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Dave Winer On Microsoft, SOAP, XML-RPC In NYT
daveuserland writes: "Lots of activity in XML-over-HTTP. An article in today's NY Times about Microsoft, SOAP, UserLand and me. My comments. In the meantime XML-RPC keeps growing with solid interop. 29 implementations in the new XML-RPC directory. The politics are intense but everything's going well." It sounds like Dave understands this .Net thing; even after hearing about it for a few years, I've yet to hear a really lucid explanation of why I should want my apps and personal data floating in an amorphous cloud, but maybe that's just me.
Will .NET deliver this (non-)nerdvana? Maybe, but my hunch is it will fall short in some critical areas for at least the first couple of releases. Remember: MS is relentless. Look how long it took them to get Windows jump-started. They hung on for years after it was first released and almost everyone thought it was totally useless. None of us should expect MS to drop this idea any time soon.
I think that some people are missing the point. XML-RPC is not formatting an HTTP GET in a fancy way. Also, XML-RPC is not just for web services - it can be used for easy communication between different pieces of software which are separated by distance, language, or platform. For example, a piece of Java that monitors my server's CPU utilization:
// assume that my class has a void getCpuUsage() method..
xmlRpcServer = new WebServer(serverPort);
xmlRpcServer.addHandler ("SrvMon", this);
And a hunk of Perl that checks up on my remote servers, blah blah...
$server = Frontier::Client->new( 'url' => 'http://whatever' );
$result = $server->call('SrvMon.getCpuUsage', '');
SOAP is more geared towards "web services" and less cool (in my opinion)
I'm pretty sure MS (and IBM) will take SOAP into directions that Dave didn't want,
Microsoft won't be able to do anything harmful as long as Dave keeps both the SOAP spec and the Hostia compiler GPL'd.
XML-RPC and SOAP are remote procedure call protocols. What have they got to do with "owning apps"? Almost nothing at all.
Oh wait, but .NET will use SOAP. Well, .NET will also use DNS but I don't see it coming up every time DNS is mentioned.
SOAP, and XML-RPC are enabling technologies. What Microsoft choose to do with them is another issue entirely.
Reminds me of an interview in 1997 where the interviewee claimed 7 years Java experience and we asked him how long he worked for Sun; his response: "Huh?"
AC
What a revolutionary technology! I had a thin X terminal on my desk in 1987.
SOAP cannot possibly make \. (or any other site) more scalable. XML-RPC and SOAP require 5-30 times the bandwidth for a simple function call. Both are synchronous protocols. Both require the additional overhead of loading an XML parser, parsing the passed XML for each request, processing the request, and (finally) building the response in XML. IOW these protocols will be *slooowww*! How this could possibly be more scalable than an in-process function call is beyond understanding.
Secondly, it is being claimed that "services" will reside on various servers. But a simple mathematical argument shows that distributed web services will be *much* less reliable than centralized servers:
For the sake of argument, assume the probability that any single server is up at any time is Ps = 99.9%, that a program uses Ns = 5 services from 5 different servers(including itself), and that those 5 services do not rely on any other servers. Then the probability that the program can complete is less than or equal to P = (Ps)**Ns = (0.999)**5 ~ 0.995
So with servers that are running at 99.9% uptime, we have a 1-in-200 chance of program failure. Plug in other values to see how reliable the component servers must be to achieve a "5-nine's" level of program completion, something relatively easily achieved by a single server.
The same mathematical rules that keep helicopters from making long flights without a critical failure will render *distributed* web services unusable unless extremely high (and costly) levels of server reliability are attained.
IMO this is yet another reason that, if used at all, web services will be used primarily as a partitioning tool for software development. But whenever possible the services (will/should be) be hosted on the same server.
Really, it's nothing conceptually different from having your home directory and local applications mounted over NFS, and using daemons like sendmail and httpd to provide protocol services, and using X11 to display on your workstation an application running on a big Unix box, and using CORBA or even rsh to control software on other machines. We all use at least a subset of these technologies every day.
Why not take all those services that were developed independently and re-architect them to make them work within a unified framework? That's all .NET is, really.
Yes, but nobody said that you had to spend your money on word processors. Myself personally, I have lots of stuff that I would rather spend my cash on.
People spent money before Microsoft existed, and they will continue to spend money even if Microsoft disappears. They just won't spend as much of it on software.
It's already happening. Sun's ultimate goal for Star Office is for it to be deployed by ASPs. The beautty of this is that StarOffice will not require that the ASP give a cut of the profits to someone else. This is good for the ASP because it lowers their costs, and it is good for Sun because it A) cuts of Microsoft's Office cash flow, and B) sells more beefy Sun hardware.
The funny thing is that Microsoft is going to go through a ton of work forcing their customers into the ASP model, only to find increased competition for their software (and from software that will almost certainly be less expensive to own).
Well said. And this will be Microsoft's undoing. If the protocols are truly open then what is the ASPs incentive to use Microsoft software? ISPs haven't been tempted by Microsoft's extensions to open protocols, and my guess is that ASPs aren't going to be too interested in paying the Microsoft tax either.
They will, of course, build .Net compatible services (in order to tap into the large Microsoft using customer base), but my guess is that they will generally shun the Microsoft specific extensions.
What most Slashdot readers are afraid of is a future in which Microsoft can say "All your Data belong to Us" (in much more polished English, of course), but this is essentially becoming less and less the case every day as Microsoft is being forced by their customers towards open standards.
what can i do with xml-rpc or soap? why is it so much better than just plain-old http post? just because it has the correct buzzword juju for today?
Actually, XML-RPC and SOAP both fall under the rubric of web services. Web services allow a program to make a remote procedure call to another machine using some wire protocol (ie XML-RPC or SOAP). The neat part about web services is that they are language neutral. That is, a Perl script on Linux can make remote procedure calls to an NT server running an ASP server. When the Perl script gets the data from the RPC call, the data will be available as a standard Perl datatype. If one were to simply use web pages to do this, every script would have to parse HTML just for that particular call. With web services, the programmer never needs to deal with XML at all.
Check out XML-RPC.com or IBM's developerWorks for more information on web services.
Dave and the GPL? I don't remember seeing anything like that. Get one thing very straight... Dave does not mix up the definitions of Open Source and 'open' protocols. Do some reading on his site before making a statement like that.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
How sad to throw away quite lots of money for something one do not need just because of "interoperability".
I wonder what if almost nobody upgrades from Word 6 or Word 95?
hany
What if blood is flowing (or is sucked) out of body?
hany
... you spend N * $50 and performs N updates just to avoid *one* aditional purchase (or better exchange) of Office 97 and *one* downgrade.
Am I I right? If so, that's sad (as I alredy wrote).
hany
Hmm, that sure sounds a lot like X11 to me...
Everything old is new again.
- chrish
It's not about leaving the application "out there" and using it from home. It's about your IT department running the application on big machines they control, in your building, on your high speed network, and letting you use them over your network. It makes a lot more sense that way - somewhat centralized administration, but without the risks involved in using apps over the Internet.
- Steve
Just use SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI locally. Part of Hailstorm is the definition of a service protocol, built around the OPEN standards of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI (both IBM & Sun have said they will also support these, and IBM's SOAP solution already works with Microsoft's SOAP solution--cross-language and cross-platfor compatibility).
Nobody will force you to use Hailstorm's services. But the advantage of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI is great. IBM realizes this. Sun realizes this. But slashdot's readers simply think that if Microsoft touches it, then it's implicitly bad. If you don't like Microsoft, just use IBM's implementation (they've given it over to Apache, in fact, so that it is truly open source).
--Be human.
I didn't mean to imply that Sun did own ebXML. However, they are one of the (I would say "The") dominant forces in the standardization process. The incorporation of SOAP into ebXML was done at Sun's request. Sun has played a bigger role, in terms of developers working on it, than any other vendor. But you are very right in saying that ebXML has support from a wide variety of vendors.
--Be human.
People. Please get a grip on your Microsoft bashing. Here's some point from a *user* of SOAP (and I'm not even using Microsoft'1 implementation).
.NET. .NET uses SOAP, but SOAP is not .NET. If it were, do you think IBM & Sun would be using SOAP?
-There are other versions of SOAP/WSDL/UDDI available. IBM has gratiously given their implementation to Apache. It looks to be the choice for open-source advocates. Sun has also announced they'll be supporting SOAP/WSDL/UDDI in the SunONE platform. Sun is also making ebXML compatible with SOAP, so that ebXML services can be called using SOAP, and vice-versa.
