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I think you're confusing Dvorak with Bob Metcalfe. Metcalfe is a respected commentator and accomplished industry pioneer who was wrong once ten years ago. Dvorak is a Linux-hating troll who is wrong most of the time.

"As we look ahead, although we've got some great products now, we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you. And we don't know how we can build them with the future PowerPC road map," Jobs said during his keynote.

The problem with the future PowerPC chips is performance per watt, Jobs said. Intel's chips are far ahead of IBM's when it comes to delivering performance without consuming a lot of power, a quality that is very important to Apple's future products, he said."
[end excerpt]

Jobs is looking for better "performance per watt" and picks Intel over AMD which was not a very smart decision on his part. Apparently he is unfamiliar with the newest AMD 'venice' core and the derivative 'Turion' AMD mobile chips which offer better performance than the Pentium M with less power consumption.

Do you mean someone like Nielson//NetRatings?

Actually, there are a lot of companies that will provide Web Analytics, which probably makes things worse rather than better to find a definitive answer for something like "What percentage of people use a mac to surf the web?"

I work for a large news oriented web site and they use Omniture for stats. They claim that the percentage of our users that use Macs is 6.2% and that it is lower than the "Internet Average" of 9.5%. (and in case you buy that line from OSOpinions that the "other" column should count for Macs then 0.6% as "not specified")

Do you mean someone like Nielson//NetRatings?

Actually, there are a lot of companies that will provide Web Analytics, which probably makes things worse rather than better to find a definitive answer for something like "What percentage of people use a mac to surf the web?"

I work for a large news oriented web site and they use Omniture for stats. They claim that the percentage of our users that use Macs is 6.2% and that it is lower than the "Internet Average" of 9.5%. (and in case you buy that line from OSOpinions that the "other" column should count for Macs then 0.6% as "not specified")

Do you mean someone like Nielson//NetRatings?

Actually, there are a lot of companies that will provide Web Analytics, which probably makes things worse rather than better to find a definitive answer for something like "What percentage of people use a mac to surf the web?"

I work for a large news oriented web site and they use Omniture for stats. They claim that the percentage of our users that use Macs is 6.2% and that it is lower than the "Internet Average" of 9.5%. (and in case you buy that line from OSOpinions that the "other" column should count for Macs then 0.6% as "not specified")

Do you mean someone like Nielson//NetRatings?

Actually, there are a lot of companies that will provide Web Analytics, which probably makes things worse rather than better to find a definitive answer for something like "What percentage of people use a mac to surf the web?"

I work for a large news oriented web site and they use Omniture for stats. They claim that the percentage of our users that use Macs is 6.2% and that it is lower than the "Internet Average" of 9.5%. (and in case you buy that line from OSOpinions that the "other" column should count for Macs then 0.6% as "not specified")

"A recent poll by Harris Survey did ask, and 92 percent of polled IT managers said their organizations had been infected with spyware -- with an average of 29 percent of their corporate PCs infected."

Come on, in just two years the things didn't change so much.

The movie theatres may end up losing money on this - they have to give the first several weeks box-office to Lucas, and, judging from the comments on the current slashdot poll, it looks like repeat business isn't going to be there ...

Lucas did the impossible - he killed the "Natalie Portman naked pouring hot grits down your pants" option with this movie.

I hear Kraft wants to sue him for devaluing the term "Cheesy".

Maybe it would be better with the sound turned off ... I here there's a version making the rounds with Monty Python-type dialog.

I have high hopes for Spaceballs 2 ... there's LOTS to poke fun at in episodes 1 thru 3.

I won't say the original article ripped me off, but I do know InfoWorld published pretty much the exact same article three days earlier and mine was better written. Oh well, call it sour grapes.

Biztalk 2004 is rewritten entirely in .Net. Just because it's not the best choice for an OS kernel doesn't mean it's bad for applications. Biztalk is turning into a pretty core app for MS server stuff, so yeah, they're eating their own dog food.

"Now BizTalk has, at long last, been rewritten in managed code. The significance of that effort is enormous. BizTalk now lives on the .Net framework, permits the use of scripts written in any .Net language, and stores orchestrations as .Net assemblies. Integration with Visual Studio .Net is much tighter.....BizTalk Server 2004 is the largest managed-code application ever developed."
http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/2003/06/03.html

>> as a result when I run the patcher, it pretty much seems to disable my internet access until it's done (web pages time out, pings timeout on first hop.

