Thursday, July 29, 2010

From here to eternity

Social media has enabled the people on the long tail also to come forward and air their opinions. One very good example is Twitter – people like to tweet about themselves. There are millions of tweets generated every minute and the numbers are going to increase. The other aspect is of interactive blogging, where people can comment on various topics.

Open source is finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. People are flocking to it. In fact most of the mail servers are on Linux platforms. Windows Exchange and Outlook are quite good, but you have to pay for it. One day I think we will break the shackles of Windows and move to more affordable and reliable systems like Open Source.

Is Open source that reliable? Well for one thing Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux are systems which have matured a lot. Governments all across the world are embracing the Open Source movement. The number one argument in favour of OpenSource is it's cost in relation to proprietary software. In today's world, for a typical company, the amount that you pay for software is higher than that for hardware. Maybe a day will come when people are given free hardware. The catch – buy the software from us.

We are witnessing a revolution in the software field, on all fronts. Today we really do not require coding to do a program. You can use programs which generate machine code for you. It used to be called compilers and interpreters. Now is the age of IDE's (Integrated Development Environments) and they are getting more and more sophisticated.

The algorithms are statistical in nature and newer methodologies like SCRUM promise to cut short the delivery time. Software in the future would be restricted to system software and some ad-hoc customized requirements. The programmer is a dying breed. The future holds great promise for the likes of testers and designers, as the arrow of time takes us towards eternity.

Surprise yourself every second.

Cheers,

Guru30

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