Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software)
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Strategy Letter VI - Joel on Software
Joel Spolsky predicts early ajax apps like gmail will be overrun by slow bloated web apps that sacrifice speed for features, and then profit once the technology catches up. It's been almost 10 years, and we aren't even close there yet.
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@cartman82 said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
profit once the technology catches up
What he didn't predict was phones replacing PCs on a home internet connection. That's increased the time that slow connections on a less powerful platform are the norm.
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@Jaloopa said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
a home internet connection
Those have got enormously faster for most people.
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@dkf yeah, but for a lot of use cases they've been replaced with a 3G/4G connection, possibly with a tiny data cap.
"PC with unlimited, multi meg connection" -> "small, power efficient device with slower, unreliable, limited connectivity"
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@Jaloopa said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
What he didn't predict was phones replacing PCs on a home internet connection. That's increased the time that slow connections on a less powerful platform are the norm.
Good point.
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@Jaloopa said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
replaced with a 3G/4G connection, possibly with a tiny data cap.
yeah but with wifi being everywhere from free wifi at the shop, through piggy backing on the provider or paying solutions. Less then 5 years ago having wifi on holiday was a treat. Now it's going from nice to have to required at a fast pace.
even with data caps and extra costs the connected everywhere, always idea is really growing on people. That is the reason those caps and costs are there in the first place: because people are willing to pay for it.
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@Luhmann Yeah, the restrictions are starting to lift again, so it might be that the prediction comes true a few years after he originally thought.
There's still the issue of processor heavy webapps being a battery killer though
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@Jaloopa said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
What he didn't predict was phones replacing PCs on a home internet connection. That's increased the time that slow connections on a less powerful platform are the norm.
Only if you've been US and Euro-centric this entire time.
There are tons of places in Asia, Africa and South America where affordable Internet links really really suck, and 56k modems are hot shit. There is a world out there.
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@blakeyrat uhm, i haven't been in all south american countries, but i've been in a few, and i live in one of them, and i haven't seen a modem in ages.(maybe the 56K was an exaggeration)
admitely, the average speed is ludicrous(~5mbps) but it's not thaaat bad
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@Jarry Well I guess Jarry is a magical God-like entity who has surveyed every ISP in the third-world and he says I'm wrong, so I must be wrong. Sorry everybody. I spoke without the guidance of Holy Jarry.
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@blakeyrat nah, i was only talking about the small part of the third-wolrd i know.
altough, i like the sound of "Holy Jarry", maybe i should let my beard and hair grow a little more and start a cult or something
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@Jarry It's just so fucking frustrating. You don't need to give counter-examples to a generalization.
And if you'd actually traveled all around South America, I'd think you'd be the one applauding my effort to get these numbskulls to think of the world outside their tiny little first-world mindset to think about the other 5 billion people in the world.
But whatever. Go into a forum and correct all the generalizations. Why not make this place as annoying as possible to post in. Knock yourself out.
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@blakeyrat hey! i do note your effort. for the record, i like talking with you because you tend to think about the world outside.
my post was more like "let's have a discussion about this" rather than a "uhm, actually" thing.
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@Jarry It literally started with "Uhm".
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@cartman82 said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
Joel Spolsky predicts
I thought his story about NewSDK being a google killer was amusing in light of Google Web Toolkit which...
combines a great portable programming language that compiles to JavaScript
I don't think they got to the seamless interop and whatever, but it's probably the closest thing to what he imagined, and v1.0 was released a year before that article.
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@Luhmann said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
yeah but with wifi being everywhere from free wifi at the shop,
You guys keep saying this, but I don't believe it...
I have WiFi at home (good)
There is WiFi at school. But it's terrible. My 3g ( yes, 3g) connection is more reliable.
There's WiFi at... about 50% of the businesses I visit. About 25% of that wifi is terrible, forcing me to use mobile data instead of wifi.I'm not in the middle of nowhere either, I'm in SW Ohio, right next to a city...
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@sloosecannon The only place I have a good, reliable, internet connection is at home, and that's it. Work is almost there, but everything is blocked by the firewalls.
And that's 10Mbps, no idea what you guys have up there these days.
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@blakeyrat said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
Well I guess Jarry is a magical God-like entity who has surveyed every ISP in the third-world and he says I'm wrong, so I must be wrong. Sorry everybody. I spoke without the guidance of Holy Jarry.
@blakeyrat said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
get these numbskulls to think of the world outside their tiny little first-world mindset
Is it at all relevant? Really?
For starters, the pattern of, bloated an let tech catch up, has been around forever, is not going away, and remains the same no matter where you are in the world. Unless third world speeds are still on pre 56k, they've also seen improvement.
