Steve Taylor's Friends

Not long ago, I was sitting across from the CEO of a media company. He showed enormous pride in the social value of his organization - in delivering news to the world via a global team of thoughtful, award-winning journalists.

He asked what made me proud to be at Sun. Among a number of things, I said I'm proudest of the role Sun plays in making sure stories like his are told - "Our technologies, after all, are how your journalists file their stories, and we play a a central role in how you present them to the world via the network." I am unreservedly proud of Sun's role in making the world a more open, transparent place.

Beyond professional journalism, the network is a social utility for the world's citizenry - whose digital cameras and cell phones and blog postings and emails form a tidal wave of transparency. We live in a world whose traumas and triumphs are visible instantaneously. Sunlight's not just a great disinfectant, it's a wonderful safety net, too - you can't fix the problems you don't know about. But once you know about a problem, even small attempts to help, multiplied over the long tail of the internet, can make an extraordinary difference.

Over the past few days, the world has watched an earthquake in China lead to the death and dislocation of countless thousands. The San Francisco Bay Area, where Sun is headquartered, has felt the impact deeply - beyond co-workers, friends and family, we've suffered our own traumas with earthquakes. A cyclone in Myanmar triggered similar thoughts among those of us effected by hurricanes in New Orleans, Louisiana.

But the world's an increasingly transparent place. And any help, from $1 to $1m, multiplied over the world, makes a difference.

Which is why I'm sending personal funds to the relief organizations I trust to bring aid to those stricken.

In anticipation of the impending return of The Venture Bros, this one opens with some Steroid Maximus. And then, it kinda goes where it went. If you're like me (which I recommend) you're imagining Christopher Walken tapdancing through the whole of side A.

Who needs a drummer?

Roger will remember the original clocky - it was in the configuration file for the "Launchpad" that shipped in IXI Panorama 2.0. Not so exciting.

is it drink o'clock?

I think it is!

Here's an interesting search query challenge for relevancy ranking: xkcd metallica. Currently google doesn't, but yahoo does, give the right answer.

Let this be a lesson to you. If you want your web site to show up in search queries, and have words encoded in audio, video, or images, include a transcript!

Today has been the most perfect weather in the history of perfect weather! YES. MORE LIKE THIS. If the weather here was like this all the time, I would be one happy camper. My life would be perfect and I would shit rainbows 24/7, I'm sure. It's 2AM and it's still, like, 70 degrees. GOD BLESS GLOBAL WARMING. Sure, it probably means we're going to be extinct in a couple of decades, but at maybe the weather in San Francisco will cease to suck for a few years in the meantime. You know. Before the food riots, and plagues from the mountains of corpses and whatnot.

Google has begun blurring faces on Street View:

This reminds me of the "censorship" pixelization code in The Sims that prevents you from ever seeing their little 1×2-pixel SimRogenous zones. (Don Hopkins once told me a long story about how hard that was to implement...)

There are also now Wikipedia links in the maps (checkbox on the "More" tab). There aren't very many of them, though. Anyone know what triggers their presence?

The technique for building tension on American Idol is an interesting one. Rather than tell you who came out on top each week, they instead tell you who came out on the bottom, giving the impression that it's an active competition which anyone can win. The truth is quite a bit more boring. If you look at the previous season eliminations, in four of the six seasons the eventual winner was never in the bottom group, and the earliest the eventual winner was in the bottom group was in the sixth show. So the show could instead knock out a third of the top 12 on the very first show, and probably not have changed the eventual result in any of the contests thus far. Chances are that in most seasons the eventual winner starts getting the most votes early and stays that way every episode.

Does this mean that American Idol would do a better job of picking the winner if it had stayed with the format of the first few seasons, where votes were used to advance competitors through to the finals? Probably, but there's a distinct lack of any criterion with which to measure 'better'. Yes, votes are more representative of later votes than the judge's judgment, and if the pool of people is bigger there's a greatly reduced chance that there won't be any decent competitors in it (as happened in season six, yeesh), but the only measure available for determining how accurate voting was is later album sales, and those have some very wacky things going on.

