The UK lost out because at a certain point, the innovations necessary to continue to progress required more and more specialized technical education. The British University system was simply not set up to handle that. It was designed to turn the sons of Lords into Lords, and the upper middle-class into educated Lordly-like young men, optimized for leading business, but NOT in leading technical innovation (or military strategy, for that matter). Such a hands-on education was beneath them.

In addition, they always felt they didn't need such innovation in re-inventing that which they already had because of their extensive colonial might. Why invent a blue dye and undercut the price tag you were already commanding by being able to bring in the dye from the east-asian source?

Germany, on the other hand, spent most of the last decades of the 19th century realizing that trade schools, which the British wouldn't invest in, were precisely the means by which Germany could catch up to the rest of the world. German innovation happened most in the field of chemistry, where they were more and more able to invent (from coal and coal tar) products that could make up for places they lacked both colonies or military power. The process for sodium-nitrates alone (originally to be a fertilizer) produced enough explosives to preserve the German army for years through WW1.

how the hell does that NOT reflect exactly what Google Desktop already did - search locally and search internet in same results set?

nevermind the obviousness of such an idea...

but then again, it isn't THAT obvious given that I don't think i've ever actually searched my phone before except while it was mounted as a filesystem on some other O/S...

Instagram's servers in that cloud server were also affected, and more people griped about that on my facebook feed than netflix.

as for "an electrical storm", that's a bit of an understatement. The issue was actually more the 80 mph wind gusts as well as the lightning continuing on for 2 hours after the wind and rain had passed (meaning crews couldn't get out there overnight).

The result is some 2 million people without power, 1 million around DC alone. Dominion Power (which services the area where the data center resides, about 5 miles from my house) lost power for more than half of its northern virginia customers, and even now has only restored power to about 60,000* out of 461,000 that lost it. On the Maryland/DC side of the potomac, half a million people may be without power for days through a 100 degree each day heat wave (and more storms like last nights coming...).

* fortunately that would include me...though i'm writing this via my sprint phone as a wifi hotspot 'cause our cable modem is still down ;-)

20 minutes into the future, Mardi Gras will be replaced by "Sky Fall", a week-long festival where this year's space junk is intentionally grounded by remote control to crash into the sea or burn up in the atmosphere.

Google's Picasa is another system where though it can track photo albums through folders, that is only a staging space for a public presentation that is utterly folder-less (Picasaweb, via the "Albums" view in Picasa).

While at first I didn't have a problem, when I started to upload the heavy stuff (photos from vacations in Disney, UK, Italy, California), the need to subdivide became obvious, yet my main front page remains this huge mess (at least it is a huge *chronological* mess, making it better than flickr's photostreams). Back-dated photos from older trips are almost never seen simply because I can't group the N albums of "Italy 2008" into a single entity.

If I had the time, I'd have already written my own front-page using the rss and webdata API's, but, well, I work for a living.

Even if they tell you to your face exactly what their intentions are, you can only ever speculate if they are telling the truth.

Agreed, and this is ever more true in (classical) music than in literature. Stravinsky's commentary on musical aesthetics and his own works are full of contradictions, both to the popular view of his works and to his own past commentary.

1 most television sucks, and will continue to suck even if you were to tape or tivo it and watch it later
2 the tv that doesn't suck is on DVD almost before the season is over, or for cable shows, is repeated so often you manage to catch it anyways.
3 HULU - on-demand watching already provided by the networks for at least some shows
4 TV Episode sales/rentals on iTunes approved by the networks for at least some shows
5 you can't take it with you. Your TiVo-taped programs, unlike a videotape, dvd, or something on the ipod, is stuck in the TiVo, and in fact the media producers ("Hollywood") went overboard on keeping the TiVo "crippled" in that way even more than the RIAA attacked the iPod (which is why it is such a pile of suck for your iPod when you get a new computer).

the issue, as i write below, is all about flash video. by not supporting it, even though technically it is possible, it is producing a device that pleases the content makers, but not the general public that is as much interested in a tool that supports their growing social media habit (youtube, blogs, facebook) as it does their occasional needs to read/watch commercial content.

the problem with not providing flash on touch devices has nothing to do with all of the "flash programming" and "navigation" issues around the flashy hovers/mouseovers we're all used to associating with flash. a gui is a gui, and if current flash developers think the touch-screen is a step backwards, they are the ones with the closed minds. things change with technology, so adapt or be left behind, but quit blaming the new technology (even if it really is more than 25 years old) for your own lack of imagination.

