I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.
I came across this wonderful quote at Doc Searls blog:
I can tell you that there are two things nearly every congressperson does not understand. One is economics. The other is technology. Now proceed.
This explains so many flaming discussions at Slashdot …
In the pre-Christmas cleanup craze, I cleaned out the bigger part of my in-house computer history museum.  In cold blood, I threw away about 40 kilograms of computer hardware. Among that were a few kilometers of network wires, all sorts of power and signal cables, power supplies, video cards, sound cards, network cards, keyboards, and more. There were some really ancient things that no long work, like a 80386 laptop and a 9600 baud speed fax-modem with built-in printer and scanner.
But. I haven’t got rid of everything. There are a few things which I could throw out just yet. Such as motherboard with 80486 processor and 16 MBytes of memory. I think it’s brand new or so. It is still packed in anti-static envelope. Also, there are a few cables that I have a suspicion that I might need one day. Don’t ask…
Recently Google announced that GTalk users can now communicate with AIM users. I didn’t mention it here and, in fact, didn’t pay it much attention since I don’t use AOL Instant Messenger. Why do I suddenly come back to this announcement? Well, because my memory played a Grand Failure Play on me. Here is a quote from Wikipedia page about ICQ:
ICQ was developed in 1996 by Mirabilis. The company was founded by four young Israelis: Yair Goldfinger, Arik Vardi, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir. After AOL bought it, it was managed by Ariel Yarnitsky and Avi Shechter.
America Online acquired Mirabilis on June 8, 1998
This was almost 10 years ago. ICQ is still popular among a few million users. AIM is also popular among a few million users. Isn’t two popular instant messaging protocols just a little bit too much for one company? Well, it’s not too much, if these two protocols share a lot in common. Do they?
Yes, they do. That’s why you can go to your Gmail right now, navigate to Chat section of the Settings, and login into AIM with your ICQ credentials. It’ll just work. You’ll get all your contacts from the ICQ server populating buddy list of your GTalk. You’ll see who is online and who is not. You’ll be able to send and receive messages to your ICQ contacts from GTalk. And you’ll have the history of your communications saved in your Gmail in exactly the same way as you have it with GTalk. Wow!
(Note that there this functionality is still very young and there are a few issues here and there, but I’m sure they will be ironed out in the nearest future. One of the annoyances for now though is encoding problem when receiving ICQ messages in Russian, and possibly some other languages too.)
I’m really glad to see such integration. I do use Gmail for a lot of communications and contact related work, and having ICQ/AIM integrated with it helps me to keep it all together. Hopefully, there will be more and better integrations with other communication tools – Yahoo Messenger, Skype, Twitter…
Web Worker Daily is being extra helpful recently. Via one of their posts I learned about Read It Later Firefox extension. It’s simple and, as many simple things – genius! It adds two buttons to your Firefox toolbar, which you can use to control your “I don’t have time for it now, but I want to read it later” list. Great idea, much needed tool, and brilliant implementation – that’s what I can say about it. It has all, and just enough of, functionality that I’d expect from such an extension.
Go check it out! There is even a video demonstration on how it can be used. Instant favorite.
A List Apart has a little introduction into HTML 5. They explain the tough process of crafting the standard, how different parties interact, and what they are trying to achieve. It all sounds pretty interesting if you have no idea about HTML 5. Also, it all sounds pretty interesting until you get to one of the final paragraphs (emphasis is mine):
Work on HTML 5 is rapidly progressing, yet it is still expected to continue for several years. Due to the requirement to produce test cases and achieve interoperable implementations, current estimates have work finishing in around ten to fifteen years.
Excuse me? They are working on a standard for the Web, one of the fastest growing, expanding, and developing areas of IT industry, which itself is one of the fastest developing industries of the modern world, and they are planning to finish in 10 or 15 years?!! Hello? Wake up!
Just take a look around. See how this place is different even from two years ago. See how dramatically different it is from five years ago. See how it is unrecognizably different from what it was ten years ago. Try to find a living human being who even remembers how it was fifteen years ago… Guys, what are you doing over there?
No matter how well you plan things today, no matter to how many people in the field you talk today, there is absolutely no way to predict how things will be in ten or fifteen years. Trying to predict this will hard enough job for a single head. Getting a few heads to agree on how this will be is beyond impossible!
If that’s how long HTML 5 will need to come out, we can just drop the effort right now. If it will even come out, it will be totally useless, because people won’t wait for it. If you think that we are moving fast now, you haven’t seen nothing yet. We are just starting. We are in the 1950s of the automobile industry. Web is still a very much foreign concept for our society. Wait a few more years when it will get more natural, and you’ll see what are the real power and speed of development.
Nobody is going to wait for a bunch of guys to agree on something that nobody knows how will come out. People will just come up with their own solutions to their problems. They will aggregate, re-factor, and re-optimize those solutions until they solve the majority of problems. And then they will move on to the next stack of problems. And will go on and on. Forever…
How important is HTML 5? It is needed, yes. But right now. Not in five years, not in ten, and not in fifteen. The problems it tries to solve are the problems of today. If it’s not coming out shortly, you can just ignore it altogether. There will be another solution…