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Sun To MS: You Don't Get It
Chuck Humble, who works at Waggener-Edstrom, one of Microsoft's earliest PR agencies, has sent an e-mail to reporters, questioning Sun's technologies and "crowing" about Microsoft's .NET. Sun has decided to answer Chuck and Microsoft with this Open Response to Microsoft. Definitely worth reading, and pretty funny answers.
Oh come off of it. All MS did was take a load of disparate technologies and give them 1 name for marketing purposes. .NET is just a convenient label for the next versions of 2/3 of MS products.
I've used the "beta". In an open-source environment, it'd be "pre-alpha proof-of-concept"
- given that the Version 3.0 releases of Microsoft products tend to be about open-source "beta" quality, I'm not surprised.
Sun is just doing the same, taking all the relevant technologies and sticking them under 1 name for marketing purposes.
It continues the development of COM, COM+, ASP, etc.
We received a full beta version yesterday. It contains VB, VC++, C#, VFP, SQL2000, and more. As you may know, VB was rewritten to match the common library with VC++, C# was built for that too. VFP was not.
I know you're just spewing forth shit from your mouth, but lets just pretend that you were confused by all the other beta versions that were out there previously. THOSE should have been labeled Alpha. But we know that alpha releases aren't as cool sounding as the Beta Band.
There is no "Waiting 5 years" for a .NET to be installed. There is no .NET as you speak of it, oh why argue, you don't know what you're speaking of.
Yes, we can blame marketing and media that .NET is something more, but it is simply the next iterative step of MTS & COM framework that has been working successfully for years. The toos that Microsoft has are simply being geared towards working in this foundation more smoothly.
I get paid a nickel for every email I read!
It actually closely follows the Linux/Open Source approach & style of FUD control, of focusing on the issues, rebut the falsehoods & keep your cool, especially keep your cool.
Sun did a poor job of keeping their cool (no pun intended). In particular, the tone of their response was quite personal against this Chuck character. Now, I won't say that he isn't a goon, but personal attacks detract from the credibility of an argument.
Oh wait...microsoft made it? Booo! Hiss!!! Boo! it's not the vendor so much as the lock-in.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Mojo Nation runs on Linux/x86, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Irix, Linux/Alpha, Linux/PPC, Linux/Sparc, and MacOS X. It is written in Python, with the performance-intensive parts and the standard open-source libraries written in C or C++. Last I checked, Java 2 still isn't available for FreeBSD, not to mention all the other platforms.
I hate to fan the flames of language holywars, and I don't think that Python, C, or C++ are the be-all and end-all of programming languages, but this "Java == portability" myth is starting to bug me. Currently, I would only choose Java for portability if I were aiming at the various embedded systems out there, and even then I would probably end up going with C or embedded C++.
I do appreciate the difference between recompiling versus shipping byte-code, but most of the actual program logic in Mojo Nation is in (Python) byte-code. And anyway, for a "download, install and run" application, the only cost of having platform-specific compilation is that users have to click on the correct hyperlink on our download page.
Regards,
Zooko
I do find the article amusing, and I'm more on
SUN's side, but I am curious about where I might
get Jini appliances and software to control them.
If such devices exist, a reply with links to the
needed hardware and software to make it all work
would be appreciated..
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
> Case in point. Java. SUN has said for years that they were going to push Java through a standards committee.
It will be interesting to see what Sun do in the future. Would you have wanted them to push Java through a standards committee with MS or HP sitting on it?
You might also try and get some historical perspective. Sun has a record of putting specifications, if not code, in the public domain. Think NIS, NFS, ONC RPC.
Don't confuse the .NET marketing blitz with the .NET framework. It's probably true that some of the back office products are getting gratiutiously slapped with the .NET moniker (Exchange.NET, anyone?).
.NET framework and tools (e.g. the Common Language Specification [CLS] and Common Language Runtime [CLR], Assemblies, etc.) are a completely real and completely new platform. Microsoft is turning their ship around on a dime again and anyone with an ounce of objectivity has got to be impressed (even if you prefer writing Java or C++ or ksh93 scripts in the end).
On the other hand, the
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Get a clue. The .NET development environment is in Beta right now. I guess "vapor" isn't what it used to be.
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Oh, I don't doubt that many of them are. But how much of what you need for a GUI are?
So, I take it you're waiting for the Java spec
to be an official ISO standard before you write
your fantastic, free implementation of it?
Sun dodged the question about multiple programming languages a bit..
-- Thrakkerzog
Consider:
/* do anything */
char s[]="abc", t[]="def";
int i=2;
if(s[i]==t[i]) {
}
From this I can assume C is better than Java?
Except that I rarely write UIs using Java. I write server side stuff. And it all runs just fine. You'd be surprised just how much back-end business logic you can write in Java without getting performance issues. And I can write stuff in java much more quickly than I can in most other languages. And because it's Java I don't have to decide whether to host the app on NT or Unix until we come to deploy it - which is a bloody good thing when you have a business as flexible as my employer.
~Cederic
My comment has nothing to do with cross-platform applications, and everything to do with "open standard" and how that relates to extensibility.
If I take perl.c and add in some code that provided a new function, and recompiled perl from scratch, then the perl code I write that uses that function will not be accepted by perl on any other machine. Even if I modify perl on my SUSE linux box and pass my perl code to someone else who has SUSE linux.
My point is that just because the language is open, doesn't make it a panacea. Sure, I could distribute my perl.c along with my perl code. But hey, if I want to extend the Java language, I can distribute my new Java compiler along with my new Java source code. But why would I want to do that? I'm better off implementing my Java extension in a suitable library and provide that library to my users. And I could also pass that library to Sun, and they might include it in the next Java release. Or maybe not. Personally I don't really care - I am using Java because I like what I get, and I like the design, and I like the readability of the code I produce, and because it lets me get stuff done. And I've never needed to extend the language and I've never yet been shafted by Sun changing the language from underneath me. And the code I write usually runs on multiple platforms, but that's a convenience and I could go learn perl or something if I had to.
Hmm, I have a meeting now. Hopefully I wont rant in that too!
~Cederic
If your requirement is that every interesting technology be built in to the language, including ones that came along years after the language, then the only way to achieve that is to change the language spec for each new feature.
Does anyone seriously Java (as a language) to have XML features, instead of keeping the language small and clean, and adding XML to the standard libraries?
I certainly don't.
In the old days of AWT in 1996, Java did limit you to the lowest common denominator. Swing fixed that by making a standard GUI API for the Java Platform. So, if Mac didn't have the concept of a combo box, it suddenly could if the app were programed in Java. This did however have a speed penality. AWT was a wrapper for local GUI API calls. Swing is not using native calls; but rather, implements it's on controls.
-----
From what I remember reading about Java's history at the Sun site, it was precisely all the money thrown into (effectively) blind alleys like NeWS that made them stop, think, look at future trends, and make Java.
So don't get your hopes up. :-)
Personally, I thought the response was pretty darn funny, but you're right, it wasn't very professional. Then again, when have any of us known Marketers to be especially concerned about "professional"?
Chuck asked for it, he got it, end of story. It might have done Sun some good to take the high road, but then again, I'm sure the funny factor counts for something too.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
> 2. When will solaris be shipped with GNOME as the default desktop?
... it is about beeing able to choose, after all. You can install Gnome on your Solaris (never did it, don't have such a box, but heard it is possible), as you can install KDE (I assume).
Well
I've been using gnome almost exclusivly under Solaris 2.6 and 8 for over a year now... been about a year and a half since I first got it running. Also had KDE working 2 years (damn, didn't realize it'd been so long) ago on the same boxes.
It's nice having choice. You should see the drastic differences in setups that are used here... some use olvwm, some CDE, some FVWm, gnome, kde, etc etc.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
A Spark? What's that?
/all/ Sun hardware these days, as well). Their budget workstations are just PCs with a super slow Ultra Sparc shoehorned in there. Any PC running a free Unix will stomp an Ultra 10 into the ground.
Face it: buying any Unix workstation these days is an exercise in futility, unless you have very specific needs. All the low end stuff from Sun, for instance, is straightup garbage (I have my deep reservations about
You don't get to the interesting stuff until your budget scales way up, of course -- when you start getting into the SGI Onyx territory, you begin to see performance numbers that no Intel box is capable of. But nobody buys those for the desktop, and regardless, it's not (usually) a function of raw processor power.
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
You mention what I think is the best (only?) reason to buy low end Sun workstations:
...
They also run the same systems your big box in the basement runs
This is right on the money. It's the whole reason they developed the Ultra 5/10, I think. It's actually a huge boon when you can run your compiles on that wussy little desktop in complete certainty that it'll work the same on the big dog. Of course, that requires a disciplined, competent IT department, which is rarer than hen's teeth, but that's a separate argument.
It's ironic, of course, that Sun implicitly encourages this sort of thing, given their very public focus on a) the "network appliance" and b) Java's WORA hype.
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Achem! What's to say you can't run gdm on a Sun? That login manager you're complaining about is just "dtlogin", which is part of CDE. If you just hunt down the right config file, you can change it to whatever you want. X is a standard, and XFree86 is nothing more than an implementation of that standard. "Xsun" is also an implementation that basically works the same way.
Of course a developer could implement it — the point is that (in the questioner's opinion), because of Sun's lack of foresight wrt XML and providing such facilities, developers have no choice but to implement it themselves or go searching for someone else's code.
Cheers,
Ever complied something under Sun's X? It a hug pain in the ass as they didn't declare the functions to be int (which ones? most) thus its much hard to work with X under Sun then may other platform. Plus the default Sun X doesn't come with startx! and is usually a pick of crap. Just a few of the pains of a default Sun install.
Now just don't get me started on CDE or Openwindows.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
"java sucks compared to .Net"
a working version of .Net has yet to be implemented.
your pretty fucked up dude.
But their spelling seems to be improving. Seems like more than 50% of the words in the editorial blurb that accompanies stories are spelled properly now! (Except JonKatz. I filter that out, so I don't know for sure.)
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
NeWS was based on Display Postscript -- something I believe Apple is doing with MacOS X. X Windows at the time was mostly Version 10.
Like most nostalgia, the wonderous tales you may have heard about NeWS leave out all the gritty bits that people would rather forget. Was it better than X at the time? Possibly -- except that it locked you into Sun. Was it better than the latest version of X as realized by, say, XFree86 4.0.x? No way.
-- Alastair
In order to achieve that the code will be compiled to pseudocode and interpreted by a JIT-compiler. (Sounds familiar)
<p>
a nitpick...
<p>
actually, apps will be compiled to IL (intermediate language), and shipped. when they are run (or installed, i've read both) they will be compiled to native code. there is no interpretation, but there is JIT compilation.
<p>
=c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
I'm not quite sure I understood your point...
As far as 'so actually you are pointless', is this a metaphysical argument? If so, perhaps we are wondering off-topic...
Um, that version of Gnome requires a Windows-based X server. Just because its Windows doesn't mean that X is no longer necessary. As for those embedded systems, it wouldn't surprise me if they were running a scaled down version of X.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
Its true that Sun does some bad stuff (particularly the way they've handled java), but they do some good stuff too. For instance, they released StarOffice under the GPL, and they have devoted 40 programmers to work on Gnome.
---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
This is just a crackpot theory I have, but I attended VBITS last fall and Microsoft was there in full force touting the benefits of the recently unveiled .NET initiative.
.NET, but seemed to carefully use examples that praised Linux, and mentioned other OSS-friendly languages (Python & Perl) as working with .NET. My thought is that they figure if you have to choose an outsider to shake hands with, pick OSS, since it's easier to FUD your way through sales pitches against OSS than a publicly-traded, for-profit company.
I found it interesting that MS folks talked about the openness one gains via
Anyway, I thought someone might find this thought interesting to consider, but take it for the basis-free speculation that it is....
> The differnece is that Microsoft has a poor track record for supporting alternate platforms. Java, OTOH, has been ported to quite a few architectures.
FUD! Microsoft has done as much as promised to port MISL to _any_ platform, MS or not, with over 200,000,000 users. (Anything less just doesn't make financial sense now, does it?)
Gladly. There are multiple vendors of the java runtime, and it is a goal of Sun to have a runtime on all major platforms. And they're doing pretty good, really. On the other hand, the .NET runtime is tied to Microsoft's .NET products. Microsoft has NOT stated that they will try to produce a runtime for any non-MS environment. They have NOT stated that other vendors will be allowed to produce runtime environments. In other words, regardless of whether they're just as portable in theory, in practice there's a huge difference.
I've had this sig for three days.
Thank you, Mr. Obvious. =]
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
Stroustrup is famous for being very anti-Java. Most people figure he's just jealous that it caught on a million times faster than his creation of C++, while mimicking some (but certainly not all) of the concepts in C++.
So here we have another guy who is very fluent in C++ and therefore thinks everyone else should do everything in C++ as well. Im sure the "C++ is so much faster" arguments can't be far away either.
I think while C++ applications are faster and are good at hiding inefficiencies in code (if you consider that to be an advantage, i dont), and there can be an endless ongoing argument about which platform allows superior architecture (I think it works out to be nearly the same in the end), it is nearly impossible to argue that the learning curve, rate of development, or deliverable design/implementation quality from an average (i.e., not genius, most programmers are not) programmer with C++ is at all comparable to that of Java.
Also, Java is somewhat proprietary, but certainly not the way Win32 is. Theres tons of VM's out there and anyone can write their own and not get sued. Shouldnt be a problem there except for Stroustrups frustration over his lack of ubiquity.
And unlike Linux, it's a $200 add-on to an existing operating system.
