Actually it is much more than what meets the eye. As a trend emerges where use of iPads/iPhones increases in the Enterprisy land, it will not hurt Apple to be up-to-date with Java. And as Steve puts it, it is better to leave upkeep of Java to Oracle who is standardizing their whole Application suite on Java and are focused on Java.Fact that Steve Job was the best man at Larry's wedding was not the deciding factor here.
As he puts it Apple is foremost a design company. I see interesting rivalry brewing up between Apple and Google. One where design is paramount and other where engineering is paramount. In fact in the tech world, Apple stands out as a design company where as pretty much everybody is more or less engineering and marketing company.
Ballmer should have been gone instead of Ray. I will not be surprised if Bill comes back(aka like what Jobs did when he came back to Apple). Granted Microsoft may not be in as bad a shape as Apple was when Jobs came back and Gates is no Jobs, but I am sure with Ballmer incharge for few more years, it might get that bad.
WOW! As per this guys logic, US should be focused on reducing the deficit right now rather than growth and jobs. With one of the deepest recession we ever faced hardly over and unemployment still so high, not sure how more jobs could have been created without help from govt stimulus(since consumer spending is down and so is pvt sector profits as well as hiring). With the kind of hole we were in and still are in, the biggest worry should be jobs and growth which are not going to come back just simply by waiting on consumer spending to pick up by itself(consumers are not going to spend, if there are no jobs).
Does anyone know about interview process at Apple(for Eng/Design positions)? It will always be debatable which of the two(Apple and Google) are more innovative - I consider Apple to be a better mix of innovation and engineering, whereas Google comes out as primarily an engineering focused company.
I think light has correctly been identified as the biggest reasons for insomnia(if you look at plants and animals, light plays a big part in their daily cycles). I have seen following changes really helpful:
1. The biggest change that needs to be made, is to have genuine respect for nature's cycles. That is the mindset needs to change from "We can sleep/wake whenever we want" to "Aligning oneself with natures rhythms". All animals and plants do it, except human beings.
2. When looking for apartment, look for apartment which lets more of sunlight in. So bedroom should have window/s which lets lot of light in on to the bed (of course it can be controlled with a blind).
2. Even during day time, instead of artificial lights, see if sunlight from windows can be used.
3. Minimize use of monitor(meaning staring at monitor) past 9PM and ideally best to sleep by 10PM. Consistently. Once the pattern is established, your body automatically falls sleep easily around these times.And, with this patten, early morning hours (6AM to 9AM) provide freshest of mind. It is about quality of wakeful hours and not quantity.
I've found this to not only provide the best quality of sleep but great clarity of mind and improvement in health.
Microsoft have money, they had talent but they no longer have vision nor talent.They can keep reinventing whatever they want, but gone are the days when they can use their OS monopoly to take over other markets(word processor, browser,...), because two future platforms of computing: mobile computing and web, they don't control.Between Google and Apple, Microsoft is getting beat on both vision and talent side.
