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Lots of .NET stories in the news today and yesterday; it's a total coincidence that Microsoft started a huge marketing push on Wednesday, including the occasional Doubleclick ad running on Slashdot. BrendanL79 writes: "Peter Wright at Salon.com contributes to public awareness of Microsoft's .NET with this exuberant piece. The praise borders on sycophancy ("Gutenberg ... Babbage ... now Gates") with no apparent tongue in his cheek. Comments?" Reader vw writes: "Active State has just released Visual Perl 1.2, Visual Python 1.2, and Visual XSLT 1.2 as plugins for Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET. Wonder how long it will take for a Mono hack." Numerous readers pointed to several stories about a buffer overflow problem in Visual Studio .NET which was supposed to be immune to buffer overflows - but it had passed Microsoft's stringent new security audit.
i would like to be the first(maybe) to congratulate the newly engaged couple in the comments of the wrong article
In Bill Gates' version of the way things will be, we will all carry around hand-held computers that will allow us to access our e-mail, trade our stocks, send video and photos to the family and generally manage our daily lives. Those hand-helds will also be phones and navigation units, and will carry our electronic wallets. They'll communicate with our computers at home to manage the heating, order the groceries and, when we get home, set just the right ambience for that all-important date with a mix of appropriate mood lighting and Barry White.
;-)
Am I the only person who is just a little afraid to have all of my personal information online? There is just too little right now to keep it secure. Maybe when we are on IPv6 it will be better. But it becomes too easy to hit a few buttons and accidentally abort your new baby instead of inform your parents.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
I don't think there's any big deal in ActiveState's visual Perl/Python/whatever editors. They are 'compatible with Visual Studio .NET'. What that means is that they integrate with the Visual Studio IDE - *not* that ActiveState have managed to compile Perl into .net bytecode.
.NET compilers for Perl and Python, we'd surely have heard about it by now...
At least, I assume that's the case. If somebody had managed to create
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
..."microsofts new stringent security audit".
am i the only one who reads this as
"we now pay attention to compiler warnings"
;)
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
The praise borders on sycophancy ("Gutenberg ... Babbage ... now Gates") with no apparent tongue in his cheek.
Microsoft has apologists? No way!
Wrong. Java 1.4 has the same thing, an undocumented feature with the exact same name that hypocrit Bill Joy bashed. Yes that's right, Sun included something called 'Unsafe' mode for Java code, that lets it write all over memory to its hearts content. Don't tell Bill Joy though, he's likely to spasm from being called on his lie.
(PS I love Java. But Bill Joy is a LIAR and should be called on his LIE.)
No, you're not. I think that the overall concept might have some promise, but I do have a problem with the idea that an entity will running the whole show. What scares me most is that ultimately, we are moving towards zero human contact. No longer do you go to the grocery store and run into your old friend from across town and chit chat for 15 minutes while making your selections.
I'm reminded of the movie Sneakers when Martin and his old friend (the villian) are on the roof and the villian is going on about how it's a new world, it's all electrons, just little ones and zeros. Everything is the information, the information is everything. It's a brave new world for humanity.. Martin's response is 'yeah, and there's nobody there' -- So we'll all have our PDAs and phones and everything, but who is there really to talk to? Get out, get some air, meet some REAL people and have some fun the old way.
Not does the technology have the ability to move our lives into greater convenience, but at the same time, to isolate us from ourselves and each other.
That, to me, is the scary part - not so much some marketer having a profile on me.
Wright says, "Without Microsoft, the PC we have today would be a very different beast."
As if this were a bad thing.
He was a verray parfit gentil knight.
.NET is many things and many people are confused by what .NET exactly refers too. In the context of this story .NET is refering to the compilers, and libraries that make up Visual Studio.NET.
VB.NET, & C# are both geared toward using the CLR and .NET Framework. Visual C++.NET can use the CLR and .NET Framework but, unlike VB, you can work with Visual C++ like you could in previous versions and ignore the CLR and .NET Framework.
So what is the security error reported? This is the detail as reported by Cigital.