Frogs are primitive animals - so the occasional extra toe is not that unusual. But this is very unusual.
from what I've heard, VB for .NET has been really changed around, such that there will be alot of compatibility problems between VD 7(or whatever the current version is) and VD for .NET. And as far as C++ support(as well as support for other languages), .NET will support a microsoft'ed version of the language(and most likely some version different from the (mangled) version they have today...
There are Gnome variants out there which are independant of X. Some run on embedded systems using an SVGA-like display system (sorry, can't find the reference), and others even on Windows
I won't speak for him, but I will speak for me: I am the desktop support for my group. I still won't touch Windows, and have just recently made myself completely Windows free. And it feels soooo good I can't even begin to describe it you. It's nice to have a machine which simply works for me, and I don't have to fight with it, or reboot it constantly, or... You get the picture. I'm changing my title to maid, because I don't do Windows.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
Yeah, I quite agree. I was just wondering from a technical perspective cos I don't know much about
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Would WINE be any use?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Got a quick write-up on how you did that?
I had to spend a while futzing around with dtlogin and m64config on an Ultra box in order to get it to come up in a video mode my monitor recognized. It appears m64config tells the hardware to generate separate (or composite) sync, which my monitor likes, but dtlogin tells it to use composite (or separate), which the monitor doesn't like. I had to wedge an m64config call into /etc/rc2.d/S99dtlogin and a few other places, which was fugly, fugly, fugly.
It'd be nice if I had an elegant solution... but even if you didn't replace dtlogin, anything that gets me away from CDE would also be pretty cool :)
So Microsoft doesn't get it huh?
Ok, fair enough for me.
But what about SUN?
Please blame me for not reading enough and not asking around enough, but wasn't SUN going to:
1. Break staroffice as a package apart and building it into an opensource office package made up of CORBA objects so it could be used in different GNOME applications?
2. When will solaris be shipped with GNOME as the default desktop?
3. When will SUN ship it's systems with a protocol a bit less bloated than X? (Ica?)
And as I heared someone say a few weeks ago, who cares what the glue is, as long as it works. IE, it doesn't matter if you use XML, EJB, Perl, Java, C, or any other cross platform tool to build your software just as long as the software does what you expect it to.
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You are right, it's more of the same 'corporate BS'. And I wonder if we should even discuss these sort of matters, but then again, they are bashing eachother with with 'technical details' and that could be interesting.
In the end the 'corporate BS manager' decides what is being programmed by the 'corporate BS programmers' and what is not.
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Is anyone using this? Why is there not more Hype to OpenOffice?
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I don't want Solaris to be shipped with my desktop, I want Solaris to be shipped with an Open Source desktop. And one that is a bit more easy to configure (for the enterprize) than CDE wich I think is a load of cr*p.
Sure, I want SUN to build some kind of system that:
- Runs X11 applications
- Is a lot more friendly to network bandwith
- Is opensource
- Is build to be ported (ie can be compiled to run on linux/windows/mac/hp/sgi without much trouble)
- Runs 'whatever the new protocol name may be' apps that use modern hardware to the best
I think SUN is one of the companies out there that has the momentum to do so. And maby while they are at it they might implement a new type of NFS too, one that has better file-locking, beter security, beter quota support, etc.I would be glad if SUN took just a little more time to build NEW things on the software side, I think they can do it, and I think they should.
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If the past is any indication,
That is really really sad. You obviously have not had to support people like yourself. You may think you are pretty cool for running Linux, but when you are non-productive for hours fixing your mistakes because you have no idea what you are doing, and when you expect people to provide you with service to allow Linux to interface with other systems on the network, I will personally come around, format your hard drive, and install Windows.
hmm? I have sitting right next to me a copy of Visual Studio.NET beta..
Whew! Take a breath, Chuck. It's clear the lack of oxygen is fogging your logic.
Fuzzy Logic?
Sorry couldn't resist the stupid joke. I love when MS trys to start a pissing contest with someone else.
This may be true in small startups which have grown up in a Windows-dominant world. But many older companies have millions invested in legacy equipment that they can't just toss out. Even newer companies have realized the benefits of having multiple platforms installed in-house. It fosters innovation and thinking if nothing else.
- Milo Hyson
Well, after a year or so of Windows For Workgroups 3.11, I'd consider that statement to be fairly truthful.
Actually, "Everything you do will be 25% less painful!" would be more accurate.
k., 99% pain free.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I agree. I also don't buy the argument "that unix is 20 years old, so it's crap"
;-)
...
;-)
e.g. Take your pencil. It's simple, intuitative, old, and it does the job.
BUT
All those thing are "MUCH" simpler then thousands of lines of code, all interacting with one another. There is a "simplicity" to a light bulb, or "wheel", that the complexity of modern software can't even come close to.
Unix isn't perfect (*no* OS is, since they are designed with different goals in mind - avoiding the "Jack of all trades, master of none" syndrome.)
I believe the orginal comment is in reference to "In the past 20 years of computing history, there are better architecture designs, and better implementations - sometimes an OS should be "shelved" and redone from scratch with them:
multithreading, protected memory, pre-emptive multitasking, virtual memory, etc, which is all "old" and "proven." (Didn't the *nix's pioneer a lot of this?
One area that *nix still has problems with, is with user security. How many systems have been compromised, because root ran some program, that was a trojan? Eros has some good essays, one a really slick security design called capability.
BeOS has a *really* NICE design. Is it perfect? We all know the answer for that: "No, but use the right tool for the right job. Yada yada yada."
*BSD, mmmm nice, clean, fast code, perfect for a router/web server. Windows, mmmm, latest games.
Nice counter-argument, BTW.
Cheers
The reason to use JAVA is simple. The shit is so slow and resource intensive that you are just about forced to have a `n UltraSparc to run the crap :)
:)
Who sells UltraSparcs again???
Microsoft doesn't get it???? No. SUN doesn't get it. At least Microsoft sticks to its guns. At last Microsoft does a good job with what they do... selling crappy proprietary software.
SUN on the other hand is much more scary if you are a Free Software advocate. Microsoft won't lie to you. SUN will say one thing and then stab you in the back.
Case in point. Java. SUN has said for years that they were going to push Java through a standards committee. Hasn't happened. Doesn't look like it will ever become Open Source/Free Software either.
dotNet or sunOne.... the are both just another proprietary software play. Don't be fooled.
Kevin
Since english isn't my native tongue, I had to look this up:
proprietary
1 : of, relating to, or characteristic of a proprietor
2 : used, made, or marketed by one having the exclusive legal right
3 : privately owned and managed and run as a profit-making organization
Well, since Sun still retain all rights on Solaris, it fits the definition of proprietary.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
He only retains the right to enforce the GPL. He may not revoke a once granted license. That's why its called copyleft.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
>You mean, all those programmers who already know VB and VC++, which they can continue to use under .NET?
.NET to be platform-independent.
.NET.
The problem is, that they can't. (Actually, in VC++ they still can, but it's discouraged and will surely vanish.)
They want
In order to achieve that the code will be compiled to pseudocode and interpreted by a JIT-compiler. (Sounds familiar)
The windows-api will be wrapped into a new platform-independent api. (What an innovative idea.)
They want VB-objects and C#-objects be mixable.
Therefor they have to change VB syntax and they are introducing new modifiers into C++ to create C# ([WebMethod], anyone?).
I can only agree to gattaca, the syntax is not a problem, the libraries and philosophy is the problem. And exactly these are changed in
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
>3. Who has a proprietary OS again?
Both?
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
I'm sure that there /. types who are far smarter that I who will sit all day and disect this little pi**ing contest, but lets face facts. M$ and Sun can be BOTH accused of trying to rewrite history and make themselves look like they are masters of the computing universe.
/. types truly care about either company enough that this issue is more important than say, the 2.4 kernel or making LINUX accessable to the masses who use products based upon the the blue screen of death? IMO, cross platform code is important and it is worth discussing so that the goal of truly portable code is eventally a reality. Sun and M$ bashing each other's brains out however does nothing to move anyone towards that goal.
Do
Let's move on shall we?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
The original author always retains all rights.
Linus Torvalds is never going to change the license on Linux even if the other coders threatened to sue or quit the team.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
LMBleedinAO!
1. The Amiga is still a force to be reckoned with (guess how Babylon 5 was made) because engineers realized software was a feature of hardware 15 years ago. The modern PC wastes millions of cycles remembering how to act like a computer. Amigans realized the world is made of Video/Audio interfaces, data, and output. As a result the Amiga doesn't waste time pretending to be a computer. It simply plows through its tasks quickly and efficiently. No wonder AmigaOS on my 14Mhz 1200 makes my Athlon 500 Debian box blink when it comes to responsive multiresolution screens on the visual field, and I won't even talk about programming simplicity. I love Debian (I can play almost all media formats from one program now), but for the sake of sanity I'm done with PCs (Macs included).
2. XML will always be a metalanguage. Any theoretical linguist can tell you that a syntax can never be more than a veil over the actual workings underneath. There has to be a deliberate agreement that this piece of text in brackets will do what I think it should. Is Microsoft going to "make it so" using a tag?
3. Who has a proprietary OS again?
4. Sun you'd better get your asses in gear too. See Strings.com. So much for novelty=everything.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
The problem is they took a subset of what server design is (pretty widgets) and made that the core.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Reading that article is like having teeth extracted with a dull butter knife!
Shouldn't this be (Score:5, Funny) as in "hilarious understatement" rather than (Score:5, Insightful). You, perceiving that /. is anti-microsoft is not exactly a brilliant insight, is it?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Sun defending its statement that XML and Java are bolted at the hip
Sun are just a bunch of lying toads. It's hard to get into a PR mud-slinging battle with M$oft and come off worst, but they seem to have managed it (I liked the other poster's comment about 17 year olds comparing Chevys and Fords)
If XML has any close ties with Java, then it's despite Sun, not because of it. The heroes of XML are the early adopters who built the first tools for it. If these people chose to build those tools in Java, it was because they liked Java as a language and an environment for code-sharing, not because Sun was encouraging them to. Over XML, and especially over SOAP, Sun has played the sort of "dog in the manger" attitude that we're usually used to seeing from M$oft. Fortunately their corporate squabbling doesn't seem to have broken things for the rest of us.
I love XML & especially RDF, development under Java, because there's a really good (although still small) Open Source community around it. It's not big corporate funding from M$oft or Sun driving it though. Kudos to IBM for their work on Apache and XML.
Well, not to outright disagree with you, but you've only provided examples of Microsoft BS when you implied both companies are equally guilty. Not to mention you ended your comment on MS unethical business practices and no mention of Sun.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
SOAP and XML don't magically make applications speak to each other, like MS would like us all to believe.
Very true. Sounds like the myth of meta-data that I was reading about the other day on Wiki.
Uhm. Not that different from this world, is'n it?
Ciao
----
FB
Am I the only one who find this sentence funny in some way?
-
-
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Interesting answers, but as any grown up knows that such answers could be re-buffed and re-buffed such that the ball can go back and forth in each court for ever.
So here is a question to Sun: when will Sun grow up and just ignore such blunders? By replying to "Chuck's" questions, Sun has lowered its own self-esteem and image to a level that I see Sun as non professional.
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Sig
abbr.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
It's just a web page, you know?
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The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
I'm not surprised that Sun's infantile response scored some points with the Slashdot crowd, but I hardly think that the average person would agree that it "made Microsoft look very stupid, very quickly."
It had the trademarks of a clumsy teenage flame -- load every sentence with as much sarcasm as possible, never miss any opportunity to take a cheap shot, and try to work in as many references to the target's first name as possible for that extra dash of obnoxiousness on a personal level. All that was missing was a reference to Bill Gate's mom.
This style of response always makes the poster look worse than his intended target. It's barely forgivable in a 16 year old. For a public statement from a Fortune 500 company, it's just pathetic.
And Xerces from Alphaworks for Java? Works a treat and works on just as many platforms. Whats your point?
the majority of Slashdot hits come from Windows/IE.
This is not by choice. I work for a large manufactoring company. I once had Linux running on my desk top computer (dual boot), but when my mother board failed and the desktop support people remounted my HD in a new machine they noticed Linux was an option at boot time. They informed my manager that I was running "un-supported" software, and they would not continue to support me if I did not remove Linux. Actually I did not need to remove it, they did it for me. Anyway to make a long story short... I SURE AS FUCK HATE RUNNING Windows... HATE IT WITH A FUCKING PASSION! I wish so much that I could be writing this post at home from my nice Linux box with Mozilla! I am forced to visit this site running WinBlows, and IE5! I am sure that a great majority of us out there wish we could be running something else. Just my $00.02
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No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
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No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo
Oh, stay away from the Ultra 5. When Sun went IDE, things went down hill very quickly. Disk to disk copy taking 100% processor utilization?! Not good. Sun's low end offerings have become increasingly dodgy in recent years, at least relative to the PC market. Low quality screens, subpar performance.
Higher-end Sun hardware is very nice, and it's what they're good at. Unless you really need an all-Sun environment, just skip their bottom end machines entirely.
Last time I checked, Java was not a functional language. In fact, it doesn't even have decent support for closures! What kind of crappy language doesn't have closures! Why would any programmer worth his/her salt even consider Java. Ugh...
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
Well, it might have been Ed Zander, I don't know! But it is going to be the default interface in Solaris 9.
It seems to me that Sun did not come off very well in this response. They repeatedly insulted Microsoft for their business practices and the fact that they have a monopoly (which is becoming less and less true by the day). Sun conveniently fails to mention that they currently have an effective monopoly on 'web services' (although that is also becoming less true daily) through java, and that they are mad that Microsoft's .NET might infringe on the utter dominance of java on the net.
