CS and the City

Larry Smith is one of the best lecturers the University of Waterloo has to offer. The great thing about Larry is that he’s a bit of a geek. Even though he’s teaching economics, he gives the whole thing a CS-Engineering treatment that tends to result in a few increadible gems of insight. The following is a few I’ve caught over the past few weeks.

“The technology sector is driven by the market place, not by cool technology.”

Inventory control isn’t sexy, but it built Walmart

[on the creation and eventual adoption of computerized inventory control in the 70s]

The technology market place is inherantly chunky and if it continues to develop products that require massive investments, it will be more and more volitle.

[on investment cycles and capacity planning]

Look at VoIP. Vonage shares are dropping like a stone and Skype is giving it away. Too many railways, not enough demand.

[on market saturation]

“Companies institutionalize ambition.” Waterloo co-ops are some of the cockiest kids out there and cocky is synonymous with self-confidence.

[on the importance of "animal spirits" in investment]

Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing Firefox having an increasingly difficult time on heavy AJAX pages like GMail and Flickr. It seemed to get worse with each security fix (1.5.0.4 right now).

I recently tried switching to the G4 optimized version of Firefox lovingly created by Neil Lee at BeatnikPad, after Nicole put me onto his generous creations. Though I saw some benefits on a few sites, it didn’t manage to fix my slow gmail which was almost to the point of making it unusable.

So I switched to Safari.

After suffering through Firefox’s slow performance for so long, the switch to Safari was like night and day. It’s been great to reclaim my GMail account again and it has really brought life to a lot of my casual browsing. My favourite feature flavour of the week is Safari’s integrated PDF handling. I love clicking through a .pdf link and having the file open in my browser instead of having to download it first and then wait for some heavy weight program to load up in the background. Something I end up doing quite a bit during my school terms.

I found a few things I need the Safari guys to patch up for me though:

1. When the PDF loads, it doesn’t immediately gain focus so I need to click on the page before I can use the up/down keys to browse around
2. When the PDF loads, use the “Auto size” feature you’ve got in the menu by default
3. Someone get me a “Home” button. How’d they miss one? How did I not know I would?
4. When the auto-complete list comes up as I’m typing in my URL, why can’t I click on one of the options to select it? I have to use the arrow keys!

There is, however, still room for Firefox on my Dock yet. I don’t know what I would do without the Web Developer extension. But if the next version of Safari gets support for all sorts of neat extensions, it might spell the end for my foxy friend. Then again, Opera just released version 9 and Flock hit beta. Maybe it’s time to go shopping for a home browser.

Bill Gates, founder and chief software architect at Microsoft, has annonced he will be leaving the company to concentrate on his work with the charity he founded, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Bill will take two years to phase out his day to day role at the company. 

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