Slashdot Mirror

I wonder how much out-cry there was when Apple introduced the dock bar or whatever it's called. Not even being a mac user, I have no idea.

Oh dude, it was ugly.

Maybe I should have been more specific. I maintain my claim that VIIV 1.0 is just a sticker. Those East Fork features may be coming in future versions of VIIV, but I don't want to spend time analyzing vaporware.

BTW, have you seen my analysis of LaGrande? Most of the IDF press coverage seems to have ignored LaGrande.

As I explained yesterday, the TPM is not actually in the processor, but the processor has a few new features that allow it to cooperate with the TPM. If you buy a motherboard with a LaGrande-enabled processor but no TPM, LaGrande will not be able to work its evil magic on you.

Can someone explain to me how .NET is so fundamentally different from Java that it could escape Java's fate?

Well, I'm not sure what Java's fate is, but while .NET isn't fundamentally different than Java, it has several big differences.

As far as the CLR vs the Java runtime goes, Java byte code is fairly specific to java. It's possible to create non-Java languages that target the byte code, but it's not particularly practical. The CLR, on the other hand, was designed from the start with the idea of multiple language support.

It may not seem like a big deal to some, but being able to write more or less equally capable code in VB.NET, C#, J#, C++, Python, or a long list of other languages really does increase adoption.

The CLR affords far better platform specific integration than Java. JNI is complicated and horrible. COM Interop and API invocation in .NET is fairly easy and straight forward. This is important for adoption considering the huge amount of legacy code that often needs to be interop'd with.

The security framework built into .NET (Code Access Security) is arguably more refined and capable than the model built into Java. This doesn't really affect the current generation of applications, but for the v2.0 generation it will be very important due to ClickOnce deployment.

The CLR has support better support for a variety of programming constucts, such as generics, than Java does... or, in some cases did but the latest and greatest java releases have done a pretty good job and matching .NET's language feature set.

While both .NET and Java are free, the application servers they run on are not. For ASP.NET, IIS is the application server. For Java/J2EE, it could be Web Sphere or a variety of others. In pretty much every case a Windows license will be a lot cheaper than the license for the J2EE app server... especially Web Sphere.

As far as language comparison goes, it's not really all that useful since the CLR supports pretty much everything you could think of, including a nearly 1 to 1 copy of Java. (J#). But if we must, here is a great, although some what dated, comparison of Java and C#.

Isn't .NET (C# really) just a Java rip-off?

Not really. It's an evolutionary step. They certainly looked at Java, but they looked at everything. Managed runtimes were not invented by Sun. They've been around for 30 years. Microsoft creating .NET is a step toward Windows having a 100% managed API... something that's good for everybody. 10 years from now it will be rare to see an unmanaged application on Windows, aside from some niche areas. Java could never have done that because Sun wasn't in the position Microsoft is in.

And just for the record, there are several other places to get that unmistakable buckling-spring feel:

http://www.cvtinc.com/products/keyboards/menu.htm CVT's Avant models (I'm typing this on an Avant Prime and it feels just like the Model M I use at home)

http://www.pckeyboard.com/customizer.html PC Keyboard, already mentioned in parent of this

http://www.mck142.com/ The Ortek MCK-142 monster with programmable function keys

http://www.cherrycorp.com/english/classic-line/key board-standard-g80-3000.htm Cherry G80, mechnical, but I'm not sure how close to the Model M feel it has...

http://www.ergocanada.com/products/keyboards/dsi_s mk85_compact.html A compact model using ALPS keyswitches. Similar to the Model M style switches.

http://www.ergo-2000.com/ergo2000/showdetl.cfm?&DI D=6&Product_ID=624&CATID=36 Northgate Omnikey models are largely discontinued, but here's an ergo one still being sold using Alps keyswitches. You can also try ebay http://search-desc.ebay.com/omnikey_W0QQftsZ2 for used or remaindered Omnikeys.

Finally, just for learning about the buckling spring/clicky keyboards, here are some great sites for details:
http://www.clickykeyboards.com/
http://www.dansdata.com/ibmkeyboard.htm
http://thesiliconunderground.editthispage.com/2001 /02/08

And for those of you wondering why several of us are going on and on about decades-old keyboards from IBM, you owe it to yourself to at least try one of these and see what you think. Yes, they are noisier than those squishy membrane ones, but the feedback from them is amazing and you get to the point of blazing over them and often catching many typos by sound alone...

