Java as SUV

Via Don
Box's Spoutlet, I read about Philip Greenspun’s take on how
Java is the SUV of Programming Tools. I find it interesting for a number of reasons:

1)      I’ve
taught short courses at about 15 universities around the country, including MIT. There
was a huge range of general competence amongst the undergrads I encountered. MIT had
the best students I ran into, although Stanford and one or two others were also excellent.
To hear Philip saying that the MIT students had a hard time with a technology does
not bode well for its general applicability at other schools. You may want to take
that with a grain of salt coming from me, though, because:

2)      I
went to MIT. :)

3)      From
the outside (of Java), Java looks almost exactly like C#/.NET to me – someone
pointing out differences in productivity is a bit surprising.

4)      This
is far from the first time I’ve heard someone describe LISP as an advanced language.
Given that I’ve been doing a bit of Emacs hacking lately, I might have to move
really learning LISP well up on my TODO list.

 

Trillian Won't Break, MSN Still Free, and Craig Still Clueless

So. Trillian has been updated - the latest version of Trillian and the patches for version 1.0 fix the issue with MSN. I still think it's an interesting shift in the landscape, but I guess I should research a bit more carefully before posting next time.

MSN IM Still Free, But Trillian May Break

Several readers pointed out to me that the Washington Post article refers to MSN Chat, not MSN IM, a completely separate service. Color me unaware - thanks to those that set me straight. But my memory was correct - there is an unrelated move to block Trillian from the MSN network: http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/28/HNmicrosoftim_1.html

MSN IM No Longer Free?

A sharp-eyed friend of mine spotted an article
in the Washington Post (availble
here ). It looks like MSFT will be limiting
use of MSN Instant Messenger. What I can't figure out is how this
affects me - if I have to start paying for it,
I'd rather use AIM or ICQ, which are still free AFAIK. Especially
since I use
Trillian, since that means my UI won't change at
all. But if all
the people I want to talk to are going to be on MSN IM, then that makes it a harder choice...

Does anyone know more about this?

Here's the article text:

Wednesday, September 24, 2003; Page E02

Microsoft said it is shutting down Internet chat services in most countries outside the United States and limiting U.S. service to help reduce criminal solicitations of children through the online discussions. The changes will take effect Oct. 14, Microsoft said. MSN will require U.S. users of its chat service to subscribe to at least one other paid MSN service. That way, the company will have credit card numbers to make it easier to track down users who violate MSN's terms of use.

DirectX SDK Summer Update Available

The DirectX SDK Summer Update is available now here…in
theory. I haven’t been able to download it yet. I’ll keep trying.

Supposedly, the managed docs got an update. They could certainly use it – there’s
basically nothing right now.

MSDN TV: Rebuilding MSDN with Angle Brackets, Pt. 2

The
other half of Tim’s MSDNTV presentation about how we use XML at MSDN.

Isabelle Passes Us By

I live near Washington DC, so we were right in the path of the hurricane that came
through last night. I wound up staying home from work on Thursday because I had to
help my wife make a few preparations (trimming branches that were close to windows,
for example) and I didn’t wind to get caught out at work if things got nasty.

Fortunately for us, things didn’t get nasty at our house. The power bounced
for a few seconds four or five times, but that was about it. I even felt comfortable
driving out later in the evening to return some movies to the video store. Along the
way, I saw a lot of lights out and two huge flashes that I think must have been transformers
exploding – I think close to two million people in the area are without power
right now. Yikes! Guess we were lucky on that count. Hope all of you were similarly
fortunate.