Re:framing: Can Foundations Take the Long View Again?
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A nonprofitâs success isnât necessarily measured in dollars and cents.
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Will broad, long beta tests mean fast adoption? Others are doubtful.
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Wikipedia has started to hit the big time.  Accordingly, several critical     articles have come out, including "The Faith-Based     Encyclopedia" by a former editor-in-chief of Britannica and a very     widely-syndicated AP article that was given such titles as "When     Information Access Is So Easy, Truth Can Be Elusive".    These articles are written by people who appear not to appreciate the merits of Wikipedia fully.  I do, however; I co-founded Wikipedia.  (I have since left the project.)    Wikipedia does have two big problems, and attention to them is long overdue.  These problems     could be eliminated by eliminating a single root problem.  If the project's     managers are not willing to solve it, I fear a fork (a new edition under new     management, for the non-techies reading this) will probably be necessary.
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Is there something new that open source development methods and values can bring to the economy? How about something old?  I think the answer may come from the developing world, where pre-industrial methods and values persist and offer some helpful models and lessons for a networked world that's less post-industrial than industrial in a new and less impersonal way. This began to become apparent to me a few years ago I had a Socratic exchange with a Nigerian pastor named Sayo, whom I was lucky to find sitting next to me on a long airplane trip.
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If you hang around on web-related mailing lists long enough, you start getting the idea that the future is full of metadata. Now, this metadata may or may not be XML, or it may or may not be RDF or OWL or a dozen other technologies with impressive-sounding words like &ldquo;ontology&rdquo; in their names. It may or may not be the long-dreamt-of (and often derided) &ldquo;Semantic Web.&rdquo; In fact, it may or may not be a dozen different buzzwords, and it may or may not be a good thing. But whatever the future is, it will definitely be full of metadata; on this the experts agree.    To my mind there&rsquo;s a problem with this: the argument always seems to depend on technologies which don&rsquo;t exist or aren&rsquo;t quite ready yet, so it always falls back to talking about how things will be &ldquo;in the future,&rdquo; which may never get here. Luckily, there's an easy way to add oodles of metadata to your documents right this minute, without having to learn anything more complicated than trusty old HTML 4.01. If it catches on, &ldquo;the future&rdquo; might get here a lot sooner than expected.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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The symfony project asks the community on their blog what sorts of projects they're using the framework for:    We are trying to get a better view of the use of symfony, and of what people think are its strongest and weakest points.   If you have five minutes to spare, we'd love to have your feedback on the matter. There is a poll thread in the forum where you can express your opinion.    If you're a user of the symfony framework, be sure to head over to the post and grab the list of questions they'd like to hear about. Tons of developers have already responded, so add your answers today!
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Analysis Fragmentation and US indifference
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The things that kill us in IT center around being forced to work within the confines of legacy infrastructural decisions and processes, and more importantly, how any change that occurs (for good or bad reasons) will at best fix one tactical issue, but that will more than likely cause other problems.  We hope the new problem will be better than the old, or at least will become someone else's issue.
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P&aacute;draic Brady continues his series on working with Complex Views in the Zend Framework with this new article - part seven focusing on the Zend_View Enhanced method.   It's been a long, and hopefully interesting, road to Part 7. In this concluding entry to the long running, and oft delayed, "Complex Views with the Zend Framework" series I introduce the Zend_View Enhanced Proposal for the Zend Framework, elaborate on its operation, and provide some opinions on the ongoing debate over its implementation.    In this final entry of the series, he recaps previous concepts (like Partials/Layouts/Controllers/Placeholders) and how far reaching the Zend_View Enhanced component is. He also includes some of the helpers and interfaces he's proposed for the module including:   Zend_View_Helper_Partial Zend_View_Helper_Controller Zend_View_Helper_HeadScript Zend_View_Helper_Doctype Zend_View_Helper_HeadStyle   He takes each of the concepts mentioned above and applies these different helpers/interfaces inside them, illustrating with some sample code as needed.
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Now that the final version of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 has been released, the in-depth analysis of its implications can begin.  Two of the first commentaries to be published have come from the legal world, and there are doubtless many more being prepared for purely internal use within software companies wondering whether to adopt the new licence.  But important as both the legal and commercial details are, I believe the true significance of the GPLv3 lies elsewhere.
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Solar fans will be happy to see (as mentioned in the latest post from Paul Jones) that all of the previous (and future) posts he's been making as tutorials on certain parts of the framework have been integrated into the Solar manual.   The translation went pretty quickly, because I wrote the original blog entries using Solar_Markdown, which converted them to HTML for the blog. Then I did some quick edits and re-converted them using Solar_Markdown_Wiki (which is the markup format for all the class API and manual entries at the Solar website).   Posts adapted so far include the posts covering views and layouts, using HTTP and sending email from Solar.
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Paolo hypothesizes a much-needed tool in a post yesterday, and a follow-up today.
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By Tom Angleberger   tomangleberger@yahoo.com
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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Where some see stasis, those of us of a certain age tend to see slow-swinging pendulums. Where some perceive exciting ideas as brand new, others perceive in them shades of the past.
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In this post on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans takes a look at an article published in a recent php|architect issue from Chris Hartjes about how several recent advancements in the PHP community have helped developers think more in "the Rails way" of development.   Chris does a good job of laying out his points. As with any article of this nature, you are going to agree with some of them and you'll disagree with some of them. However, to get to that point you'll have to consider all of them. That's really the point of the article; making developer sit back and think for a minute. It's well worth the read.   Cal also mentions some of the topics presented in the article including more conceptual ideas like "Convention Over Configuration" and "Rapid Should Mean Rapid".