-IBM/Apache's implementation is interoperable with Microsoft's. Previous versions have had some major problems. But this is less a case of "embrace and extend", and more of a case of "this is new technology, and we haven't got the bugs worked out". I've seen IBM/Apache's and Microsoft's SOAP solutions call one another, from/to different languages. There are still a few quirks, but each release brings both Microsoft's and IBM/Apache's solution in greater compliance with the standard (yes, IBM's solution had some compliance problems, too!).
-Services are the next natural progression in software development. We've got from monolithic to client/server to 3-tier to n-tier develoment. The problem is that even with n-tier development, each tier relies upon the tiers next to it, in the form of a non-standard, programmer-developed API for the interface. Services free us from this, as they standardize the API between "tiers". And, by breaking down the "tier" concept, services can help bring component architecture to what was once a tier. It makes it easier to developed these components, and easier to assemble the components into an application. And it makes it easier to integrate components from third parties (such as -ack!- Hailstorm--but more importantly from small software vendors--I'm certainly not going to trust my sensitive info to Microsoft).
-XML-RPC is *not* SOAP. The only thing in common is that XML-RPC allows network programming using XML, as does SOAP. But SOAP packeges each network component into a service. This service can then be described in a standard way using WSDL (Web Services Description Language), so that programs can discover the API for a service and call the service automaticallly. Then, these services can be advertised using UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration), a sort of yellow pages for web services. XML-RPC provides RPC functionality, transferring data using XML.
-Web services do *not* have to use the Internet. This concept can work just as well on an Intranet. For large corporations, where there cannot be constant communication between the developers of services, using SOAP/WSDL/UDDI makes sense, as each development group then has a reliable and standard way of using services created by other groups.
-SOAP !=
Sorry for the long rant. I just hear way too many misconceptions. I get tired of it after a while.
--Be human.
As was finally said by someone else, SOAP and XML-RPC are the distributed-object scheme that will probably make the concept ubiquitous, since they provide a simple, elegant way to encapsulate requests and objects (XML) and any number of ways of transporting them over existing protocols (HTTP, SMTP/POP, FTP, whatever).
Slashdot could benefit from it right now. One of Slash's weak points is its two-tier architecture. At present, there's a database layer without much logic, and a bunch of Perl executing on the webserver.
One of many easy ways SOAP can make the Slash engine more scalable would be to move the heavier Perl functions to another server, and leave the outward-facing webserver free to spit out pages without thinking too hard. I suggest the SOAP::Lite Perl module. It's got an elegant API that's so simple to use, you'd barely have to change any of the existing codebase. Throw your heavier logic on a non-public HTTP server, point your shell code on the main HTTP server at it with a couple of lines to tell it where the SOAP server is, and voila! You're three-tiered, and your public webserver no longer needs a direct connection to your database server, so it can be safer too.
Want to move one particularly nasty piece of logic to its own hardware? Easy. Want to handle some things like moderation asynchronously? Just make some of your SOAP calls via SMTP, and have a cron job pick them up and process them via cron. Again, without changing your existing code much at all.
RPC and distributed objects aren't really new. You could have done this with CORBA, DCOM, EJB, or any number of other technologies.. but this time around it's especially easy to use, easy to work across languages, and has the added advantage of being easy to make available across the Internet without a fight over exotic firewall rules. You don't have to work to tunnel it over HTTP.. it can be HTTP.
I used the example of Slashdot-split-into-3-tiers-with-SOAP to explain to young Timothy what SOAP and XML-RPC are and what they're used for, since he seemed to think they were some kind of useless buzzwords with no application in the real world... because he didn't know what they were.
I'm quite aware that Slashdot's real bottleneck is in the database, and that this pretty unsolvable as long as (1) their code is MySQL-specific and (2) there still isn't a Free Software RDBMS that supports advanced replication and load balancing that's also Free and open. But since the only tiered web application Timothy's ever seen is Slashdot, I had to use it as the example.
So again, Microsoft are re-re-inventing the One True Unix Way (centralised server, remote thin clients).
Ah me. Still waiting for MS-Winux v1.0, when they release a true unix clone and tout it as more stable, reliable, and secure than any Windows ever. Oh and no they're not re-inventing 30-yr old technology "like linux did". Theirs will be Microsoft Unix after all! New! Improved! Washes whiter than white!
(completely brushing aside xenix at this point).
Where are we going? and why am I in this handbasket?
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
I have been using XMLRPC for about 9 months now and it has been superb. Easy to use, tons of clients, just what we wanted. Basically it provided a mechanism for Web apps to talk to all our backend systems via a middle tier. Nice and fast and stable.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
No you own your copy(s) of the software .Net are most EULAs are about remove or
minimizing this, because of the this little
pesky detail called "Right of First Sale".
what copyright grants are right over the production of copies. No possetion of all the copies.
Grey (Chris Lusena)
Except if the server gets a virus. Then you lose everything.
In a business environment, you have a backup/restore infrastructure in place even with multitudes of servers. It would be very easy to do this with this so-called basement server.
The most common reason for using "upgraded" versions of software, particularly Microsoft office productivity packages, is for:
1. Compatability with everyone else that upgrades or has already upgraded
2. Because the vendor (in your example, Microsoft) ceases to sell the older, feature-complete, products
Oh wait, did I say sell? I meant rent.
No, you just rewrite your Bean.
Don't sell IMAP short. It's the protocol you want to use to keep those pictures, music, contact info, etc. in a central location that can be easily sync'd/replicated as needed on any client. IMAP is all about replicating MIME objects, after all.
It's a shame more ISPs don't offer IMAP because then we could have distributed disks all around the net.
The whole point here is the whole "Any device, anywhere" view that Microsoft has been driving at for a while now (Auto PC, Pocket PC, Tablet PCs, Web TV, upcoming Stinger cell phone, and so on). If you think about it, it's really not much different than keeping your mail on an ISP's mail server and just pulling it with imap on whatever machine you're going to read it from, except that the vision is more than mail -- it's digital pictures, digital music, contact info, free/busy info (aka, calendaring info), and more. The apps don't live in the cloud, only the data does (well, apps may keep a replicating copy in the cloud, but you don't run the app from the cloud -- it runs from whatever device it can run on). In fact, the only app neccessary for most of this is a web browser -- the rich clients are about enriching the experience, not creating the experience.
At the same time, you won't need a 24/7 internet connection to be able to work on your documents that live in the cloud. Local replication will make sure you have the latest copy of the data (as of the last time you were online) that you can work with and modify to your heart's content locally. Then the next time you connect to the net, it gets propped to the cloud, where you can then access the revised information from anywhere (PDA, laptop, cell phone, auto pc, internet kiosk, wherever). This does bring up some interesting security issues, but then those same issues exist with the current model of ISP mail servers holding mail that you then retrieve with imap, just on a smaller scale.
He deserved it.
Back in 1997 or so, Dave was bashing Apple left and right, running as fast as he could to port every bit of his code to Windows. He wrote DaveNet missives about how well MS understands and helps developers, how Apple just screwed its developers, and how Apple was on the verge of death.
Now he gets to see what comes from trying to be a pilot fish in the jaws of the big shark. It couldn't of happened to a more deserving guy.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
In the above case, one could use a "header" line in the CSV file:
Name, Phone, Fax
...
Bob, 756838, 124437
Jerry, 34543, 5554
It's easier to view a lot of CSV data in a glance than it is to view XML data (maybe not a biggie, but still). It also helps than you can load the file into a spreadsheet program (aka Excel) for editing.
Structured data - now that is a pain in CSV. You have to carefully maintain relations between objects, so it is possible.. but hardly convenient.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Anyone notice, buried deep in the articles, how Microsoft have hijacked CLI? Instead of "command line interface", it now means some whiz-bang hype-speak. Just like they tried to do with DNS, I suspect, when it (briefly) became "digital nervous system". What's next? UNIX - "User of .Net Information eXtranets"
Yeah, the nerve of those people.... They replaced netscape, still one of the dodgiest computer products ever released, with a more stable, more powerful, faster, easier to use alternative....
...meanwhile netscape rested on their laurels....
...yeah, it must have been dirty tricks... "Oh but they gave it away for free!" - you bastards!
Or maybe give away the razor (ie) and make money on the blades (iis)?
bloody zealots...
