Knowing .NET

Peter Coffee’s pre-PDC column correctly points out that truly compelling apps such as eBay, Google, and videogames are built, not in the abstract realms of virtual machines but with painstaking attention to hardware capabilities. This is one reason why knowing C++ is the most important qualification for those wishing to be professional programmers. Peter hooks this observation to the abstraction of Indigo / Windows Communication Foundation, which I think is a bit of a conflation – I don’t really see the software abstraction of Indigo being the same thing as the hardware abstraction of .NET / Java. But as always, worth reading.

My latest article on line-fitting in ink is up on DevX

This was a tough one, with a failed attempt to port the Levenberg-Marquadt algorithm to C#, so finally I just did a very basic solver.

The rumor had been floating for a week, but eBay purchased Skype for $2.6B + $1.5B in future performance-based payments (that’s clever!). They kind of contort it into “Voice over IP will help our high-end auctions,” (used cars, antiques, etc.) but you gotta’ think that they’ll keep it a separate division, slug it out with Vonage and Microsoft, and see if they can’t maintain a big chunk of the VoIP pie.

In other news, Oracle buys out Siebel for $5.9B. Sobering to realize that one of the most high-flying players in the enterprise software industry is only valued around twice as much as the still-in-shortpants Skype.