Not only that, but the Sun business model is very similar to Microsoft's despite claims to the contrary. Their StarOffice is almost as good as Microsoft's Office, although it still needs a lot of work, and a major problem with it is that to an actual end-user it might seem even more proprietary than Office.
Finally, the representative from Sun came off as a childish imbecile. He repeatedly released boorish jokes directed at Microsoft or Chuck himself. He did this while totally disregarding any similar problems that Sun may face, and the fact that it would be impossible for Microsoft to respond without seeming even more childish. The only thing this letter could possibly accomplish is to aggravate Microsoft, and make the more intelligent readers hate Sun even more.
Basically, Sun and Microsoft are about the same, and basically the only differences are that they have different acronyms for the same products, and Microsoft makes a lot more money.
The two companies should probably stop fighting and, frankly, just shut their proverbial cake-holes.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Understand it? Hell, I've busted a gut trying to create it, but guess what? It can't be done effectively, and sometimes it can't be done at all. The ONLY way that I know of to standardize computing equipment is to buy all of your boxes at once, from a single vendor. That means every year of three scraping ALL computer hardware and repeating.
I have two Gateway boxes, bought only 6 months apart. They are not standardized because Gateway couldn't sell me the same stuff in the second as the first. Big pain in the ass when hardware problems take one down. I can't just swap shit around until at least one of them works.
Then there is the fact that a Mac is simply a more appropriate tool for certain jobs being done by certain people.
Sometimes even an old Compaq transportable 8088 does the job BETTER than any more modern hardware. Go figure. The idea isn't to standardize on equipment and apps, the idea is * to get the job done.*
Makes as much sense to standarize on phillips head screws when an allen head is what is really needed for a particular application.
You also make the logical fallicy of supposing that people showing up on the JAVA forums are the majority of the people using JAVA. I'm sorry, but these people are a biased, preselected *subset* of JAVA users. And where is that bias weighted toward? You guessed it, toward people developing small apps for inhouse use.
Yeah. And you don't NEED a canopener to open an aluminum can. But it's the best tool for the job.
Why would you carry a canopener if you are equipped with a swiss army knife?
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If Microsoft is the solution, I want my problems back
Sun:"The Solaris Operating Environment complies with Spec 1170, which defines the UNIX® standard. Its source code is openly available, too, allowing developers and customers to innovate."
Does anybody have a link/URL to the code ?
Hahahahaha! That's a laugh! UltraSparc 5 and 10 "workstations" use good old 7200 RPM IDE drives. Boy, those are speedy!
Oh and here's a newsflash: If I built a PC for the $5000 an Ultra10 costs, I could have dual processors, a gig of RAM, 64MB DDR RAM 3D card, and 10,000 RPM SCSI3 drives and smoke your SPARC in any benchmark. But then again, I could smoke the Ultra 10 just using a typical Athlon 1200 MHZ config and save a few thousand dollars. You're paying more for a name and the "PoM" that you have Sun Microsystems standing behind you (after you buy a support contract).
Suckers.
Final tidbit. An Athlon 1200MHz beats a Sun Blade 1000 (1750 config) in independent benchmarks. Price on the Sun Blade? $10,000
Yeah, why would anyone actually look at the performance they're getting? How stupid. You should just buy the prettiest architecture and make yourself a few dozen cups of coffee while your stuff compiles. Meantime your buddy on the PC will pick up your slack.
Sun's response reminded me a Usenet flame. Not the type of tone I would expect from a big corporation. Pretty childish all in all.
- Ultra 5 and 10 use IDE drives
- Ultra 5 and 10 use PCI bus
- Ultra 5 and 10 have lower benchmark performance against cheaper PCs.
You can have your architecture. I'll take biggest bang for the buck.We did. As our Sparcs died off we canabalized unused ones for parts and eventually threw them away. Very few left now.
Actually they are saying that Java is OS independent and XML is application independent. While it matters to a lot of people to be able to run Java on multiple OSes, it also matters to a lot of people that they can edit the documents in programs written in other languages.
Monkey sense
This will probably get modded down severely as troll flamebait redundant whatever, but it's my two cents' worth. (Donate the change to your company coffee fund.)
The Microsoft product, IMO, was never meant for high-end server operations...it was made for consumers and managers to be able to prepare their correspondence and play 'what-if' with spreadsheets. In other words, write letters and balance checkbooks, and that's about it. Server-level operability wasn't even considered for quite a long time, and wasn't stabilized (again, IMO) until NT 4.0 was released. By stark contrast, Sun has had high-end server software (and hardware, of course) for quite a few years, and has only refined and improved operability as time has progressed.
As to the excellence of the software...there are two versions of the same question you ask, depending on who you're talking to. If you're talking to an administrator of an NT box, you ask how often he has to reboot. If you're talking to an administrator of a Sun box, you ask when s/he had to reboot last. Chances are the NT admin will relate his answer to a number of hours; the Sun admin will likely reference his answer to a specific calendar date.
Ya gets what ya pays fer. 'Nuff said.
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
I figured that the author's poison pen was sustained by writing the word "Fuck" for his name, and then doing a global search and replace afterwards.
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ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At risk of helping start a holy war, I sincerely doubt that it will be BSD.
BSD is not a serious threat to microsoft in any space within which they would like to deploy .NET. Linux, on the other hand, is. I suspect that they will attempt to deploy .NET as part of their "embrace and have an abusive relationship with" strategy, this time applied to Linux.
Microsoft operates in terms of market share. Linux has more market share than BSD. That isn't to say anything about their relative value to the end user (although it does imply some things) but only to say that Linux has a broader installed base. (I suspect that at this point, even RedHat alone has a broader installed base than any one BSD implementation, except perhaps SunOS 4, which is on its way out (still!) anyway.)
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ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Luckily enough this is untrue as of Java 2, when using SWING, which enables you to use any Component, that is found in an modern GUI.
The .NET runtime will be especially hard to implement on platforms, that do not provide the Win32-API (that is on any non-MS-Plattform), it is possible to do, but exceptionally hard.
Java was designed to be implementable on every modern operating system (and it is implemented on virtually every modern operating system)
Here, Here ...
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You're right we need a little more SUN,Apple,Oracle,IBM,Linux,BSD,BeOS bashing in
Only the strong computers/apps should survive!!!
Then we will make a beowolf cluster out of them...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Check out Sun Australia's Online Catalogue
Directly from the Ultra 5 product page:
A21UJCY-256-EPROMO
Ultra 5, Model 400, 400MHz UltraSPARC IIi, 256MB DRAM, Onboard PGX24 graphics, 7200rpm 20GB EIDE hard disc, 48x CD-ROM. AUD $5000
Thats a CD-ROM, not a DVD, that's an ATI Rage II graphics chip, not something high end and that's AUD $5000, not AUD $2500.
The only place I've pulled anything is directly from Sun's Australian on-line catalogue. It's not my fault if those specs smell like they've come from someone's ass...it's because they're directly from Scott McNealy's ass, not mine.
The developers where I'm working are using Java precisely because it is cross platform, so I'm not so sure that Sun got it wrong.
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ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
Actually this statement is false (no, not this one, the one above, silly).
Java is neither standardized or open. Sun owns the trademark on Java and has the right to sue anyone using that trademark without their consent.
Microsoft payed Sun nearly $50 million for a Java license and when they failed to comply with 'the standard' they found that all they'd bought was a lawsuit - never mind the fact that they had agreed to provide the reference implementation of the JVM on windows for free. How is this 'open'?
In submitting the .NET specification to ECMA, Microsoft is providing an open standard for their technology. You won't need a license to sell products containing .NET implementations, and you won't get a lawsuit if/when your implementation doesn't conform to the standard - you just won't be conforming to the standard. This sounds much more open to me.
Sun's argument that .NET is bound to Windows is fatuous. I'm sure that while Sun was developing Java it was just as bound to their operating systems. It was only when they ported their environment to other platforms was it considered cross-platform. The only way any language or system could be considered not cross-platform is if there's a legal protection against porting that system. This is exactly the case when porting Java, so arguably Java is not cross platform. It's only available on those platforms for which Java has been ported by JVM implementors that Sun has not threatened with lawsuits. It has done this on at least one occasion and there's no reason to believe they won't protect their 'standard' again. Why they'd need to protect a standard that was supposedly 'open' I have no idea...
As to this stupid PR bullshit. All I read in the article is Chuck wazzitsname asking pointed questions and the Sun representative just avoiding answering the questions. Sounds like politics as usual to me. Not interesting.
I could not stop myself CHUCKling while reading Sun's response.
No, I'm not discussing the portability of the Java bytecode. I'm talking the portability of Java source code, which can be compiled to either Java bytecode or a native x86 executable in the exact same manner as C or C++ source code.
But in my feeling (and Bjarne Stroustrup's opinion too) Java is not platform-independent, but a proprietary platform unto itself.
You're apparently not aware of GCJ. It compiles Java natively, so even if you consider the JVM to be a single platform, Java is still platform-independent.
something that would have been really inappropriate to do in Java, as this was meant to be a free downloadable app for which tech support costs had to be near zero, and we could not expect our users to install a Java runtime.
A free downloadable app can be written in Java without requiring a runtime - or it can be downloaded and run securely by using a runtime.
You also don't have to wait until a needed version of some targeted runtime is available on any platform to be able to run your application with cross-platform C++ libraries like Xerces - because there are no runtimes.
With GCJ you don't need to wait for a needed version of some targeted runtime - because, while there are runtimes, you don't need them. You may need to wait for the compiler, but that's the case for every language at first.
If more powerful players than you want to trip each other up with competing initiatives - well, just let them, and go on about your business by using open source like Xerces-C.
If you're going purely open-source, you're probably using GCC anyway, and 3.0 will include the ability to compile Java, so that's no reason to avoid Java.
We're talking about Sun here, they don't even mind personally attacking their own customers.
Well they do a hell of a good job of hiding that download. I can't seem to find it.
Promoting human rights is a waste of time - Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy
How can this guy be better than Bill Gates?
First Solaris is not Open Source and I would prefer using MS products rather than Sun products. Sun sucks as well as Java, have you even done business with them before talking? Besides, Linux distributions are so much better.
all they dream and concentrate about is how they're going to screw MS and steal their market share. In the end they're only screwing themselves.
It's not that because of all the java hype and cross platform sharability that we developers have to think we will be forced to develop in java the next few years.
Consider for instance Coldfusion language CFML. Nowadays Coldfusion Server runs on a C++ engine, but the version after Coldfusion 5.0 will run on a JRUN platform. Nothing will change to it's CFML language, but the underlying architecture will be Java.
--- just a thought
Get a life. If your not interested in the PR exchanges between the companies that will eventually determine the nature of your world, fine, skip the post. Some of us really enjoy a bit of microsoft bashing, even if we don't use linux.
you forgot to mention that since microsoft won't release their source code, and only release limited interface info, that your apis won't work as well.
I read the whole article (a rarity for me) and was laughing through most of it. I like the fact that Sun was able to respond to all questions calmly and lucidly, and in most cases Microsoft's premise in asking questions was completely uninformed so MS came off as buffoons for asking. Sun could have done a lot more "this is the pot calling the kettle black" replies, especially about proprietary formats, but Sun's a grown-up.... :)
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Duh! My first clue (maybe not the first but the boldest of late) was when MS's DNS servers went down, and /. gave it a rating of "ho hum, so what if you can't get to their KB or Hotmail". Just because the company is a monopoly that is less than scrupulous in their practices doesn't mean that Joe Consumer (using Windoze, dialing MSN to get to their Hotmail email) doesn't have a use for them. Unfortunate, sure, but true.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Okay, see, that's odd you'd say that (and odder still, as I said in an earlier post, that Sun didn't say it): in the piece, Microsoft's flak says that Sun is trying to make their tools The Standard "because they say so"... but Microsoft tools ARE considered the standard (and by you, Yoshi, in the above quote) because They Say So. FHTWO.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
s/Chuck/Dave
Interesting... I can even download the source to solaris.. on sun's own page.. How is that not open source?
n/m, perhaps i'm using the wrong w0rd
Heh, First, I'd like to say I got a big kick out of your flame.
,stable?, windows 2000 @ work.. the thing is.. It crashes all the goddamn time. right out of the box. The machine was built with win2000 in mind and all hardware was in microsoft's list. Remember, Forced.
I guess i'm just seriouly pissed off about having being forced to use the ever
Sun products on the other hand work flawlessly (at least when i used em).. there is slightly more freedom too and a sliggtly lower price to boot!.. So i believe sun isn't all that bad when comparaed to microsoft.
Maybe i should've previewed that first...
, Slightly ,
If only there were an easy way to push microsoft out of the home market as well as the server market. It it my understanding that a lot of people are stuck using windows because of the large market share, the variety of software, and the lack of (better?) alternatives.
Personally, I believe the open source unixes (Solaris, Linux, BSD, etc) would be key. These operating systems need to be more compatible with each other and easier to use, to attract developers... or at least push compile compatibility.. So one application developed for one platform is easily ported to another.
Microsoft has grossly abused technology, inovation, personal freedom, etc. for large corporate gain. And.. thus, in my opinion, deserves to be put out of business. This may prove difficult as they are very large, have govnmt lobbyists preaching Microsoft's cause, and have too much money. We must all remain strong and not give to microsoft's bullshit no matter how much money they are offering. This is War, and it isn't gonna be easy.
Viva La Resistance.
Beau Bellamy
This is Microsoft's way of licensing Java without losing face.