Secondly, and possibly even more important, bringing up dramatically destitute 3rd world makes no sense because many of these places don't even have electricity or running water.
At what point is it relevant to average in the internet speed of a part of the world that's happy to have a well dug?
Yes, you have a point that there's a world out there. But sometimes the conversation can only be useful if it ignores that fact.
You chimed in on a comment that said that the market shift to mobile has delayed this prediction, by pointing out that outside of the US and Europe, the delay is invalid because they're 15 years behind in internet speed?
The prediction holds no matter what. Slow bloated web apps are being churned out constantly, and they're just shrugging because they are expecting technology to keep up. At some point, in some area of the world, the tech will catch up and their sites will be prepared to profit where they are interested in profiting.
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@xaade In Brazil, only 50% of the population has some type of Internet. From these 50%, only 2% are on dial-up. Not sure how this generalize to the rest of the 3rd world, but it means that normally or you have something better than dial-up, or you don't have internet at all.
On the other hand, our "3G" isn't any better than 56kbps dial-up.
Source: http://www.cetic.br/tics/usuarios/2014/total-brasil/A5/
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Ok, but my point was that, if the market is targeting US and Europe and expecting technology to catch up, bringing up 3rd world isn't going to change the argument.
The prediction begs the question that the 1st world is the targeted market.
When you look at China, they don't access the internet the same way we do. They use meta sites to get to their information. When you can drill down to an order page from a forum, you don't need as fast of an internet speed. When support comes from a forum, you don't need to access the bloated app.
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@xaade sites that make good use of the extra bandwidth providing more features = good
1GB flash-based landing page where I can't find the phone number of your company = evil
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Amazing! A thread about Joel Spolsky without the phrases "jumped the shark" or "language that compiles to PHP and ASP.NET!"
Wait, shit...
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@xaade And GPS software like Waze that will show a pop-up, requiring a user-action. when you're driving, for a perfect recoverable network problem is TRWTF
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(I’m still waiting for someone to show me a Java applet for phones that can access any of the phone’s features, like the camera, the contacts list, the SMS messages, or the GPS receiver.)
Sandboxes didn’t work then and they’re not working now.
It's almost like this was written before Android took off!
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And you’ll tell your children how excited you were to get 2GB to store email, and they’ll laugh at you. Their nail polish has more than 2GB.
Yeah, we have 32GB MicroSDs for $10 today. Hard drive price seems to be in the order of $0.025/GB. And Outlook.com offers a whooping 5GB ¬¬
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@Jaloopa said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
There's still the issue of processor heavy webapps being a battery killer though
We will never recover from the traumatic brain injury of if there is always somebody bringing it back to our memory.
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@clippy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds
Unfortunately it lumps everything below 4Mbit/s into a single bucket. But at the bottom of that list is about 1.5Mbit/s at average with only about 2% of the users above 4Mbit/s, so the spread appears to be not too big. 56k <= 0.05 Mbit/s, so I'd guess there are fairly few of those around? (Lot's of extrapolation here, though.)
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@blakeyrat said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
@Jarry It's just so fucking frustrating. You don't need to give counter-examples to a generalization.
And if you'd actually traveled all around South America, I'd think you'd be the one applauding my effort to get these numbskulls to think of the world outside their tiny little first-world mindset to think about the other 5 billion people in the world.
But whatever. Go into a forum and correct all the generalizations. Why not make this place as annoying as possible to post in. Knock yourself out.
You're quite the cunt aren't you.
Great job at getting us "numbskulls to think of the world outside" our own... by stating a false statement about a complete continent. And then when someone FROM that continent corrects you, you act like they're the dick head.
Hrmm.... lets see how hard this would have been to even research before even typing in your numbskullery in an attempt to culture us plebes.
Global average - 5.1
Argentina - 4.2
Bolivia - 1.8
Brazil - 3.6
Chile - 5.7
Colombia - 4.2
Ecuador - 4.1
Paraguay - 1.5
Peru - 4.4
Uruguay - 5.9
Venezuala - 1.5
...And that's the average, not the peak. Peaks through out South America get into the 40's.
And I didn't have to travel around all of South America for that... I just had to look at numbers from people who did.
I mean fuck, you take a offense because @Jarry started their post with "Uhm"? Are you fucking kidding me? Your skin must be soft as lilies you fucking wimp. But it's ok to refer to all of us as uncultured numbskulls?
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@lordofduct There are far darker corners in the world. Also, average doesn't say much, considering the 50% here that doesn't have internet at all, because the norm here is being poor as dirt.
