Just wanted to point out that the most important part is not so much survival as the ability to reproduce.
A more accurate way to phrase this is that the "better" organisms get more opportunities to reproduce (e.g., by surviving longer, but perhaps for other reasons, such as being more attractive or more capable, etc.), and the "worse" ones get fewer opportunities to do so (for any of a multitude of reasons). All else being equal, over time, the "better" organism's offspring are going to outnumber those of the "worse" organism, eventually significantly so.

I think this is a more enlightening description of natural selection, as it explains why it works a little better. I think I read this in one of Dawkins's books (either "Selfish Gene" or "Ancestor's Tale". Both are highly recommended, BTW; the latter isn't as well known, but is quite fascinating).

I have to say I am impressed. I have had a play with some of the demos and I like what I see. Whilst I agree that there are limitations this project seems fantastic.

Having tried and failed to use "win runner" in the past due to the complexity of the GUI application I was testing, this scripting would get past the problems we were having.

I can envisage sending canned scripts to my folks for doing maintenance on their own machine, even just some diagnostics that I find hard to do over the phone.

I have a couple of itches of my own that I reckon I could scratch with this, for example I have a macbook that I sometimes attach to an external display. Sometimes the external is on the left of my laptop, sometimes the right, sometimes directly above it would be cool to have a script that allowed me to just click an icon to arrange the displays appropriately. Sikuli is close. I am about to go off and see if that will work.

I mean they have associative arrays indexed by a freaking picture. That is simply, well, paradigm shifting. I am less concerned about the actual efficacy of Sikuli than I am about the ability to hook applications together through their GUI. I am thinking about something like "GUI pipes" which is something I have been thinking about for some time. Mark III of this stuff could be amazing.

I honestly think this project is potentially awesome, in the olden days, before the net was quite so pervasive we used to talk about using the RussTerm, which was basically getting our guy on the ground in a foreigh country (Russell) to type stuff on the machine he was looking at whilst we talked him through it over the phone, mostly because we could not automate the stuff we wanted to do. This would address many of the use cases for which similar requirements might exist today. That's just one idea that occurs off the top of my head.

Many posters have noted that much of this functionality exists already in tools like; AutoIt, AutoHotKey, some numpty even mentioned sendkeys in VB. But these people have missed the point, until now its all been very "Goto X,Y -> Click" not "find(Thing).click()". Even things like WinRunner or RationalTest seem, in my experience to be far to rigid to be useful. I can see how I would have used this tool to do much good work for our software back when I was demoing, devloping and testing stuff.

That it is wrapped in a nice scripting language as well just makes it even better.

I'm off to see how good it actually is....

The fundamental problem with many internal IT departments and particularly with regard to the development of software is the lack of discipline that the customers have because of the absence of price as a constraining behaviour.

When you are a good external provider of bespoke software you end up being able to use the price of your overall service and in particular, intra project "changes" in order to make sure that the customer is disciplined about defining and holding to a realistic set of requirements. It is difficult to understate how critical this is to success. In most of the crappy internal IT departments that I have dealt with the only constraint that the customer has is time and as such everything "can be done" because they just change their requirments with no impact on their budget and so the project delays and slides inexorably towards failure.

This is without even looking at the issue of competing internal requests for limited IT resource where, assuming that the resource is limited, the best solution for the company as a whole is to provide the limited resource to the profit centre that can most afford to pay them, thus allocating the resource to the mest problems within the business. This particular point is a bit of an over generalisation but I feel that _more_ rather than _less_ business focus from the IT folk is the way to ensure less projects fail.

TFA, reasons that the IT department should go back to the business with "with a set of recommendations for how he thought he could deliver a superior set of solutions that would meet their needs in 2012". In other words act like a domain expert business whose services the customer would be willing to purchase and to whose advice the customer would be willing to listen to illuminate, improve or limit their requirments.

Why doesn't this happen? Because the vast majority of IT departments are not run like business and they have not demonstrated the expertise (through repeated success) to allow the actual profit centres of the company to be willing to listen to them.