Forget patching, BattleNet does the same thing when I just try to play on it. Too bad there wasn't an open source BattleNet.

Man, if only Bill Gates had a nickel for everytime Windows crashed, he could pay his way out...

Well in 2003 there were 593,085,000 PC's. There were 42.8 million PC's sold in Q2 2004, for simplicity lets assume that these sales remain stable for the period Q1 2004 to the end of Q2 2005 - this would equal 256,800,000 PC's baught in this period. I don't have any figures showing how many of these purchases will be replacements rather than new users, therefore I shall be conservative and say 50% are replacements giving a total number of PC's in the world at a very rough estimate by the end of Q2 2005 to be 721,485,000. About 95% of PC's run Windows, therefore the number of Window's PC's in the world at the end of Q2 2005 would equal approximately 685,410,750.

Let us assume that each Window's PC crashes twice per week, worldwide that's 1,370,821,500 windows crashes per week which equals 71,529,465,870 worldwide windows crashes per year.

A Nickel is worth 5 cents, so the amount of money you would receive per crash per year (pcpy) if you had a Nickel for every time Windows crashed would be $3,576,473,293.5, or $3.58 Billion. Windows was released in 1985 so if we assumed that there were a constant number of PC's from 1985 to 2005 that would be $71.53 billion. Of course there weren't as many PC's in 1985 so that figure would actually be a lot lot less.

As Billy No Gates has a personal wealth of over $61 billion it is safe to say that your argument has been proved!

Infoworld CTO Chad Dickerson has a good take on these "critical shortage of CS students" reports that have been coming out lately.

Yes, everyone who ever read in an SEC filing knows that. But it is not so usual to see investigations mentioned in those.

"Also, if they know about a SEC investigation or lawsuit against them, a company would usually give more information than that in a 10k"

Well, yeah, since when is SCOX known for complying to those rules? :)

Dude -- you need to get your facts straight. Microsoft *is* calling for patent reform as well.
Check out this infoworld article at http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/03/10/HNmicros oftpatent_1.html

Obviously because Microsoft is not working to fix the current system, it is using these patents for offensive means, not defensive means.

By your own argument, it is likely using them for defensive means for now.

It might have been a campus-wide licensing agreement. When I was in university in the U.S., they sold Windows on CD-Rs in the student store

One might think that, but in all likelihood that isn't the case. Intellectual property, for better or worse, is systematically not respected in China.

Read about it. In 2004 it's estimated that only 4% of all software sold in China was legit.* And as shockingly low as that number may seem, it's not uncommon for most third world countries.

I always think it's funny how the industry targets college kids giving away copyrighted work for free while casting a blind eye on the REAL pirates making a profit from the illegal sale of copyrighted work.

*(Note: this figure is only ACTUAL sales--not including mythical "sales figures" like the RIAA/MPAA attempt to use. The difference is basically equating the profits of bootleggers to the losses of the industry, which IS a fair comparison, IMO.)

-Grym

You have to load the Java VM and initialize it. That takes a fair bit of time and memory. Then you have to convert the bytecode to native instructions (!!) and execute them.

Of course, all of this happens at startup and is a one time cost. The ongoing savings of a long time program can easily make up for this cost. Java programs tend to compare most favorably with large programs that take several seconds to start up. An equivalent Java program does the same, but provides better performance in the long run. (Server side applications are particularly good at taking advantage of this.)

A virtual machine can be an emulator. A VM is just not strictly an emulator in the modern definition. But it does create a fake environment that the code is "compiled" to. That "compiled" bytecode then has to be converted to native code to execute. You have abstraction between your code and everything else.

You're not saying anything I don't know. I did chose to use the modern distinction between a VM and an emulator, but that's primarily because the two ARE quite different these days.

Way back in the day we had a way of loading code dynamically without shared objects. They were called overlays. You literally loaded them on top of another segment of code. This was done mostly to get around memory limitations.

These two are like the Wright Brothers' first airplane compared to a 747. Java can not only load code dynamically, it can investigate it and tell you all kinds of wonderful things about the code. In JavaBean land, this allows components to be dynamically plugged in, and properties to be made available by reading in their "getXXX()" and "setXXX()" methods. Similarly, JSP pages are possible (and of high performance) because the page can be translated into Java, then loaded dynamically. The exception mechanism combined with the sandbox mechanism ensure that one of those pages can never crash the entire JVM either by accident or by intention. (Of course, in the real world there are some ways of exploiting the underlying OS's limits to crash the JVM, but overall systems are very highly protected against failure.)