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@clippy said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
@lordofduct There are far darker corners in the world. Also, average doesn't say much, considering the 50% here that doesn't have internet at all, because the norm here is being poor as dirt.
Yeah, and your point?
Doesn't stop the fact that @Blakeyrat was a fucking cunt to @Jarry.
Are you suggesting that @blakeyrat is better versed in the darker corners of the world than @Jarry despite @Jarry living in said region? I don't think you're suggesting that. Your word choice implies you're also from that region (you say "here"). Are you suggesting @blakeyrat is better versed than you? I'd hope not.
I'm not better versed either.
But this isn't about whose right or wrong, it's about the presumptive, cunty, attitude of blakey's that I'm just dishing right back at him.
Cause that's fun.
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@lordofduct Like I give a shit what Dr. Robotnik thinks.
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@blakeyrat said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
@lordofduct Like I give a shit what Dr. Robotnik thinks.
But he is the Eggman, and therefore also the Walrus!
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What’s going to happen? The winners are going to do what worked at Bell Labs in 1978: build a programming language, like C, that’s portable and efficient. It should compile down to “native” code (native code being JavaScript and DOMs) with different backends for different target platforms, where the compiler writers obsess about performance so you don’t have to. It’ll have all the same performance as native JavaScript with full access to the DOM in a consistent fashion, and it’ll compile down to IE native and Firefox native portably and automatically. And, yes, it’ll go into your CSS and muck around with it in some frightening but provably-correct way so you never have to think about CSS incompatibilities ever again. Ever. Oh joyous day that will be.
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@blakeyrat said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
There are tons of places in Asia, Africa and South America where affordable Internet links really really suck, and 56k modems are hot shit.
From what I heard, in central Africa people almost exclusively use cell phones, because everything except from the cellular network sucks or doesn't even exist. (No first-hand experience, just what I read/heard.)
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@asdf yeah, sub Saharan Africa was a real pioneer in things like payments via phone app, because its how most people access their banking
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@blakeyrat said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
@lordofduct Like I give a shit what Dr. Robotnik thinks.
YES!
You're not the first to point that out about my avatar, and it pleases me that it looks like such.
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@blakeyrat said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
@lordofduct Like I give a shit what Dr. Robotnik thinks.
Maybe not, but he just read you the riot act.
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@Polygeekery Pfft. I'm an American.
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@lordofduct said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
And that's the average, not the peak. Peaks through out South America get into the 40's.
And I didn't have to travel around all of South America for that... I just had to look at numbers from people who did.
I mean fuck, you take a offense because @Jarry started their post with "Uhm"? Are you fucking kidding me? Your skin must be soft as lilies you fucking wimp. But it's ok to refer to all of us as uncultured numbskulls?Blakeyrat is an SJW now. He doesn't need facts to be fake-offended in the name of other cultures.
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@clippy wait I thought you're not supposed to use Waze while driving
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@bb36e said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
@clippy wait I thought you're not supposed to use Waze while driving
huh?
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@clippy oh never mind, I got confused with some other road related app.
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@clippy said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
@bb36e said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
@clippy wait I thought you're not supposed to use Waze while driving
huh?
Are you confused because most people travel via burro in Brazil?
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@blakeyrat said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
@Polygeekery Pfft. I'm an American.
OK... not sure what that means.
@Polygeekery said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
@cartman82 said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
Blakeyrat is an SJW now.
Now?
That explains a lot!
If that's so... hey @blakeyrat , don't you know calling yourself "American" is offensive to all the other countries located in the Americas. Fucking insensitive asshole.
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@Luhmann I have a contract from the days when H+ was new, unlimited data, unlimited texts, unlimited phone minutes.
My phone could do 4G but I would have to settle for 25 Gig a month. I am not giving this contract up until the data caps are removed again (the contract is over 2 years old now).
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@xaade said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
At what point is it relevant to average in the internet speed of a part of the world that's happy to have a well dug?
Really relevant. Mobile networks over there is mega important.
Scott Hanselman has basically said they skipped a lot of infrastructure that is taken for granted in first world countries and have gone straight to mobile networks and smart devices.
He briefly mentions it here: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GoingToFooCamp2007.aspx
But in one of his developer life podcasts he talks about it at length, unfortunately I remember which one.
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@lordofduct said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
OK... not sure what that means.
Maybe look up what country has a Riot Act.
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@lucas1 said in Strategy Letter VI (Joel on Software):
My phone could do 4G but I would have to settle for 25 Gig a month.
25 Gig and you're complaining? Let me introduce you to the world of German cell phone providers, where even 300MB is fucking expensive.
I couldn't even dream of unlimited data for under 500€ in my wet dreams.