on the key problem, the issue is simple: flash video, as served by youtube, is the de facto standard for open video linking and embedding on the web.

remove flash support (even with youtube adding apple's proprietary format to a percentage of its content), and you are explicitly removing support for the majority of the video on the web, especially as linked by blogs and facebook.

apple is intentionally crippling their device for the web in order to drive more users to iTunes for video content. while that works to a point for the damned phones, for a larger device trying to find its raison d'etre as a potential replacement for netbooks, telling your potential userbase that the $200 netbook does more (and for free and with real freedom) than your $500 table with its appstore costs and restrictions, is NOT a good selling point.

apple is selling itself as a device for commercial content makers, but at the cost of not realizing you can't sell a device to the general public today if word gets out it is a bane to social networking. without full youtube and facebook video support, it is exactly that.

and the point of many others on the pro-php side is that there would be far MORE errors if it was written as a c++ application, due to what they see as that language's inherent complexities and lack of readability. I quit C++ for pretty much that very reason 13 years ago. Modern C++ is, in my opinion, self-obfuscating.

Now, PHP is also obfuscated now, for much the same reason - supporting multiple programming techniques (procedural, fake OO, and now real OO), large numbers of old deprecated libraries with different coding standards, and examples that poorly separate concerns (MVC) leading to bad mixes of logic and rendering until one goes out of their way to learn a template engine (and there's zillions of those, too).

But I don't have time for the mundanities of memory management and crap like that, especially when trying to figure out what the policy is for some library and how it is different from the next library I use, and for that matter, just how many libraries for C++ are out there, open-sourced and actively supported and maintained?

If FB was rewritten from scratch, to the design it is now (keeping in mind this is now effectively the 4th major iteration of it), then a C++ implementation would certainly be more efficient, if still more expensive from a developer resource perspective (C++ programmers are rare and expensive, 'cause nobody wants to work in it anymore because of all that tedium). But once written, it would be frozen because C++ produces generally far less maintainable code in my experience because of its difficulty and lack of readability.

Web applications in non-critical fields (and social networking is certainly non-critical) have to evolve, often and easily, and c++ does not provide that - it is better for a web app to risk a little instability than it is to provide 99.99% uptime but be impossible to change.

there's also the whole question of "what is the bottleneck". hint: it ain't the php servers, its the database (and its mirrors). this is true for any web app - most of the "power" of such a huge database app is in transaction handling and the like, and in that, the underlying php code is itself written in C++ - these servers will be doing the same amount of work (for this part of the process, 80/20 rules and all that) no matter what the rest of the http/html processing code is doing.

So look for a new job with less of a PHB and on the day you quit, leave a copy of the book on his desk.

and a huge chunk of both of those systems run on other languages as well. they both evolved from assembling lots of tools, all written in their own languages. some were converted to a more standard library/language upon acquisition, some not. and *for the most part* yahoo and google are *just* formatting data into a web page, or more often now formatting data into web services and letting their huge javascript libraries do the rendering. Real MVC

my point wasn't that "big corps don't use P-languages" my point was that corporations use what they believe is the right tool for the job.

my point was that "the P languages are weekend hobby languages" is likely true not because "they're more fun" but because they fit the type of work that hobbyists do.

It is as it always has been: the right tool for the job.

The kinds of at home projects someone does are the kind for which Ruby and Python (and PHP) are optimized for. Why? Because they themselves evolved to the directions of the userbase who were already doing those kinds of projects. They have requirements, these languages meet them.

These languages do NOT quite meet the requirements of the projects that happen in the professional workplace, just like a $100 power-tool from Home Depot won't quite be the right thing involved when building a 10 story office. Integration with existing tools and already written software (a BIG, HUGE, DON'T EVER TRY TO REWRITE THE WORLD FROM SCRATCH AGAIN requirement), a history of professional support, perhaps a corporate name to back it up (and while /.'ers don't give Microsoft any respect, the rest of the world does, so deal). These are the requirements for professional software development.

"fun" never enters into it.

Ease of use, yes, but that ease of use is driven by what you intend to do with it. If you use the tool for the types of tasks for which it was designed, it is easy to use. If I try to get all transactional and cross-app integrated with PHP, it's a pain, unless I use a higher-level webservice abstraction. If I try to write a simple tiny blog-like webpage in Java, it's far too stressful because there are so many pieces involved that are necessary for more "mission-critical" work that I have to implement even though I don't care.

Right tool for the right job.

As it always has been.