Anything you can do in Java, I can do in C/C++. Java is written in C/C++!

Show me a dynamically compiled JSP-like system without resorting to a bytecode design. It's pretty darn hard, isn't it? How about a self-organizing code system that consists of nothing more than a bunch of SPI modules strung together? Not impossible, but quite difficult to do in C/C++.

The argument that C can do anything Java can do is just silly. Of course the same effects can be replicated, because both run on a computer. The features of the Java language, OTOH, make these things *easy* and *low cost*.

Also, don't get your hopes up about those "millions of other professional developers". I doubt there are millions of developers, and most are certainly not Java devs.

Apparently, the surveys say differently. Considering the number of JDK downloads alone suggests that we're well into the millions of developers. Trust me, Java is THE most popular development platform at the moment.

I couldn't believe what you wrote about Front Page, so I tried to look up a source. So here's an article that talks about it...
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/01/09/17/ 010917opfoster.html
and they quote the license:
"You may not use the Software in connection with any site that disparages Microsoft, MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, or their products or services ... " or else what?

Perhaps their apps are already browser neutral

Yeah, if anybody wants to read more about Friendster and what they've done with MySQL, etc., InfoWorld recently ran a feature package about the subject. Check it out if you have the time.

"Single point of failure." I for one don't want to be unable to make or receive calls just because my PDA gets a virus or otherwise decides to act up. Think it doesn't happen? It happenned to Chad Dickerson No, I think all-in-one is a very BAD idea.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/06/10/ 020610hnopensource.html discusses how governmental organisations round the world (Germany, Taiwan, France, Finland, the Philippines, South Korea, and China) are tending more and more to leave Microsoft and head towards Linux and other open source software, generally to save money. This British education survey is just another in the chain.

If companies had to pay $50k-$100k to hire cheap labor, we'd either have less unemployment for the American high tech community, or more companies would move off-shore sooner rather than later.

This is all about greed. You've got a few billionaires who don't give a damn about their employees or the quality of the products they turn out. Do you remember when Microsoft used to (arguably) turn out decent products with mostly American employees rather than the bug ridden years behind schedule crap that's coming out now? Do you remember when Dell made quality computers in this country rather than the throw-away junk they're making in Mexico? The hell with quality. The hell with worrying if my neighbors have to go on unemployment. The greedy royalty of this country can't be bothered by problems the serfs are having. Let them eat cake!

Long live King Bill!

Is here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/12/02/HNmanage rsmisuse_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworl d.com/article/04/12/02/HNmanagersmisuse_1.html/

Microsoft has been firing people over the last several years instead of laying them off since they don't have to pay them anything once they show them the door. When they target you for replacement, they start giving you 3.0 or 2.5 performance scores rather than the 3.5 (average) or 4.0 scores you'd been receiving. Once your lower priced replacement is in place and ready to take over for you, you get one last 2.5 and are escorted out of the building for poor work. Several of the security staff are spending 100% of their time escorting employees out after such bogus firings.

For the most part, those being thrown away are older white males (40s, 50s, or 60s) not in management. The belief is that they can be replaced by a 20-something or 30-something Indian (or whatever) for considerably less cost. The unpaid overtime is a big bonus. The departing employee was probably only good for 60 hours a week. The newly hired employee will think nothing of spending 80 hours a week trying to satisfy his new American company. The costs are down, but every schedule is slipping more than ever.

Before congress follows King Bill's suggestion, someone should study the facts and look at the lives that have been ruined by Microsoft in the name of cheaper labor. These people aren't even given the option of working for less. They're just tossed out for being too old and/or expensive, but the firing is blamed on poor performance. This is a crock. Bill and Steve should be thrown out of the country for what they're doing!

See http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/04/12/16OPreal ity_1.html for more background.