I have always felt that Sun got it so wrong when they decided that developers wanted to be able to develop cross-platform, when in truth very few developers find this an advantage. I love to code with Java because its a very powerful and superably elegant language not because its cross platform. Having said that xml is also a superb technology and very elegant too.
"all broken things dream of repair" - chris letcher
Geez talk about spouting the party line! It's not my problem if you dont understand that standardisation will help your business. Just because Sun say something doesn't mean that that is the way it is ("a key part of Sun's idea that " the network is the computer""). The reason for people using a product in practice is often not the same as the reason for creating the product in the first place. You just have to spend a few days hanging round the Java forums to realise that 75% of the people developing with Java are 1. inhouse 2. developing small apps for departmental / specific use (ie non generalised software) where the computing structure is homogenous, even if it is not across the entire organisation.
"all broken things dream of repair" - chris letcher
Wow you know what BASIC stands for, how novel! See my other reply too, but basically just because Sun says Java is positioned for wide realease doesnt make it so. in fact Java is VB's biggest rival, because it's easy to code in and like VB the apps dfeveloped with both will not need to stand up to high stress. Java is a great RAD tool! I agree with you about the matuirty issue but i plan on being retired in 10 years time.
"all broken things dream of repair" - chris letcher
My apologies if I cam across as belly-aching. I tried to imply ("That's the way it goes") that I was quite happy with the fact that I would have to build my WM of choice. I know perfectly well that mine is not a good choice for a default. I would argue, neither is Gnome; certainly no better than CDE. I was, in fact, saying exactly what you do here: I'd have to do this anywa.y. That was precisely my point.
My suggestion (which you have not quoted, I notice) was that instead, the best way to make Solaris easily accessible for those who want to use unusual managers would be to use the *X platform* which most of these managers run with, ie XFree86. This would make the process of building your manager of choice much easier. I was trying to point out that for alot of users, GNOME as opposed to CDE does not save them anything (all the KDE, WindowMaker, FVWM, etc. users), whereas using XFree86 instead of Sun X *would* save them something.
~cHris--
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
"But in our experience we haven't found a piece of software yet that doesn't require hardware."
I have loads of AOL software, none of it has seen hardware and I get everything they promised. Sun could obviously learn alot from Microsoft.
Forget Joe Consumer -- the majority of Slashdot hits come from Windows/IE. Even if everyone claims to be using Galeon or lynx.
What I have to laugh at are posts like this complaining that Slashdot is a hotbed of pro-Microsoft, anti-Linux, anti-Mozilla sentiment.
The .NET runtime can be installed on any platform it is implemented for, just like a JVM. Right now, there's only
one runtime, and that one for Win32 and it's only in beta yet.
.NET can run on most anything, I'd be willing to bet a quarter (ie, 25) that .NET will always be second rate on non-Windows clients, in large part because of...
.NET doesn't even support them directly through the framework API. Instead,
something called the Windows Forms API is used. AFAIK, this is NOT part of .NET.
.NET does include GUIs -- and the tool o' choice is VB.NET (what comes after VB 6.0; I think of VB.NET as approx == VB 7). Balmer make a big deal at VBITS that the world needed however million more web programmers... "And that's YOU, the VB programmers!" Woohoo!
.NET from one's predictions of how .NET will manifeat itself in reality. .NET sounds great (program in the "anti-establishment" lang of your choice, long as it isn't Java! Java's conspicuously absent from the list), but what you're going to end up with are incredibly dynamic client-side apps on Windows machines that load whatever .dlls are needed as needed (the browser becomes the "SuperSituational App" -- forget TEXTAREA, hello MSWordArea) and second-rate ports to html form element clients running on alternative operating systems (hello TEXTAREA again -- spell check [on the client], nope; italics and bold, nope; embedded images, nope -- you get the point).
.NET sounds great, you (where you == them darn semi-competent programmers that want to make something that hits 80% of the client market with extreme emphasis on doing it the quickest) are still going to want to use Windows workstations to program [in VB.NET] for Windows apps that will be served from Windows boxes (less important) to Windows clients (very important). Everything non-Windows will be second rate, again.
But don't ever expect that leg up to change. Though in principle
For GUI apps, it's my understanding that
Actually
I think it's important to separate one's understanding of the concept of
Though the concept of
Ruffin Bailey
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
First, Sun says:
but the concept of open applies to architecture, not to implementations
Then, Sun slams MS (Ballmer) for saying:
Microsoft will continue to protect any intellectual property that it embeds as objects in XML wrappers. 'We will have proprietary formats to protect our intellectual property
Sun is saying that it is OK for their implementations to be proprietary, but it is not OK for MS to do the same.
this is a left handed sig
The really interesting thing about .NET is that it's managing to irritate almost all current windows developers in one way or another.
.NET might be wonderful but the bottom line is that there are very few experts anymore and there's more going on under the hood than ever, placing even more pressure on MS to get everything 'acceptably' correct.
The key is that everyone will be able to code in a bastardised version of the language of their choice. Whether this is a big enough selling point I don't know but it doesn't matter. .NET makes many things much easier and it's going to arrive no matter what anyone says. As a COM/DCOM programmer I find it ironic that all those hours working with obscure macros, dodgy structures and strange compilation switches aren't going to be very useful at all within a couple of months.
The VB developers are understandably unhappy about some of the changes that are being made. Garbage collection for example has a major impact on when finalization / destruction code is called. Developers didn't code with that in mind. C++ developers are pissed off that having become experts in eeking out the last bit of performance from their code the Common Runtime promises that all code should perform pretty much the same regardless of language. MS are dumping Java and going with C# which is syntactically very similiar.
I won't miss them however...
I've got a Pentium 75 set aside for a similar function as soon as I can get the DSL connection. Pulled it out of a dumpter last fall. I'm finding stuff up to 200 mHz MMX now. People don't seem to throw out Suns.
The man is actually called Humble. Quite some name to be making such bold statements
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Nah...you want to see overpriced, look at Sun's high-end stuff, like the Enterprise 10000. (On Sun's page for the E10K, why is there a "buy online" link?)
Could someone please explain to me the difference here?
1. Cost of getting run-time installed. A Java implementation comes free (eg) on most Linux distros (also available free), whereas MS's long-term strategy with regards to Linux (or any non-MAC OS) has been extremely nebulous. I think this is the button that he was trying to push in the part you quoted.
2. Whether or not it will run right now. Something tells me we'll see more of .NET before 2003, but still, it ain't available just yet. (although Wrox already has a book on C# development, and a job I looked into was keying up for .NET development)
3. Reliability of implementation of runtime. Java does have a bit of a head start and a solid base of coders.
4. (point in MS's favour) ability to implement the .NET technology to be better integrated with an existing OS. If nothing else, it could lead to better speed and maybe better exploitation of available OS resources. Did JavaOS ever get off the ground? I stopped caring when I found out how much fun CGI programming was with C in Linux (but I digress...).
C'mon, gimme a -1, Insightful! Can it be done??
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
The only factor that M$ have on the PC price is whether you have Windoze on it.[0]
PC with M$ costs more than PC without M$.
Besides, I (like some of the others who've responded to your ill-informed comment) have used Sun servers and have seen how powerfull they are.
[0] OK, OK, you might have an MS rodent
The Open Source movement is comprised of artisans. Purveyors need not (and try not to) take notice.
-nowt
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
"20 years for Linux to come out of beta."
Listen to yourself. You act as if the only two operating systems in existance are Linux and Windows. You fail to address: Solaris, Net/Open/Trusted/FreeBSD, MacOS, IRIX, SCO, etc. etc..
I find this especially amusing that you retaliate with a Linux flame as a comment to an article related to SUN.
As to your comment that thinking Microsoft is going down is a dream: If the government wasn't on MS's ass I would probably say the same thing.
Linux isn't any more beta than Windows is. Windows users just have enough patience with MS to have to download bug fixes the day they get the O/S. I can't wait to see Windows running on the X-Box. I don't think the console gaming community is going to appreciate having to hook up their console to a phone jack and wait a few hours while it downloads X-Box SP1. But then again this isn't about Linux (why did you bring it up?) and this isn't about X-Box (my fault).
Yeah, and then try to run the VB code on a Linux Box, a UNIX box, and a IBM Mainframe. Microsoft doesn't realize that Java is the natural progression of languages, sure we will still need C, Assembly, etc, but we sure as hell don't need VB.
.OCX file and registered fine. Then I took the .OCX file and brought it to the University and tried to use it. Guess what it didn't register, and I was using the same version of windows (service packs and all). They can't even make their own stuff work together, much less products from many different vendors.
I remember when I took a college class and had to build a Active X control. I wrote it at home on Windoze NT and built the
GOD BLESS DALE...... He lived to race and died racing!!!
Aaron, a wannabe #3!!!
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
As a programmer for an open-source project and for a B2B company I can't tell you how important cross-platform programming is ! And I've gotta tell ya, beeing cross-platform with C/C++ is hard, and the advantage of Java is that it's platform-independent from the ground up. A Java app may not integrate into a desktop as well as a good written cross-platform C++ app but you always have to consider the pros and cons when choosing a programming language, and no programming language is even near to be perfect/all-purpose... that's why there are so many of them :-)
You sir are an idiot. Suns computers are meant to be high end workstations and servers, not GAMING platforms. Do you need a Geforce 2 for a workstation? Hell no!
And a 400mhz Alpha or Spark will beat the pants off a 1200mhz AMD anyday.
>>Yet again, a pointless story about Sun and Microsoft making bitchy remarks and putdowns at each other. I mean come on folks, surely by now we've got to the point where every tit-for-tat exchange to come out of the PR departments of large companies isn't anything new.
... deep down you know you want to pick up that big tub of popcorn and Goober's candy and Chant Fud Fight!
.com"
When you clicked on this article you must have known what was coming. So why did you read it? And now why are you complaining!
Come on
FUD FUD FUD FUD!
".NET" vs. "the Dot in
Popcorn anyone?
:)
I miss the Karma Whores.
We Java (J2EE) to deliver an Interactive Digital Television System (www.kingston-vision.co.uk).
We develop & unit test on NT PC's using Ultra-10's server, systems test on mid-range Solaris servers, and commission to high-end Clustered Enterprise Solaris Servers, Pace STB's, nCube Video Servers and Linux Servers for IP Services. We integrate with Oracle, and in the near future need to integrate legacy DB. We can also (through XML/XSLT) support a wide range of other client devices Web PAD's, Phones and all types PC's (not just Wintel).
Currently we transparently use a combination of JSWDK, Tomcat and Netscape, on the various platforms, we have a great choice of Application Servers from major names IBM, Oracle, Borland, Forte, IPlanet as well as Sun, on a range of server hardware from the smallest PC to the largest monsters. Java is open in all but name.
Interactive Digital TV simply could not be delivered with Microsoft or PC technology, even the highest end Wintel servers are not even in the same league as our requirements. Java is the only realistic development platforms without the major head ache of multiple development tools, environments and big dose of x-compilation.
It's also must be very reliable, KIT demands 24/7 service because people expect it to be as reliability as TV not their PC's and in the 13 months it's been available we have has ZERO outage due to Java.
As a development tool J2EE is a dream to work with, it's highly OO & readily implements from UML. The API's & JDK's are clean, and support a wide range services in Networking, Integration and Media.
The only down side is the difficulty recruiting skilled Java Software Engineers, personally I regard this as just another advantage :)
How silly is M$ going to look in a few years when .NET has no context because we've moved on to a new URL spec?
And besides, I don't want to use or even talk about anything that causes me to use punctuation as the first character of a sentence when I use as the first word. I think M$ just used it to piss off any one writing a word processor.
.NET needs to die early so we don't have to write much about it.
- Sig this!
I think M$ mostly BUYS games from small developers and takes all the credit. You ever notice all those opening splash screens when you start a M$ game? The ones that talk about who really develped it?
- Sig this!
i work for a small web development/consulting company... i work under linux. so do three other of our java developers. our 4 other java developers run windows (98x3, 2000x1)... no one has to recompile when it comes time to throw our class files up on our linux-based java app server. we all can run the same IDE, too. everything was great until we decided it would be a good idea to do native interfacing with a 3rd party library, which just so happened to be in a fscking DLL. now i'm writing C++ code in Visual Studio, which decides every once in awhile that the enter key should move the cursor to the next line, rather than inserting a \r\n ... *sigh*
reech bee-yond ur clip-0n
- Chuck Chuck Bo Buck
hehe.. didn't mean to be anal.. but heyBonana Fanna Fo Fuck
Fee Fi Mo Muck
Chuck!
You crazy man? You piss off supahfly!
Here is the problem with your code. Even though you make a good point, your comparison is really not pointing out the weaknesses of VB, it is pointing out the weaknesses in your knowledge of coding in VB.
Your code is not carefully detailed enough. You could have saved time by declaring those variables in a structure in VB, and not attempt to write it as you would write a program with a C-Like syntax.
For example:
Type example
i as Integer
s as String
t as String
td as String
sd as String
End Type
Now initialize those variables in a sub to display the result.
Like this:
Private Sub Command1_Click()
Dim myExample As example
i = 4 'On the fly intialization
s = "VB String" 'On the fly initialization
t = "Another String" 'On the fly initialization
sd = Mid(s, i, 1)
td = Mid(t, i, 1)
If sd = td Then 'Assign the value of td to sd then display the 4th character in the string.
txtDisplay.Text = sd
Else 'Otherwise display the 4th character in the string td as a reminder
txtDisplay.Text = td
End If
End
The result is t based upon my remake of the code. It returns the 4th character in the string t. You could set it to read and display a whole string or word with a little modification.
