Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Uhm ... where's the problem? OpenOffice is Reallity and the source is beeing worked on, the entire Package is broken up, and the Wordprocessor is working stand alone... I don't geht this point.
> 2. When will solaris be shipped with GNOME as the default desktop?Well ... 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). Dou you want to force them to install _your_ default-desktop??? Thats open?
> 3. When will SUN ship it's systems with a protocol a bit less bloated than X? (Ica?)So you want Solaris to run a non-X Windowing System and at the same time to be Gnome the standard-desktop? I see a problem here. I've not heard that Gnome runs on anything but X.
I think I haven't gotten your point or misinterpreted your posing, otherwise I can't explain, why it's so easy to counter.
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