October 20, 2007, 7:40 pm
Via Sue Schmitz comes the sad word that Alex, the amazing Gray Parrot whose cognitive abilities were literally incredible, has died. Supposedly (there I go with the doubt), he had a vocabulary of 150 words, could count recognize quantities up to 6, could identify 50 objects, understood concepts such as “bigger” and “smaller,” and knew better than to call virtual methods within constructors.
I’m not surprised that Wikipedia has criticisms, but even there it only actually quotes one direct criticism, which in context (in the referenced NY Times article) is pretty clearly simply skepticism, not a repudiation.
October 20, 2007, 2:20 pm
Is this a strictly true statement?
“One can freely download command-line compilers for all Microsoft languages and never use Visual Studio.”
Specifically, don’t you need VS to develop for Smartphones and / or Windows Mobile?
October 20, 2007, 10:38 am
With the release to public beta of Popfly, Microsoft’s mashup editor, I’ll reiterate my theory that mashups are the UNIX shell of the Internet. The corollary is that we need a suite of command equivalents:
| Command |
Mashup Alternative |
| cd, mkdir, rmdir |
facilities for manipulating “current URI”; REST principles, etc. |
| mailx |
messaging transformations and transports: mail, IM, SMS, twitter, etc. |
| man |
? |
| jobs, ps, kill, sleep, etc. |
facilities for multiple mashup control |
| ls |
spidering facilities / robust HTML parsing, etc. “Get-ChildItem” in all its polymorphic complexity. |
| who |
FOAF |
| finger, chfn |
blogging |
| cat, sed, sort, grep, wc, tail, etc. |
All sorts of facilities for transformation of source to sink |
Right now, everyone’s concentrating on what output the mashup editors can produce or what the component manipulation looks like. I think the winner of the mashup evolution will be the one that provides the most flexible suite of components.