If you look closely, the code is more organized, and you can make changes more easily. You can also "reuse" the code now. At first you could do none of these things without retyping. In VB6, it is better to create structures when you want to manipulate small amounts of string or integer data. Don't just code in a sub. Use class modules if you want to manipulate larger amounts of data more efficiently.
It is a different way from doing things in Java, but the very same thing can be done in VB with elegance and style if done properly. Your code won't be bloated when you use structures. You can create an instance of the type where you need it and then initialize the variables on the fly. There are more words, but it is easier to read and it does the exact same thing as cryptic looking Java code. A high level language is supposed to be closer to human comprehension. Languages like XML demonstrate this perfectly. VB is not so different in effect.
I've been using VB.NET beta, and these problems have been addressed. But in this case, you could have easily created a structure in a module and just referenced the code to keep it clean and organized. When using type structures in VB, the memory is handled automatically so you don't have to destroy it as you would an object instanced from a class in VB to keep things tidy. You could have used an array and cut all that stuff in half. I like whitespace, so it looks longer and I decided to show you based on what you typed.
Peace, SubtleSeer
Java is positioned for the wide release market... Not the inhouse (corporate) environment. Your thinking visual (ugh) BASIC (Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) (it says it all).
Though I am not a java developer myself (yet). I've spent 10 years doing C++ code in X/Motif and for MS Windoze using a variety of different cross platform methodologies. I can already see Java maturing as a language and moving into wide use as a general software development tool for all kinds (especially wide-release) of applications.
The difference between Java and C/C++ comes in age. C++ has been around for 10 years or so now, and is well established in the market. Java is just now coming into maturity. Java is at the place where C++ was 10 years ago.
I think there might be a little hyperbole there, no? There were more than a few anti-monopoly barbs, not to mention flat out ridicule. I'm not saying I wasn't greatly amused. It certainly makes thier corporate culture seem to be something akin to angry interns. This sort of fued can't be helped. The companies view information at large as very seperate things, and they're competing for acceptance in a limited space. But for the rhetoric to take such an amusing turn. I can't help but wonder if the informal, and hyperbole prone culture of the internet help fosters such displays. If so, I'm once again in Al Gore's debt.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Well not that my crappy textbooks aren't biased, everyones are. But I have a Computer Structure and Organization book which makes a pretty good case for hardware and software being equal partners. In that, anything you do with software you can do in hardware and vice versa. The case Sun seems to have publicly settled on is without hardware, software is an idea waiting to be executed, while the hardware is real, and can be poked with sharp sticks. I suppose in a world of plentiful hardware and multi-platform languages that's a more tenuous position. But this is really a pointless question. (IMHO) As it would seem to be wholey in the domain of personal perogative and Philosophy 101.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
The whole article was amusing in that I don't like MS so I like reading things which re-enforce my prejudices. However when you get right down to it this stuff is pretty childish and the constant use of "Chuck" was plain irritating.
However I do have a constructive comment to make. One of the MS questions accuses Sun of using proprietry processor and proprietry operating system. Someone should perhapse point out to our friend Chuck that x86 is proprietry to Intel and Windows is proprietry to MS. Just because they are common doesn't make them any less proprietry than ARM and RiscOS.
(\/)atthew
The people yelling about the architecture have clearly never used Ultra5s and are assuming they are like EnterpriseServer juniors. They are not, they are like really crappy PCs that happen to have a SPARC chip in them. The IDE performance sucks, the PCI bus limits the scalability to that of a cheap PC.
Lets face it, Sun isn't what it used to be. Even their high end "super reliable" servers have been having reliability problems the past few years. Just ask anyone who works at eBay or other large volume sites that use the high end enterprise ultras..You know, the ones that Sun tried to get people to sign NDAs for just so they could get tech support to find out why their multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars server could not keep an uptime of over a single day under heavy load.
Its funny most of these anti-Sun posts get modded down to troll. Seems Slashdot moderators have a selective memory. When talking about how Java isn't GPLed, bashing Sun is a good way to karma whore. But on an article related to Sun slamming Microsoft, bashing Sun gets you the old Troll status.
"Imagine if this box had been shipped with GNOME as the default window manager. I would have had to get hold of WindowMaker, and some libs so that it would compile for Solaris, and then hack the configuration of the Solaris X graphical login and session handler in such a way that it recognized Windowmaker as existing and was willing to start Windowmaker for me instead of GNOME."
Even the, erm, "sucky" distros have rather easy options when it comes to changing window managers. I doubt that they wouldn't ship with libraries for whatever GUI they had before - they don't want to (and haven't) switched too many default things at once always providing the old. And if Windowmaker wasn't the standard distro before then you'd have to do this anyway so why the belly-aching?
It needn't be difficult and - as a default - Gnome is better choice than Windowmaker.
Now if Sun were to repoint GDK to their own non XWindows thang then that might be something to w00p about.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
"Java's WORA hype"
That would be Write Once, Run Away ?
The fact this post got modded down to -1 is a joke. The poster makes a good point about ease of use but gets slammed for being pro MS. I know someone not long ago made a point about the moderation of pro vs anti Sun comments, but I think this needed to be pointed out too.
/. has a lynch mob mentality.
I think we have established that
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
As ugly as VB is, it has its area to shine: Quick automated editing of proprietary MS Office files. But with open XML-based document formats (such as in KOffice) it will become obsolete.
BTW, KOffice uses Python as its "VB". Cleaner, more portable, and replaceable.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
You are right, I have quite a lot deficiencies in VB Programming as I prefer to code C++. VB is only for quick and dirty hacks in a MS Office environment, and I think somebody who attempts to do something complex in VB (something that will require code reuse) will lose from the beginnig.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
Both are talking about open standards, and both were and are not able to produce a browser according to w3c papers.
I was complaining about it several times before. There are well written specifications with a lot of implementation guides at w3.org and nobody is able or willing to make a full compliant system. I havn't anything against extensions to the standard, but why is there no implementation with all features described in the standard?
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
To do anything useful in .Net (e.g. write to a file) you have to use one of the "framework" classes to do it.
Microsoft have NOT said for certain that they will make the specs/code to the framework classes public.
If they don't, it will be "cross-platform" in their marketing... but virtually impossible to use outside Windows.
Now I'm not one to say that Microsoft are the visionaries who came up with a lot of cool stuff. But in this world you've got the Inventors and then you've got people who take that and make it better. Microsoft has proven time and again that an initially crappy release does get better and better when they work on it aggressively. For that matter so did Sun. But Sun's (and Oracle's I might add) agenda has always been to screw MS over. MS announces something, provides a relaistiv timeline and SUn and Oracle announce something later and claim that their half-assed implementation is available now. Oh please gimme a break. Sun ONE?? Okay. Whatever.
Java has its good points and its bad points (as do most other programming languages). Its a case of using the correct tools to do the job. IMHO, Sun did more things right than they did wrong with Java and its attendant widgets. On the other hand, Microsoft, while they may write some good software *ducks in anticipation of napalm*, has a shocking business model. Embrace, Extend, Assimilate. Then charge like a wounded bull for the latest version. I embrace MS's business model, by paying as little as possible for MS products. All the others I use are free. I haven't figured out how to Extend yet. And as for Assimilation. Umm. You can forget it. No .sig.
A nice response from Sun we have, but not the first. This MS vs. Sun thing has gone much too far, and it's Microsoft's fault this time around: People like that Chuck guy representing the biggest software company in the world? Tsk, tsk.But then, Sun has been incredibly stupid at times, distorting facts just as bad (like the time they said Windows 2000 had 63,000 bugs!). I think both companies should just shut up , do their stuff really work right,and let the consumer choose. a) Double-check what you say
There is no such thing as 'world peace'.
Ignore this message.Accidentally pressed enter.
There is no such thing as 'world peace'.
We are being Stallmanned. Each of us is being exploited by the GNUs when we go to the market to buy food. The GNUs charge a hidden software tax that costs consumers billions of dollars per year in tribute payed to the GNUs. The Stallman GNU\Linux Tax is a national scandal, and it serves as one more reason why we must solve the GNUish Problem.
Here is my response to Sun as inserted into their website:
Personally, as someone who owns stock in Sun, I'm pissed that they would actually make that sort of public response. It's ridiculous that two gigantic, multibillion dollar corporations are going at it like a couple of schoolchildren. Yes, I love Java and I hate Microsoft. Then again, I'm a college student. Given how easy it is for computer scientists to find jobs these days, I can afford to be immature and blow off Microsoft when they ask me to schedule an interview. I do not think it's okay for Sun to act the same way. If they need to respond to crap like that, they could at least do so with a bit more dignity.
-Doug
Those APIs that keep getting 'depracated' you mean?
If MS succeeds with its .NET vision, then thousands of programmers will have to spend a lot of time learning how to do the same things differently
You mean, all those programmers who already know VB and VC++, which they can continue to use under .NET?
Opposing a new technology because you don't want to learn it seems a bit short-sighted to me.
Tell me again how that would be writing cross platform applications? I'm not sure I get your point. Have you ever known anybody do this and then complain that their application doesn't work across platforms? No, because you would slap them with a wet kipper if they did.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I am by no means an expert on .Net, but I have been reading quite a bit. .Net is a marketing term which covers a whole lot. There are various pieces, and I believe you are focused solely on C# and the CLR.
But as to your question. It's hard to say since there isn't a Unix implementation yet.
But the GUI elements of C# seem to me to be quite portable.
Your write something like:
private Button button1 = new Button();
button1.Location = new Point(10,10);
button1.Size = new Size(50,25);
button1.Text = "OK"
button1.Click += new System.EventHandler(button1_Click):
and so forth...
That and the other GUI primitives seem to me to be quite portable.
Now there are obviously going to be things that you can do on Windows easily that you won't be able to do on Unix simply because Windows supports the functionality and Unix does not.
And vice versa.
From what I have seen Java limits you to the lowest common denominator. Microsoft didn't want to make that mistake, and thus C# is far more flexible in what it will allow you to do.
".NET seems to drag along a signifigant part of the Windows API. "
.Net is. That's not unsurprising, as I think Microsoft has not communicated that well.
.Net being discussed between Microsoft and Sun is SOAP, or essentially XML based RPC over HTTP.
.Net and just don't get it, primarily because they aren't willing to sit down and learn about it. :(
You seem to be considerably confused over what
.Net encompasses a great deal of change for the Windows platform. But in this case, the piece of
That is standardized, it has nothing to do with Windows API, and it is the key to interoperability between systems.
It's amazing to me the number of people who complain about
Interesting. But then that pretty much kills the Write-Once Run-Anywhere paradigm, since the minute I take advantage of a Mac specific feature... it won't run anywhere else.
So now you have a case that if you want a cross-platform solution you have to write your code to be portable.
Which makes Java just like any other language, just with a lot more overhead.
Deprecated items can also be removed one full release after they have been marked deprecated (i.e. Java 3 does not have to include things listed as deprecated in Java 2, but they do have to exist in Java 2.7).
They don't have to be removed, but I expect if something has been deprecated for multple full releases and finally goes away it'll be a Real Bad Thing.
Still I would rather have deprecated API calls plus a set of nice sensable calls then a mish-mash of dozens of ways to do it with no clear indication of which is really the best. It is nice to see Sun saying "Oh, awt was a mistake, here is a easier thing to use, and if it isn't good enough we'll fix that too". The alternitave is something like X, or Windows. Or libc.
C# has some nice features (which like Java all appeared elsewhere first). If I didn't have to learn the MS APIs to use it well I would be intrested. Oh, and if it ran on, say, half the platforms Java does. Regretably I think the boxing and unboxing and better destruction sementics will make it hard to implment as a language on top of the JVM...
That may be, but I am discussing .Net itself, not just part of it. As far as I can tell to make a useful GUI .Net program you need to use a lot of Windows APIs. I wrote a ssh client in Java, and looked into making a C# one. I learned enough about C# to like it, and enough about .Net to not write it. If I have enough free time I may still do the C# version. I expect to use it less then the Java one (I normally only use it to get mostly secure access from odd places)
It is unsupprising, the damm thing is big, and as you said before Microsoft communicates about it poorly. Most people have limited time. I know I do. I spent the weekend looking for framing shots for my film class, I have more hobbies then just computers. I do still feel I know enough about .Net to talk about it. I also realise I don't know enough to really be right about all of it. You seem to imply that you know more about it then me. Is it possable to write a GUI C# program that is portable to systmes that don't implment most of the Windows API? Or are the Unix .Net implmentations going to be as limited as, say, the SmartCard Java implmentations?
Hmm, where did this list of things Microsoft finds disappointing about Sun come from? Must be from Festivus[?] -- seems like the "Airing of Grievances" is really catching on!
I'm an old-school UNIX hacker, some would say UNIX bigot. But I found Sun's answers smug, juvenile, and annoying. I would have found Sun's response more credible if they just got to the point and saved us the "Chuck, you ignorant slut" ornamentation.
I'd like to submit this for understatement of the year.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
I'm starting to get tired of the constant MS-SUN feud. If only one of them would actually deliver superiour products, but instead they both concentrate on bickering about each other.
------------------
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You may like my a cappella music
Hey, I'm not gung-ho about .NOT either. I was just pointing out that you can download the BETA version of the framework. I'm sort of skeptical about .NET, though I think it has the potential to be a powerful cross-platform framework. I guess it's Microsoft's trackrecord that leads me to believe they will only push their products and platforms down everyone's throat. We'll see.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
You can download the .NET framework BETA from The Microsoft Developer Network. It's not vapour.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
Furthermore, he's also liable to come back with "Oh, yeah? It takes one to know one!" At which point the truly wise consumer takes his business elsewhere, ignoring the schoolyard squabbling.