It makes one feel almost 'drunk'. sort of powerful, managing things left and right.....- but then I caught myself how I lost contact- I did not respect the other and allow time to listen without doing anything else. I caught myself thinking thousand things while the other was talking . And I did not like it. I saw I was on the point of becoming superficial and unable to understand the really important issues. Like I would read quite a few newspapers every day - which was part of my work - and I would end up reading like a machine just looking for specific words but not bothering to understand the essence, the ideas behind an article.

Apple has been doing this for quite some time. Last one I remember was the salutation of Jimmy Carter (sorry I couldn't find a better reference). I think they also ironically did the same thing when one of the Beatles passed away.

I'm concerned to hear that Dave Winer is suffering from health problems. Whatever you think of him and his various endeavors, Dave has been incredibly influential in the Macintosh software and Internet development communities for about as long as I can remember. Incredibly productive, too. I won't try to list all the stuff he's done, but we've all used the fruits of his labor. And he hasn't filed a single patent for any of it.

So screw the blogs and give Dave a break. If there's anyone out there who has earned a bit of understanding, Dave's the guy.

Speedy recovery to you, Dave.

I don't know, my blog has some very useful information that Google serves out to a lot of people needing help, for instance, this page is a lifesaver when you hose your Win2000 install using Easy CD Creator, and a lot of people still e-mail me, 2 years later, to thank me for writing it up.

Nice idiot filter.

Actually, it probably works better to filter out net-savvy people. The brain tends to remember things by fitting them into frameworks. Someone who hasn't use the net much, won't have the framework that .com.au is an Australian company. So, they'll read a long string of text, rather than the chunked and pre-processed version which people who have used the 'net a lot will get. It's a lot like this famous sentence, where your brain gets the meaning, and when it goes to find the error, it doesn't notice, because it's looking at a version which already has the duplication ignored.

Actually, I'm mixing up like threee psychological phenomena, because it's been a while -- but the point remains that it's not "idiotic" to make an error like this, but natural.

The page you list shows a hundred or so that run on the JVM. A similar page for .NET shows only 27.

Not what the marketing folks at Microsoft would have you believe, huh?

There is no also right to rebroadcast TV channels unmodified

YES, there IS.

See also this, which states "as of September 1999, Canadian copyright legislation allowed iCraveTV to retransmit television signals already carried on Canadian cable channels".

Where are your links?

Internet Explorer 5.2.1 [...] Most reliable renderer; good performance; great standards support.

Um, what? If this were true, then why would Apple make an article documenting the IE's shortcomings? Also, on the subject of verions, why do they test version 0.5 of Chimera? 0.6 is much better and has been out since November 4th. It's a month later! The tested version of IE is 5.2.1, but on my machine I have 5.2.2. The modification date is October 3rd. This article is dated.

Also why didn't the article address security? I seem to recall a problem with IE in that when it would download .hqx files it would automatically execute them. Granted it doesn't do this anymore, but it shows IE has a bad track record.

Everything I've ready by Williams rocked. He did Cyberpunk better than almost any other. The only book that comes close to Hardwired was Bad Voltage.

This is a good list (and I'm not just saying that because the Hack the Planet Discussion you pointed to has lots of me in it...). However, this is a better place link to the discussion thread you mention.

• UIWeb.com
• UIWizards Reading list
• Hack the Planet 2.0 discussion

So I was checking my logs and a spider for some new Chinese Google lookalike site, OpenFind, is crawling my site voraciously. It's not shy and retiring like the GoogleBot but instead likes to swallow a lot of resources. Reminds me of the nasty AltaVista bot in its heyday.

Anyway, knowing the way business gets done in China, perhaps someone in the party-military-industrial complex with serious guanxi got Google firewalled to make a nice cosy space for this OpenFind in the Chinese marketplace?

To quote Wes Felter, "Am I the only one who thinks all the iPod kludges are stupid?"

Just intriguing to see. J2EE, .NET, etc., all definitely have a place, but it is interesting seeing how many people hop on the bandwagon without requiring the developing company to prove that they eat their own dogfood.

