Node.js Digs Dirt - about Data-Intensive Real-Time Applications

 

Isaac Z. Schlueter, Joyent

 

30:59

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June 03, 2011

What Bill Gates didn’t count on when he declared Jobs a loser back in 1998, was the Californian’s tenacity. It took 12 years to do it, but Apple is well positioned now to take Microsoft’s crown.

Walk through various devices and much clearer view of windows 8. Exciting times.

Over the past several weeks, we (Rafael did most of the work, I shouted at him) built Geosense for Windows, a Windows 7 sensor driver that connects the location platform with geolocation service providers who include but is not limited to Google Location Services. These geolocation providers work by matching and triangulating known cell towers and wireless access points in its database to estimate a latitude and longitude, with remarkable accuracy and scope.

Steve Wozniak leaned over to Douglas Engelbart at The Tech Museum in San Jose on Saturday, to speak a personal tribute to the man who invented the computer mouse and who, back in the 1950s, began to conceptualize the possibility of a vast realm of information where people could zip around exploring almost any idea.

Today we call it the Internet.

"If all the leaders of the world — the presidents of all the countries, the CEOs of all the companies — were here in this room, you'd be my hero," Wozniak, who co-founded Apple Computer and helped create some of the first commercially successful personal computers in the 1970s, told Engelbart. "You'd be the one I would gravitate to."

The occasion was a crowded and jubilant 85th birthday party for Engelbart, the white-haired cyber-seer from Atherton whose ideas now shape the lives of billions of people each day.

When DVD Jon was arrested after breaking the CSS encryption algorithm, he was charged with “unauthorized computer trespassing.” That led his lawyers to ask the obvious question, “On whose computer did he trespass?” The prosecutor’s answer: “his own.”

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today.

This bothers me too. And it scares me.

In the past, I'd justify getting a macbook pro because even though Apple is closed you're still able to write software that is open on top. That was a mistake. Never an Apple product for me again.

To put it briefly, I think the new, mobile Apple is doing immense harm to the computing legacy the company has forged. We could have had a Mac tablet today. Instead, we have a giant iPhone – and that’s a decision that has some serious repercussions. It’s a blow to open source alternatives, but also to open development in general: the power of interchangeable hardware and software, on which everything we do with music and visuals on computers is based.

...

I’m entirely biased by my own perspective. There are certain things I care about, that I believe in. I can talk about the technical, measurable values of each of those, but I can only speak for myself. With that in mind, the iPad, in a single device, embodies the exact opposite of all the reasons I’ve invested so much time in computing for the last 25 years.

Thats pretty much what I think too.

Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). The first release of Sikuli contains Sikuli Script, a visual scripting API for Jython, and Sikuli IDE, an integrated development environment for writing visual scripts with screenshots easily. Sikuli Script automates anything you see on the screen without internal API's support.