Don't get me wrong, I think if you ignore all the FUD and mudslinging, Sun makes some good products. I mean, if you want to run a honkin' huge Oracle farm, ye olde E10000 is the way to go. But their PR department needs to grow up just a little, and not descend to the level of the big ape up in Redmond they so loathe.
--
Hacking the Penguin in the Backyard of the Beast
Renton, WA
C# has some nice features (which like Java all appeared elsewhere first)...
Agreed, totally. Not sure about your comment on better destruction semantics - isn't it the same as Java: the destructor is not guaranteed to be called (at all) because of the vagueries of automatic garbage collection? I was under the impression that the destructor was nothing more than a Finalise call in disguise.
The other gripe I have is that there is no equivalent to a throws clause. You can't specify that a method throws an exception. This seems to me to be a bad thing - it screws up design by contract and I wonder if they did it to make optimisation easier?
As I was reading the article, I couldn't help but think, what if SUN had made the Xbox?
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Check out ONE
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
--If MS succeeds with its
I'd have to disagree. I mean if you and the thousands of others are already programming in a Java environment in today's Microsoft-is-everywhere world, I can't imagine it would get worse 'tomorrow'.
I guess I'm saying I don't see the war being fought via .NET. I see more impact coming from the O/S platform war, the server war, etc.
Plus, as companies grow & merge, they simply get bigger, needing bigger servers, hardware, etc. Microsoft wouldn't last a day in these companies. I figure that if you have plenty of jobs to choose from right now that are non-Microsoft, I can only imagine seeing the same tomorrow, or even more. Plus, this is the computer industry-- there will always be competition & new technologies to learn.
Rader
Ah, it's even funnier if you read the entire article imagining that it's Peppermint Patty berating Charlie Brown over something stupid that he's done. :)
"Gee, Chuck, you sure are stupid. You're not making any sence Chuck. You're not even in the same game, Chuck. Why can't you even hit the ball, Chuck?"
Ender
Nothing to see here
Windows and other assorted software is only free so long as they don't "yank the chain", so to speak.
Remember, each of these pieces of software (Windows, stuff for Windows) generally has a EULA attached - which basically says "We have all the rights, you have none - and if we say so, you have to give us back the software, delete it from your machine, and oh, by the way, you DON'T get your money back" - read the fine print, and tell me it isn't true. Granted, no one knows whether such "contracts" are enforcable - but I would bet M$ and others would take you to court to prove a point - that they have more money than you (money is the enforcement). If the UCITA passes in all the other states - suddenly EULAs *do* become enforcable - add the DMCA on top of that, the Digital Signatures Act that treats clicking on the EULA button to get Winders installed as a *real* signature - and suddenly you aren't looking at freedom anymore, but at a contract on the way you live. Let's not forget, those same companies rarely if ever show any source to their products - so if they move on to a newer version, and you don't upgrade - or if they completely drop support on a version - you are HOSED (unless, of course, you cough up the tribu-- err, I mean, money - for a new license).
Contrast all of this with Linux, and GPL'd software (note, I do not say Open Source - that carries a ton of different meanings to various people - many times depending on whether they are trying to make money on code or whatnot): You get the OS, the programs, etc - more importantly, you get the code - you can change it, give it away - burn it, whatever you want to do with it, you can. No worries that if Mr. Torvalds dies you are hosed, no worries if Stallman goes to M$ (hahahahaha!!!), emacs won't be there. No worries that someone can recall or stop supporting the software. No worries at all!
Perhaps there are worries if you are a business (most notably, how can I make money on this new stuff). I just say you haven't figured it out yet.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I have read the article and sun does make a lot of vaild ideas concerning not locking down ideas to one platform/language. This can only be a good thing (open systems breed good competition)
XML and java do work well together (look at www.openxml.org).
Yes all of suns ideas are not perfect rmi is cool but has a large overhead however sun will let us add things and run on free systems
Give me an open solution that i can run on any system rather than a one OS one language solution
- They will support these machines for a long time -- I guess 5 years or so. Keeping spares for that long cranks up the price.
- The large majority of these machines will have support contracts. This means that they need to be reliable, because if they're not then they will cost the vendor later to support. Making reliable machines costs money.
- They have stuff like ECC memory, does your PC?
From the buyer's point of view:- These machines have long lives. We've just stopped using an IPX from (?) 1992. Sure it was slow, but it ran Solaris 7 OK, and it made a fine X terminal. We might still revive it to do something like DNS or print serving. I worked somewhere that had a Sun 3 on maintenance until 1996 or so (and they fixed it in 1996 too): it was 11 when we turned it off.
- Professional boxes are typically very homogenous -- if you buy a Sun (or an HP or whatever), then it will run pretty much the same OS image that all your other boxes will run: you won't have to spend time mucking around with some weirdo graphics card. That's a big deal.
- When bits go wrong they'll get replaced, and they'll get replaced by bits that work the same way: you won't have to spend ages finding drivers for the new graphics card they shipped you because they don't have the old ones any more.
- They also run the same systems your big box in the basement runs, so you can develop code on a (relatively) cheap machine without having to worry too much about porting it all the time. In fact this is why people like Sun sell workstations I think: I doubt they make much money on them compared to what they make on E10ks.
In summary, They aren't that expensive if you get paid. Sure if your time is worth nothing, then saving a couple of thousand dollars when you buy a machine amtters a lot. But if your time costs money then the time you save because of the points above more than pays for the extra up-front cost.Of course that's not to say that Suns aren't quite expensive: they are, but the difference is basically in the noise for many purposes.
And of course there are plenty of cases where a Sun won't cut it -- for instance if you really need lots of raw CPU performance, either for some single-processor machine or some embarrasingly parallel problem which you can solve with a farm of PCs. PCs beat Suns every time for Quake...
Of course, in third grade the name Chuck was by far the funniest one to use in the name game, just for the third line... :)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Ah yes, another episode of As The FUD Turns. Always amusing to watch, sometimes intriguing, but there is no real substance.
It's kind of funny to watch two technological titans call each other names like kids at the schoolyard. "We're more Open than you are", "Our technology is more advanced than yours", "My server can beat up your server", "Nyah, nyah nyah, nyah nyaaaaah nyah!".
The bottom line is that you have two groups, each vigorously defending their positions, but THEY ARE BOTH WRONG. So very wrong.
It is amusing to watch, though.
C'mon guys. Open the source or shut up!
"Still, you're probably wondering what we think of SOAP. So there is no confusion: We think it's great! We support it on the UDDI, on W3C XP working group, in the Java language, and in other products.
That said, we're cautious because we have concerns about what Microsoft is doing with SOAP. For example, Microsoft is pushing hooks that would allow it to create extensions to the SOAP framework that would require Microsoft technologies to access Web services. The only way those services can then be accessed in their richest form is via the Internet Explorer browser connected to a Microsoft Windows server. That's called lock-in. That means no choice. We think that's wrong.
Our experience is that Microsoft uses standards as second-class connections. They make them available where they must to communicate outward, but they lure customers into a proprietary lock-in.
Then again, your actions on the standards front don't surprise us. You give yourself away in your own questions. For example, "allow" our customers to interoperate? Everyone knows that no vendor can dictate terms to its customers. Except, of course, monopolies. "
Hmm. I checked and didn't see a version that I can run on Linux for my home server, or Solaris on both SPARC and Intel, nor anything for the IBM SP2 boxes running AIX or our S390 mainframe. Java, and true standards based APIs and programming languages are available for all these platforms. Where does that put .NET? As a proprietary solution from a company that doesn't understand the problem.
Besides, Ultra 5's aren't $5000, and they come with DVD's now. You forgot the high end card if you're looking for good graphics. You're pulling those numbers from your ass is what you're doing. Try closer to around $2500.
developers have no choice but to implement it themselves or go searching for someone else's code.
...or use open-source projects, like saxon...
and what exactly is jaxp doing for us, if it isn't handling xml in Java?
> The common language runtime WILL however be ported to various other platforms.
/. already
.NET sounded really cool until I found out two things:
.NET).
.NET, I completely lost interest.
Will this be "ported" in typical Microsoft style though? For example:
NT 3.5: The much hyped POSIX subsystem. However, could you mix and match POSIX and native Win32 calls? No. Thus making the POSIX system useless but for the most bare porting efforts.
IE: Available for UNIX. Yeah, in a hideous cludge that consisted on bundling most of windows with the application.
Win2k: Kerberos, discussed to death on
Etc...
I thought
Firstly that it isn't a case of using *any* language, it's a subset of available languages, including C# (bastadised C) and Eiffel# (or whatever they've called it, equally bastadised to fit
Secondly, crossplatformness. I like Java because it contains libraries for the kitchen sink - collections, networking TCP/UDP, GUI, and then audio/video (JMF), high level 3D (Java3D)... I get all this crossplatform. When I heard about "Winforms" - that the GUI code isn't included in the "portable"
If I want portable without libraries, I have C - and then I can add portable libraries for the things I need. People have been doing this for decades.
0.02,
Mike
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
From the article:
"As for Jini technology itself, you're wrong. It's been very successful...in fact, late last year, a European Jini technology conference had to turn interested developers away because they were already 25 percent overbooked."
So, does that mean that 5 people showed up instead of 4? [rimshot]
The day that a PR guy can admit that something didn't turn out as well as they hoped is the day I start taking press releases seriously.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I don't know why M$ bother with all this back-stabbing and petty quarreling when they've developed software that can do this!
----------------------------
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Moderator's essentials
There are limits to how much foresight you can expect someone to show. For example, no-one would expect Microsoft to have the foresight to notice anything that might have happened more recently than five years ago.
-- Andrem
There has been a major scientific break-in
Sure it would. However, do you really want to be a second-rate netizen just like in the browser-wars? That's what you get for not creating and following fully open standards.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Uhm. Admittedly being a programmer I'm biased, but this does not sound right. Computers are empty general purpose machines, not appliances, therefore the software IS the computer (well, almost).
Think of another classic dualism: genetic vs culture. Which one is more important in the determination of human personality?
My idea is that genetic gives potentials, i.e. it defines the hardware. But is the cultural environment that 'programs' the human brain about how to actually *think*.
Ciao
----
FB
Sun's claims that Java and XML are joined at the hip violates XML's main benefit- independence from any platform or programming language
Yeah. And you don't NEED a canopener to open an aluminum can. But it's the best tool for the job.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Suddenly I can imagine Sun as an Open Source company.
:-)
It's already starting to prefer humor to PR. Admitted, this was just PR with a layer of humor on top, but it's a lot better than that cheap WW II-propaganda that we got so used to take from Microsoft. Once Sun couldn't care less than Linus what other companies claim about their products, I think Sun can really be trusted
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
We've been working with a lot of Java and XML. Some of us have been looking into the XML resources available to C/C++, and they just aren't as good. I realize you can put a very good system together with them, but it's not nearly as clean or easy to use.
And while we haven't tested the Java version under all of those platforms-- we don't even have all of those in house-- it's worked just fine under every platform we've tested on, including Linux, Windows 98/NT/2000, and Mac.
And guess what-- the runtime was already installed on all of those machines. We didn't even have to recompile, we just copied it and ran it. And, finally, the Xerces Java implementation is also totally open source.
The telling point, though, is that we decided to rewrite a lot of the SAX parser module. From my experience with C++, doing the same thing in that language would certainly have broken compilation or execution on some platforms, and required some platform-specific code. But again, we just compiled it, copied it over, and ran it.
The corporate enviroment is a mishmash of departments and platforms of various ages and flavors that all have to share the in house network facilities, and often the same apps.
In my own business here, which is very small, I am running an old Compaq transportable 8088 which actually handles the most important core apps for my business, an old Tandy 1000TL, A Tandy CoCo, a 486 laptop, An old Mac running OS 7.5, an Athlon 900 running W98, and an Duron 600 running linux which serves extra duty as a firewall/router.
I've never seen a business more than a few years old with anything approaching the sort of segregated/homogenous computing structure that you posit.
Second, Java is NOT positioned for inhouse development. I'm truely clueless where you get this idea. Java has ALWAYS, from its very inception, been a key part of Sun's idea that " the network is the computer" and the WWW is where it found its first adherents, not inhouse, where the old guard was perfectly happy with its C and COBOL.
I don't want to move towards a world of the ubiquitous `network appliance'. I know; to many I am a naysayer for this. There are some compelling arguements r.e. the ability to pass off a certain functionality that is too processor intensive on one's own portable unit to a commodified local computation grid, [for say, realtime speech recognition and translation].
;) No, I mean that in the status quo today, you may have to pay for crappy and propriatary software, but at least you then own it. You can do with it what you want, lately it even seems you may be able to legally reverse engineer it in certain cases.
But I really don't like the idea of moving towards a world in which someone dosen't buy software anymore. What?! Not buying software is good, right?
Do you really want to be typing that private letter on software that is actually running on someone else's hardware?! Yikes! I want software that runs locally, without the need for network services. Otherwise, I would have no real privacy.
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
MS has an excellent consumer OS with 95% market share.
As to the excellence of the os, I'd say that was debateable.
Sun don't have anything with 95% market share.
I'd say Java has a fair market share.
Sun have never even written a game.
So? Have MS ever made a server? Sun makes all its money off hardware and not software...
Not true. The .NET runtime can be installed on any platform it is implemented for, just like a JVM. Right now, there's only one runtime, and that one for Win32 and it's only in beta yet. For Java, the situation is, of course, much different. The common language runtime WILL however be ported to various other platforms.