Looking at the American Idol top sellers one thing stands out: in most of the seasons, exactly one finalist sold over a million albums, with a big gap below that. The exceptions are season 2, which had two, and season 6, which had none (see aforementioned observation about complete lack of talent in season 6). Apparently the show's producers pick exactly one singer to put some real marketing muscle behind each season, and let the others sell however many they happen to sell. The other thing which stands out is that with the exception of Kelly Clarkson, the first season winner, not a single top seller has sold more than half as many copies of their second album as their first, strongly implying that almost all of their sales are due to Idol-related publicity, with complete failure to build a fanbase on their singing merits alone.

Clarkson was the huge exception to that rule. She sold more than twice as many copies of her second album as her first. My guess is that had American Idol not lucked out with Clarkson in the first season, it would be viewed as having no legitimacy as a source of new talent whatsoever.

JavaOne wrapped up on Friday. We hosted individuals from across the globe, and from every industry: consumer electronics and gaming, to enterprise IT, space exploration, factory automation, the automotive industry, academia - like the network itself, Java delivers something for nearly everyone, everywhere.

This year's biggest announcements centered around Java's role in the future of rich internet applications (or RIA's). What's a rich internet application? It depends on your perspective - from mine, it's any network connected application that persists in front of a user, typically outside a browser, that can operate when disconnected from the network.

On the one hand, I'd claim Java's always been a RIA platform - before the world really wanted one. Early Java applets delivered interactivity, but at the expense of development complexity and, in the early days, performance - when a browser, and more recently Javascript, would suffice.

But browser based applications are hitting complexity and performance limits, and content owners are striving for higher levels of engagement (via high definition video, or advanced interactivity). Developers are demanding something new - the browser's a wonderfully accessible programming model, but it's a weak deployment model for rich/disconnected applications.

An unspoken driver of RIA is also business model evolution - many companies behind rich applications are seeking independence from browsers and search engines, whose default settings and corporate parents present a competitive threat. There's a growing appetite for locally installed applications that build rich, direct and permanent engagement with consumers. No one wants to pay a toll to meet their own customers.

With that in mind, as we looked to reinvent the Java platform, we heard a consistent set of requirements. And not just from coders, but from sports francishes seeking to directly engage their fans, media companies wanting to bypass browser defaults, to artists and businesses and device manufacturers - everyone's looking to uniquely engage consumers via the network. These audiences have nearly identitical requirements for a RIA platform - they want technology that:

First, RIA developers want to reach every consumer on earth, and on every device.

Why? Because the market is in front of consumers - no matter what screen they may be using. Desktop, mobile phone, personal navigation, digital book - you name it. The market's in front of all the screens in your life, not just a PC.

That said, on PC's alone, Java's popularity has grown in the last few years, as measured by runtime downloads - we routinely download 40 to 50 million new Java runtimes a month, and update more than a billion every year.

The adoption of the Java platform exceeds the adoption of Microsoft's Windows itself - Sun's Java runtime environment (JRE) is preloaded on nearly every Windows machine (from HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc.), but also runs on Apple's Macintosh, Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSe, Solaris and OpenSolaris desktops. In addition, a JRE is present on billions - yes, billions - of wireless and mobile devices, from automobile dashboards and navigation devices, to Amazon's Kindle (did you know Amazon's Kindle is a Java platform?).

Which is to say, the Java platform reaches more people than any other software technology the world has ever seen.

Why? Because content owners and application developers want to engage consumers - and want to engage artists and creative professionals in the workflow.

Java's history with simplicity isn't perfect - which is why our teams have rewritten the applet model, and focused so intently on making the new consumer Java runtime environment (download a beta version here) exceptionally fast to load within a web page, exceptionally performant for complex interactivity, and trivially accessible to consumers. We've also simplified Java with a scripting language, JavaFX script, that enables creative professionals to engage with coders to create immersive experiences, while embracing the creative tool chain (from interaction design to pixel manipulation) used by the worlds designers and digital artists.

And I'm really pleased we've solved the desktop installation problem, by making JavaFX applets separable from a web page with a simple drag and drop (click the image above to watch this demonstrated). Developers can now bypass the browser to trivially install apps on desktops - once the applet's dropped on the desktop, content owners have a direct relationship with their consumers.