The protection afforded by the new feature allows developers to continue to use vulnerable string functions such as strcpy() as usual and still be "protected" against some forms of stack smashing. The new feature is closely based on an invention of Crispin Cowan's called StackGuard and is meant to be used when creating standard native code (not the new .NET intermediate language, referred to as "managed code").
This is a problem with Microsoft's Version 7 C++ compiler not with the CLR and .NET Framework.
No, you're thinking of Slate.
I'm a little surprised with the article's tone, especially coming from Salon. While reading this article I'm reminded of marketing drivel coming directly from Redmond itself. This is not a news story, it's just straight-out gushing and it's the disgusting type of a "article" I'd expect from a heavily sponsored e-rag like ZDNET. Frankly, I will never look at Salon the same way.
----- rL
Speaking about Python, does anyone know when the final release of ActivePython 2.2 will be released? It has been in "Alpha" for a while and the product page hasn't been updated in a while.
"In 1454, Johann Gutenberg changed the world forever when the first of his Bibles rolled off the world's first printing press. Three centuries later, in 1791, Charles Babbage was born. Best known for his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, his work is widely acknowledged as providing the earliest steppingstones from which the modern computer would emerge. Again, the world would never be the same. From the article:
William Henry Gates arrived on the planet in 1951. Whether you love him or detest him with every ounce of your moral fiber, there is no denying the contribution Bill has made to this earth. Without Microsoft, the PC we have today would be a very different beast."
Does anyone truly believe that Gates has made a positive contribution to "this earth", other than his (admittedly laudable) charitable works?
From a technological standpoint, the only thing you can really say he has helped (and I say helped because he certainly cannot claim sole credit) achieve is the positioning of computers in everyday non-geek life. Even that would have happened sooner or later has Gates not existed.
This type of melodramatic, snivelling hyperbole is starting to crop up all over the IT press, with reviews reading like commercials and biographies gushing with misplaced hero-worship.
Ick.
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
Didn't Babbage never actually get as far as a working prototype? I recall the Science Museum in London had to use computer controlled machining in order to build their working model of the analytical engine - without them they'd never have been able to make the parts accurately enough.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
I heard Steve Ballmer speak Tuesday night in Chicago at the VisulaStudio.net kickoff. In response to an audience question about the Mono project he said two things. "First, we're not afraid of competition. Second, we're not used to competing with our own intellectual property and we will defend ourselves. So I guess you could say I don't think very much of it."
:-)
I put this in quotes but I'm paraphrasing based on my best recollection. I gotta give him credit for being accessible and for answering questions. Still can't help hating him, though.
Take off the tin foil hat for a second, would ya?
How long did it take for Microsoft to dominate the desktop market? They released Windows 1.0 a long time before OS/2 fell off the competitive map.
Microsofts domination kinda snuck up on everyone, since the IT industry assumed that there would allways be a company to compete with Bill&Co in the OS/Office Productivity space. This time, no such assumptions will be made. If they actually get something like this off the ground, there will be lots of people (Miguel) making great things that compete with Microsoft's offerings by the time it gets pervasive enough.
I'd suggest you take this for what it is at a base level - something that could be useful and cool. Remember, it is possible to enter a cage with a dangerous beast, as long as you know what to expect and how to counter it's natural responses.
IMHO, it's time to accept Microsoft as an industry leader. You just have to think of them in the same way that you do a clueless PHB.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
I also agree that the lack of human contact would be a bad thing. First off, we could not drink anymore as popular definition defines someone who drinks alone as an alcoholic. But seriously, I think that we are moving away from personal contact which is very important to mental health. It is true that you can converse with people online but it is not the same as sitting around a table with a pitcher of beer and shooting the sh?t for a few hours.
/. around the campfire.
Although I think that this new technology is going to take away from those accidental meetings I hope that, if it delivers on its promise, it will provide more time to create opportunities for human interaction. But then again, all the technology that we create to save time seems to require more time than we save to keep the technology saving us time. Wordy but true. I don't advocate a return to simpler times... I would die without my connection to the internet. But a week or two where I could just focus on getting to know the people around me while also getting to know more about the earth I am on would be a great thing.