Starting from scratch is what bad programmers do when they don't have the intelligence or patience to figure out what has been done and what has been learned previously. Well, let me state that there are cases where starting from scratch makes sense, but there are the far more prevelant "It's all crap, I'm starting from scratch" mentality, which roughly translates to "It's easier for me to impose my will and start with what I know than to try to figure out what the prior person did and learned". Beware a programmer who ever claims that they need to rewrite something: 9 times out of 10 it's because they are lazy, or they're just not smart enough to figure it out.

BTW: Who you are talking about is Joel, i.e. http://joel.editthispage.com. HA! Just visited there and hilariously enough he has a co-rewriting story up. You're thinking of this article.

Starting from scratch is what bad programmers do when they don't have the intelligence or patience to figure out what has been done and what has been learned previously. Well, let me state that there are cases where starting from scratch makes sense, but there are the far more prevelant "It's all crap, I'm starting from scratch" mentality, which roughly translates to "It's easier for me to impose my will and start with what I know than to try to figure out what the prior person did and learned". Beware a programmer who ever claims that they need to rewrite something: 9 times out of 10 it's because they are lazy, or they're just not smart enough to figure it out.

BTW: Who you are talking about is Joel, i.e. http://joel.editthispage.com. HA! Just visited there and hilariously enough he has a co-rewriting story up. You're thinking of this article.

Actually, once he gets done arguing in defense of old code and gets down to talking about what to with the old code that has to go, refactoring is exactly what he's arguing for, both in is his response here:

<Joel>If a piece of your code is ugly and doesn't work, by all means, rewrite that piece.</Joel>

and in his longer piece about saving old code on his site (about two thirds of the way down).

But as a pretty regular reader of his site, he sometimes seems to have an almost religious devotion to old code.

At the Joel on Software site he writes about his own product, CityDesk: "Porting *Joel on Software* to CityDesk involved a lot of manual copying-and-pasting -- something I never would have had the patience for if it wasn't for the opportunity to thoroughly test CityDesk."

I just discovered this site you're referring to (Joel's site), and it's interesting to say the least. Here you have a Window$ programmer who has apparently *NEVER* heard of free / open source software.

And he keeps ranting about software. His main gripe? "Man there's so much buggy canned software out there, including Microsoft's, it's like I spend my life as a developper working around bugs!"

Use the source, Luke. Really, read the site and appreciate how much free/OS software makes our life easier.

What a wonderfully simple and powerful concept...

It reminds me of something Joel Spolsky wrote, about how Microsoft programmers get paid per line of code written, not by the quality of the code. Furthermore, they get paid more for every bugfix. This means that their personal 'revenue models' encourage flawed code.

Just something to chew on...

to some excellent comments and feedback, I'd like to offer the following:

1. Yes, 1.44mb can hardly be called "tiny". To be honest, the reason it was chosen is that I just *had* to include the QNX Demo Disk and the OffByOne Web Browser. But much of the site is dedicated to apps in the 2 to 200kb range, which I think can fairly be called "tiny". One example is EVE, a very cool vector graphics editor whose executable is a mere 39k. There are many more listed along these lines.

2. Yes, Windows is very bloated, but by customizing the shell, removing IE, and performing a host of other surgeries, it can actually be quite a nice little OS. I just received an email reply from the author of Optimizing Windows (published by O'Reilly). His book explains (among many other things) how to get Windows 95 down to 17 mb.

3. I realize that Slashdot is generally geared towards *nix users and want to thank you for being kind enough to list a site mainly covering DOS/Windows apps. As I mention on the home page, folks (from any OS) interested in contributing to the site or having a link posted are more than welcome to contact me.

Also, many thanks to those responsible for the mirror mentioned in one of the posts.

Much aloha,

Miles Wolbe
miles@tinyapps.org
http://www.TinyApps.org/

Anyway, here is a rather illuminating article on "bloatware". Cheers.

What they should do is perhaps re-design IIS, and use as much existing (heavily peer reviewed) code as possible.

Read the Gartner story here and then the whole spiel here. Joel's a highly opinionated person, but we tend to agree on a lot of things.