You might have also seen that we're adding full high quality audio and video codecs to Java on every platform on which it runs - resolving another gap for RIA developers, support for time-based media (click here for a demo of high performance video).

Third, enterprises want to reuse their existing Java skills and assets in moving to RIA.

Nearly every enterprise employs programmers with Java skills - it's still the number one internet language taught across the world, and found pervasively in global business infrastructure. As businesses move to engage their customers via RIA platforms, reusing existing skills, and connecting RIA's to existing systems, gives the Java community a unique ability to build from what exists - rather than attempt to replace it.

This familiarity also allows businesses and developer teams to focus on engaging with consumers - rather than irritating IT with new infrastructure requirements (JavaFX developers simply link to existing enterprise infrastructure, vs. requiring new systems for RIA apps).

Why free? Because developers don't want to encumber their applications with royalty bearing dependencies, or use technologies that predefine where consumers might appear. You don't build developer communities around closed source, you build user communities -

and this is an instance where developer selection and adoption will define the broadest RIA marketplace. JavaFX will, like all of Sun's software platforms, be made freely available as open source, and it'll be released via the GPL (v2) license.

And lest you think free and open software is the province of those with goatees and tattoos... we're seeing a rising tide of developing nations mandating free and open software in government and academic procurement. Why? To protect choice, and build indigenous opportunity - there's no reason to build dependencies upon proprietary software if you can avoid it.

If you've been watching the social media space as carefully as we have, you understand the value of instrumentation and intentionality in building a business on the web. Knowing what users are doing with your product, whether it's a fantasy cricket league or a consumer banking application, enables more innovative business models, the delivery of higher value services, placement of more valuable ads - data allows for better decisions, and better value creation (and bluntly put, higher CPA).

But most rich internet applications are built, then deployed - into a fog. Developers who leave the confines of the browser either lose access to information about what their users are doing, or have to rely upon a technology provider that's inserting itself into their data stream. And some of those technology providers compete with content developers.

With a project code named Project Insight, we'll be instrumenting the Java platform to enable developers to harvest the data stream generated by their RIA content. JavaFX developers can focus on their business models - rather than enhancing someone else's.

By definition, it's worth more to Sun than the adoption of someone else's platform (known as "positive option value") - and the proprietary infrastructure used to serve it (don't forget, RIA's have rich internet back-ends (RIBs?). And in the RIA world, all the options are going to be priced at free, anyways - this isn't a contest to be won on price.

From where I sit, the platform likely to win will be the one that sets developers free - to pursue markets, opportunities and customer experiences as they define them, not as vendors define them. Now, setting developers free - that's where we can excel. It's in the DNA of everything we do.

For developers, learn more at JavaFX.com. And be sure to check out NetBeans - like Java itself, it's starting to rock the free world...

Am I being singled out, or is there a new plague of AIM bots going around? I used to get prodded by these stupid things every couple of weeks, but I've blocked a dozen of them in the last week. This time it's usually a bot with "salmon" in its name.

I get the impression that a lot of people hate this fountain, but I think it's awesome. It reminds me of something that would have been in Planet of the Apes or Logan's Run: an early Seventies vision of the Grim Meathook Future.

The web browser is the new operating system. My own computer is at this point little more than a glorified web browser, with a text editor, command prompt, python interpreter and svn thrown in for the occasional color.

Since the web browser is the new OS, it should really, really, have the equivalent of a process list. I almost always have a whole bunch of tabs open, and firefox is most of the time using a nontrivial amount of CPU doing not much of anything. I have to guess which tab is causing the problem when the CPU gets pegged, and sometimes it seems that even shutting down all tabs doesn't completely fix the problem. Could somebody please implement metrics on how much CPU each tab/window is using, and get the process separation right so that whenever a tab/window is shut down all remnants of it are completely toast?

I had an idea the other day. A see-saw has two seats, each of which is offset from the other one by 180 degrees. A more complicated linkage could create a three-saw which had three seats each of which was offset from the next by 120 degrees.

Why? Because.