« Oliver Postgate has died | Main | Nicotine addiction and genetics »
December 15, 2008
The future will be with you shortly ...
I remember when I used to have trouble writing software. Slow compilers, not enough memory, crap debuggers, slow and small disks. That's pretty much gone away, and as Fred Brooks says, the only remaining obstacles in software development are the programmers themselves.
Sometimes, I take this convergent technology thing for granted. For various reasons, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Copenhagen right now using a Bluetooth connection to my 3G phone to upload this blog entry and do some general web surfing. On a good day, with the wind in the right direction, I can connect through the VPN at home to my Linux server, and talk to the Oracle database on that, and check code in and out of my Subversion repository. Of course, I can also print to my colour LaserJet 1600 via the Samba-share, using CUPS on the server, and remote connect using SSH or VNC (all over the VPN, of course).
Even 10 years ago, this was just a wet dream. We struggled, in the small company I was co-running, to manage with V34 modems, and the for the road warrior, the occasional GSM data card for your laptop, at 9.6kBps, connected to your crappy phone by a wire, and the whole thing was desparately unreliable. CVS ruled supreme, Linux was just rearing its ugly head and LaserJet printers were either black and white or cost £10,000 for dodgy colour.
And still I have trouble writing software.
Posted by daen at December 15, 2008 02:11 AM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)