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Just to comfort your fears someone has to get access to a telnet or something simular to run X there is simply no other way, and X offers no more access than the person already had with the command line. Now if you do run a remote X connection there are security problems of such a connection being tapped and possibly taken over, but that is solved in other mannors.
Well, actually it was because the computer refused to let me install '97, whenever I uninstalled 2000 and installed '97 it would tell me my license was invalid when I tried to run any '97 programs. Messed with it for a while and finally gave up, and installed 2000 on a few computers that needed to directly interoperate with that one computer. Then I got complaints from other groups about interoperability, even though it was rare that they shared documents, and they could have manually converted, I got tired of them complaining and installed it on all computers :)
N=20 actually, not a huge number. Anyways shortly after doing do it occured to me that I could have probably reinstalled windows and been able to installed '97 on the initial machine, but it was too late. And I felt pretty stupid about it
Although, there really isn't (currently) any way for Big Evil Corp(tm) to track you down, so in a practical sense, you own it. Just not in a legal sense.
With .NET, things could be so much easier.
.NET will allow you to use Linux, or any other .NET compatible platform, to communicate with...
I'm not interested in will, could, should. This the same shit I get from Microsoft. There were problems with SQL Server 6.5, they said 7.0 will fix all my problems. I had problems with 7.0, guess what!!, now SQL 2000 will fix all my problems. Interestingly I get the same sort of responses from Microsloth with reguards to NT and its service packs. I want to write software now, with tools that work and are mature now.
Microsoft has a legal obligation to maximise its profits. Never forget that.
obligatory no login link
The protocol is SOAP you silly twat, it's already open. You'll be able to sniff it off the wire if you really want.
Here are some things that are done better (and in some cases quicker) on a large, professionally managed server:
- Storage of any important data. Backup is just too much of a pain for most people. It should be taken off the table.
- Long-running processes or periodic processes. Desktop machines, for various reasons like noise/power/instability, tend to get turned off or restarted. Multi-month or -year uptime is not a reality for most desktops, even if the O/S is reliable.
- Processes that use a large amount of system resources. Better to rent a few gigs of RAM or a few hundred gigs of disk when you need them, rather than plowing all that money into hardware that you will only occasionally use.
- Services that should be accessible to other users. A desktop is not normally going to have the reliable high speed connectivity and scalable load capacity of a larger, more managed system.
I would agree that the functions of MS Office, as we are accustomed to using them, don't seem like a good fit for this model, but there are some good possibilities in there.Dammit, it's plain you know that isn't actually the case, but let's not go around posting statements that aren't true. It is bad for the discourse. Mmmkay?
Even if the protocol is eventually made public, they can still force you to use their servers.
.localnet initiative. That is, your private server is the 'cloud'.
I would really love to see a
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
The major primary complaint I have had with MS is the pervasion of inferior technology by means of superior marketing. Check Out my blurb on Boiling Frogs.
Please, get over yourself. Complaining that a company is too good at marketing their product is ri-god-damn-diculous.
"We gotta integrate IE into Windows because we'll never win otherwise"
In other words, they couldn't win on the merits of the program. So they HAD to win by other means. This was well in advance of IE 5. Are you still Enthusiastically using the ActiveX desktop
Umm, if you ask me, IE won the browser wars despite that Active desktop shit. I don't know anyone that uses it. It's completely irrelevant in any sort of "browser wars" discussion. While Microsoft may have thought they'd 'win' by making the desktop more like a web browser, they actually won be producing a stable, fast product more standards compliant than anything else at the time.
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Rare Window - free your photos
No - Netscape had a browser monopoly where they could cram their proprietary HTML extensions down peoples throats whether they liked it or not.
Netscape are responsible for one of the most hated and half-baked HTML 'features' of all times - frames. Frames were never part of an HTML spec, Netscape made them up. There are many elements of HTML like this that Netscape just pulled out of their ass and were able force into the W3C's HTML specification because they dominated the browser market so completely.
I remember all the browser war graphs back in '96 when people first began to question Netscape's browser monopoly. Most people thought their position was unassailable - we had grown used to poor performance and constant browser crashes.
IE came preinstalled while NS was a huge download. Without this bundling IE could never have had market penetration to dominate like they do today.
I can't say I agree with you here. Bundling definitely helps with certain market segments, but remember, Netscape got to its position solely on downloads. Microsoft had been bundling IE since at least version 2 - and it wasn't helping their position. Whether you care to admit it or not, it was the quality of later browsers - particularly IE5 that got them where they are today.
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Rare Window - free your photos
Netscape was struggling to make money because every time they came out with a product MS came out with the same prduct and gave it away for free.
Netscape's browser was for all practical purposes free from the beginning. The only people paying for it were large companies. From what I've heard, making money off browser sales wasn't their core business in any case.
Apache (still the most popular web server) exisited long before Netscape's (let alone Microsoft's) webserver. So to say that IIS (still a minority product) being free killed Netscape doesn't make sense either.
With NS running out of money they could no longer afford to keep NS competitive and started trying to find other markets.
Are you saying Netscape couldn't afford to put resources into further developing their web browser? I haven't heard that before.
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Rare Window - free your photos
If you're interested, he's talking mainly about MS and IBM adding WSDL to the SOAP spec. The original userland article is here: http://davenet.userland.com/2001/03/29/unstallingS oap
This isn't really a feature. This is an anti-feature, designed to make it difficult for people to run any version of Word before 2000.
"Yeah sure Bill, I will trust you with my data!" says the guy who has a Hotmail address. I'm cracking up!
An AC wrote: "Wow, you had insider info on Microsoft's .Net strategy three years ago! Seems strange that MS only just announced it, what...6 mons ago? It's really sad that slashdot has gotten this bad. I find it odd that no one pointed out this glaring inaccuracy (or exaggeration?) above."
Dear AC:
It's now well into 2001.
And in 1999, Dell was pushing information about the ".Net" thing via Microsoft in their small business computer sales catalogs (and I bet also in the Enterprise ones), complete with little data-cloud diagrams. I had a job editing / revising copy for certain of those catalogs, and even then could not get a straight answer about the real nature of it. And ".Net" was not the first name for this MS project, though the name which preceded it is slipping my mind.
Public announcements are not the only source of information -- the hype had started long before.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
True the stupid home user ends up subsidizing the schools and the corporations not to mention all the people in the third world.
P.S. For the not too awful stupid people you can get education discounts via internet pretty easily (of course you could just pirate the thing like the rest of the world does and stick the lusers with the bill).
War is necrophilia.
Of course you are right. Windows users are profoundly stupid and could never grasp the complexity of using a computer to anything non trivial. It's for this reason that I always recommend MACs for first time computer buyers and those windows users who always tend to mess things up royally even though windows is so easy and usable.
Believe it or not there are people in this world who get confused by windows and mess it up, cause it to crash or lock up. These nincompoops do stupid things like lose their start menu, destroy desktop settings etc.
There is hope on the horizon though. MacOsX is very promising and may become the one platform for the drooling retards that use windows now and the geeks that like unix. Time will tell.
War is necrophilia.
"...yeah, it must have been dirty tricks... "Oh but they gave it away for free!" - you bastards!"
Fucking communist pigs! Don't they realize that it's un-american to give things away for free.
War is necrophilia.
Well netscape was better then IE till IE came out version 5. Until then Netscape was a much better browser and the only way MS could dislogde it from the top was by giving away IE when netscape was trying to sell it. IE came preinstalled while NS was a huge download. Without this bundling IE could never have had market penetration to dominate like they do today.
Unfortunately for NS they did not have a monopoly where they could cram their browser down peoples throats wheather they liked it or not.
War is necrophilia.
Is there a widely used language without an ORB? Oh yea probably VB.
War is necrophilia.
Not true. You'll still have to rewrite your app to take into account the new field. If you are going to rewrite it anyway then what have you gained?
War is necrophilia.
It's called not having a moral compass.
War is necrophilia.
XML does no such thing.
Client 1 insists on sending you ADO XML format datasets, client 2 runs oracle, client 3 rund DB/2 and client 4 uses WDDX. They all send you XML files with different attributes. Worse yet one spells out states the other one put's in a abbreviation. One put "city of New york" and the other puts "new york city" and the other one puts "new york".
Oh yes it's all XML but so what? you still have to write a parser for each and every one of your clients because they sure as hell ain't going to rewrite their app or change the data in their database. Not only that but you have to translate the data itself for each and every client because XML is unable to force them to put "New York" in their city field.
