A sort of follow-up to the programmer/developer thread?

In just the past 20 years, knowing how to program in cobol, fortran and assembly language went from desirable by every major employer and a "great major" in school, to a worthy job, but with a chain to a desk and some really really old code to stare at every day. Database programming was the key to development riches. Its still valuable, but nothing like the opportunities of the 80s. Same can be said of C and Basic.

If you know everything there was to know about Novell networks and Lotus Notes, you could easily earn a living. Today, you better have expanded your skill set.

From Dbase to Clipper to ASP to PHP, scripting languages have built worthy applications on top of the network of choice of their day. The nature of scripting languages is that they always will be replaced by something better at some point. What happens to all those PHP apps in place today ?

No matter what the technology, language or platform, it has a limited shelf life and will use its position as "the Hammer" until it loses it.

For the past 15 years, everyone who "gets it" has tried to use the Internet to fix or create whatever they think "the next big thing " is. How much longer until there is something new that comes along and makes Web X.0 on the net look old and tired ?

The Internet Hammer and the everything Nail

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages – Java, C++, or Python.

Protocol Buffers - Google Code

Phillip Hallam-Baker:

Internet crime keeps getting worse...but it doesn’t have to be that way. In this book, Internet security pioneer Phillip Hallam-Baker shows how we can make the Internet far friendlier for honest people–and far less friendly to criminals.

The dotCrime Manifesto begins with a revealing new look at the challenge of Internet crime–and a surprising look at today’s Internet criminals. You’ll discover why the Internet’s lack of accountability makes it so vulnerable, and how this can be fixed – technically, politically, and culturally.

Hallam-Baker introduces tactical, short-term measures for countering phishing, botnets, spam, and other forms of Internet crime. Even more important, he presents a comprehensive plan for implementing accountability-driven security infrastructure: a plan that draws on tools that are already available, and rapidly emerging standards and products. The result: a safer Internet that doesn’t sacrifice what people value most: power, ubiquity, simplicity, flexibility, or privacy.

PHB has a web site specifically for this book.

The dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime

Authors include Gunter Ollmann of IBM ISS.

Access to Google’s global Web server logs enabled the authors to provide the first in-depth global perspective on the state of insecurity for Web browser technologies. Understanding the nature of the threats against Web browser and their plug-in technologies is important for continued Internet usage. As more users and organizations depend upon these browser technologies to access ever more complex and distributed business applications, any threats to the underlying platform equate to a direct risk to business continuity and integrity.

By measuring the patching processes of Web browser user populations, we have been able to identify the potential global scale of Web-based malicious exploitation of browser technologies and prove how existing mechanisms such as Firefox’s auto-update can outperform more complex and less timely solutions.

Based on direct measurements of the adoption of new Web browser updates based upon available USER-AGENT major and minor browser software version numbers, and by combining that data with Secunia’s latest PSI local-host scanning results for plug-in patch adoption (even though sample sizes are radically different), we quantified the lower bounds of the Web browser population vulnerable to attacks through security weaknesses.

Unfortunately, just like a floating iceberg, we were only able to measure and accurately estimate the tip above the water.

Understanding the Web browser threat

Accepted papers include:

A Modified Fuzzy C-Means Algorithm For Collaborative Filtering

Putting the collaborator back into collaborative filtering

Improved Neighborhood-Based Algorithms for Large-Scale Recommender Systems

Large-scale recommenders based on Association Rule Mining

From hits to niches? or how popular artists can bias music recommendations

Investigation of Various Matrix Factorization Methods for Large Recommender Systems

Second KDD Workshop on Large-Scale Recommender Systems and the Netflix Prize Competition

HTTPMR is an implementation of Google's famous Map/Reduce data processing model on clusters of HTTP servers.

httpmr

If you want reliable global Internet connections, have a limitless appetite for video, or happen to live in Greenland or East Africa, here's some good news: a construction surge in transoceanic cable is under way.

Technology Review: New Oceans of Data

Never mind Web 3.0: The next stage in technological evolution is a single worldwide computer.

Tap Into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer

bondi (pronounced "bond-eye") is a programming language centered on pattern-matching. It supports functional, imperative, query-based and object-oriented programming styles using a single small evaluator.

bondi

Nicholas Carr:

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?