Forem: William Ferreira de Paula

The Brazilian National Policy of Informatics Or How-To Not Create A Tech Industry In Your Country

William Ferreira de Paula — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 05:28:22 +0000

In the year of 1984 the Brazilian Government introduced a new panacea of protectionist politics called "National Policy of Informatics" It prevented international companies sell and commercializing computer products in Brazil to guarantee that only the local industry had that right.

Well, the wet dream of protectionists ends up being a nightmare for the most interested and directly affected, "the consumers".

Products at most parts of that era were copies or reverse engineering of products sold in Japan, USA, and Europe, and they were sold at prices overinflated to 3 times and obsolete by 2 or 3 generations.

Some companies did some R&D but they were minimal, the great idea here was rent-seeking and not the creation of an industry, and Brazil is known for not having a strong venture capitalist culture, with some of the politicians saying that don't want adventures in the market, how if the market was something with all guaranties of the world.

This kind of blurred vision of the market is characteristic of people who don't understand how to manage a business, not even a grocery store, a distance from reality that has affected the country in many ways, and not just in the tech market.

The legislation ended at the beginning of the 1990s because the national market was too far behind the international market, even though the current tax policies continued the inflation of product prices making the computers a product to few and hurting the creation of a real market.

And we are seeing something stupid like this again with the current AI Regulation copying things done by EU that are not the best practices in the market, that will ensure that again we will not have a top-of-market industry, the pains of being government by many commodities-sellers-minded politicians.

So this is the recipe for failure, a tax asylum, the search for rent without understanding what is needed for that, and poorly minded politicians, was said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, politics appear to be the same in this country.

Apple Vision Pro Has Shipments Cut. Was Clearly Unavoidable.

William Ferreira de Paula — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 22:18:59 +0000

Let's go to my five minutes a la Dvorak...

Apple has announced that is revising its market strategy for its last product the Apple Vision Pro, this was because of the low demand that was required in the market, they were expecting something around 700-800k but the demand was half of this, nearly 400-450k, which is not a surprise.

What price of U$3499 is too expensive too the majority of the market and doesn't appear to have the same benefits that Hololens 2 has, since the price tag is the same, other than that VR is something that has been around for a long time time and never appear to completely take off in the market to the general consumer.

I had my first experience with VR glasses in the middle of the 1990s, and the technology was around a lot before that, Google and Microsoft did a good job with the VR googles, mainly I think that Hololens have real use in cases such as manufacturing, military and medicine, what I think that Vision Pro is lacking.

Well, I was not the unique that had seen that maybe the tech was not to take off with Apple, at last, was a cleary unavoidable failure.

So Long Venerable Z80 and Thanks For All the Fish!

William Ferreira de Paula — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 01:36:48 +0000

This week Zilog announced that the Venerable Z80 processor will be discontinued and will not be manufactured as a DIP anymore, the brainchild of Federico Faggin one of the creators of the original Intel 4004, the Z80 is a landmark in processors and was used in a variety of appliances, computers, and hardware that we cannot even imagine like the TRS-80, the CollecoVision, Sharp Hotbit, Gradient Expert, TK90X, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and many others.

Widely used in the hobbyist, maker, and electronics scene this little marvel will be missed by a legion of people who learned to love it in his tenure of 48 years in the market, the way it works, his small instruction set, and the versatility that has been introduced with him.

But not all is tears about this 8-bit giant, the Z80 architecture will continue to be used for a long time in the form of FPGA implementations, and as an example to teach processor architecture, and probably we will see clones in the market if the opportunity appears.

Can appear foolish to say goodbye to a small piece of silicon, but for people from an electronics background is a part of our history that will not be forgotten, from a time when we had to assemble our own computers or create our small systems.

Nothing more to say.

So Long Venerable Z80 and thanks for all the fish! You will be missed but will stay with us for long, long time.

Z80 Product line: Z84C00 - End of Life/Last Time Buy Notification

🤔 What do you think about Hackathons?

William Ferreira de Paula — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 06:47:55 +0000

Often when I'm navigating the web I find people talking about "Hackathons", I have participated in many of them and I have my own considerations about what is a good one and what is a bad hackathon.

Today I have found people appearing that they have some fun about, and others talking about how they shouldn't do that and how the company that arranged that doesn't have "social-responsibilty", which is another thing that I have my considerations about.

But about Hackatons, I want to ask, what makes them enjoyable? What makes the good ones? What makes the bad ones?

What do you think about folks?

🤔 What is the worst technology advice you have received?

William Ferreira de Paula — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 14:31:19 +0000

We work in a very comprehensive area, which involves many technologies and approaches, we often ask for advice and help from other people, but sometimes help causes more problems, often because it is polluted with points of view, noises and discontects that end up distorting what you would like to learn or use from original use or idea, could you share your experiences with this type of situation?

The Reading Is - Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

William Ferreira de Paula — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 03:12:27 +0000

📚The Reading Is is a fortnightly series of articles about books that any developer should read, presenting the context they are written and why are important.

Technical Book Reference 📖

Book: Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Authors: The Gang of Four (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides)
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Subject: The more common design patterns at that time and ways to implement than, software engineering, software architecture, object-oriented programming, the first book to collect and publish design patterns.
Year: 1994

The Age of Noise

📯 At the begging of 1990s, there's too much noise about object-oriented programming, noise that persists to our days with some ideas like to "design the real world" or "create things as they are" that are myths, more marketing than reality, hordes of structured programmers leaned over stacks of books trying to learn how use objects, how to do object-oriented design and how to solve problems with this paradigm.

We wrote software with procedural languages that are practically extinct today like Basic, Clipper, Pascal, Cobol (desktop, since mainframe continue going well and beating languages like Java in performance) and C (C is not extinct and go very well, thank you) and we are migrating to this paradigm with languages like C++, Smalltalk, Object Pascal, and Java (at the middle of the 1990s that when I begin to learn to program).

In this context, people write rigid software, since many programmers had no experience or have experience in a different paradigm, relaying in they own solutions without proper standards or approaches to solving day to day problems, in other hand is an era of heavy analysis and heavy design in a world dominated by the waterfall with unrealistic schedules and unachievable deadlines.

Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides writes this book directed to developers that have some experience with object-oriented languages and object-oriented design, but are searching for solutions that can solve problems with documented and well-tested knowledge that aim for great reuse and flexibility, the book is not centered to target only very experienced programmers since he explains ways to implement patterns concisely.

It covers the three basics types of patterns, Creational, Structural and Behavioral, at that time Concurrency Patterns are not a priority to developers, because machines that use more than one processor are expensive and processors with more than one core are years a had, distributed computing are not a mainstream issue at that time too, covering the 23 classic design patterns that we know today, using examples in Smalltalk and C++ that can be used as a base and be written in any other object-oriented language.

Using an objective approach they explain what is a pattern, informing the reader about the problem that originates it, the solution approach to this problem and consequences of using this pattern, the book was published in 1994 and has a digital HTML version published in CD in 1997 (This is the edition I have entered in contact in the 1990s) that have the 😆fantastic😆 HD resolution of 800x600.

Is a recommended read to developers that want to understand design patterns, their meanings and how implemented then, is a piece of history of our area and a simple essay of practicality allied with ingenuity, as everything in life design patterns attract criticism of many people but without a doubt, they change our way to write code and improve our abilities to solve problems in a way that any developer can rely on simple solutions to well-known problems.

Attributions

Noise - Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash
Code - Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Puzzle - Photo by Gabriel Crismariu on Unsplash