Lessons of Failure

Humans + Software Development = Always Interesting

CAT | Companies

There’s a wide sense of lament since Oracle has taken over Sun and their intellectual property, including MySQL, Java, Solaris and their hardware sales business.  I’d say the average observer of this process might use the terms “slow moving train wreck”.  I doubt they are far off on this one.

Read more on How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New Axis of Evil (Oracle)…

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If you walked into a store and asked to have someone make you a suit and you agreed on a price of $100 and week’s sewing time, a week later you’d expect to walk back in and be trying on your new suit after parting with a $100 bill (at least in America).

Read more on The Outsourcing Low Cost Lie…

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The ChallengerTop Ten Reasons Babies are better than the iPad

  1. Babies eventually grow up to be better than their fathers.
  2. Babies get cuter as they get older.  Think those fingerprints on your screen will get any cuter?

Read more on Top Ten Reasons Babies are better than iPads…

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Seriously, has the Mozilla team run out of important things to work on in Firefox?

My Firefox browser updated to 3.6.2 today and I’m greeted with this page, asking me to try their new personas:

Read more on Worst Idea of 2010: Firefox Personas…

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About 12 years ago, I was a member of the Professional Services Group for a C++ tools company.  They created a great framework for C++ classes, particularly dates and strings, that really didn’t exist in a standard format at the time.  They dominated the market because their tools were second-to-none.

Read more on Trust But Verify, A Consulting Love Story…

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iPhone app development is a pain–onerous approval process, random rejections, lousy development environment, a requirement where all developers need to get Apple tattoos, the list goes on. But is Android the platform that is poised to take the crown from the Cupertino Competition? Android has its share of problems too…

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Dec/09

17

Military Software Sucks

Apparently the US Military can’t write software worth a damn.  Here’s a textbook-classic case of what happens when you decide to ignore a problem that is clearly evident at requirements time until well after post-deployment.

Read more on Military Software Sucks…

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Cloud computing is clearly not where we want it to be.

On the one hand, we have folks actively trumpeting the benefits and utilitarian nature of cloud computing and data storage.  It’s attractive for sure.  Access data anywhere.  Avoid the hassles of local backups.  Prevent data recovery disasters.  Pay-for-what-you-eat models.  Unlimited computing potential.  It’s all sounds great on a blog.  Clearly the proponents want us to think Cloud computing is exactly like living on “Cloud Nine“.

Read more on Data In The Cloud: Cloud 9 or Plan 9?…

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In Part One of this post, we discussed the Great Concurrency Problem and the promise of Go in taking the throne from Java.  Today, I show why Go isn’t going to get us there.

Read more on Google’s Go Isn’t Getting Us Anywhere, Part 2…

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There’s buzz in the air about Google’s new language Go.  Naturally, I was excited hearing about it.  After all, Google has produced so many interesting tools and frameworks to date there’s almost automatic interest in any new Google software release.  But this wasn’t just a product, this was a Google language release.  My programmer brain pricked up immediately.

Read more on Google’s Go Isn’t Getting Us Anywhere, Part 1…

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