Is this similar to how Microsoft was going to port ActiveX to various other platforms?
"And like that
You are incorrect.... many of the .NET classes are in fact written in C# (a .NET language)
Perhaps you should sign up for the beta or go read through the online docs.
-
The IHA Forums
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
OK, no problem :)
.NET runtime automatically compiles it down to whatever your native processor is and writes that to disk. From then forward, you are running in your processor's native mode... not byte code interpretations.
.NET compiles down to what is called "Microsoft Intermediary Language" or MSIL for short. It is a complete "virtualized" processor.... in other words, it is a complete virtual instruction set, and programs are compiled down to this assembly language. The difference between it and x86, is that MSIL is verifyable, whereas you can't ever be sure that next x86 instruction isn't going to wig out and screw something up.
When you install a program, the local
Of course for applets over the web (replacements for ActiveX controls), there is also a JIT compiling option. This is also the method used to run ASP.NET scripts -- when they are uploaded, the system JITs them and then caches the compilation for later usage.
-
The IHA Forums
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
OK, sun should have said to Microsoft. Exactly how many development products do you have for .NET, and where can you get them from? .NET is VAPORWARE, and a knee jerk reaction to Sun's Java technology, which is available everyware (www.java.sun.com (Free)), JBuilder, Forte For Java CE (www.sun.com) (FREE!)....
GOD BLESS DALE...... He lived to race and died racing!!!
Aaron, a wannabe #3!!!
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
It was about 4 years ago that the blackdown project came out with ver 1.0 of the JDK. Unless I'm mistaken I don't think apple or OS/2 had a working JDK.
Maybe. I was pretty sure that IBM had released an IBM-created JDK for OS/2 sometime in '96; IBM was really pushing Java...
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
I agree - we are studying it in my Computer Science course at Uni and my main gripe (apart from the fact that it does things in slightly strange ways) is that it make my PIII-600 act like a 486. (Any views expressed here are MINE - the University can go get it's own!)
I am biased in the sense that I believe Java and J2EE provide a more superior and cost-effective solution than .NET ever will.
.NET ready solutions and products and tries to market them in the enterprise solutions market by trying to beat down Sun alternatives.
However, what makes me disappointed is that this is defiantly not the end, and its going to get even worse as Microsoft starts delivering
Not only will Sun and Microsoft try take each other down ( and their products, like 'Chai' HP initiative licensed by Microsoft ), but also take down other neutral technologies like XML, which has real potential.
This is bad for all concerned, especially for developers as it means being locked into a particular technology trees resulting in a lack of exposure to different paradigms and reduced ability to gain 'generic' skills that can be used and applied anywhere, and instead the growth of specialised product centric skills which can't be migrated to other technologies and products. Overall, the would result in reduced job opportunities as people become locked into products, apis and languages.
In the end it'll be the end-users that pay.
An Enterprise 250 w/2x440mhz CPUs w/512mb ram goes for under $25k USD.
You're not helping yourself.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Microsoft dismissed the criticism of its own .NET initiative to provide software for a more pervasive Internet and hit back at Sun for being late to the game.
"You can't have a standard just by unilaterally declaring something to be a standard," a Microsoft spokesman said by email. "How is this announcement not a belated and vaporous response to Microsoft .NET?"
ROFLMAO! Micro$oft tries to make its standards everyones standards just because it can! What a joke!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
I think one of the differences between the two is that Sun started with Java and built a framework from there (actually, they didn't really build it, they did a bunch, other people did some, it just accumulated.) .NET just happens to be working in the opposite way; beginning with an overall design, then fleshing out the details. The reason there's no really good equivalent for .NET at Sun is that no single framework was created at the start. You end up having to refer to the Java-framework-conglomerate as Java simply for lack of a better term. I'm no Java zealot, by the way. Whether Sun's idea or MS's idea will work better, I don't know.
Dim s, t, sd, td As String
Dim i As Integer
i = 4
s = "VB String"
t = "Another String"
sd = Mid( s, i, 1)
td = Mid( t, i, 1)
If sd = td Then
' do anything
End If
String s="J String",t="Another String";
// do anything
So keep it. VB has a lot of unnecessary words, but not even distinct equal and assignment operators.int i=4;
if(s.charAt(i)==t.charAt(i))
{
}
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
The differnece is that Microsoft has a poor track record for supporting alternate platforms. Java, OTOH, has been ported to quite a few architectures. As of right now, the only platform that Microsoft has contributed to at all outside of the Windows OS is MacOS, and Microsoft probably only did that because of the fact that they no longer perceive MacOS as a threat to their dominance in the desktop market.
Also, Java applications run inside of a virtual machine which places a good, thick layer of abstraction between the Java apps that you and I would write and the hardware/OS of the underlying platform. From what I've heard, .NET does not put a layer of abstraction between the platform and .NET programs, so if any cross-platform work has to be done from .NET to any other environment... well, you're pretty much SOL, because porting will require source code modification. From what it looks like to me, .NET is language independant but not platform independant.
However, if I'm wrong, please correct me. : )
Don't let the lusers get you down.
A nice response from Sun we have, but not the first. This MS vs. Sun thing has gone much too far, and it's Microsoft's fault this time around: People like that Chuck guy representing the biggest software company in the world? Tsk, tsk.But then, Sun has been incredibly stupid at times, distorting facts just as bad (like the time they said Windows 2000 had 63,000 bugs!). I think both companies should just shut up , do their stuff really work right,and let the consumer choose. .NET and ,frankly, neither do most of us, but clever people will wait and see before deciding what is good and what is bad. .NET can very well be marvellous but then again, so can Sun's future technologies.
And now some advice for the two companies:
a) Double-check what you say. If you want to accuse the other company of something, make sure it is completely true. They will surely find a way to fight back, but it will be less embarassing.
b) Ask the consumers! They know best, cause they could be using products from both companies, and they know if something just doesnt work with the other company's implementation.
c) Don't say anything for something that's not yet out.Sun doesnt know much about
So, don't write anything off just yet....Let the truth be decided by us.
There is no such thing as 'world peace'.
For those who don't have time to read this rather long article, I can (after diligently reading the first few paragraphs) sum it up for you:
Microsoft: Sun, how you could possibly think you can compete? Our dick is so much bigger than yours.
Sun: No no, you misunderstand the size of our dick. It is really way bigger than yours, and it is still getting bigger while yours is shrivelling. Soon, we will taunt you by waving our huge dick in your face.
There is a reason, other then a multi-year-headstart, that Java's runtime is available for a lot of platforms. The amount of Java's runtime that is not (or can't be) written in Java is quite small. Limited mostly to drawing primataves, low level I/O, and a few other things. .NET seems to drag along a signifigant part of the Windows API. That's great on Windows, but when you are on signifigantly diffrent systems you are screwed unless Microsoft implments them for dozens of platforms, or manages the substantal task of re-writing them in C# or another .NET language.
Oops, it seems we are arguing along similar lines.
I do assert that even if the Win API is not offically part of .NET, if there is no supplyed substitute (on Windows!), and no effort by MS to get it used, and easy access to the "non-standard WinAPI" then it will become a de facto .NET standard, and it will be tied to Windows.
Not that it is wholy bad to give Windows a decent language (C# is decent), but it isn't the step into the open platform world that MS asserts it is.
Both the language, API and bytecode specifications are available at your convenience. The fact that ISO or any other organization has not put a stamp on it is not very relevant since all the relevant information is open. Lets call it an open industry standard. Closed propietary standards on the other hand do not have these properties. The win32 API, for instance, is largely undocumented and creating something such as wine is a long process of reverse engineering and testing of the binaries.
.Net is going to be similar to win32 and different from Java in that many of the APIs will be undocumented and in addition that there will be dependencies on the closed win32 API's. Because of this, vendor independent implementations of .Net, as is common for Java VMs and compilers, are highly unlikely to be available.
.Net specifications available and is even moving to standardize for instance C#. However, the bulk of .Net remains closed.
Now
Now the confusing part is that MS is making parts of their
Jilles
This used to be the case - Java had three goes at getting a Platform Independent GUI right, I agree. But what you're talking about is stuff that happened years ago. Java has settled down now...
BTW, 'deprecated' is not the same as invalidated. You can still use them, it's just that you get a warning at compile time saying there's a better way, have a look at the docs...Which strikes me as a fairly civilised way of doing things.
You mean, all those programmers who already know VB and VC++, which they can continue to use under
Not my argument: I don't want to stop VB or VC++ programmers doing their thang - I just don't want to be stooped from doing mine, that's all.
Opposing a new technology because you don't want to learn it seems a bit short-sighted to me.
I agree totally. I was advocating something different: chosing not to learn something, because I could better spend my time doing something else. That strikes me as forsighted...
At the moment the only time I can forsee taking the time out to learn
Two possiblities that might make this possible are:
I am not taking sides on Microsoft or Sun, but I liked one thing Sun said and definitely agree with it.
"Sun Answer: We hate to be the first ones to tell you this, but the concept of open applies to architecture, not to implementations. And architectures and implementations are two different and independent notions."
This is important because there are still many people who don't know this, give them an open architecture with a close implementation, and they will bitch all day long about how it is not open, give them a closed architecture with an open implementation and they do think you did the right thing. Some might argue that the architecture can be derived from the implementation, but that is wrong...
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
....my favorite example of this is the splash screens that come up during a Windows install, telling you that this new Os will "Make Your System Faster" even though after using w2k for a month, reinstalling NT4WS on the same box brings up an immediately noticeable speed boost...
My favorite one is from the Windows 95 installer, "Everything you do will be more fun!"
That's quite a claim.
Consider this statement:
.NET (presuming, of course, that it was available today).
.NET will run on any system that has .NET runtime installed. Could someone please explain to me the difference here?
In the world that the Java community envisions, that program can run on any computer. That's just not so in the Microsoft world. It will only run on Microsoft
Now, IIRC, Java will run on any system that has the Java runtime installed.
Whats even funnier is you don't get it. .NET is, at this point, still all vapor. Lots of press releases with promises. And of course, Microsoft delivers on all its promises.
.NET to be implemented.
.NET may actually work well enough someday to where MS will actually allow it to be used on their machines.
And those poor old Java programmers, in many markets making more money than coders in any other languages, as well as having more available jobs. Java isn't weak. Not by a long shot.
Microsoft is on it's way down. Even bastions of pro MS zealots like zdnet are turning into bastions of MS hate. I don't really care what OS/platform people use. But to believe that Microsoft isn't doing anything but heading into the toilet at this point is delusion. Lawsuits right and left. The DOJ case looming over it head. Microsofts biggest expense right now all the used toilet paper they have to buy to print up new stock certificates on to make sure they don't record the big losses they are sufering.
I use the Internet today. I have no intention of doing the following-
1. Waiting 5 years for a working(?) version of
2. Paying a MS tax to access my own data, while being bled dry by all the additional software costs. (No better way to force people into the upgrade cycle than to possess the customers data.
3. Being very limited in where I can actually go today.
.NET has nothing to do with innovation. It has nothing to do with a great new idea for networking. It has to do with control and expansion. They are desperate. Then again,
There is a much more usefull question to be asking at this point. How about:
2. Why should Solaris be shipped with GNOME as the default desktop?
I'm posting this using a Sun Ultra machine, running Solaris, with a window manager called Windowmaker. I like it; I run it on my laptop and my home desktop; I see no reason not to use it at work. In order to build this working environment, I had to get hold of WindowMaker, and some libs so that it would compile for Solaris, and then hack the configuration of the Solaris X graphical login and session handler in such a way that it recognized Windowmaker as existing and was willing to start Windowmaker for me instead of CDE. This took a while, but that's the way it goes.
Imagine if this box had been shipped with GNOME as the default window manager. I would have had to get hold of WindowMaker, and some libs so that it would compile for Solaris, and then hack the configuration of the Solaris X graphical login and session handler in such a way that it recognized Windowmaker as existing and was willing to start Windowmaker for me instead of GNOME. I do not see why this would improve my quality of life or my ease of use.
Personally, I would argue that using XFree86 instead of Sun X would be a much more significant thing, since that would allow me to load a program such as GDM in place of the graphical login handler already loaded, which would make the process of building the WM of my choice much easier. This is, of course, not going to happen, but that does not diminish the significance of my point, which is that you are making the same assumptions as Sun (that you can predict what WM people will want to use).
~cHris--
Chris Naden
"Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
What a bastard Chuck came off as! Is this really the kind of PR that MS needs at this point? They look like 17 year old American boys comparing one's Ford to another's Chevy... Just shut the fuck up, race your cars, and let history decide who the winner is.
I mean, Sun had every right to come back in the same way... And it was pretty cool... Mostly, it made MS look stupid, very quickly.
Of course, the funniest thing about it all was how much MS sounded like Sun did a few years ago, when Java was still half in the dark...
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
Now is this really fair ?
The original M$ story was FUD of the highest order, perhaps as Java Software Engineer I have an advantage in recognising that large parts of the original M$ attack are simply untrue. The Sun response focuses of answering the questions/issues raised, and defending Sun & Java from the attack, with only trivial swipes at .NET
It actually closely follows the Linux/Open Source approach & style of FUD control, of focusing on the issues, rebut the falsehoods & keep your cool, especially keep your cool. I think this may well prove as important as the Halloween leaks, & subsequent rebuttals.
Wow, great. Yet again, a pointless story about Sun and Microsoft making bitchy remarks and putdowns at each other. I mean come on folks, surely by now we've got to the point where every tit-for-tat exchange to come out of the PR departments of large companies isn't anything new? If it's not Sun and Microsoft, it's Oracle and Microsoft, Intel and AMD or whichever pair of companies feels like garnering some free publicity at the time.