Anyone for a camping trip? If you have 15 km of optical cable just laying around... we could run it down to our site and not miss
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
Sure, you'll have a device to be able to do all this, but people won't use them for one of two reasons:
1) They'll be paranoid of having all that info available
2) There will just be too many friggen features for folks to care.
I don't know about you, but I programmed the addressbook for my FIRST phone. Three phones later, I pick the thing up and use it to dial numbers. I don't use the IR, I don't have it sync with my palm pilot, and I don't send two way messages, I just use it as a digital 'can and string' to talk to people.
Us Slashdot folks are pretty savvy gadget freaky people. That doen't mean my Mom's going to program her favorite MP#^H^H^HWMA's to play on Tuesday when the humidity is high and she's the only person at home.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Peter Wright seems to have been given a few too many Microsoft T-shirts, for his critical facilities have completely left him.
.Net will not assist in the distribution of pr0n, and therefore will never be as important to humanity as the printing press, the computer, or the Web.
Human history has shown that with the advent of any new important media, pr0n has never been far behind. The printing press? One estimate says that within 10 years 30% of all presses were being used for pr0n. Glossy magazines? Pr0n. Pictures on your computer screen? Pr0n. The Web? Pr0n.
The simple fact is that
Careers should combine three things: what you can do, what you want to do, and what you can get paid for.
I've always heard there's a lot of "smart people" working at microsoft, if this is the case, they must also be disgruntled employees to let this slide in the middle of "security month"
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
It's not actually a _compiler_ overflow.
Instead, it's a subversion of the "buffer overflow protection" that's built-in to the compiler. The most startling piece of this technical review is that the Microsoft "Overflow Protection" in the compiler appears to be a port of StackGuard. The reviewers point out that an examination of the binary output reveals that the compiled code is nearly identical to the StackGuard output.
I'm scared.
dinner: it's what's for beer
Read the bio blurb at the end of the article - the author has written a pair of books on programming in VisualBasic and has 2 books on .Net coming out this year. Hmmm... might he have some stake in .Net's widespread adoption?
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Once again I find myself ashamed to be a part of an industry that can't remember anything five years into the past. .NET has been done before, many times. The only news here is the hype, as always.
.net includes more security features (useful in some contexts) and is multi-language instead of multi-platform. This last issue is a practical one only, at least until Mono is working. And they decided to go multi-language via an IDL, which I consider to be moronic (OpenStep used fat binaries, faster, smaller, better, realistic).
.net will be one of the most used systems out there. That's the power of marketting. Look how well it worked on the droid on Salon.
Let's see, unified runtime, libraries of code with multiple versions, simplified networked object support, standardized metadata...
OpenStep circa 1995.
Sure, OS used plists instead of XML (which didn't exist), a private system instead of UDDI (which didn't exist) and was aimed at C people instead of Java (whichy didn't exist) but the broad strokes are the same:
A multi-platform runtime with standardized libraries, which can exist as multiple versions (with resources) at the same time, with objects that can write themselves out so they can be manipulated as flat data (for storage or network invocation).
The differences are interesting too,
I'm sure other "old timers" will have their own similar systems to include for comparison, but the real point is not that OpenStep did it, but that SOMEONE did it.
And years later no one is using OS (mostly), whereas I'm sure five years from now
Maury
When I read that Salon puff piece last night, I had to check my calendar. Twice. Yet it stubbornly refused to be April Fools Day.
.NET. I wouldn't have minded, much, a softball piece on .NET.
I wouldn't have minded a piece on
But that fawning piece of crap was inexcusable. It was clearly written by the marketing department - no tech would ever favorably compare Bill Gates to Guttenberg - but it was presented as a straight story.
Now I'm going to find it impossible to take any other story the post seriously. I will always have to ask who really wrote the piece.
That's a shame - Salon has been a good thorn in the side of the powerful for a long time. Look at the old stories on the "Drug Czar" paying for anti-drug messages in prime time entertainment shows, or their coverage of the RIAA. But now there will always be a loud voice in the back of my head asking if this is another PR piece by the powerful.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
In other news, Motor Trend covered the 2002 North American International Auto Show with two sentences: "Cobo Hall was filled with cars. Some of them were brand new."
