For example, the current state of play is that Sun’s JRuby team (Sun hired key Ruby developers Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter, back in September) has just released JRuby 0.9.1 for Java, with version 1.0 is expected in due course.

Apparently, going from JRuby 0.9.1 to 0.9.0 apparently brings a 50 to 60 per cent performance improvement (just how slow was it then ?), improves support for Ruby on Rails and for including Java classes in Ruby; delivers various design refactorings; and fixes some 86 Jira bugs. According to Thomas Enebo,
JRuby is going really well.

And Microsoft has just hired Ruby guru John Lam, to help it add dynamic scripting languages to the Common Language Runtime platform. Apparently, he created RubyCLR as an alternative to Microsoft’s C#, so this suggests that Microsoft could soon deliver Ruby as a complement to it’s release of IronPython (which is Python for .Net). There’s certainly a rich choice for dynamic programming enthusiasts these days.

The problem I have is that delivering systems fast is popular, until the business finds out:

• that what it gets doesn’t align with its requirements well,
• that the cost of development pales into insignificance besides the cost of support,
• there’s no traceability

Of course, better dynamic languages may help but they’re still not really the real issue, as far as I can see., For example, customers and employers are thinking about ITIL and IT governance).

The real issue is that there’s No Silver Bullet. It’s an important essay from way back in 1986, by Frederick P. Brooks (he of Mythical Man-Month) that has been repeatedly proven.

Programming consists of overcoming two things: accidental difficulties, things which are difficult because you happen to be using inadequate programming tools, and things which are difficult, which no programming tool or language is going to solve. An example of an accidental difficulty is manual memory management, e.g. “malloc” and “free,” or the singleton classes people create in Java because they don’t have top level functions. An example of something which is actually difficult is dealing with the subtle interactions between different parts of a program, for example, figuring out all the implications of a new feature that you just added.

Improvements in programming languages can eliminate accidental difficulties, but after you’ve done that, you’re left with the actual complexity of software development, so the No Silver Bullet theory basically warns us to expect diminishing returns from new technologies. I’m not really doing justice to Brooks’ argument, so if you haven’t read No Silver Bullet recently, I would highly recommend it.

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These are not theories, but facts. Yet companies trip over themselves to buy others, launch change initiatives, introduce pay for performance, flit from one big idea to the next – and pay their CEOs stratospherically. It’s hardly surprising so many go belly up. If doctors were as cavalier with the evidence, a lot of their patients would be dead and many medics would be behind bars.

Bosses in love with claptrap and blinded by ideologies Bosses in love with claptrap and blinded by ideologies

Amazon link – no referrer code !!

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Along those lines, here’s a link to Top 10 Lies told to Naive Artists and Designers. It’s written from the perspective of a graphic designer, but can be applied to the people who post those threads about starting a hosting company, starting an at home IT service company, or even going contracting.

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More details about Anoushe Ansari

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All courses consist of audio and text lessons divided into chapters and those are divided further into courses like basic course volume 1 and volume 2. Most units and audio files seem to be really big, the test mp3 files that I listened to had a size of about 10 megabytes each and lasted for about 20 minutes.

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It is a myth that the Free World Military Forces lost the Vietnam War. Called the American War by the Vietnamese the Communists lost at Tet 68 when they had their arses handed back to them on a plate. The South Vietnamese rebellion that the North had banked their money on didn’t eventuate and when Nixon released the dogs of war in the form of B52s a year or two later, they were forced to the Peace Talks in Paris. Agreement was reached, all beligerants withdrew; the US and Australia went home and the North Vietnamese pulled back north of the DMZ. The war was over.

Two years later the North Vietnamese, rearmed by the USSR who wanted warm ports on the Pacific rim, invaded the South.

In a 2004 post about Long Tan, Kev also makes the point that there are only two memorials to foreign armies in Vietnam. One is at Long Tan where D Coy held the thin green line and by doing so wrote themselves into history books.

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My first thought was that Ebay was trying to prevent that a serious competitor would compete with Ebays own service Paypal. This could be but I found something that might give them at least a justification to ban Google Checkout for now.

Ebay uses several factors to determine wether a payment service will be permitted. One of those factors is “whether the payment service has a substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services (new services without such a track record generally cannot be promoted on eBay)”

Google has of course such a track record with Adwords and Google Video but of course not with Google Payment. This could mean that they will evaluate google checkout again at a later date and probably add it to their list of accepted payments services then.

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