• Usman Farman

• Letter from an Afghani-American

• This is War

• Man questioned in shooting death of Sikh

• Sikh leaders angry and stunned over attacks

I have to ask myself what I would ask of those responsible for the events that have taken place.
Those who have lost loved ones have many questions.
They should be given the opportunity to pose these questions to those responsible, and receive answers.
This could take a very, very long time.
Hopefully, some insight could be derived from this procedure.
I have only thought about this for a short time, but it seems just.

eigenstates

People will just vote for it.

Oh yeah... voting with overwhelming numbers for such a system. Voting for the convenience, the simplicity, but --most of all-- for the safety and security that such a system will promise. Just consider how the internet alone has brought many never-before-worried-about identity issues to the discussion front (like Hailstorm, etc).

The ENUM ads will be slick and well-crafted: "You are you!!! Say goodbye to identity theft, missing children, wanted fugitives, credit card fraud..." yada yada yada. Hey, check this site out yourself. It's like an early angle on the kinda sales pitch that'll be used to convince people to accept such invasive crap.

Hey... any legal-age, lethargic non-voters out there should think about how people you know who do vote would react to such a proposition --

the day is coming...

A crisis such as this one is an important test case for Slashdot as an organizing medium for the tech community. In this instance, Slashdot has completely failed. Even just reporting about the protests would not have been enough, you need to motivate people to take part in such a protest shortly before it. Show images, link to videos, post a permanent story on the front page -- that singals importance. You have to reach people's emotions to get them off their asses (and for that, you have to get off your own ass, Hemos). Do you think CmdrTaco and Hemos will understand that? Or will anyone who points out their failure simply be moderated down? Slashdot is a site with great political potential -- but in spite of years in the making, it has failed to realize its potential so far.

Visitors only have a limited viewtime per day. Do you really want to give that all to Slashdot, if it degenerates into a fake community site primarily giving you a highly filtered digest of CNN, ZDNet, Wired News and press releases? If this is not a test case -- an unjust arrest, an unconstitutional law, rallies all over the nation --, then what is?

You may want to check out some alternatives:

• Kuro5hin is a user-moderated community with a wide scope of topics (specific issue-related stories are usually voted up by the users if well-presented, stories are not typically one-liners like on Slashdot. I've never seen a really good story voted down on K5)
• Advogato is a very open community with trust-based moderation that has often discussed issues related to information freedom
• Indymedia is a leftist general community news outlet that sometimes has tech stories as well
• infoAnarchy is a Scoop-based weblog discussing issues of copyright and information freedom which I edit (here's my summary of Dmitry's case)
• Wes Felter's weblog is a pretty good digest of current tech-related events
• Radio Userland allows you to automatically compile a personal digest from many web news-sources using RSS (Windows and MacOS) -- if Slashdot is only mainstream news, you might as well use a tool like this one

Others?

--

--

With the exception of C#, .Net is basically stuff that's already has an open specification, with a spiffy new marketroid's name.

"We're programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We're not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds."

The article: Things You Should Never Do

I can see benefits - if those who develop the policies and software for AOL are forced to use it, they'll likely understand customer issues a lot more quickly. Ease of use, spam, filtering for content might get a lot more attention internally.

Here's a piece about using your software in house - Juno had such a good email client that everyone was using Outlook.

While I can understand Winer's POV, he often let's his emotions overcome him and pummels things into the ground. That just demonstrates his dedication in one respect, but it often seems to overcome his objections and cloud his judgement

Boy, that's an understatement. The guy's just an arrogant ass. A smart one, but an ass none the less. While he manages to come up with some good ideas, he just can't play well with others. He often switches between co-opting or viciously attacking them.

Try agreeing with him on something and then attempt to refine the discussion. God help you if you attempt to fault his logic.

Read more on winerlog

And as for his interaction with other vendors, it seems he's pissed them all off. Wonder why? Read his website; see how many times he tells the so-called BigCo's to "fuck off". Yeah, that's the way to get people to work with you...

He's an irrelevant blip on the radar screen.

note: can == "know" in old Scottish

Actually it's "ken", and it's still slang today ("I dinnae ken" == "I don't know").

