turker.out.printlnMy two cents on technology, life and anything else

O’Reilly Radar recently published some data regarding the State of the Computer Book Market, Part 2 in the US. O’Reilly believes that the book sales are a good indicator of where the industry is focusing on. There is also a Part 1 and Part 3 of this analysis.

In Part 2, O’Reilly analyzes the market in categories, namely, Systems and Programming, Web Design and Development, Digital Media Applications, and some other dimensions. I am mostly interested in the Systems and Programming area. I am not going to copy the whole analysis but couple things cought my attention more than others. According to the data, there is increasing sales for Software Engineering books which O’Reilly attributes to the tendency of the industry to “build right and to scale”. Moreover, Software Project Management book sales were also rising and the “Agile” meme is replacing the “Extreme” meme. Finally, if this data is really a reflection of the industry, we are far from secure applications because the security books are not showing any increase. Industry either have concepts nailed down or they think they nailed down or even worse they don’t care about security and secure applications.
[tags]o’reilly, computer books, tech[/tags]

Technorati Tags: o’reilly, computer books, market analysis

Insomnia at livejournal reports a brave protest by Georgetown law students.

Alberto Gonzales spoke before law students at Georgetown today, justifying illegal, unauthorized surveilance of US citizens, but during the course of his speech the students in class did something pretty ballsy and brave. They got up from their seats and turned their backs to him.

To make matters worse for Gonzales, additional students came into the room, wearing black cowls and carrying a simple banner, written on a sheet.

One comment for the post summed up my thoughts as well:

May each and every one of them remember this when they are senior members of firms, judges and politicians themselves….

Fred Wilson wonders if Bill Gates is a cat with nine lives and comes up with a great post. It is definetely a good read since Microsoft produced lots of buzz this past week because of the PDC.

With the importance Microsoft is starting to give to RSS they may manage to adopt themselves to the Web 2.0. However, I don’t think Web 2.0 is just RSS. Whatever Microsoft does at that point would probably be incremental innovation rather than a radical one since the disruptive technologies are already seem to be in place. Nevertheless, I think these are interesting times for my age group who missed the times when Bill Gates managed to come up with the disruptive PC 1.0.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, rss, innovation

Seth Godin, “bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change” offers a new free ebook title “Who’s There?”. He says:

Who’s There is not an ebook about how to write better or how to follow the traditional conventions about formatting and building a blog. It’s not designed to sell you one service instead of another, either.

I decided to mirror the ebook here on my blog. You can download it from here.