Depending on how you define success, you may get different answer to the question above.
If you choose for the success criteria:
- amount of money made by programming AND
- number of people using the product AND
- impact on the community at large
the answer is probably Charles (Karoly) Simonyi, Hungarian born ex-Microsoft employee, billionaire, astronaut and original author of Microsoft Word.
True, there certainly are people that made more money than him and their fortune is closely related to software - but unlike Simonyi none of them was actively programming for major part of their career. Take Bill Gates for example - most of his coding goes back to his teenage years and after creating Basic, his role was not related with active code writing. Also the number of people using Altair Basic (or any basic) today is likely nowhere in the Word league.
I've stumbled upon this page, full of math jokes. Many of them are IMHO really good and extremly funny (your mileage may vary, though).
My favorite few:
Two male mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says to the second that the average person knows very little about basic mathematics. The second one disagrees, and claims that most people can cope with a reasonable amount of math.
The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress. He tells her that in a few minutes, after his friend has returned, he will call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer one third x cubed.
1) Bruce Schneier
Bruce is author of several excellent books on cryptography, from very easy, thriller like read to a classic work Applied Cryptograhy (highly recommended). The blog goes back to 2004 and is fascinating read.
2) Paul Thurrott
Paul is the Windows guy from Windows Weekly podcast (recommended) who also runs the Winsupersite . He is one of the few people who focus on Microsoft technology and still keep balanced, fair view of the affairs. Paul is certainly not a Microsoft fanboy - and obviously not a Microsoft hater. He seems to share the same balanced approach in case of Apple and OS-X - he appreciates his strengths without being an Apple zealot.
How to extend the life of the Vista trial period to 120 days: Technically, if you try to use Ultimate Edition (which is legally allowed to use in VM) nothing really can prevent an unscrupulous user to keep using Vista for free - for the price of re-installing the VM every 120 days ...
Few Mac goodies: Adium is out in version 1.0 - get it here - more details on http://adiumx.com/
Last build before Leopard is out - http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0702.html. Btw, did you know that Apple UK has their own Mac guy and PC guy ? I love their accent, but I still think that John Hodgman is the best :-)
Back in stone age when most information available was actually printed on paper in forms of magazines and books , people experiencing the information overload invented techniques of speed reading to deal with it.
It worked - mostly.
Nowadays, we have most of the content coming to you through the browser window. Even if you can still speed read the web page, you can get even more speed advantage and quickly sort out the interesting content from the fluff by using the magic of news feeds, RSS, Atom and wonderful free tool Google Reader.
However I like the Web applications, the fact is that as soon as you do not have connectivity, they are of very little use. Well - maybe not for long. The Dojo Offline Toolkit makes promise that sounds almost too good to be true:
Imagine a version of GMail with a “Work Offline” button on the left-hand side of the screen. When pressed, GMail downloads 100 of your most recent emails into Dojo Offline, including pieces of it’s user-interface. A user can now close their browser and leave the network, stepping on an airplane for example. Once in the air, the user can then simply open their laptop and browser and type in mail.google.com. The GMail UI magically appears, along with their 100 most recent emails. A user can read these mails, compose new ones, or reply to existing ones. A flight attendant announces that the plane will land soon; the user closes their browser and laptop. Later, when they are back on the network, they can click the “Work Online” button, which will send all of their locally written emails to the GMail server.
In software industry there are no annual awards and recognitions of achievements that would resemble the Annual Academy Awards of the movie industry. Various magazines, publishers and companies do present theirs yearly list of Best Products, but they are often biased and seldom representative. The one list that stands apart and that in my opinion comes closest the Oscar is Jolt Awards published by used-to-be one of the best magazines for professional programmers - Dr Dobbs Journal. It is still around and still a pretty good magazine, I guess - but the evolution of the Internet and shift of the money towards on-line advertisement changed the business landscape for most of the magazines, depending on revenue stream from ads. The list has various categories: for books (general and technical), project management, database systems and tools, IDE, design tools, development libraries and so on.
Time to clean up the link cache once again.
Obviously, most of the news on Techsites are Vista related. Web Worker's daily gives you 10 reasons why to upgrade to Vista and 10 reasons why not. MacHouse comments on complicated upgrade paths and Brian Briggs offers decision chart for the updgradees.
General spirit - compared to the launch of Windows 95 - is fairly cynical. The italian Mac bloggers sums it up: Niente di nuovo in Vista. So does this one. This site shows some real innovation :-). Despite it is Vista launch, Steve Jobs and OS-X seems to get almost as much publicity as Vista and as few bloggers commented - Microsoft does not take it easy - see Bill Gates TV appearance.
As of today, I am at podcast #26 of Security Now! and Steve with Leo are have started their "foundation series" on How Internet works. It is really great and enjoyable topic, nicely and very enjoyably presented. Given the delivery format limitation (voice without possibility of adding any drawing), there is of course limit on the amount of details that can be presented. Being a curious creature, I wanted to dig little bit deeper into "excruciating details" of TCP/IP and started to search for a good book.
As the tittle says, Fedora Core 6 is it. Everything is installed, everything works. The box is very fast, Samba network server is visible on all computers - I have not had time yet to do some tests on access and write speed. I have 930 GB shared space on RAID 5 which is in process of being subdivided into separate shares for video, images, music, and so on.
Installation was really nice and I was very pleasantly surprised how huge progress did Linux made since 2000 when I last time was really spending some time on it (I was always using Linux as file server and Webserver, but since year 2000 never actually was working in Linux environment). The only minor issue during configuration was that after installing suggested updates (one almost feels like with Windows when Linux box tells you that there newer versions for 200 something packages available), the mouse disappeared. It was there, I could drag and drop, click - but it was invisible. It took less then minute googling to find an answer. As usually in Linux, once you find what is wrong, fixing it is very easy. All I had to do was editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (which is of course text file) and adding: Option "HWCursor" "off" to the Videocard device section.