Let me get this straight. Microsoft is, for better or worse, the most significant software company in the world. They have just released a profoundly significant update to their development environment. The computer trade media is paying more than just lip service to it all. And Michael somehow thinks it's media bias, simply because it's a company he doesn't like?
It's not a "total coincidence". It's news!
This sig intentionally left blank.
...once again was not Bill Gates' at all. It was what Sun proposed with the Java platform (and possibly others that I don't know before them). When will people realize that Bill does not have that "vision" thing? Perhaps the same day they learn that Bill Gates did not invent the personal computer, nor the Internet.
Please post a link, possibly one from Microsoft.com that explains what .net is. I failed to find it a few months ago. All i found was buzz and stuff you could buy. Some link that is useful for a developer beyond "XML and VB and can do everything and more productive. "
hmm, might be a good one for ask slashdot.
Peter Wright is a software consultant and .Net titles for Apress slated
the author of numerous books on Visual
Basic programming. He is currently
working on two
for release later this year.
Hmm. That explains a lot.
To answer your questions:
.NET though); and
1) Larry Wall, who gave a ringing endorsement of Visual Perl a few years ago (that was before
2) Yes! It's called Visual J#.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
From the summary (yes, it was written by Michael, not the submitters): Numerous readers pointed to several stories about a buffer overflow problem in Visual Studio .NET which was supposed to be immune to buffer overflows - but it had passed Microsoft's stringent new security audit.
Where to begin with this mess of falsehoods?
On a side note, since this only affects unmanaged code, it's not really related to the .NET/CLR stuff.
I think the consolidation of information is an option, not a requirement. If I can have multiple accounts, with different information, then I would have no problem with Passport-like functionality. I think most security problems, perhaps an overwhelming majority, stem from users. There are many people out there now who use the same password for all their accounts, and never change it. Challenge Microsoft's plan, but let's not be totally paranoid- Any network, particularly the internet, is insecure. Just weigh the tradeoffs.
I'm pretty surprised by the exuberant tone of the Salon article. Salon -- for the most part -- usually maintains at least a modicum of scepticism in their technology articles. But this article? Cripes.
:)
.NET technologies. It's not .NET or -- nothing. At least, I don't think it is. I think .NET will mesh with current technologies and we'll see hybridity for a long time to come. Same with film, same with books.
It sounds like a Jon Katz essay!
Just kidding.
(Well, not really.)
I'm not sure how to take such exuberance. My first question after the reading the article was: is this guy on the Microsoft payroll?
And my second question was: just what, exactly, brought upon this sudden exuberance? A Microsoft PR push, perhaps? (I mean, the idea of web services -- while interesting -- still remains, I think, somewhat problematic -- at least in terms of security.)
The problem with these sorts of articles -- and I've seen similar articles about the e-book replacing the book, digital cameras replace film cameras -- is that the new technology (.NET, digital cameras, e-books) are always presented as if the choice is one or the other.
I'll grant that digital cameras -- especially the high end cameras -- are cool. But they don't do anything (yet) that film cameras can. (And, no, I'm not interested in a film versus digital debate -- I'm a darkroom guy -- always will be -- so I'll never concede that digital *replaces* film.)
Same with
I'm curious, though, why people think it *has* to be an exclusive thing when it comes to new technologies. Digital cameras *must* defeat film cameras. Ergo film is dead.
E-books *must* replace regular books. Ergo, I'm a pretentious jerk who thinks that the books will stay around. (And does it never dawn on anyone -- at least with the e-book versus book debate -- that there actually exists some people -- myself among them -- who *like* books because they're books? I mean, yeah, it sounds weird: but I like book-as-object. Not to be pretentious with. But just to hold, touch, smell. It's one of those subtle little joys I derive from life: a physical book. The actual thing. Nothing digital about it.)
