Dr. Dobb's Journal February, 2005
In the spirit of "if it was important enough to mention once, it's worth mentioning twice," it's time to look back and catch up on some of the items I've previously wasted this space on. In the November 2004 issue, for instance, I talked about how Teresis (a Los Angeles-based provider of digital workflow solutions for television) and Rapidtext (a national transcription services company) teamed up to bring jobs to Marshall, Missouri. As it turns out, the Marshall Plan isn't the only kid on the back forty, at least in terms of outsourcing jobs to rural America. Rural Sourcing Inc. (http://www.ruralsource.com/) is a Jonesboro, Arkansas, startup founded in 2003 with the goal of supporting economic expansion by creating high-technology employment opportunities in rural America. Rural Sourcing, founded by Kathy White (former CIO of Cardinal Health, one of Information Week's top 10 CIOs in 1997, and former associate professor of information technology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro), has set up two facilities in Arkansas, one in New Mexico, and a soon-to-be-opened operation in North Carolina.
In March 2002, I looked at the prospects of wind-generated electricity. At the time, wind turbines in the U.S. were generating about 4500 megawatts of electricity. The good news is that, by the end of 2003, U.S. capacity reached 6374 megawatts, and utility wind-power projects underway will create another 3000 megawatts of wind capacity in the U.S. over the next five years. According to some estimates, producing more than 1 million megawatt-hours of electricity by the 170 wind turbines at three-year-old Gray County Wind Farm in Montezuma, Kansas, alone would have required 606,000 tons of coal, or more than 12 billion cubic feet of natural gas. Moreover, fossil-fuel plants generating the same amount of electricity would have released into the air 1 million tons of carbon dioxide, 2650 tons of sulfur dioxide, 2170 tons of nitrogen oxides, and 52 pounds of mercury.
In October 2004, I pointed out that iTunes downloads were pushing iPod sales, while iPods sales were driving Macintosh sales. More interestingly, iPods seemed to be propelling the migration of Windows users to Macs. According to a survey by financial firm Piper Jaffray, this trend is continuing, with 6 percent of iPod users switched from Windows-based PCs to Macs, and another 7 percent saying they are planning to. Factors influencing the decision to switch include ease of use, the entertainment value, and the perception of better security.
Last month, I prattled on about how new programming languages seemed to pop up all the time. While Caml, Delphi, and Python aren't new, there is news about them. For starters, Borland has recently released Delphi 2005 (http://www.borland.com/delphi/), which lets you target both Win32 and .NET. Second, Python 2.4 (http://www.python.org/2.4/) has finally been released with a boatload of new features, ranging from decimal data types to multiline imports. Third, it's okay to admit that you don't know much about Caml, a functional language developed in 1984 by INRIA (a French computer science research institute). However, you can learn more about it in Developing Applications with Objective Caml, a book by Emmanuel Chailloux, Pascal Manoury, and Bruno Pagano that was recently translated into English from French and made freely available in PDF or HTML format (http://caml.inria.fr/oreilly-book/).
Also in the January 2005 issue, I made reference to a recent DDJ survey. In truth, we routinely participate in a number of studies. The NOP/CMP Professional Developer Panel, for instance, surveys several hundred software engineers, many of whom are DDJ readers. To me, one of the more interesting factoids that turned up was that 84 percent of the respondents agreed with the statement that "open-source tools are an important addition to my toolkit," and 95 percent concurred that "open source is here to stay." What was reassuring, however, was that this exuberance for open source was tempered by realism, in that only 40 percent agreed that "in an ideal world, all software would be open source," while 98 percent "prefer using both open source and proprietary software."
As for programming languages, C/C++ was the language used professionally by 61 percent of those surveyed, SQL by 55 percent, Java by 44 percent, Perl by 28 percent, and C# by 23 percent. This study was generally in sync with the TIOBE Programming Community Index (http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index/tekst.htm), which attempts to gauge language popularity via Google and Yahoo! searches. According to a recent TPC Index, C held the top spot for languages with a 17.9 percent rating, followed by Java with 14.8 percent, C++ with 13.8 percent, Perl with 9.7 percent, SQL with 3.0 percent, and C# with 1.5 percent. (Note that I've abbreviated the TPC list for purposes of comparison.)
Finally, in July 2004, I mentioned that "SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs" was my current favorite online PlayStation2 game. Still is. Okay, I've tried "Red Dead Revolver," "Star Wars: Battlefront," and "MVP Baseball 2004" (and I still can't hit a curve ball, let alone throw one). That said, "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2," with its over-the-shoulder camera view and great graphics, looks promising. I'll let you know the next time I catch up and look back.