ucantblamem

I was reading some commentary yesterday from John Gruber, which makes the point that:

Five years later [since Bill Gates commented on the well played business deal that Steve Jobs made with the record companies], the iTunes Store has sold five billion songs, and Microsoft still doesn’t have an answer.

While reading this I immediately asked myself, “Do they need to have an answer?“. Microsoft is a very large company and their core business is clearly Operating Systems and Business Software, so why do they need to be concerned with selling music to consumers? (more…)

The web industry has long required developers to learn multiple languages and technologies to get things done. For instance, a typical web-app these days might be built on Code Igniter (which is written in PHP), with MySQL and Amazon S3 storage, MooTools (JavaScript) for good measure, utilising Google Gears where possible, with standards-based CSS to boot.

Such a web-app would require the developer to know eight technologies pretty well to make it work; not to mention that they would also need to compile and setup PHP, MySQL, Apache, a firewall, DNS and a mail system on a Linux-based server. Oh and let’s not forget a versioning system like GIT or SVN.

My point is, that the level of knowledge needed to build a (quality) web-based application these days is a little more than the average person can handle, especially considering the rate at which new technologies are being released.

But rather than see this scattering of new technologies grow, what I’d much prefer to see is new systems that reduce the number of different technologies developers need to learn and make the entire process of building web-applications quicker and easier. (more…)

I’m not much of a conspiracy doomsday theorist and certainly not the type to start stocking up my bomb-shelter, but I had a thought today while reading about the large Hadron Collider (CERN); How ironic would it be if our persuit to see the beginning of the universe in fact destroyed it.

Hehe… I’d laugh. :P