I guess this is a history repeating itself - before RDBMS there were hierarchical dbs, and other such technologies. There was a reason why RDBMS won the battle. And probably the top most reason was the simplicity with which you can define relation ship between data, store this data(with relationship) and access it easily. We are all use to using SQL, and even though with all the ORMs in the world, it is still probably a very simple(yet powerful) language. If you look at HTTP, the corner stone of web, one of the reasons it has been so popular, is because of it's simplicity yet powerful. And it can thought to represent the same simplicity as RDBBMS (everything revolves around some really basic operations - read, write, update, delete <-> GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). And historically, invariability the technologies which hides the complexity of what they do by providing a simple interface, normally win. And that was one of the main reasons for the success of RDBMS. And which still remains true. And that was precisely the reason why every one started using RDBMS for blog type application, even though it is not the best use of RDBMS. Come to think of it, why would you want to store lot of text (content of each blog) for each blog id in RDBMS - but people did (because it was so simple to do, and that is what they are used to). Hence the use of RDBMS for these type of applications was debatable to begin with. However if you look at transactions management that is required by some of the financial applications, for example, I doubt how far the NOSQL solutions will go in satisfying the requirement. With regards to the scalability, I will not get into the cost factor. Because there are different ways of calculating the actual "cost" of something - if you are Google - the cost of having few PhDs writing your own filesystem and db(or NOSQL) is not much compared to the benefits you are going to get out of it. But if you are not Google, it is a different story. So if we leave the cost factor aside, for a moment, the list of options available with some of the high end RDBMS technologies(with regards to performance), for example Oracle, are quite broad - from active/active clustering technologies(RAC), from different indexing types(b-tree, bitmap, clustered, index-organized), multitude of partitioning types - range based, hash-based(combination of these), list based etc, the list goes on. Same is true about Subase or SQL server(except of active/active clustering). So I am sure the performance issues can be handled in these RDBMS technologies (without just throwing hardware at it).
I completely agree and also think that one of the main reason behind US success has been the "can do" and "hacker" culture and freedom to express yourself. I also think that if more of this culture gets hold in India(instead of rat race for degrees and titles), we can see lot more product based companies (instead of service based) being setup in india. There is no shortage brain power in India, it's the creativity and hacker ethics that needs ramp up. I am really proud of the fact that you have established a product based company(successful one) being run from India.
There is no doubt about the effectiveness of meditation. It is a tool. And certainly Vipassana seems to be as methodical and systematic an approach as can be possible, when it comes to learning(and seeing results of) meditation. However, as in programming, it is important to go beyond the tool/s. And the same is true about this peace thing. There is a similar path (non-dual advaita based on self inquiry), where in addition to meditation, emphasis is given on the root of the problem(or identifying and fixing the root of the problem, which they identify as "I" or mind). In fact, it is very similar to Zen Budhism, in the sense it is very direct, but is geared more more towards knowledge-based /intellectual bend of mind. Here is one interview by Daivd Goodman on this: http://www.davidgodman.org/rteach/jd5.shtml. I am sure there must be lot of internet resources on the same.
This is a very interesting and well thought essay. Especially the stats and facts behind some of the positions he is taking are very interesting. With regards to creativity, I would tend to think that: if we look at nature, there seem to be two inherent trends emerge from time immemorial: 1) nature is interested mainly in prorogation of species(thru reproduction) and 2) at the subject level creativity seems to be one of the big driving factors. Meaning, if we look at every species, it is hardwired to reproduce, and lot of physical and non-physical characteristics/actions are specifically put in place by nature, so that species propagates(including humans). Second, behind lot of our endeavors, creativity is the underlying force. And so, for example art, music, scientific discovery (and even sports or programming), the underlying desire is to create(something). I tend to think, even behind the desire to be powerful (for example CEOs/other powerful positions etc, in present times is nothing but desire to create(or failure there of fulfilling this desire and thus reflecting in powergrab). And so in case of women, this particular desire(to create something) is inherently fulfilled(or fulfillable) by giving birth and creating a human being. And of lot their energies over centuries has gone towards this (and then tending and caring for their created product). Whereas men has no such outlet, so they need to express it somehow - hence this is also one reason why see men all over the place at top in lot of fields.
Overall it might be much better than the deal with IBM. With IBM it was a forgone conclusion that Solaris would have vanished, in case of Oracle there is a fair chance it will survive(look at Weblogic - Oracle is promoting Weblogic as their primary middleware). With this purchase, Oracle is in a position to provide(and own) the whole stack : hardware/os/app container(java)/app/database - look around the only other company which comes close to this is Microsoft(which does not have a big ERP portfolio). I think MySQL was just a small factor in this deal. I think this will be big loss to IBM(now that Oracle gets it). IT customers are gravitating towards utility and end-to-end solutions and applications usually drive push(guess who has the biggest business application portfolio).