Today I shared the experience a friend had with one of the companies he works with. It involved a failed transition from what was mainly a console-based suite of applications powered by Sun systems and Oracle, to an AJAX and Web-based system running on Windows, .NET and SQL Server. It seems that that entry was submitted to Reddit, and so I’ve been reading some of the comments that were left there.
I recently wrote about the troubles I had using the JavaScript-based Brickslayer game. Please read my earlier article to get a good idea about the numerous problems I ran into. Also read this comment to that article. Somebody going by the name joe, stated the following: quite right. JavaScript is NOT for games or animation. However for most other things on the web, it works quite well.
Last night at the pub, a friend and colleague of mine was telling me of a recent experience he had at a company he was doing some IT work for. I think the lesson learned is a very important one, and thus I wish to share it. But first I’ll describe the situation he encountered.
Today I noticed an article suggesting the use of Puppy Linux on older laptops. I know several people who have also had some success with Puppy Linux, so it may very well be a good Linux distribution to use on older hardware.
Ricardo Herrmann just left an excellent comment to an article I had written about the general inadequacy of JavaScript-based Web applications. In his comment, he points out the Brickslayer game. It’s essentially a JavaScript-based Breakout clone. And like Ricardo pointed out, Breakout ran quite well on an Atari 2600. Keep in mind that the Atari 2600 is, well, rather under-powered compared to typical desktop computers today.
We’re beginning to enter a new era in computing. We’re rapidly leaving the days of uniprocessor systems. This has been the trend in the enterprise world for some time now. But with Intel and AMD releasing dual- and quad-core CPUs, and these CPUs being used even in low-end systems, they will soon become near-ubiquitous. Unfortunately, few of our programming languages and development platforms are truly equipped to handle the parallelism that we will be seeing on the typical desktop system in the near future.
Every so often I hear somebody come along and compare the fragmentation of the various Linux distributions today to the “UNIX Wars” of the late 1980s and the early 1990s. I find it somewhat funny when that happens, as I think that the situation is quite different.
First of all, the article mentions there being over 300 different Linux distributions. There were nowhere near that many UNIX vendors in the late 1980s. So the scale of fragmentation isn’t even remotely close.
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the application development platform that Facebook has become, as well as on the various other “Web operating systems” that are being developed. For example, there was some discussion today on Slashdot about Facebook’s acquisition of Parakey. I think it’s quite unfortunate that the industry is heading in that direction. It’s looking like that’s the wrong direction to go in.
I recently wrote about Pyro Desktop. Pyro is essentially an effort to merge the desktop and the Web, which I think is a poor idea. I’ve gotten some interesting feedback on that article from others, and I’d like to address their comments.
The first comment is from Manuzhai, over at Reddit. It focuses on the suitability of the Web as an application development platform. The basic suggestion is that while the browser may not have been an adequate platform in the past and even the present, the continual evolution of JavaScript will change that.
I was reading today about Pyro Desktop. As the Pyro homepage states: Pyro is a new kind of desktop environment for Linux built on Mozilla Firefox. Its goal is to enable true integration between the Web and modern desktop computing. By merging the Web with the desktop, Pyro offers the first big step toward a new future for the Web and the applications built for it.