"You only need to port what's necessary," he said. "If you've got a little graphic interface and it looks real pretty and it's 32-bit, that's fine - it'll run. But when you need the 32-bit addressing, the bigger data space, certainly port that into 64-bit."
This reminds me of some other famous quotes:

"There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed." Source: Focus Magazine, nr.43, pages 206-212, (October 23, 1995) (http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html)
"Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that" Source: Speech at Computer History Museum (http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/01/HNgates talksmuseum_1.html), InfoWorld magazine, October 2001
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

My chiropractor found out about the BSA the hard way.
He had 2... count 'em 2, machines in his office, both running Win2k, Microsoft Office, and some accounting and scheduling software. He got a nice little letter from the BSA saying they wanted to do an audit.
He had no idea where his license info was, it's just him and his wife running a 2-exam-room office and he called me in a panic. I had told him about the Ernie Ball Case previously - he was all sorts of freaked out. Short of shelling out hundreds of dollars for new licenses, he was screwed. Granted, Ernie Ball is a larger company that might be able to suck it up, but it could mean financial ruin for a husband & wife operation.
He's now happily running Debian and OpenOffice on both machines. He had been planning on buying an updated version of his accounting/scheduling software regardless, and we found that it runs perfectly under wine.
He won't be hearing from the BSA again any time soon.

Want a recent example of the corruption in the U.S. government? Here's one from Ed Foster: Crime and Punishment, and Copyright.

In the U.S. government of today, anyone can get anything they want if they have money.

Quotes:

"After all, the music and movie industry moguls who spend so much time and money getting Congress to do their bidding are not without sins of their own. Just as an example, last month Time Warner -- a corporation with a foot in both industries -- agreed to pay a $300 million fine to the SEC to settle civil fraud charges. It had earlier paid $210 million to get the DoJ to go away on criminal fraud charges involving some of the same accounting shenanigans. Time Warner just had to pay this chump change rather admit guilt, in spite of the fact that, as one SEC officer noted, some 'of the misconduct occurred while the ink of a prior Commission cease-and-desist order was barely dry.' Oh, by the way, the Time Warner CFO, Controller, and Deputy Controller also agreed to never do such nasty things again. But apparently they don't face jail time, or even fines, and they're still working for Time Warner.

"So it's possible some of the same Time Warner officials who have been caught once or twice robbing investors in the past could be doing so again even as we speak. Of course, last week they may have been too busy passing out rewards to their minions on Capital Hill, or perhaps they were involved in all those lawsuits the MPAA and RIAA were filing to harass the researchers developing the Internet2."

A good thing would be to life guarantee the possible exchange of your broken/damaged CD/DVD, thus allowing them to be protected and uncopy-able.

Imagine the pain in the ass of having to send back a broken/defective DVD as "proof of damage" in order to receive a replacement. What would be worse is that the media corporations would offload such a responsibility to independent fulfillment houses, similar to the way rebates work today. Some of these fulfillment houses are not very scrupulous to begin with, and even those that are honest can be hell to deal with.

Here's what they were saying in 2003 ...

SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- Borland's Kylix development software remains in limbo, with no new release having been issued for a year and the company not saying whether there will be an upgrade.
...
Borland CTO Blake Stone stressed the company's C++Builder as an alternative to Kylix.

Sorry to rain on your parade but the article is about an incident that took place in India. If that's not people other than myself talking about outsourcing to India then what is it?

That's why I used the phrase "particular discussion" - the discussion that these points arose in rather than the article itself. It is of course possible to have a discussion that covers wider issues than the article itself, even on slashdot :P

Again, as for my initial comment which you consider irrelevant, it was intended to point out to a poster who was concerned about justice being done that justice was being done, albeit by the relevant Indian authorities rather than their US counterparts.

I don't consider it irrelevant, sorry if I gave that impression. I was just making the point that, if we're throwing anecdotal evidence into the melting pot, mentioning China is just as valid as mentioning India - neither country was explicitly or implicitly mentioned in the question you were responding to.

By the way, the "[W]ho's talking about outsourcing to China?" in my previous post was a question asking for examples of companies who are currently outsourcing to China or even considering it.

Ah, mea culpa, I misinterpreted it as a derogatory "where the heck did China come into it?". China is apparently due to be the next big outsourcing location, so the many horror stories are definitely something to worry about. (The last link isn't strictly related to outsourcing, but the same problems apply)

As for xenophobia you'll notice that I qualified my remarks by saying "sorry, that's what it looks like from where I'm standing", which was my way of saying "hey, you may not have meant it this way, but that's what it's going to look like to some people" but in not so many words.

