The Hindu Business Line : Let's talk tech

What do computers and politics have in common? Everybody talks about both but there's seldom any understanding of either term. Well, here's a book that does more than just talk. Plus a look at what net coding will be like in the future.

WITH marauding hordes, Genghis Khan terrorised whole populations. His motto: "It's not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail." But he is long dead. Yet his philosophy lives on in the software world, writes Karen Southwick in Everyone Else Must Fail, from Crown Business (www.crownbusiness.com) . She provides "the unvarnished truth about Oracle and Larry Ellison". The blurb speaks of how, inside Oracle, "Ellison has time and again systematically purged key operating, sales, and marketing people who got too powerful for his comfort." What is his style? "Freewheeling version of capitalism, the kind practised by the nineteenth century robber barons who ran their companies as private fiefdoms." The book raises a question: "Whether Oracle's products and the reliance placed in them by so many are too important to be subject to the whims of one man." Is there a warning "about an ingenious man's tendency to be his own company's worst enemy"?

The introduction notes how he has "come a long way from the college dropout who started at the bottom rung financially and socially." He is "by turns brilliant and intolerant, inspiring and chilling, energetic and disinterested." Ellison is "one of the most intriguing, dominant, and misguided leaders of a major twenty-first-century corporation." Don't forget that more than half of the Fortune 100 cited Oracle as the preferred database vendor, or that Ellison owns nearly one-fourth of Oracle's stock. He is "the ultimate narcissist," as one business psychologist said. "Ellison may be the last of his kind, but he is unforgettable." He complains "about the way the press tears down heroes, comparing the media to lions at the ancient Roman Colosseum." Yet he takes gleeful joy "in creating controversies." The author analyses: "Because of his childhood, Ellison feels vulnerable whenever he feels himself growing dependent on someone else. He can't stand the thought of abandonment, so he abandons other people before they can do it to him."

Ellison has gone over to the dark side of the Silicon Valley infatuation with power and wealth, notes the concluding chapter, titled On the Edge. His world is solipsistic. But don't count him out too soon. "He has been a wildly entertaining performer," finishes the author, but sighs: "How much more he could have been."

Let's talk IT out

What's common between politics and computers? Everybody talks about both and yet unfortunately few understand. So, Mohammed Azam has taken `a dialogue oriented approach' to IT. His book Computer Literacy Kit, from Eswar Press (www.eswar.com) , is aimed at "providing a wholesome learning experience for the entire family." Being conversational in style, there are many questions throughout the book, and these find answers from the author's many characters. For instance, "Who were the first buyers of personal computers?" Hobbyists, who knew electronics and software, bought the first lot of PCs. "Apple Computers realised that users did not like the idea of messing around with a lot of wires specially with electricity running in them and unveiled a model that was fully built. The users had to merely take it home and connect it to their TV and start work."

Questions often come in torrents: Such as, what is a platter, what is a cylinder, why is the hard disk sealed, how does the read/ write assembly work, how is data recorded on magnetic tape, how is the storage of a tape measured, and so forth. Also, there are short poems. "The computer will tell you with a beep or chime/ That you pressed the wrong key this time." Or, "The Operating System plays the host/Taking over after the POST." Yet another, "Command and syntax you need not cram/But to run Windows you need plenty of RAM." Try this one on virus: "A virus is actually an intelligent string of bytes/ But it is malignant and it sometimes bites/ Some rename and some even corrupt a file/ Some are a nuisance, harmless and not vile."

The book provides an elaborate glossary with entries such as "a.out: The default name of the executable file produced by the Unix assembler, link editor, and C compiler" and "Daisy chain: The linking of items one after another. In word processing, daisy chain printing means to print documents one after another." To keep the conversation alive, there are illustrations throughout the book. Good read for starters.

Net coding

In the near future, we will be dealing with distributed applications, fragments of which run on different systems, in heterogeneous networks, under different operating systems; and the computer itself would lose its traditional look, and take any shape, from cubic units built into the walls to small devices such as wristwatches. This is the scenario that Sergei Dunaev paints in Advanced Internet Programming Technologies and Applications, from Eswar PressThe book is a guide for developing Net applications and e-com solutions. "Readers learn how to create and use objects such as applets, scriplets, servlets, XML-constructions, JSP, ASP pages and so on," states the back cover. "JavaBeans/ CORBA and ActiveX/DCOM are described in detail."

What software developers encounter every day are "two basic technologies," notes the author in the first chapter. One of these is ActiveX/ DCOM, used on Intel platforms using Windows OS, while the parallel technology is called JavaBeans/ CORBA, which does not depend on either the platform or the OS. DCOM, which is no diploma in commerce, but distributed component object model, also called COM `with a longer wire' because it allows `registration of remote objects'. ActiveX serves a unique purpose — that of providing operations for program components inside composite program containers that include Web browsers and other document viewers. JavaBeans components are "obliged to advertise their characteristics", and the "clearing of these characteristics by other components is called introspection."

Now what is CORBA? "When we say CORBA, we actually mean CORBA/ IIOP," that is Common Object Request Broker Architecture/ Internet Inter-ORB. This is a technology "meant for distributed information objects that can closely interact with each other within a managing program, which essentially consists of these objects itself." There is lot more in this `advanced' book for the eager beaver.

Books2Byte@hotmail.com

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