Monday, September 29, 2008 Ng: Don’t text and drive By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
TECHNOLOGY has its downside and here’s one: The other day, a Southern California commuter train collided with another, killing 26 people. Signals from the station were working and the incident was blamed on human error.
There were allegations that collision occurred because the engineer in charged of the train was text messaging at that time and missed a stop signal.
Investigations revealed that some friends of the engineer had apparently received a text message from the engineer about a minute before the crash.
I feel strongly about this. I think we need to understand the perils of texting while driving. I know this from experience. A few years ago, I had a minor accident—I bumped the car in front of mine because I was texting while driving.
So while we urge people not to “drink and drive,” we should also issue the warning “don’t text and drive” just as vigorously.
That train accident was said to be the deadliest US rail disaster in 15 years. The last train accident was in 1993 in the US, which killed 47 people in Alabama.
NEW PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE. I am quite excited about Microsoft’s plan to release a new programming language called F#, which is for financial modelling and analysis, scientific and academic computing.
When I started to learn programming, BASIC language was popular. Then, there was Fortran and Cobol.
Programming languages evolve. What makes a programming language strong and easy to use becomes a hindrance as technology advances. So there have been myriads of languages that were introduced. I went through Pascal and C, C++ and then C# and Java.
But there is not a single language that works best for all occasions, and as new computing paradigms come in, new languages that are more efficient in executing that paradigms are also introduced.
However, F#, when introduced, will not be a replacement for C# or Visual Basic, which is the language now used for most mainstream development. It is targeted toward applications that need to do technical algorithms and explorative tests, as well as financial modelling and data mining.
One thing I noticed about Open source is that even if you do open source programs now, you still have to know how to market it. It used to be that a few years ago, you could get market share by offering it for free, but now it is beyond that.
The web has spawned something else–there are so many things that are free now. So one would need to do more than that to get people to notice.
If you want to release a new song, or in my experience a new book, the fastest way to get many people interested is to allow free download from the web. But one has to make it worthwhile for the other person to download.
I used to get very excited when I get a CD or DVD. But lately, almost every company I encounter is giving out DVDs. I have a dozen CDs and DVDs that I have not been able to open yet for lack of time.
This made me think that, nowadays, giving samples does not bring the desired results. One has to innovate to catch people’s attention.
