The Interface is the Application

You heard it here first.  Move over Marshall McCluan.

If it seems easy to the customer it should seem easy to the developer

Is the goal of software development to make the development aspects as easy as the customer perceives it might be to accomplish there business goals?

The smell of propriety…

Digital rights is an issue that is far from resolved. And companies have still not figured out how to use file sharing on the internet or the internet in general to market (i.e. sell) their intellectual property. Specifcally, I’m thinking music and movies. I’d like to present an analogy:

I like the smell of cinamon. It is particularly pleasing to walk past Saint Cinamon in the mall and catch that glorious sent. However, I rarely, if ever actually purchase a cinamon roll. But I know where to find one if I actually want to eat one.

Others perhaps smell that smell for the first time or the first to in a while and are very much inticed to buy a roll and often do. Others still are regular customers and are well acquainted with the smell and taste of cinamon rolls.

So what’s the difference between all of these people? Some people purchase the product, while others simply enjoy the smell. The air is free to enjoy but that smell wasn’t free to make. Would Saint Cinamon like to charge people for smelling the smell of their rolls? Perhaps…and almost certainly if they were a big record label. This the mistake of the Record Labels, they are trying to charge all the ’smellers’. This encourages people to come up with ingenius ways of avoiding being charged for a smell. The Record Labels seem to miss the idea that some smellers turn into buyers, but on the other hand some are lifelong smellers, who don’t want all the calories that come with being a buyer.

In the mean time….

Yahoo Buzz appears to be a cool time waster.

Coming Soon…

I’m going to post a collection of a couple articles I’ve come across about bad XML and how it relates to Java and other languages for the Web.

Word of the Day

Here it is: satisfice

Being Stateless as a Philosophy

Aside from the sales pitch this is a good read.  Check it out here.

What do you think success means?

Found this diagram that made me re-evaluate what success can mean.

Find source here.

On Choice

The question of choice and number of options comes up often in life.  Some may assume the more choice the better, however there is evidence to the contrary:

When you look at Vanguard 401(k) plans in a variety of different employers, where what varies from one employer to the next is the number of mutual fund options that they provide, the more options the employer provides, the less likely people are to choose any of them. Even though not choosing mean passing up significant amounts of matching money from the employer…

In the domain I know best, the world of academic institutions, increasingly, especially in the more selective places, they essentially don’t tell students what to do. They give you this gigantic list of courses, ‘Take 10 of these and you will have met our liberal arts requirement. We don’t care which 10.’ Here are these 18 year olds who don’t know squat, and people who do know something aren’t willing to tell them what they ought to do.

See source.

Futher investigation by psychologists suggest leaving the really big decisions (buy house, take a job, move away etc.) to your subconscious as researchers in the Netherlands propose.   Here’s instructions on how to do it!

So next time you are mulling over a descion sleep on it!

EJB 3.0 or Spring

Has EJB been sufficiently improved enough for it to be on the ‘right’ side of the Pareto Principle?  Lets see if we can find out.