service. Please let me explain, using two examples.
1. The Quality of Search Results
I get the feeling that despite your constant tuning of your search algorithms, the quality of search results is not really increasing. To give you an example, it was impossible for me to find some of my friend's web sites using your search engine. Interestingly, your competitors do not seem to suffer from that problem. Type my friends name into the search field and their websites are listed on first position. Unfortunately, the same is also happening with my homepage. So, if someone searches for my name, the first result you return is some page from a conference website containing my bio, followed by lots of really irrelevant pages. My homepage, despite having my last name in the domain name and my full name in almost every page title, comes on position 12.
2. AdWords
I have been using your AdWords service for some time now to drive some traffic to my company's homepage. Now, what's happening here is that every time I visit one of my campaign pages, lots of keywords are marked as inactive, with the note to increase the bid by some unreasonable amount to reactivate them. The cost I pay for the ads has very much tripled since I started using your service, without giving me back any more value. Bob Cringely's recent columns indicate that others are making the same experience.
Now, I am just one of many small customers of yours, and you probably don't care losing my business or that of other small customers. Nevertheless, your competition is not asleep, and, as the saying goes, other mothers have cute daughters, too. So, maybe you should take some time to sit back and think about your core values, that you display so proudly on your website.
Yours Sincerely,
G.
Good old binary search. Every knows it — it's one of the first algorithms taught in Computer Science — but in the days of std::map and java.util.Hashtable it is no longer used as much as it probably should be. And yes, I am guilty of that, too ;-)
Tim Bray wrote an excellent essay: On the Goodness of Binary Search. Read it, and next time you need to find something, remember binary search.