Indeed rather than behaving less like a business IT should behave more like a business, or perhaps more acurately more like an entrepeneur with a goal of maximising profit and then

Those that can't teach, teach teachers
Those that can't teach teachers profess
And those that can't profess work in University administration

Apparently those too stupid to work in University administration work in school administration

But that is just a technical distinction. Libraries work by giving me access to books without having to buy them. Indeed the rationale of libraries is to give people who cannot afford books access to them. Just because it is now possible for the library to sate all it's patrons at once by copying the eBook it is no difference.

As a library patron I am not a lost customer to the publisher (note I am avoiding saying author deliberately) since I was never going to be their customer anyway, I just don't have the money to buy all those books and I certainly ain't paying anything like full physical book price for an eBook what a rip off.

So keeping the cell phone in a pants pocket wasn't such a great idea after all... ;)

You raise _the_ fascinating question. I am intrigued by the balance between my privacy, independence and the robustness and accessibility (web apps) of the cloud framework.

I love google services, I trust Google to store my data and be there tomorrow. I trust them to be less evil than my needs demand for the services that I use. I use encryption for stuff that is sensitive and mostly (if not completely) I don't particularly care about whether they have access to my data because under the current terms of service (and given that it is all so free it is interesting to test if there is any enforceability of these "agreements") doing something dodgy with it would be a wrong yada, yada, yada.

I could establish these services myself on my servers at home, but I consider the Google infrastructure an outsourcing arrangement that provides a resilience I could not as easily provide myself.

Have I lost control? Well, yes and no. My sensitive data I maintain locally and backup and it is a pain. My email, I leave with gmail. That balance is about right for me. If they went malicious on me and took it all away I would be inconvenienced (and mighty annoyed) but life would go on. Given that I am happy with the intangible price I pay, the next question for me is how much money would I pay for the services that I use. Thankfully I don't have to answer that question yet, but FWIW it aint zero.

Cloud vendor out of business is a great scenario. It is a part of the risk assessment you just have to do with this stuff. I think reexamining the POP USENET examples you give provides a worthwhile excercise, those services were provided by institutions that then passed them on to you, your university (well mine at least) your workplace. But the amount of privacy you had there was equally small and as employers moved to provide these services you had the same set of problems if you moved employers.

So.... I think we have always had this problem. We now have many many times the data and the amenity from these service providers and so we have a few new problems but the fundamental question remains. I don't see a better solution than a market place of reliable providers between whom I can transfer my requirements. The one thing I do see as needing to improve is the ability to have these services built on open standards to make the services more transferrable between providers. That however is perhaps the killer question and perhaps even the develoment for which we really should be pushing.

Plus there was a competing tower (Al Burj) and they were both very coy about their planned height so as not to let the other trump them (excuse the pun) http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2008/03/13/46879.html

More than most important it is the only reason to comment. HOW comments can only ever be wrong. The code is right (well at least it is what it is) telling how the code does what it does can only be informative by being wrong since even if it is right it is only right insofar as it reflects what the actual code does.

For this reason, I am not a big fan of comments other than self documenting API regimes since they can be used to adress precisely this point.

On the other hand I am a fan of literate programming but then that's a whole different story.

I worked for a software house of 10 people. We wore what the hell we wanted unless we were facing clients, then we wore what the hell the client needed to see in order to believe we were professionals. Once the client "knew" us, we wore what the hell we wanted. We grew, we merged with a company of equivalent size to make about 200 people. We kept our "dress code". The merged company exploded in size, technology group represented less than 10% of the 10,000 staff globally a big group of that 10% wore some company branded hooey we stayed with what the hell we wanted. Someone tried to introduce the idea that we should conform to a uniform policy.

I find the requirement for "uniforms" for non customer facing resources to be offensive. I have enough trouble with the idea of "uniforms" for people that do face customers. What I understand is that some customers come at things with a view to what a professional looks like and in order to make the connection you have to conform until you can prove that your suit isnot what makes you worth paying to do your job.

