The Cafes

Why was VRML an also-ran in the flood of new technologies introduced in the 1990s? It wasn’t fundamentally broken or a bad idea. It wasn’t worse than other technologies of the day like Java 1.0 and Shockwave. It certainly didn’t suffer from a lack of hype, investment, or development resources compared to the winners. VRML fail for one reason and one reason only: it didn’t run on the Mac; and OpenOffice is failing now for the same reason.
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Recently I asked for advice about hotels for JavaOne, or really any conference held at the Moscone Center. Surprisingly although over the last ten years I’ve become intimately familiar with Silicon Valley and can tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the San Jose or Santa Clara convention centers and surrounding areas, I haven’t been to any shows at the Moscone Center for almost ten years. In fact, I think the last one would have been Software Development 99 West just before that show moved south to San Jose. For that trip I stayed at the Phoenix Inn, which is a reasonably cheap, clean, and funky hotel in the Tenderloin district. It was nice enough, if you didn’t mind a bit of a hike or a bus ride to the convention center in the morning. However, I thought JavaOne might be a little more intense so I decided I’d like to stay somewhere closer, and asked for advice. Here’s what I found out.
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Peter von der Ahé and a few others are pushing type inference in Java 7. The goal is to not have to explicitly declare local variable types. Remi Forax offers this example:

  // print a frequency table of words
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    map := new HashMap<String, Integer>();
    for(word : args) {
      freq := map.get(word);
      map.put(word, (freq==null) ? 1 : freq+1);
    }
    System.out.println(map);
  }

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Sometimes you can write more freely if you’re anonymous. You may want to talk about really personal and embarrassing things. You may want to talk about subjects that embarrass and upset governments with armed police or large corporations with lots of lawyers. Sometimes you just don’t want your employees to know their boss enjoys knitting tea cozies on the weekends. Sometimes you may not even care all that much about anonymity, but just want to establish different identities for different activities, much like novelists use pseudonyms when switching genres. It is absolutely possible to blog anonymously, and many people do it.

How much trouble it is depends on your security needs and paranoia level. A lot depends on what’s likely to happen if your anonymity is breached. For instance are you worried about being:

• Laughed at?
• Fired?
• Arrested?

Obviously if you think the CIA is going to be hunting you down, then you’ll take anonymity somewhat more seriously than if you’re merely worried your brother might make fun of your Ashlee Simpson fan site.
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Last night a few hundred assorted New York geeks packed into Google’s new Chelsea offices to hear Google engineer Luiz Barroso discuss “Watts, Faults, and Other Fascinating Dirty Words Computer Architects Can No Longer Afford to Ignore.” Capsule version: While CPU power has been increasing regularly, for the last fifteen years or so MIPs per watt may actually have been going down. At the very least, it has not been growing nearly as fast as total processing power per server. The good news is that since we haven’t really bothered to optimize our computers for energy efficiency there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit left to pick off in this space.
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