Ah, thanks for the warning. I hadn't really considered the possibility it might be taken that way. Seems that too long in a sufficiently multicultural society tends to desensitise you to people's sensitivity.

Thanks for a good debate :)

Don't use 3rd party auditing agencies. Buy a better scanner than Nessus for use in-house. There are plenty out there. With a higher-end commercial vulnerability scanner, you are not just buying the scanning engine, but the research that goes into the vulnerability descriptions and solutions. There is a big difference in the amount of time you waste dealing with false positives and "solutions" that just parrot the vendor's original advisory without telling you what you need to know (e.g. is this patch going to break compatibility, etc.).

All products can do more or less the same kind of scans, but once you have seen the better products you will realize that using Nessus is often a false economy. Not to say Nessus is useless, but the money you save will often be wasted chasing down all of the bogus information. Plus, telling people to fix vulns which are false positives will undermine your credibility in the organization. Which means in the future, people will be less willing to take your word on security when it really matters.

Plus, most auditors these days (I'm talking about the big names as well as the little guys) tend to buy and use 2 or 3 different tools and just copy and paste the reports together in Microsoft Word. There's seldom any real additional analysis being performed by the auditors. Certainly no analysis with any technical depth to it.

Sorry, that industry propaganda has been debunked completely by a little detail called the FACTS. CD sales were up for 2004, despite the spread of Bit Torrent and the usual P2P suspects.

And remember when Eminem's 'The Eminem Show' was so widely spread as "digital copies transferred at high speed" that it was the #2 CD played on PCs BEFORE it was released? Did that send M back to the trailer park? Oh no, it debuted as the #1 selling CD. No end to the industry there.
(http://www.buffzone.com/business/world/31bcd.html )

And since we're being real here, for a second, what about all those surveys and sales figures from the wild west Napster and MP3.com days that showed while music sales were down all over in the US of A, and music sales were down in areas of colleges and universities that blocked access from their networks to Napster, music sales were down BY A LESSER AMMOUNT near colleges and universities that did NOT block access to Napster?

1998 to 2002 CD sales were down all over. The economy was in recession, fewer titles were released by RIAA artists, the big sellers like Britany were in a slump, things were bad all over for the RIAA. Yet, sales were better in areas where students had access to "unrestricted exact digital copies transferred at high speed." Seems people actually do use the internet to 'try before they buy.'
(http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/07/21 /000721hnnapsterboost.html)

So, looking at the FACTS, unrestricted exact digital copies transferred at high speed to anyone who wants one will HELP the music industry. Do you disagree?

That's not surprising - they've only just bought that.

Therefore, in the matter of defendant Thomas Alva Edison versus respondent the Book Authors Guild and respondent the Sheet Music Publishers Association, this court unanimously concurs with the lower court's decree. In inventing and offering for sale his "moving picture" and "phonograph" devices, the defendant induced countless infringing acts against the holders of copyrights for books and music. Defendant Edison's assets are to be seized in order to make restitution to the respondents. Furthermore, all phonographs, record players, moving picture equipment and similar devices are to be confiscated and destroyed. All "record" companies and "film studios" most disgorge their ill-gotten gains and henceforth cease and desist all operations now and forevermore.

One side of this court case does IMHO not know what they are doing.

The recording industry tried the courts to stop radio airplay of recordings. Now radio is both a revenue source and a major free (except for payola) advertising channel.

The movie industry tried the courts to make the video recorder illegal. Now video rentals and sales are one of their largest revenue streams.

And now they try the courts to make new technology illegal - again. I bet that p2p will end up generating more revenue for these companies. (In France and several other european countries they already are generating revenue from p2p.)

Don't these companies want to earn money?

If you'd bother to use google, you might make a fool of yourself less often as a juvenile troll.

Ed Foster at InfoWorld has written quite a bit on the BSA and Microsoft. Here's one example. The rest you can find yourself, or just continue trolling. I really don't care.

Jon Udell, reliable innovator, has a nice take on this over here
Rather than taking sides in this debate -- which I can't do, because I sympathize with both positions while endorsing neither -- I'd like to try to broaden its scope....

Jon Udell has also has written about OpenSearch.

CK

Jon Udell has also has written about OpenSearch.

CK

The JVM source code IS AVAILABLE under the Sun Community Source Licensing. You can try it for yourself.