I probably would have walked from my job over this issue because it really sits at the heart of my relationship with my employer. My expertise, commitment and professionalism are measured in what I do and not the clothes I wear. If my boss thinks otherwise then he or she is a tool. If I cannot persuade them or their boss of this issue then the company is not worth working for. Period.

We all have to make compromises and by the time this issue came up for me I was senior enought that I could have pulled weight and just ignored it but I was holding out for all the guys in our group who didn't have that ability. I cannot overstate how much this kind of thing shits me. I don't know about your Helldesk folk but the ones I work with fall into two categories, the good who treat most problems like puzzles and do what has to be done to solve them, for them I would go into bat to get 'em the right to wear what the hell they like. The others, you know the kind I mean, I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire and I have bollocked them and their managers over their work, I would be happy if their uniform was a grey smock and a dunces hat, just so we know what to expect...

If you cannot leave your job then suck it up and wait until you can because this kind of thing is a baaaad deal.

No, I think dumbing down the langauges is the right thing to do. Made my living writing software for 20 years, never wrote a piece of assembler once. Some of the stuff we wrote was actually hard. Still never wrote a single piece of assembler. For this I am eternally thankful. Clearly almost every language we have is a better (and dumbed down) compared to assembler. Don't misunderstand, I fully accept that assembler has its place, but that too is a fairly generic statement that I am happy to endorse "I accpet that has it's place".

When looking at something new, I now try and start with some of the more dumbed down languages, Python, Tcl, Perl etc. I even had to learn a bit of Ruby the other day because I wanted to enhance something that someone had written in Ruby. Their choice. Whatever reason. Now I have a tool that does exactly what I want and it took 2 days. Sure, not a complex task but writing in C or Java would have been a nightmare.

I am waiting for the "Fisher Price" language. A bunch of oversized blocks that you just "snap" together to make your applications. Sure you only use 2% of their functionality but the big blocks are robust and "apparently" simple to the "programmer" and all one needs to do is specify the "what" rather than the "how". And isn't that the real ideal. I am sure we've all thought it even if we were too ashamed to say it... "Aaargh, bloody machine do what I meant not what I coded". So the real developments in this area are to find "environments" that allow users to specify the "what's" and leave the hows to the "environment". The language can be as dumb as possible.

To paraphrase; "Everything should be made as dumb as possible but no dumber"

We have quite a lot of dumbing down to be done.

Ah, pre-christmas in London. Oxford and Regent Streets window displays and in particular "Liberty" (http://www.liberty.co.uk/fcp/content/find_us/content), buy some chestnuts (they may or may not be roasted on an open fire) wander around looking at the poor folk stressing about crowds/shopping. Marvel at the crowds. Many, many Christmas drinks to be had at that time of year, try "The City" almost any evening, many pubs many suits many parties.

Don't bother with your laptop. Frankly I wouldn't even bother with a camera, just get a PAYG camera phone on your way in and if you need more microSD cards as you go along just buy 'em. Besides I would lean towards searching out the kind of fun for which you would prefer for there to be no photgraphic evidence at all, there is a fair bit of that to be had in London.

Don't know how old you are, but Shoreditch (Cargo Bar, anything at all on the Shoreditch High Street) for the young, Kensington and Chelsea for the glam (or wanna be :-), Soho for the mixed. Covent Garden and Leceister Sq for the tourists. Other locales; Islington, Clerkenwell, Borough (try the markets on the weekend). And that's without even leaving the "Circle Line" (much).

See some stand up comedy (http://www.99clubcomedy.com/home.html). Try a different countries cuisine every night. Pick at least one Fine Dining restaurant if you can, the best are superb. Definitely go clubbing, if that's not your thing look for some live bands. Grab a TimeOut magazine and just pick stuff.

London can be really "isolating", but if you make the effort and just try and connect with people that are doing the kind of things you want to do, you'll find them (mainly the foreigners :-) really welcoming. I find that during the pre christmas time people are much more friendly so it should be easy enough to do.