And in terms of why you would care, I don't think you would today - but if it takes off as MS hopes, you'll end up being locked out of services unless you're using an MS client (no change there then).

-dair

Microsoft has a long standing history of using proprietary lock-in as its main means of remaining competitive in the marketplace, rather than relying on technical merits or superior service. Even now as Microsoft claims to be embracing open standards we see moves such as pollution of standards (kerberos) to lock in clients to a single-vendor server solution, and Hailstorm/Passport which would require every user of .NET services to store their purchasing history on Microsoft servers.

This business model is equivalent to auto makers building cars that only ran on gasoline purchased from them.

Can you give us any proof that Microsoft is moving away from this antiquated model, and address how a customer could choose a different vendor in the two cases mentioned.

From Joel on Software:

Version 5.0 of Microsoft's flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still remember our first 20MB PC hard drives (around 1985) and so 15MB sure seemed like a lot.

By the time Excel 2000 came out, it required a whopping 146MB ... almost a tenfold increase! Dang those sloppy Microsoft programmers, right?

Wrong.

From Joel on Software:

Version 5.0 of Microsoft's flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still remember our first 20MB PC hard drives (around 1985) and so 15MB sure seemed like a lot.

By the time Excel 2000 came out, it required a whopping 146MB ... almost a tenfold increase! Dang those sloppy Microsoft programmers, right?

Wrong.

http://techinterview.editthispage.com/

Yes, everyone thinks that, and comes to the wrong conclusion,as you did. There's a discussion of the answer here - if you switch your choice your chances of winning are 2/3, if you stick, 1/3. The subtlety in the statistical argument derives from the fact that the host is giving you more information half way through the game, which the simplistic statistical interpretation you give doesn't take into account. But if you're still not convinced, the best way to provide evidence is to run a Monte Carlo simulation of the game, or to calculate every possible combination - which is what guy's co-workers were doing.

Quoting from Peopleware, second edition, chapter 28 "Competition", under the "Teamicide Re-visited" heading (pg. 183 in my copy):

"Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible. Since coaching is essential to the workings of a healthy team, anything the manager does to increase competition within a team has to be viewed as teamicidale."

DeMarco & Lister quote W. Edwards Deming's "14 Points", where point 12B says that annual or merit ratings and management by objectives should be abolished. Alfie Kohn's work focuses on the harm caused by the "Do this and you'll get this" mentality. Joel Spolsky's essay, "Incentive Pay Considered Harmful" is a quick read on the subject.

Apart from the fact that you should not be managing technical people let alone interviewing them, if you are Technically Illiterate, why do you assume a Certificate shows that a candidate knows what they are doing? All it shows is that the candidate could sit through a course and get the questions right at the end of it. That sort of learning is usually of the parrot type, I.E, listen, store but not understand, reiterate.

If you want proof of someones knowledge, ask them questions about their supposed area of knowledge. If you are technically illiterate, have someone who does know their stuff to ask the questions. Get them to evaluate the answers. The very best way is to set them theoritical situations and ask them what their course of action would be. Whatever you do though, don't look at a pretty peice of paper and think they know what's what.

For someone with some very good ideas, take a look at Joel on Software

I'm halfway inclined to believe that out of all these posts, the only reason so many praise Dave Winer is because Slashdot is repressing the awful truth about Dave. Yadda!

To make a browser great, watch your new users very closely.

I know, I wish Slashdot had the same type of WYSIWYG editor that my weblog does. It uses Manila, from Userland, to allow WYSIWYG in IE 5+ for Windows, at least. I know that isn't the Slashdot audience, but I'm betting 30% of the hits here come on IE...
---

The larger consulting firms usually have one thing in mind: to get more and more of their people billable. It's not usually in the [short term] interest of the consulting firm to do a good effective job then get out.

One needn't even offer a cynical explanation in the case of large consulatancies; Joel Spolsky offers this explanation, which basically boils down to: it's easy to hold quality while hiring a dozen people. It's hard to grow to hundreds and still have quality employees, so you set up emthodologies for the low quality staff to operate to. Pity the customer...

I am amazed at how perfectly this article dovetails with this story. Joel has a long, reasoned, and compelling essay about why code should be reused instead of rewritten. I suggest the original poster (and the rest of us) take a look.