All this talk about a beautiful world full of all singing all dancing interop apps is pure bullshit pitched at PHBs so they can part with shareholders money. It's a fucking lie.
War is necrophilia.
By the time IE5.0 came about millions upon millions of homes had IE installed with windows. Netscape was struggling to make money because every time they came out with a product MS came out with the same prduct and gave it away for free. With NS running out of money they could no longer afford to keep NS competitive and started trying to find other markets. But It was moot because MS had an infinate amount of money and kept undercutting their business with giveaways (I guess communism is sometimes good).
In the end all netscape had was a portal and MS was ofcourse attacking that too. AOL bought it pretty much for the portal and the rest is history. How ironic that now MS is facing the same threat except from a bunch of communist, anti-american snot nosed kids.
War is necrophilia.
once again no advantage for XML. If I wrote my app using perl or http post it would ignore the extra field too.
War is necrophilia.
"Netscape's browser was for all practical purposes free from the beginning. The only people paying for it were large companies."
Are you saying that large companies paying for your product is a trivial source of revenue? A comapny needs every cent it can get.
"Are you saying Netscape couldn't afford to put resources into further developing their web browser? I haven't heard that before."
Any business person would realize that MS was going to win the browser war because they were giving away the product that netscape was trying to sell. Same with web servers. It would have been suicide to budget money towards developing the browser if MS was going to bundle theirs with windows and put it in every desktop in the world. They scambled looking for markets where MS did not play but every time they entered a market MS entered the same market with a similar product and gave it away for free. It was a doomed task. When MS wants to kill a competitor the competitor will die because MS has what amounts to infinate amount of money and they can subsidize any of their products with their office and windows monopoly. Ask Real.
War is necrophilia.
I dont' know if it's true or not but...
When Freud was asked about communism he reportedly said "it won't work because people are not that good".
War is necrophilia.
I can parse delimeted data or fixed length data with one line of code too it really does not matter. Every client who sends me data produces a different object. I have to write my interfaces for each and every XML document my clients send me. Not only that but somebody could send you < name> bob</name> and somebody could send you < name value="bob"/> both are legal XML both require different code. XML is only self documenting to a human.
War is necrophilia.
"if MS and Oracle can't agree on their dataset format, that's not really a problem with the underlying technology. "
I disagree vehemently. If the purpose of the technology is to ease interchange and the technology is not able to achieve that then it's a failure. XML is a silly standard because it specifies nothing at all.
"but there's also got to be a better way. "
Here is a better way. Have XMl actually enforce relationships just like a database does. Specify tags that say this element is bound by a relationship to this other element (or url). Have realistic contraints and lookups. Only then will it actually be useful.
XML as it exists now is only a hair above useless. CSV does pretty much the same thing without added bloat and even perl style hashes are more useful ans easier to parse. Any technology which leaves it up to competitors to agree on a standard is doomed to failure. MS and Oracle will never agree and you will be writing translators for their XML formats.
XML is a failure because it does not deliver what it promises.
War is necrophilia.
XML schema is just this side of useless.
You can specify that some element ought to be text but you can't specify the context. Let's say that you had an element called county. You have to make it text right? Well can somebody put "goatse.cx" into this county field? Will the XML parser say "sorry that's not a county" of course not. Worse yet the US postal office says that there is a county called "lake and peninsula" in alaska does your XML parser reject "lake & peninsula"?
Schemas only enforce trivial rules not real life business rules. There ought to be a schema element that says "this is a county as defined by the USPS URL, the elements must exist in this URL". I suppose you could list all umpteen thousand counties in your schema and be screwed when the USPS creates a new one.
War is necrophilia.
And then he woke up...
War is necrophilia.
There are already dozens of standards including the humble comma delimeted file that every body can produce in a hurry. I can't tell you how many interfaces I have built in my life but I know for a fact that XML or SOAP or any other acronym will only mean more work. The single biggest success I have seen so far is HL7 (for the health care industry). They got together and created a massive standard based on fixed length data which specified not only positions and lengths but datatypes and content as well. Only when you enforce data integrity and consistency will you actually have a usable interop tool.
Tagging arbitrary data so that a generic parser can turn it into an object is pretty much useless.
What's needed is not tagging but data integrity and enforcement. Something like constraint rules in a database except over the internet. That would be cool.
War is necrophilia.
Why do you have to wait for .Net to use XML? Consider the Apache Group's Coocon, for instance. MS didn't invent XML. They weren't the first to use it. But when they come out with .Net then it will save you time?
$20 is still more than $0. Anyone capable of warez will just use the warez. Its not like there are value-added features. What we'll see is traffic in patches for file format upgrades for the old warez.
Netscape got to its position because it was better. It wasn't until Netscape was throttled into a comatose state that IE could claim victory.
Perhaps some coders should get together and take on the monolith.. build a simple linux based OS that is easy to install (put the cd in the drive man) and "rent" apps themselves, be it for free or for *gasp* a profit.
How we know is more important than what we know.
bah.. read the EULA, Microsoft can recall any piece of software they want and if you use it after the fact you are violating the license.
How we know is more important than what we know.
so because you can control how you use the software you are not willing to purchase it? Bavo! Now if only everyone would apply this to the software have today, we wouldnt have such rediculous things as the EULA. But no, most people are willing to just break the law and ignore the license. One day they just might come break down your door and put the cuffs on you for having an expired copy of win98. "This software has been recalled, it's people like you are contributing to the downfall of society!!" as they drag you off to the Ministry of Love.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Dude, I'm talking about linux as in the kernel. Everything else would have to be written. Some leet framebuffer gui running natilus or something.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I dont understand. You are aware that you dont own your software right? Even if it is free software, unless you wrote it you dont own it. Even if it is in the public domain it is debatable whether you "own" it, as per any understanding of the word property. Perhaps when app rental is a reality the misconception that software is like that bike you got for christmas will finally die.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Sun Microsystems sales staff circa 1994?
How we know is more important than what we know.
wow, twenty-nine implementations. then again, way more people than that have my phone number, and still nobody calls.
what can i do with xml-rpc or soap? why is it so much better than just plain-old http post? just because it has the correct buzzword juju for today?
it just seems like a lot of pissing in the wind (pick your direction) right now.
Netscape got to its position because it was better
Wrong. Netscape got to its position because it was the only choice. When MS (InterWHAT?) finally decided to make a browser they had to push into a nearly 100% dominated market. For several years Netscape still had a 80% share of the browers.
But instead of improving their product they sat back while the ever hungry Microsoft Corporation came out with better and better versions.
People will drift to the better product and when version IE 5.x came out, Netscape was a floating, bloated, dead corpse.
XML frontend to:
LDAP storage.
Voila.
But I thought Microsoft's original raison d'etre was that "the IT department locks up all the computing power in their big air-conditioned rooms and just lets you have the apps they want you to have, but with the IBM PC and MS, you can have whatever you want at your fingertips, without having to kow-tow to anybody."
Hmmmm. Funny how things work out, isn't it.
And aren't all these web forms scarily like old 3970 terminal apps?
They are transport and encapsulation. This says nothing about what's being sent:
A query like:
is useless for interoperability unless you know WHAT the encapsulated data is and how to interpret it. All you get from XML-RPC is encapsulation, transport, and easy generation/parsing.
These are good deeds and noble goals... But interoperability requires knowing the semantic meaning of what is sent.
Why repeat myself when I already answered this claim?
Doh! Slashdot nuking tag-like entities:
<query data="414324hg3j5hg34j5g3" command="4j2f345hj3g5hj3g5jh32" encrypted_paramater="4325435435254">
Is not interpretable.
Except that the the servers will be run by Microsoft, the protocols will be either be essentially secret, or be designed such that you *still* have to use microsoft's servers.
.net, combined with the set of other normal techniques. (they own the client software, which doesn't interoperate well with 'other' servers.... change the protocol every other year.... public protocols for encapsulation, but proprietary specifications for the data being encapsulated anyone?..... Outright proprietary protocols.)
.net as being: Basically inetd, except poorly designed. Oh, and like MSN from 1994, except cheaper for them cause they don't gotta pay for the modems or phone lines.
Even if the protocol is eventually made public, they can still force you to use their servers. (See the protocol-enforced centralization of ICQ/AIM protocols versus the DNS-based ones of (say) email or http.)