Ditto with film: yeah digital stuff is interesting. But it's not yet gone anywhere that film cameras and darkroom work hasn't already gone. And no, instant picture previews on LCD viewscreens do not count. There are those of us who actually *like* the pace of a wet darkroom, like the tactile feel of printmaking and wet chemicals and attention to detail that wet darkroom work requires. But this is way, way off-topic...)
But this is just a viewpoint that I've been noticing lately: it's *got* to be the new stuff because we must kill off the "old" stuff. We must prove that film is indeed dead.
That books are indeed dead.
That anything non-.NET related is instantly "legacy" technology and therefore useless.
Is there no middle ground? No possibility of a hybrid? (Digital cameras for some studio work, sure, but -- cripes -- can anyone really beat a beautifully shot 4 X 5 negative carefully developed and printed? When it's done right, it's exquisite.)
And -- my last point -- the people hankering for the new technology are often quite venomous when it comes to trying to reconcile the old with the new. Those of us still in love with the old stuff, yeah, maybe we're behind the times, and old-farts, and pathetic people who can't appreciate the new stuff coming down the pike -- but geez. Somtimes it's nice to take a break from the "latest and greatest" and go back to the "old stuff"
Somtimes it just clears the head a bit.
First, let's get the myth out of the way. .Net is not a product. It's a marketing term,
This is probably the most telling statment of the whole article. .Net is not about a new way of using computers, cool technology, security or any of the other things Microsoft is spouting. .Net is a buzz word driven marketing push and nothing else. It is not going to solve any problems that have not already been solved, introduce any new technology or bring world peace. Microsoft is going to spend the next several years spending billions of dollars to bring us .Net Notepad, .Net Solitaire and the new and improved .Net Virus.
I capped my karma a few days ago, so feel free to moderate me down, just don't expect me to care.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
I agree that we still need people, but never having to deal with a rude customer service person, distracted airline reservations agent or disinterested store clerk again is a future I can get behind.
At Kroger in Atlanta you can check yourself out with a mostly automated system (you still need a guy to manage every four units to check IDs and whatnot) that allows you to check out without having to deal with lines or bored cashiers.
Let's face it -- there are some things machines do better than people and ringing up groceries is only one of them (booking most airline tickets is another). The only advantage a cashier has over a machine is the ability to smile and ask how my day is, and if he/she isn't going to bother to do that, I'll take a machine any day.
You can decide not to use it: /GS is the compiler switch flag to turn it on. When I check the C++ project I worked on the last couple of days in VC++.NET, it sets the flag ON by default. (which is ok by me, it saved my already yesterday when it reported the stackframe was corrupted after a bad memset() ;))
Switching it OFF will turn off the stackguard functionality and you can build your code without it, but have to check buffer overflows yourself.
So it's perhaps wise to switch it ON in debug builds plus release builds that are tested, and switch it OFF in release builds that are deployed to customers.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Wow! 50% improvement in programmer productivity.
Fine print:
... at shops like Microsoft where the entire design cycle consists of coding. In more mature shops where requirements analysis, specification, design, and QA take up 80-90% of the design cycle things may be a bit different.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The article points out that VS.NET includes the _ability_ to write unmanaged C++ code.
This is, in itself, not a security issue. The security issue is that anyone could potentially write a program that has buffer overflow problems.
And they likely left unsafe C++ ability in VS.NET so they retained backward compatibility with the bazillions of C++ programs already written.
This is just a political hack trying to take a swipe at MS after losing a security review contract.
The WSJ and MSNBC are notriously against Microsoft and this article is right in line with their more baseless attacks.
I'm not a fan of MS business practices and hope something drastic happens in the DOJ lawsuit, but this has nothing to do with VS.NET, which I think is an incredible development tool for _ALL_ of us, not just MS developers.
that location better be under control of an independend body!
And what independent body would be better than you. Nobody else in the world has a better reason to keep your personal information a secret than you. Zimran Ahmed of winterspeak.com has the best solution. Instead of letting Microsoft keep my name , address, phone number and credit card number, how about I get a keyboard macro program like Perfect keyboard or RoboType and write a couple of clever macros to fill in spaces for me. Now I have the same functionality, but I only have to worry about someone breaking into my house, which has never happened, and I don't have to worry about someone breaking into Microsofts software, which happens daily.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
Remember when Salon used to be pro-open source? Anyway, I looked through their archives, and over the last year, pro-open source / anti-MS articles have all but disappeared.
