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1月30日 Open Source ShenanigansI have written many times (in Portuguese) about how the Open Source movement in Brazil is “different” from what I see abroad. In my experience, “Open Source” in Brazil usually means “get something for free, usually created by some naïve Gringo”.
Needless to say, I am not highly regarded in Open Source circles. However, I usually read in the press, both here and abroad, “how the Open Source movement is strong in Brazil” and all sort of great things being done. Now an article in no less a place than www.linux.com entitled “Brazil's FOSS utopia image at risk” tells a not so rosy story. Some quotes: “Conectiva (now part of Mandriva) widely publicized a deal with systems integrator Positivo that resulted in more than 90,000 computers shipped with Conectiva installed, Debian developer Gustavo Franco suggests that "almost all the users installed Microsoft Windows copies over that."” “I could see that their job was very poor quality-wise, and with no planning at all.” “many organizations and companies developing and selling free software in Brazil appear to be in violation of section 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL)” “the FOSS movement in Brazil won't be a community-oriented one, but something being managed by a well-paid company. Details and source code won't be available” “the problem is mostly related to free riders and people who are good at communicating stuff that they don't actually do” I can say that the article is true to the reality. If I wrote it I would get the regular hate mail I got in those situations. Check at http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/01/17/2018227 1月29日 Thoughts on programming languagesI just watched a video on Channel 9 on “Future Programming Languages” at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=273697. It had some good points and some weak points.
Except for Anders Hejlsberg I noticed a lot of “academia thinking” less focus on the day-to-day challenges that most people have, like writing line of business applications for Web environments. The choice of a very extrovert “mathematical guy” for the role of the “user” didn’t help either. Who else cares for operator overloading? There was a lot of talk about concurrency and functional programming. This is fine with scientific programming, but those things are not all that important for LOB applications in my opinion:
I wish they focused more on the challenges we have writing multi-tier web applications with SQL Server back ends. In that sense, LINQ is a big step forward but they didn’t talk much about that. As a plus note, Anders Hejlsberg said a very interesting phrase: "it’s not the level o abstraction that defines the power of a language but the spectrum of abstractions available”. 1月25日 London Devweek 2007I’ve been invited to speak at the London’s DevWeek 2007. Sometimes my picture shows up on the top right, right atop Microsoft’s logo on their web site.
I will deliver two sessions there:
If you are interested, it will take place from February 26th to March 2nd. Check at http://www.devweek.com/. 1月23日 BI to be a new thing for years to comeAfter some holydays in Bombinhas, Brazil I am back to the blogsphere.
Right now I am in Redmond attending a BI (Business Intelligence) class ad I got a surprise: I’ve always thought of BI as being only a strategic tool used to analyze historic data in order to drive future initiatives. Well, that use is alive and well, but the use of BI has been going “down the food chain” and now affects even operational activities.
For instance, suppose you manage a call center that sells services for several companies. You will want to allocate resources so as to be under your SLA but without wasting resources. By using BI you might detect usage patterns and can plan accordingly. For instance, there might be more insurance claims on Monday so you allocate more people to your insurance client on Mondays. You can even use the BI approach for almost real-time response, like detecting bugs or security attacks if you collect support data. There are many, many possibilities, so I think this BI thing will live on as a new thing with new uses for many years. |
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