Oh, and you'll probably pay by the minute or pay by the access to use their servers, and there will with no real alternatives.
I would expect this behaivor from
This is what I see
While the real public standards would be fully public from the data, encapsulation, and transport. Probably have multiple vendors shipping servers and clients. Real competetion, run your own server, or purchase from a selection of service providers who have purchased the code... Much like HTTP or SMTP.... and the rest of the internet.
There's no free lunch; you're obviously paying for what services you use either way. But, which option will likely give you better service, more choice, higher stability, cheaper prices, and more control over your critical computing infrastructure.
One way makes Microsoft a perpetual middleman, in control and siphoning money. The other way gives you a choice.
Yeah, SOAP itself is NOT GPL'ed. It was submitted to W3, but Dave himself is not a GPL advocate for his software and he makes that known.
He is interested in open standards and interop though.
As i understand it, and so far doesn't appear to be mentioned here is that MS has taken an open standard (SOAP) and started the "embrace and extend" approach.
The fact that Dave is a coauthor of the spec (AFAIK he seems to say it a lot if you read davenet or scripting.com) makes it doubly frustrating to him.
While I can understand Winer's POV, he often let's his emotions overcome him and pummels things into the ground. That just demonstrates his dedication in one respect, but it often seems to overcome his objections and cloud his judgement.
I'm pretty sure MS (and IBM) will take SOAP into directions that Dave didn't want, just as the Netscape folks decided to do with RSS. However, unlike Winer's constructive approach of working on RSS 0.92 (ratehr than 1.0) I haven't seen anything constructive yet. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and believe he's coming up with some uber plan for SOAP.
Regardless of what happens, I am sure he'll continue his version/vision of SOAP in his Manila products. I realy wish him well. It'd be a shame to not be able to use his products or have them not work with MS products merely out of spite from MS.
I will agree with your level of frustration with the buzzwordology and incorrect representations of what XML is actually useful for.
--
assert(expired(knowledge));
Well XML/RPC is basically taking the place of DCOM/COM/blah blah blah.... and the .Net, what a wonderful idea that is. Yeah sure Bill, I will trust you with my data!
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
The problem is, all of your examples seem like they would require alot of bandwidth to work correctly. Backups to a server somewhere? Well, i've only got 2GB of data...it shouldn't be that long on a 56k modem right?
As far as processes that require large resources is concerned, i doubt many, if any, home users have such processes. Except perhaps games, but i don't see this model of doing things better then the current one. Some games played on the internet are slow enough without off loading some of the processing.
Most people get the local geek to install software. Once installed i doubt very many update their office software or web browser. As long as it works, they use it. Doesn't matter if there's a security hole, they don't know about it or probably don't care either. They just want it to work.
Are you starting to see the parallels with renting movies and renting software?
... these people don't want to sell you the use of their server resources for number crunching. They want to rent you lightweight software that can be built with web technology (DHTML, XML, Java, etc), where the programs are stored on the server, and possibly even your data. The idea that the server is going to be doing most of the work is just wrong.
Actually no i'm not. I don't pay a monthly fee whether i rent movies or not. And i usually use my computer for many more things then word processing and web browsing. But even those things i do quite frequently. I guess in your comparison, i'd want to watch the movie whenever i want, hence i'd buy that movie, not rent it.
Well, no not ALL the processing. As I understand it, this type of technology wants some of the processing on your end -- such as the handling of user events, typing, clicking buttons, and what have you, but the data storage and processing to be done on the server end.
What processing, exactly, would be quicker to do on a server then on my own machine? Clicks and what not are handled on my screen. Does bolding get done by the server then? Table creation? Even things like image or sound processing would be pointless to have a server do, since the time it takes to upload the original and download the finished piece is much greater then the time it takes for my computer to do it. I would think most people don't want their personal data stored away on some distant server. Just like i don't use the library to file my personal love letters.
A typical example is a word processor. I write maybe three documents a year. I'd rather pay a small fee each time I create a document, rather than $50 for the whole word processor, which I may never use more than once before upgrading to the next version of Office.
Actually i'm betting people word process more then you think. But the only reason to upgrade currently is b/c you need to keep file formats compatable. If MS saved documents as something like HTML by default, you would never upgrade your word processor. IMHO, it has too many 'features' as it is. Nothing has really changed in Word for the past 5 years i'd say.
It also maintains flexibility. Use Word from any of your desktops, at home, at work, etc. Download it when you want it. (Kind of like Pay-Per-View, to keep the movie watching analogy.)
Your analogy is flawed. I have cable here, but if my parents don't, i can't order pay per view now can i? Even if i did, THEY get charged for it, not me. I also can't order ppv on any TV that doesn't have a cable box with it. I can already word process where ever there is a computer; thats a pretty standard thing. I may not be able to play the latest game i'm enjoying anywhere, but so what? I doubt many people are like 'damn, i wish i could use this software on anyones computer.' And if there are, they typically bring the CDs with them...
You're thinking about this all wrong
Sounds good, but i want 100% reliability. Whenever i need to use the applications, i want to be able to. But i doubt MS servers will never crash, or even that the best/only route to the MS servers will always be up. I remember a few short years ago one of Worldcoms fiber optic lines was cut, and it brought the internet in the Easter US to a halt basically. It was almost impossible to get anywhere. I sure hope that doesn't happen if i need to type a letter and send it out by a certain date.
That makes no sense. Either people are going to pay to rent Word (pay-per-use), or they aren't. If you don't use Word, then you don't pay for it, therefore what do you care if it's better than the last version?
Actually it makes perfect sense. This is what MS has been doing all along. A few of the companies i worked for have upgraded, even though they didn't want to. They knew there was no point, but someone (client, supplier, whatever) upgraded and can't figure out how to save as an older version. So we upgraded, just to be able to read the new file format.
Well you've got that choice as a consumer, but it seems kind of close-minded to make that decision before you have all the facts, let alone a trial of it...
Just b/c he's decided not to try it at all does not mean he is being closed minded. Maybe he just doesnt think the pitfalls (or potential pitfalls) are worth looking into this further. Don't call him close minded b/c he's made a decision on the facts currently available.
Then CORBA came along, it was to be the answer to all the worlds problems. I admit I'm ignorant of CORBA, but it seems to me that is hasn't lived up to the hype.
Now we have XML. Again, XML seems great for what it is designed for, a standardized markup language (without some of the more silly features in SGML), but does XMLRPC make sense? Do we really need another standard? What does XMLRPC give us, other than buzzwords for managers to throw about?
I can hear my boss now, "Do your next project in XMLRPC, and mail me .doc files weekly to let me know the status."
Someone please enlighten me.
read the EULA, Microsoft can recall any piece of software they want...
In the absence of an evil piece of crap like UCITA (or a particularly corrupt judge), EULAs that don't show up until after you've paid for the software are usually considered meaningless. This is just one of the reasons why the fight against UCITA is so important. UCITA would make all the evil crap in EULAS legally binding. See www.4cite.org.
--
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Find a good article, put a link, and put your comments in the submission
Well, this is a little different since this new york times article is about him (Dave Winer submitted the link). That makes his comments on the article pretty on topic...
A link to an ignored author (John Markoff) provided by an ignored editor (timothy). Yet the content is marginally interesting. Yet another block up for reconsideration...
their software distrubution model is getting less and less in line with traditional copyright law (+ insane magically-binding you-never-agreed-to-them licenses), and more and more compatible with the street performer protocol.
Nice dream. Linux will never be as easy as the mac or windows though.
I'm not being anti-linux, this is the plain truth. Linux coders simply cannot make things easy enough for your grandmother to use, primarily because coders' ideas of easy are far different from your grandmother's idea of easy. Open source coders write things for themselves, not their grandparents.
----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I agree with the potential utility of subscription ware.
What I fear, though, is that, alongside the potentially great developments in technology (automatic upgrades, bug fixes, translations) and in business models,(subscription service revenue) will be embedded the same gratuituous toll collectors gathering money merely because they own the tollboth on the main highway and not because of any intrinsic new value added. (See other posting about Word 6.0 being essentially featureful.)
I'll go out on a limb and put words in the mouths of Bill Gates and Scott McNealy...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Really!
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Money is to be spent. The economy depends on it. If people don't spend money, we're thrown into a depression. Think of society as a blood-stream, if there is no flow, there is no life.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Well, then you may extend the analogy to include more of the universe, and everything is conserved one way or another. However, loss in energy is what resources are there to remedy. Any (known) system cannot be active without losing energy to another, but self-sustaining systems will seek and exploit energy where it can be found. If a system is leeched too much though, it will either free itself from the parasites or become non-sustaining.