The SCSL is NOT an open source license (it doesn't give you the right to redistribute modified versions), but still it is much better than closed source. J2SE 5.0 is also available under the JRL (Java Research License) that allows sharing binary-based research distributions of Java.

Sun is preparing a tweaked license for J2SE 6.0 called JIUL (Java Internal Use License), in an effort to show that "the company wants to make Java as open source as possible while maintaining platform compatibility". You can read two recent articles on this topic in infoworld and news.com .

As for the GPL-compatibility, I remind you that most open source licenses are NOT GPL-compatible. Neither the Apache License nor the Mozilla Public License are GPL-compatible and this has not stopped the Apache httpd nor the Firefox widespread adoption in the open source community. Expecting Sun to release its JVM source code under a GPL-compatible license is nonsense. What we can realistically expect in the near future is a license scheme that would allow free redistribution in a company. They make this to please large companies like IBM, that has been complaining for some time now that the Sun JVM is not open source.

However, nobody is forced to use the Sun JVM. GCJ and Kaffe are GPL, aren't they?

Tom Yager of InfoWorld had an article that spoke to this issue, a few weeks ago. He was talking about how most OSes fail to guard applications against timeouts and hardware failures. They leave it up to application developers to bloat their code will all kinds of handlers. Most applications simply die when faced with these kinds of problems. It would take far too long to code for all the possibilities, and cost too much.

Heavy Metal Umlat [infoworld.com] is a very interesting look at the history of a Wiki page. Worth checking out.

That's Heavy Metal Umlaut.
Misspelling the same (key) word twice in a twenty-word post makes my eyes hurt. It may also make the baby Jesus cry, FWIW.

Heavy Metal Umlat is a very interesting look at the history of a Wiki page. Worth checking out.

Actually, the first time I heard the phrase "open sores software" was from Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet.

I emailed him straight away to complain, and he blamed it on his editor. Then he went on to publish three or four more editorials flaming "open sores software" again.

He may have been responsible for Ethernet, but Bob Metcalfe is a lying, fudding sack of shit.

Ugh...you could be more right than you know:

All about screencasting (ugh)

When Microsoft Office is free[ed2k link]?

Considering the utterly prohibitive costs to a small business should they ever be subject to a BSA audit while using the "free" version of MS Office, I'd say it's actually pretty expensive. Honestly, an audit can be a business changing experience. It just isn't worth the risk.

The last small company I worked for was busy transitioning as many staff as they could over to OpenOffice. They weren't doing this because OpenOffice was cheaper, they were doing this because they didn't have to bother with the task of filing and managing licenses - the reduced cost was just a bonus.

Jedidiah.

One of the more interesting overviews of wikipedia, and wikis in general - something that you can send to someone non-tech-savvy who doesn't really understand the idea of a collaborative web page - can be found here:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html

Basically, shows how the "Heavy Metal Umlaut" (heh) page at wikipedia has evolved over some time. Interesting stuff. Note: This is a flash movie, although when it comes up, if your browser window isn't tall enough, it'll probably just look like a web page. Scroll down for the play/stop/back controls.

IDGNS: What exactly are you doing to ensure security?

Nagel: We support a capability for signed code. Imagine a piece of code that has a signature on it, basically saying that this is a trusted application. Unless the code has been signed by some legitimate signing agency, which often is the carrier or wireless operator, you can't load the application on the smart phone. We also provide a lot of the encryption capabilities as well as secure VPN technology.

Tom Yeager wrote a column that you might find interesting: Welcome to the Mac, Oracle

Here is an article by John Udell that I found fascinating when it was published a few months ago. It discusses the quasi-rich-client architecture that Google cobbled together to bring us GMail. The really incredible part is that interfaces built on this architecture, consumed in the browser, outperform commercial desktop apps:

"One of my favorite acid tests is address completion. When you begin typing an e-mail address, your mail program should immediately show you the matching addresses and then dynamically constrain the list as you continue to type. Outlook does poorly on this test; you have to type CTRL-K to invoke the address book in a separate window. OS X's Mail does address completion in situ, just as I expect. So does Gmail. And here's the shocker: Gmail does it faster."

I appreciate AP's efforts to assign some greater precision and clarity to this architecture. Up until now, realistically, I figured I had to be tethered to .net/XAML, Mozilla/XUL, or something like Macromedia Flex.