Braces – which style?
if (true)
{
doSomething();
}
else
{
doSomethingElse();
}
One last thing. On the C/C++ braces style. It has gotta be ‘Allman’ for me. It just looks so much more readable when there is symetry.
Archive for October, 2004
Virgin Digital
A few weeks ago, I got into a discussion with a co-worker, Adam Lasnik, about the online music industry. Other than being an all around nice guy, it turns out that Adam knows quite a bit about all the online music sites. At his suggestion, I tried out Virgin Digital, the new online Music store and service by Mr. Branson.
Essentially, the deal goes like this: you pay a monthly fee, and you get to listen to all the music in their library via their application. The fee is like $9 – $10 a month. As soon as you stop paying the fee, the music stops.
They had a 14 day free trial, so… I tried it.
My overall impression was Wow. Although their app had a few kinks or UI quirks, it was an amazing experience to literally listen to just about anything you could think of. They, of course, did not have some of the odd stuff that I listened to during my college years, but they pretty much had everything else. I could easily see myself paying $10 a month to listen to whatever I want. The service also did allow you to download WMA files of the songs, so you could listen to it that way as well. I never felt the need to. My wife loved it too, and she agreed.
Virgin Digital is highly recommended.
Now, with Napster on the Microsoft Media Center and with cell phone networks getting better. You can imagine something like this being really handy. One other blog I read, Russell Beattie’s notebook, already talked about the potential on cell phones. In fact, a few days after he suggested it, I read about ATT Wireless selling music on cell phones.
Ok, the security post, and what happened…
Remember that post to my blog a few months back. The one about ‘The End to Computer Viruses’. Well, I sent that link to a bunch of people. Some of the ‘technorati’ and press types that get cited on the net a lot.
What did I learn:
I am not a writer. I actually spent a lot of time trying to get that article written. The hard part is talking about something very technical to a medium or low tech crowd. The result was a mess. For the technical people it was like “hey, you didn’t explain X, Y, or Z”. For the non-technical it was, “what are you talking about??” I couldn’t hook either crowd.
People like that don’t read their email. Seriously. Some of them responded weeks later.
Some of them are a bit snotty. I emailed Larry Osterman. He basically replied with ‘you are just copying Paladium’. He then /dev/nulled any attempt at a discussion about this. Now, when I used to read his blog, I thought. “Hey, neat. That guy was at Microsoft for 20 years. Those are some neat stories.” Now, I read further with: ‘hey, this guy worked on some of those clunky designs that everybody hated. (SMB/CIFS, Exchange 2000).’ Maybe they don’t allow rational discourse at Microsoft? Whatever.
Some people actually cross linked the entry and mentioned it, but if you aren’t in that top 1%, you get very little traffic.
Kuroshin is filled with zealots (probably more than /.) I felt like their community review process went to the lowest common denominator. Lots of name calling and abuse. (Nothing has changed since the ole BBS days)
The internet will let you get the word out, only if you can get your message broadcast on one of the trusted channels. I wrote the article and put it on my own domain. rather than use O’Reilly or some other publication. The traffic was zilch. My other articles on O’Reilly really generated some traffic.
Now, if I had written the article better, maybe a lot of these problems would go away. Then again maybe not. If you look at the way the computer industry moves, you can see that there is a lack of innovation. I wanted to really give the OS community a little shock from the cattle prod.
Recently, however, I learned that the Qualcomm BREW platform is a great example of a signed code environment. They have 40 million handsets with this stuff. Then end result: they are profitable, have no viruses/spyware on the phones, and there support costs are lower.
When people make money on something, they figure it out. All of the established players are already moving towards this. You’ll just have to take what the OS guys give when it’s ready rather than now.
Overall, a good experience… I learned something.
More interesting PC designs…
The above design is the PC3 from http://www.vent-box.com/. Nice designs. Quiet as well.
Ghost in the Shell #2 : Innocence
Saw the movie last night at the Aquarius in Palo Alto. Great Anime. I was told before the movie that the story was not as good as the first one. They were right, but so be it. The thing is, you just can’t get much else to compete with the genre. As long as the story didn’t hurt the visual design, I would be happy. The visuals were just fantastic, mesmerizing. I recommend seeing the movie in a high quality setting.
There is also a little side story about this. Over 8 years ago, I came to Palo Alto to check out Silicon Valley as a place to work. While I was here, I saw the local paper and it gave the previous Ghost great reviews. This was a time when the Internet was still new and the valley was exciting. So going back to see the sequel in the same theatre was kind of more than just seeing a movie. It was also a time to reflect on how far we’ve come. Things have changed, but this is still a great place to be.
Whither CyberPunk
So, I had some time to spare and I had this old book lying around, Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Neat book. I enjoyed it. So after the book, I looked around to see if anything had come out since then. Nada. There hasn’t been any significant work in the genre since the 1980’s or very early 1990’s.
I did a search out on the internet. Again… access denied. Most of the references are to old Usenet FAQs or to old role-playing games. If you don’t count the MATRIX, I think the literary genre is dying. Even if you look at the MATRIX, you will find it lacking the diversity of the 80’s CyberPunk.
If you look around further, a lot of the stuff related to CyberPunk is also not so popular anymore. Where did Virtual Reality go? Where are the goggles and the gloves? I guess it takes a long time for things like this to materialize. Also, I doubt you will see some of this stuff materialize out of the existing computer standards and infrastructure ( HTML & CSS, C/C++, etc. 
, c’mon)
It will be interesting to see if any new books come out that really reinvigorate the genre and entertain us.