In other words a depression can be healthy, since it will in effect change the system so that it can become self-sustaining again (hopefully). Just like prey depends on predators to keep their genetic codes in top shape; nothing is truly evil. It depends on the level of one's perspective and is therefore subjective.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
We're still a fair ways off, but our design - as it says on the home page - is "an Open Source, cryptographically secure, transparent to the user, distributed platform for creating, maintaining, and selectively sharing profile information." Sorta like an Open Source Hailstorm running on Freenet.
Though the code (written in Java, XML and SOAP) is available for anonymous CVS download, it doesn't really run yet without a lot of tweaking (so no bug reports, please). But we'd love to get feedback and ideas how to make this free framework more solid - and more amenable to the business folk who we'd love to see jump on it.
--
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
The trick is, you don't own the poor things today. Thanks to Microsoft, UCITA is being pushed hard all across the US. You can't even complain about bad software with UCITA because you specifically will not own a damn thing and cannot cite current consumer legislation.
.NET.
It's curious that Microsoft should be one of only two organisations that pushed UCITA - against the ACM and the IEEE it must be reminded - and that despite the overwhelming opposition it still got drafted like Billg wanted (ok, he's poor today, we should pity him) and it's going to get passed everywhere - and then suddenly, as a mere coincidence mind you, out comes Hailstorm, MPA and
Pure coincidence - or what was it Auric Goldfinger said?
radsoft.net
Assuming that MS isn't doing any of this .NET stuff for the 'common good'. Now where do you think is it taking them (dragging us)? And why?
.NET (stragglers can use Windows Terminal Server to support their 'legacy' Windows code), what's left of the PC. Why it's a network computer. Just like the Java folks wanted. But better. Then can now close down the platform and turn it into a true appliance.
.NET approach, use Java instead. They don't HAVE to succeed, you know.
Running apps over the cloud is not a new idea. It's what the Java folks had in mind, and might have built had MS not decided to marginalize it (by pushing IE with outdata Java on the world, and by hobbling Netscape, thereby making sure that noone else was out there that could get the job done).
So why do they want to do it? Maybe because they're realizing that with free competition getting better all the time, you can't keep selling apps indefinitely. But you probably can sell services indefinitely.
And then there's the 'platform'. Once they get the world converted over to
Of course, that means you can't run Linux or BSD on it, but who wants that anyway. Oh, you do? Maybe that's the point. No free OS's, no place to run those free apps, no more competition.
So anybody out there interested in the
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
I've yet to hear a really lucid explanation of why I should want my apps and personal data floating in an amorphous cloud, but maybe that's just me.
XML and its family of technologies such as SOAP, SXLT, et. al. is all about making two "alien thing" to talk to each other at the data level WITHOUT putting any restriction on those two "alien things" (other than that they have to understanding XML.)
Yes, this is being pitched as web-services -- by the market. This is fine as long as you don't stop your thinking at this level, as XML is much more than enabling web-services. For example, there is nothing prevents us from using XML to enable two applications (or components) to communicate to each other even when they are sitting on our local hard-drive.
Now, think about this. If ALL programs and applications had an XML based API (SOAP-RPC) image how simple it would be to integrate and capitalize on them with your own application.
Hell, I can create a brand new application buy accessing the 100+ much often repeated functionality and code in my Linux applications. Now THIS is what I call Open Source (and code reuse) -- a system that I can re-use over and over WITHOUT having to do an open heart-surgery on it.
---------------
Sig
abbr.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
I've yet to hear a really lucid explanation of why I should want my apps and personal data floating in an amorphous cloud, but maybe that's just me .Net is. .Net.
Sigh. That is not what
.Net technologies will enable application rental and data storage, but it is more than that. People not wanting to rent apps is irrelevant to the success of
But how are you going to enlarge the cake if your market share already exceeds 90% ???
"We won't use guns, we won't use bombs, we'll use the one thing we've got more of and that's our minds" - Pulp
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Great article but..
Can't we ever have a computer article in a mainstream publication without the car metaphor? Geez, it took long enough for the "information superhighway" to become the buzzword of yesteryear.
To each, mine.
I'm glad to see someone explain this clearly instead of simply asking "why?" or whining about Microsoft.
However, one slight correction: Sun doesn't own ebXML. ebXML was created by UN/CEFACT (a division of the United Nations), OASIS (the consortium who owns xml.org) and a whole slew of companies, especially those with a heavy investment in EDI. I don't believe Sun's contribution was any greater than IBM's.
- Scott
You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light. --Edward Abbey
school's usually get mass discounted academic prices, nothing like what regular consumers have to pay
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
"How many people really jump up and down at the idea of not owning software."
No one's jumping up and down for it, but corporations will sit up and beg for it if Microsoft says it will reduce their TCO.
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
Its seems like most people here you do not understand what .Net is, and it is Microsoft's fault to some degree. .Net does completely fix dll hell, the .net framework and clr where designed around "xcopy" deployment, meaning no more registry, xml config files in the app directory (novel idea ;)). In fact it makes me wonder about how the registry will be used as time goes on. But anyway my main piont is .Net is being marketed centralized applications that are rented, but in reality that is just one way to use the underlying framework, and at the same time it is Microsoft "eating there own dog food", by using the framework for that purpose. But it you still prefer to make a classic windows app the .Net framework gives a excellent library (Winforms) to do so, and if you so desire you can get into the raw GDI+, or even directx, its not all about web apps.
For those of you trying to make a quick buck. Find a good article, put a link, and put your comments in the submission with a lot of banner ads. i.e. "Check out this on cnn.com and my comments."
While that might be the microsoft sales plot, on the technological level there's a lot more to it than that. MSNet (.net is the stupidest name in ages) is an extension of the principles of COM, which is a reasonably powerful extensible architecture. The ability to access objects anywhere is a very revolutionary (and not microsoft exclusive) concept.
Look at a newsbrowser, for instance. It contacts the server. The server gets the article out of memory, and translates it from however it's stored to a transmittable form. From there it's sent along the wire and converted into a different form, and from there it pops up on your screen. Tin, and most other newsreaders, are reasonably huge. The servers are pretty massive, too. They're both a tangle of code around something, that from a modern perspective, smells a lot like a hack. Often you have to process a huge stack of data before you even see an article. "Loading Headers..."
Were you designing usenet today, using distriubted object technology, the news indexes, lists, and articles, would all be objects on the server that you call. NNTP would be unnecessary - the communication is taken care of by whatever they're calling RPC today - so the communication stuff gets trimmed out of each end. The client becomes thin, so you don't have to worry about state on the client end. It goes from technology that people have spent years trying to get right (because they have to solve a half a dozen big problesm other than news storage and indexing), to something a couple guys can hack up in a month in thier free time because they only have to worry about the news. Not protocols, timeouts, latency, client state, etc... but news. COM/CORBA/MSNet handles all of the communication.
Am I looking forward to a lease, no-configuration-control, subscriber based software model? Not on your life. Does that mean that MSNet and the technology therin is a smelly pile of elephant dung? No. COM, CORBA, JavaBeans, MSNet, whatever - pick the product brand of your choice - is some incredible stuff. It forfills the promise that RPC introduced.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
I know little about the serverserver communications for NNTP. I know enough, though, to know that reasonably successful group mirroring across the world is quite an accomplishment. I think you miss my point - the "distributed, replicated, client-server collaberation system" part should - and is now becoming - seperate from the "news".
All of these systems are quite admirable, because they do everything themselves. They had to - nobody else did it then. You wouldn't design it that way now, though.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
I thought you might have, but of course we have a world of readers following our conversation.
I'll throw in at this point something that you might already know - Mozilla is built around XPCOM, which aims to bring most of the benefits of MSCOM to the open source world. I don't know how much they get into inter-machine communication, though.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
So, Anonymous Coward, who are you and what do you have to gain/lose by all of this?
I see .NET as typical rent-to-own (nothing) bullshit. (Slow credit ? No credit ? Not to worry! Microsoft will get your financing approved!)
I would guess that the average consumer will not dig it very much either. They may not immediately understand and seize their alternatives but that doesn't mean they'll all line up and drop trou' for Microsoft's plan to "share" their income stream in perpetuity either.