The smarmy and condescending tone of this article is a real put-off, and yet again Sun are doing little other than spewing hyperbole about Java with a few facts, figures and dates to give it authenticity. Sun, as a company have done little for anyone but themselves, and have fought tooth and claw to keep Java from being a truly open standard, only ever making token gestures when people shouted loudly enough.
Not that Microsoft it any better. They're not. Which makes me wonder who cares about this sort of exchange? It adds nothing of interest to the world of computing, just more of the same corporate BS we've seen a thousand times before.
So what if Microsoft has more money? There are many companies that have more money than Microsoft and are not doing squat with it. I fail to see the importance of even bringing it up. As per Microsoft having better prospects, what the hell planet are you from? Microsoft has a a single point of failure in the business model that they are currently running with. If windows was to fail all other products would collapse underneath the sheer weight and media crap that would follow. Granted I do not know what would cause that - but the possibility always remains. You are off on your 95 percent shares, what with Apple's resurgence and the rise of Linux on desktops etc. I'm curious how Microsoft can keep up with this sort of FUD. Fact of the matter is that these sort of numbers come from Microsoft themselves - they are produced by the amount of OEM and retail purchases made over a year. The problem with this is that due to the model Microsoft employs every single x86 system that leaves a major manufacturer must have a Microsoft OS - else they loose out on the privilege to deal with that sort of cost. This figure doesn't even take the Macintosh platform and other alternatives.
/any/ form of UNIX - Solaris or otherwise.
/real/ standards org - something Microsoft is not used to. Get a grip my friend Microsoft just cannot say "IT WILL BE SO" and make it so. They may have a lot of
/server/ systems Sun boxes are actually really REALLY cheap in comparison to what there has been in the past. And if you really, REALLY wanted to - you always could run Solaris x86 on you're 5-and-dime pile of junk system. Just fyi.
If you think that Microsoft is poised to seize control of the console market you should think again. The x-box is going to be interesting, of that I have no doubt - but exactly HOW Microsoft goes about marketing, distributing, and selling the licenses for the development platform will be vastly more important than anything else. The Nintendo 64 was "poised to seize control of the console market", as was the Atari Jaguar -- the problem? REALLY EXPENSIVE developer licenses and a company that did not want to work very closely with those developers. IMHO Microsoft isn't as cheap in the development department, nor as rich in the Windows CE environment to handle this. However - we shall see.
Sun has written games, nothing fully 3d and interactive and "gee wow" - but that's not what they do. You really don't get it - look at the game giants of time past: Sierra On-Line, Accolade, EA, Atari, etc. It's a difficult business that you must be VERY aggressive in. Sun isn't stupid - they are more concerned with profitability then market ubiquity.
Better products? Dude - you really gotta learn something. I have used IIS, Apache, and Netscape
Enterprise Server on NT with various preprocessing engines (such as ColdFusion, Webobjects, etc). They ran pretty well for a fairly small amount of traffic - however the moment that we went from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand of hits a day we got screwed. The problem wasn't so much the hardware, or even the software - but in the OS itself - in fact IIS did MUCH poorer than Netscape Enterprise Server (which was quite astounding). As per management of it, you've got to be kidding. I can write scripts, wrappers, use products such as Micromuse Netcool, HP Vantagepoint (ITO), Lord - pretty much *anything* I want to manage a web server running almost
As per a "standard". All I have to say is "what the fuck?" - any company cannot simply REWRITE a
standard, they go through a process through a
influence in the market place but they are not Gods.
Hardware is something that's always fun. You've got me here - yes Sun does have expensive hardware. Shit look at the E-line. It's a lot of damn money, into the tens of thousands of dollars range. Wow - well look at the Netra line if you are cheap. The Netra T-1 is 7 grand (give or take) and the Netra X-1 is going to be 995 bucks. Take that and look at Compaq equipment it's just as expensive - if not more. Ever priced out an IBM S/390? You'd probably choke. Just because you CAN run windows NT on your 300 dollar pile of shit you threw together out of the 5-and-dime doesn't mean it is a "server" I wouldn't trust running carrier grade to that - not in my lifetime. That's why there are
Overall I have problems with your argument - you essentially say that Microsoft owns the market in every possible sense of the technology when in fact they own very *VERY* little. Most enterprise level systems are managed in a way completely unlike how Microsoft works. To hear you say that they can rewrite standards and deliver the same level of service to other businesses on cheap hardware makes me cringe and tells me you just don't get it. What is more is that you defend the very thing that the government is saying is a "very bad thing" - you simply validate the decision to break up Microsoft.
here's one I prepared earlier.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Why do people use it?
I don't know about other companies, but ours is an almost 100% java shop, and the reason is, every project is manageable and succesfull, all of our products run on HP-UX, Sun and NT, and we do a lot of code-reuse.
Besides, Java is VERY readable.
Sigged!
You know, Chuck. I think we'd better Chuck your name Chuck, into every sentence we can Chuck it into...
I mean Chuck, don't you find that everyone carrys on a bit Chuck, especially about how much wood can a woodChuck Chuck if a woodChuck would Chuck wood.
Huh, Chuck? ....Chuck???
I'm looking forward to this new standard method of internet information design. Thats really what this is all about right? How we ( developers ) design the next evolution of information services. I remember very well how MS software ties together on a internet system. I also remember how Sun has handled Linux over the last 3-4 years. It might not have been as nice as the Linux community wanted but Sun was honest about what it thought and that was worth something. ( though i have no idea what ).
.dot come site I pushed Linux because I had fath in the blackdown's efforts and knew that soon Sun was going to have to support Java on Linux.
.NOT (sorry bill, could not help it) I mean .NET
I believe it too be true that if you use microsoft software in your middle tiers you will start to tie your self to both microsoft client capablities and to microsoft backend software. If you take a look at any company that is using Exchange server you will find that allmost ALL the clients are Outlook. That's pretty impressive you must admit. I can remember upper management Giving the okay to Internet Explorer functions because they were neat. I allways thought that DCOM added it's own weridness. I was totaly amazed. Microsoft put a GUI on RPC (Remote Procedure Call) calls on the server. Now that took balls.. not to mention the fact that I have yet to run into a Unix programmer that has been thinking. "I'd like to have a GUI that forced the way I installed RPC code. And then made it so that I had to create a Client.exe inorder for the the client to use the RPC. (Give me a break, I think this is crappy version of RPC) calls on the server." Wow that was not too clear. Let me explain that again. You write your DCOM functions. ( mostly in VB ) Then you use the GUI to register them. Then you make a Client.exe that will install the RPC information into the Clients Registry. Now programs can call the servers functions like it was in a DLL sitting on the Client. Sounds easy to setup and use right? Well I suggest you try it. It was probly the 3rd to last straw that made me swear off MS software. The idea is that on many levels Microsoft has built in sugar to attract other Microsoft Software or Tier solutions. This was back when GNOME was a set of Spec's. Hmm... Now that I think about it do i really have to say anything more about MS?
It was about 4 years ago that the blackdown project came out with ver 1.0 of the JDK. Unless I'm mistaken I don't think apple or OS/2 had a working JDK. Concidering that during this time every IS dept was gearing up to switch from what ever language to Visual Basic on the client side. Java was not concidered a contender in my mind 4 years ago. But the one thing I saw was real promise. Java was a great toy for me to play with at the time. I loved playing with applets. This was around the time when people started looking at network and internet services. The ideas of XML seem to be the anwser for data packaging. Ever try to figure out a "packet" of information that was in a undocumented structure with out source code that did not have null terminated vars? XML looks pretty good after problems like that.
Back to Sun and Java and Blackdown. Alot of people seem to think that Sun did alot of C*ck Blocking with the Blackdown project. I don't know if that is all that fair. In the end Sun had to admit that Linux was becoming a perfered Java platform. I know that when I heard about a
Sun has a way of doing things and then telling us about it. It's true that a Sun server is all Sun hardware. But if you ever get a chance to look inside one of these boxes you will understand why the price for a Sun box compared to a Intel server is the same as paying the extra for the BMW 850 over the Camero SS. Personally you can do more tinkering for speed to the Camero then the BMW if you know what i mean. The thing about Sun hardware is that you can Hook it up to any network. Run all kinds of open services off it. And it has a good reputation for staying up. For a company that has been working like China befour Nixon the attudes towards Opensource is pretty damn impressive. In a age when Oracle and IBM seems to be pushing linux. Suns been pretty well behaved in my mind. Let's face it. CEO's and VP's will allways put their feet where the pizza goes. It's allways been a heated battle for the hearts and minds of IS departments.
In a nutshell. I think I have a better chance using the Sun instead of the Microsoft . The reason? Because I'll write it on Linux and in the future my users will be able to move it to Sun or any other system that supports java. I should also be able to count on the fact that if I write good code then the system will have a long and upgradable life span. This is whats import to me and this is why I'm interested in finding out what Sun has in mind. Sure they are mean to Tux but they are also worried about their servers being replaced by Linux boxes. But you will never see IIS on Linux. Sun's released StarOffice for linux ( correct me but sun did not have to do this after they bought it did they? ). Forte for linux and of coarse they are not supporting the JDK on linux.
You may not like Sun but the people they have working their really do know what they are doing. I also think that Linux and Java Knowlege will be very important to stoping
Last one in jail is a fascist.
Is it just me, or are both of these companies throwing around utter bull shit business speak like "smart, intelligent, collaborative, next-generation" when in fact besides better interoperable programming methodology, it is completely vapid and almost utterly disconnected from implementing an innovative web service?
.NET architecture will free users from the limitations imposed by the data silos that populate the Web today"
Off the MS web page for example:
".NET is important to end users because it makes computers easier to use and far more functional."
Wow, where do i sign up!
"By allowing multiple secure data feeds to be merged into a single user interface--or even a programmable decision engine--the
SOAP and XML don't magically make applications speak to each other, like MS would like us all to believe.
What MS has is market dominance which allows them to leverage their reputation in creating new "standards" -- no matter how vapid and stupid their talk about their next generation of programming tools is.
Now don't take me for a Microsoft fan or anything. But until Sun releases the Java specification to a vendor-neutral international standards body I have no use for this large corporation trying to manipulate the market by winning developer mindshare. Remember your choice of development platform is a vote you make, either in favor of one company or another, but hopefully a choice you make with clear thought behind it.
What Sun basically said is that XML is platform independent, and Java is platform independent, so it makes a lot of sense to use XML with Java.
Now, I'm not arguing that there is lots of great XML software available for Java. But in my feeling (and Bjarne Stroustrup's opinion too) Java is not platform-independent, but a proprietary platform unto itself.
And in fact most of my actual working experience with XML has been in C++ using the platform-independent Xerces-C validating parser for DOM and SAX from the good folks at the Apache XML Project. (You can also use Xerces-C from Perl or Win32 COM with provided wrappers).
I used Xerces-C on MacOS and Win32 for the config files and user documents of a consumer GUI application after integrating it with the similarly cross-platform ZooLib cross-platform application framework - something that would have been really inappropriate to do in Java, as this was meant to be a free downloadable app for which tech support costs had to be near zero, and we could not expect our users to install a Java runtime.
According to its web page, the C++ version of Xerces works on:
- Win32
- Linux
- Solaris
- AIX
- HP-UX
- OS/390
- AS/400
- SGI IRIX
- Macintosh
- OS/2
- PTX
- "and more!"
Further, it's open source under the Apache license and doesn't come with any burdensome requirements or political repercussions from dealing with Sun. You also don't have to wait until a needed version of some targeted runtime is available on any platform to be able to run your application with cross-platform C++ libraries like Xerces - because there are no runtimes.If more powerful players than you want to trip each other up with competing initiatives - well, just let them, and go on about your business by using open source like Xerces-C.
BTW - the Win32 port listed on the web page says it builds with Visual C++, I think others have built it with Borland C++ and I was building it with Metrowerks Codewarror for both my Mac and Windows versions, and could cross-compile on each platform for the other.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
I'd like you to understand why cross-platform code is incredibly important (note that this page quotes Judge Jackson of the MS vs. DOJ case as to why Microsoft felt it was so important to put a stop to cross-platform code as to break the law.)
But I think what we have lost sight of is maintaining both the usefulness of our code and our independence as programmers by not remembering how to write cross-platform code.
What Sun got wrong was not making Java cross-platform, but trying to bind us all into proprietary platform of Java while sweetly singing into our ears that it was platform independent. Sun did this and continues with it to serve its own marketing and political purposes, purposes which may not serve the interests of either the public or the independent developer.
You too can write cross-platform code, in almost any compiled language. Check out the ZooLib cross-platform application framework for C++, as well as the Boost C++ Libraries.
Jon Watte of Be, Inc. told me "Portable, to some people, means it builds on at least two linux distributions with several flavors of GCC".
Here's a list of a bunch of application frameworks, many of which are cross-platform, and many of which are open source - so there's more than just ZooLib to pick from.
Get off your duff and ship your executables for all platforms in common use - and not just ones with POSIX system call APIs!
And here's a hint for making your code buildable cross-platform - ever try to run "./configure" on a computer that doesn't have a command shell? Pretty hard. Makes folks like me struggle to write all the makefile's and config.h's by hand. But look at how many platforms the Independent JPEG Group's JPEG codec library builds on - DOS, MacOS, Cray, you name it, and it builds with both ANSI-C and old K&R c compilers (using macros for the function interfaces).
Kids these days... damn it makes me mad.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
that /. is a little anti-microsoft