As others have noted, despite Intel's best efforts, it's not like CPU or RAM are expensive nowadays.
Bottomline: .NET solves .NO problem for the consumer. It just creates extra problems that didn't exist before, while trying to stick a IV tap in Joe Users' wallet.
A monthly fee is something Joe actually notices if only because he have to be comfortably dead to overlook it -that invisible hand at Microsoft may be about to get chopped off at the elbow.
Whether businesses want to convert to internal .NET servers for their office non-productivity is another question. But again, for different reasons I think they'd be crazy to do that.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
throw new Exception("getreal,Dave");
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Not that I'm backing M$, but it's an old adage in marketing (and Pratchett) that it's better to reduce the slice but enlarge the cake.
Supply and demand. Units and unit prices. They'll get less from you if they get it from twice as many people. And if they can reduce costs, and then reduce price in order to increase demand, they will. Overall profit, not individual.
How many of you actually know how powerful xml-rpc actually is? By the responses I would say less than 1 in 50. As far as I am concerned Dave has every right to pat himself on the back. The man is just about single handedly responsible for the technology buzz that will be showing in strength this year. It is really nothing more than a way to communicate with objects remotely no matter what the platform or language. Now the question becomes should we support SOAP, the answer is a explicit no! SOAP is a total bastardization of the xml-rpc protocol to support COM.
Got Code?
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While I wouldn't be so complementary to MS (short on coffee today) this sums it up nicely.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Comp Sci. :)
Your argument seems to be based on the premise that Microsoft is trying to make things cheaper for you. To that I'd say are you insane? Microsoft may be willing to make things easier for you, add features, whatever. The one thing they will never do is reduce the amount of money they think they can get from you.
its like code bloat, except that now network
protocols are going to be stretched to the limits
of its spandexy vagueness.
Wait, 640K would be enough for everybody!
Windows users are profoundly stupid and could never grasp the complexity of using a computer to anything non trivial.
This is classic computer enthusiast elitism and it's absolutely, positively idiotic. I would offer up that anyone who is willing to proclaim "Windows users are profoundly stupid" are less intelligent than the ones they're criticizing, given their willingness to paint an entire genre of users with such a ridiculous statement.
As the parent post indicated there are a lot of people who use computers for very specific tasks and they only want to know exactly what is necessary to get by. That's efficiency not stupidity. Do you know how to replace the headgasket in your car? Do you know how to build a microprocessor out of silicon and some heat? No? Well you're just stupid now aren't you?
There are people who have domain specific skills because it is a hobby (i.e. Linux enthusiasts), or because they need those skills for career purposes. The vast majority of the population could easily grasp Linux and the nuances of configuration (this isn't rocket science it's just a matter of spending the time and having the motivation), but they DON'T WANT TO.
In any case the simple fact that you attempted to climb up into the tower of "alternative OS elitism" proves that you're rather on the juvenile scale. I am going to make a wild guess here that there are hundreds of thousands of Windows users out there who are far more intelligent (and certainly more mature) than you.
How many people really jump up and down at the idea of not owning software. I don't see anything in this that will ever make me not want to own my apps outright.
... these people don't want to sell you the use of their server resources for number crunching. They want to rent you lightweight software that can be built with web technology (DHTML, XML, Java, etc), where the programs are stored on the server, and possibly even your data. The idea that the server is going to be doing most of the work is just wrong.
It could be because you appear to have no real idea of what this idea of "not owning software" is all about.
Do I rent some movies? Sure. Do I own some movies? Sure. Why do you do both? Why not buy all the movies you like to watch?
Hmm, what's that, you say some movies you only want to see one time? You don't wish to pay $20 - $30 and own the movie forever? You'd rather pay a small, one-time fee and watch it only once or twice?
Are you starting to see the parallels with renting movies and renting software?
The idea as I understand it is to leave the gui at home and move all of the processing onto the servers.
Well, no not ALL the processing. As I understand it, this type of technology wants some of the processing on your end -- such as the handling of user events, typing, clicking buttons, and what have you, but the data storage and processing to be done on the server end.
A typical example is a word processor. I write maybe three documents a year. I'd rather pay a small fee each time I create a document, rather than $50 for the whole word processor, which I may never use more than once before upgrading to the next version of Office.
It also maintains flexibility. Use Word from any of your desktops, at home, at work, etc. Download it when you want it. (Kind of like Pay-Per-View, to keep the movie watching analogy.)
And if you don't like renting applications, don't. Buy them instead. If there is a market of people who would rather own the software, believe me, there will be someone there to supply the demand, even if Microsoft doesn't (and they will).
The really processor intensive things like encoding and image editing aren't going to really benefit from this.
You're thinking about this all wrong
This is just a plan to get us to get people hooked before they realize the newest Word isn't really any better than the last.
That makes no sense. Either people are going to pay to rent Word (pay-per-use), or they aren't. If you don't use Word, then you don't pay for it, therefore what do you care if it's better than the last version?
Even if linux does this I won't use it
Well you've got that choice as a consumer, but it seems kind of close-minded to make that decision before you have all the facts, let alone a trial of it...
-thomas
"And like that
Reminds me of Dana Carvey's SNL George Bush: "Doing that economy thing, going round and round."
Bill? : "Doing that .Net thing, going round and round."
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Thanks for getting me started on finding more about the SOAP/XML phenomenon, and how IBM will hopefully keep M$ straight on this technology.
I think that to the tech oriented person, this sounds like a bad idea. It does to me. I personally don't like the idea of not owning my software or having my own storage for my own data. Of course, everyone isn't me and you. I think, for the average consumer, this is desirable. Especially with a new version of Office or whatever coming out every year. How many "average" users will want to continually upgrade or installing new software, when they can pay a some sort of fee and have it happen automatically? With the increasing availability of broadband access, I can see how something like this would catch on. I don't like it, but I do see its merits.
Is this not a step backwards? Take the power away from the individual users and back into the hands of those who control the servers? I do not want the MCP having control of my data and forcing my programs to compete in games.
I noticed that the NYT was much less flattering of Microsoft than Dave was.... His point seemed to be that this is a major strategic mistake on Microsoft's part.
I say, let us zig to their zag-- as they try to centralize, let us decentralize.
Also notice that Free software is the bane of this sort of model because the major arguement for centralized application serving is the fact that it can often cut the number of licenses that need to be puchased for a given piece of software.
I do think that there is a place for Application Service Providers, but that their role will probably be geared mostly to small businesses because this is the only market segment where real value can be added. This is .NET's potential market.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Of course, Microsoft and other companies are not doing this as a benefit to the user. There are some benefits -- such as access-anywhere and edit-from-any-machine documents -- but you get those benefits with just about any centralized file server.
The real motivation is, of course, the licensing. You state: "This is just a plan to get us to get people hooked" as if it is a secret. It's not. The companies have published white papers and executives have made comments in interviews and so on. They flat-out state that their motivation is "recurring revenue" that comes from monthly and yearly subscriptions to their hosted apps (and, by the way, access to your files).
This is a revenue model 100%, and even the companies doing things like this seem to be comfortable admitting it. Probably because shareholders are drooling over stuff like this.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
How many people really jump up and down at the idea of not owning software. I don't see anything in this that will ever make me not want to own my apps outright.
Do you remember when HP introduced the first LaserJet? They initially thought to market it as a print server. They figured nobody would want to personally own one, that everyone would just "rent" time on it by sharing. However, it turned out to be the opposite. Everyone wanted to own a laserprinter personally. There are some things that people prefer to own rather than rent. Like cars. You hear people say "Man, I'm saving up to buy that Ferrari." You do not hear people say "Man, I'm saving up to rent that Ferrari." Books are like this too. Sure, libraries are great. But notice they haven't put bookstores out of business. That's because people like owning their own books.
Same with software. There's a company I know who used to have a number of Pro/E seats. When Parametric Technologies instituted an even more draconian licensing scheme involving lots of regular payments (the new MS Office 2000 license reminds me of this), they just chucked Pro/E off their systems.
I can already do this. It's called ftp.
A real specific example of why Word would be better with .NET capabilities would be this: you write user manuals for a software company, free
lance. You have a new-whiz bang computer/laptop, but not everyone at the mega-soft corp company has a new version of xyz app. Luckily, your
software company runs MS xyz server, and has decided to allow you to upload the documents to it weekly for progress review. Members of the
review staff have Office 95, but luckily, the MS xyz server tranlsates the document on the fly, delivers them a properly formatted version for Office
95, allows them to edit it, saves changes, and updates the original, still in the newest format. Sure, you COULD do this by hand, but when 10 editors
take the file automatically, edit it, and send it back to you in file versions ranging from Office 95, 97, 2000 and XP, things get messy.
So then, what you are saying is that .NET is
gonna be great because it's a solution to the problem deliberately created, perpetuated, and maintained
by Microsoft? I have an idea, why don't they
just screw .NET and go with open file formats
instead?
The one thing they will never do is reduce the amount of money they think they can get from you.
Right now the cost of Office for a large portion of users is $0 because it's warezed. By increasing copy protection and lowering the entry cost (through rental), MS is betting that they can get more money by getting all the deadbeats to pay up.
As the guy said, if it only cost (say) $20/year to use Word for the couple times you needed it, that might be more attractive than having $600 of pirated software, just in case.
I always thought NNTP was cool because it was a distributed, replicated, client-server collaberation system for the masses 20 years before arguably inferior commercial implementations (ahem,Exchange Public Folders) existed.
Yeah, it's sort of a hack, but not as much of one as (say) SMTP mail...
I should have mentioned that I agree with the jist of your post. Of course it could be done better now, except for the problem that most modern IT is too vendor-identified to get the universal coverage of something like NNTP.
Sorry, most regular users and businesses do not use cracks or lurk in IRC to find FTP sites. They do pass around a single CD, etc. Microsoft isn't interested in the hardcore pirate market, they are interested in making casual piracy less attractive.
1. Microsoft is interested in rental pricing for their software (something that IBM and other have been doing for 30 years!)
.NET.
.NET and .NET software won't necessarily be rented.
2. Microsoft is obsoleting their COM/DCOM technology platform in favor of a new platform called
3. Points 1 and 2 aren't necessarily related -- rental software will exist without
Nice dream. Linux will never be as easy as the mac or windows though.
.NET he would not have the right to continue using that old version of DOS or WordPerfect 4.3 and ...
.NET or you would still be paying for the ancient software it runs. That is, if you weren't forced to buy a couple of new systems along the way and throw away a perfectly good PIII.
Mac OS X _IS_ Linux... (well, sort of)
I have written some simple programs for my grandfather (age 76) that he runs on an ancient 8086 (yes, there is no digit missing). He does it very nice.
With the M$ sceme called
And even more: technically it would be impossible.
Now imagine it is april 2011. Your ancient Intel PIII 1Ghz. Is still collecting dust as part of your Domotica system... Good thing you didn't convert it to
120 chars is not enough!
There a multidude of ways (read distributors) of Linux. Ever tried getting windows NT from anybody else then MicroShit?
If you have bad experiences with one company goto another. That is basis of the free market. Once M$ ties yours hands (read hardware) you can not ever start using anything else (without loosing your entire previous investment).
When you get tired of Red Hat, go get your Linux elsewhere.
120 chars is not enough!
Maybe you should actually think for yourself, rather than regurgitate all this tired Slashbot nonsense.
Probably too much to ask, but sometimes the idiocy is just so overwhelming that someone has to speak up.
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Can you guess who I am?
The question is, "Do you need RPC?". A big question. RPC is something that has been done badly many times, and solves a limited class of problems. If you do then structuring the protocol constructs in XML seems a fine way to go. If you really need to do CGI-POST type transactions then HTTP is a good choice, but that's a big IF. There are lots of people trying to more with CGI/POST than is was meant for, and that's part of what is being addressed with SOAP. HTTP is well known, and people inderstand it, so it is very attractive. It's about as ubiquitous as it gets on the net. Ask a business type what DNS is and you'll likely get a blank look, ask them what HTTP is and they'll (theink they) have a much better clue.
The major questions are "do you need RPC?" and "do you want to do things like HTTP does them?" in my opinion. Fortunatley HTTP is an easy component of the puzzle to replace with something that has a longer session duration that one connection or peer-to-peer characteristics if you need them.
my 2 cents.
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Jack not name, jack job!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Yeah, I understand why a business would love this. Just have a little basement server with all the proggies on it. Lots of cute little display windows everywhere else. Cheap! Except if the server gets a virus. Then you lose everything. I could understand universities wanting this too. MS will get what they want: a steady dependable revenue stream. Maybe once they get that the prices for home software will go down. The cynical side of me doubts this.
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
Thank you, you said everything I was thinking. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a elite hacker. I don't know how to program. (Well a little assembly and C. I'm trying.) I am pretty technically competent though. I just don't like the whole idea. Especially the part where I store my personal data on servers run by a company that seems to have no security knowledge or morals whatsoever.
Hardcore linux users say they hate the gui-is-the-os thinking. Well I hate linux's the-server-is-the-os thinking. Don't get me wrong. I like linux. It's just that I use it for the free development tools. I installed Mandrake with the developer setting, and lookee here. I've got an anonymous ftp server, news server, and web server running by default.
Those are pretty easy to shut off, and they shouldn't have been on in the first place. But what about xservers. Why do I need remote display? Sure lots of people do, but do I need it. It makes me so jittery because I don't know all the security wholes in x. I know it's probably secure but still I don't need it. Why isn't there any non-server x. Don't tell me it's impossible.
That's what I like about windows. The apps assume that you aren't connected to the internet. It may sound silly to all those MS haters, but I only connect to the internet with windows. Why? I've got zonealarm in windows. I trust that. Linux is so complicated that even if I'm pretty sure that I've gotten everything, I can't be sure. As I remember one of the main reason early techs advocated home computers over mainframes is that they wanted user data to be secure.
One of the other posters above said that I don't really own my software right now. But the basis of ownership is control. If I own a piece of land that means that I have sole control over it. The laws of adverse possession recognize this. If you squat on someones land for so long you own it. That's why I don't like this. It's taking my ownership away from me.
I would use this on linux as long as the source code for the server side software was available. After all, I already have an xserver running on linux. Why not another server?
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
How many people really jump up and down at the idea of not owning software. I don't see anything in this that will ever make me not want to own my apps outright.
The idea as I understand it is to leave the gui at home and move all of the processing onto the servers. There's just no reason for that. We live in a day of celeron's and athlons. The most commonly used apps are web browsing and word processing. Word processing isn't processor intensive or at least it shouldn't be. If a word processor chews up my 433 MHz celeron it needs to go. The really processor intensive things like encoding and image editing aren't going to really benefit from this. What time would you save by uploading a huge wav and letting a remote server turn it into an mp3 and then ship it back to you.
This is just a plan to get us to get people hooked before they realize the newest Word isn't really any better than the last.
Even if linux does this I won't use it
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
From the NYT article: [The] goal, Microsoft and Mr. Winer would agree, is nothing less than a computing lingua franca - a network software environment in which programs could run and be maintained on a variety of different machines, regardless of which operating system they use.
Uh, actually... I don't think that MS and Mr. Winer agree on that. The only way Microsoft would agree to that statement is after taking out everything following the last comma.
This is not a "what if"... this is a fact of life. You cannot prevent anyone from building on your foundation.
The analogy that comes to mind is we have open sourced concrete so all buildings built with concrete must have all roofing material open sourced as well. One does not affect the other.
MS/IBM/etc. will just put up roofs, different style walls, etc. and the open sourcing of concrete (SOAP) if it had occurred would not be an impediment.
Open source has a place but proprietary is here for many, many years to come. If truth be told propietary has a better life expectancy than open source (more interested parties having their interest continually fed over the long haul). Open source has an up hill battle over the long haul for all but the most public applications.
It's work to produce programs and hard work to maintain them.
They do understand at some level that in order to guarantee success they need the developers to have access to them and make it relatively easy.
Any system based on the innate good of a human is doomed to disappointment. My degree is in History/Poly Sci. What's yours?
This post was supposed to be a reply to the neutron-star gold article. Moderate it down into oblivion.
In closing, before everyone freaks out about "M$" taking their cash (read:actually having to pay for Microsoft software they use anyway), visit msdn.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Check this article out in ZDNET.
They will probably package this along with M$ Office, you'll probably have to buy it from M$ afterwards.
His passowrd is "where-do-you-want-it-stuck-today"
IN TEH FUCHAR, LITERSY WLIL EB OPSHANAL!!!!!111
His password is "free-pr0n-with-slashdot-id<47"
IN TEH FUCHAR, LITERSY WLIL EB OPSHANAL!!!!!111