.Net!
.Net will free us from that. .Net is about your data and your applications running anywhere, on any device, at any time. .Net is about freedom to share information, freedom to get at and manipulate data in the ways that you want to manipulate it. .Net is the future."
Anyway, here are some choice quotes from the article, which reads like Bill Gates himself wrote it:
"All hail
Microsoft's new software development tools are more than just nifty -- they are a great boon to humanity."
"In 1454, Johann Gutenberg changed the world forever when the first of his Bibles rolled off the world's first printing press. Three centuries later, in 1791, Charles Babbage was born. Best known for his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, his work is widely acknowledged as providing the earliest steppingstones from which the modern computer would emerge. Again, the world would never be the same."
"William Henry Gates arrived on the planet in 1951. Whether you love him or detest him with every ounce of your moral fiber, there is no denying the contribution Bill has made to this earth. Without Microsoft, the PC we have today would be a very different beast. Without Microsoft, ".Net" would be just another domain name suffix."
"Right now, the Web is no more than a mirror image of the bad old mainframe days with dumb clients speaking to central all-powerful servers.
".Net and the fundamental concepts surrounding it are a major step forward for software development as a whole, and a stunning leap forward for realizing the true potential of the Internet as a means of communicating and sharing information."
"Now that it's finally available, Visual Studio.Net will usher in a new age of connectivity and usability the likes of which has only previously been imagined by science fiction authors. Every facet of our lives will be connected, but not from the point of view of increasing the pain we feel as slaves to our machines. The results of Visual Studio.Net's deployment will be an increased level of freedom, with the machines finally realizing their true potential as information manipulators and slaves to humanity."
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
Microsoft started a huge marketing push on Wednesday, including the occasional Doubleclick ad running on Slashdot.
This simply won't do. We must have Campaign Finance Reform for the IT industry. Because Slashdot is receiving money from MS, they must be corrupt. Therefore, it should be illegal for MS to place ads 60 days before the release of a new product.
In all seriousness, if you only read Slashdot you might think that the DMCA is the only threat to free speech. Peal yourself away from the CRT a little bit and wake up to what a bunch of jerks we have in congress. It's like the constitution just fell of a high-wire, and fell through the first net. Now if the president signs this bill it will fall through the 2nd net, and if the Supreme Court doesn't wack it our freedom will fall into the abyss. You would never know that if you just read Slashdot.
This post paid for by the Radical National Committee to Criticize Politicians less than 60 days before an election.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
My personal pantheon (in this order) 1. Guy who invented Novacaine for dental procedures 2. Thomas Crapper -- inventor of indoor plumbing 3. Norman Borlaug -- developer of high-yield cereal grains (he is supported on foundation money, the robber barons (i.e. Gates's) of last century, so his stuff is "Open Source") 4. Chester Carlson -- inventor of Xerox photocopy process (I love my laser printer -- THAT is the best thing since Guttenberg)
Microsoft has a mixed record on PR firms. Sometimes they're very good, sometimes they make stupid but probably innocent mistakes, and sometimes they seem to be trolling.
A classic example of the latter was a product launch ad with very impressive music. Impressive funeral music for the damned. I remember recognizing the piece and thinking that it was an odd choice for a product launch... and a few days later it was yanked and the PR firm fired.
So I keep going around in circles on this - was it entirely written by an overzealous VB hack? Or did he flesh out an article outlined by a PR firm? The piece does not sound like something a tech author would write - it strikes the same false note.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I think the average Salon reader is not the kind of reader who takes things at face value. I think the editors know it too. Look at it as a subtle editorial troll, designed to provoke an outraged response. Which it has.
.Net titles for Apress slated for release later this year.
.Net, the Internet will be transformed from a complex, un-standardized mishmash of awkward static views of data to a dynamic pool of data connected by a true web of Web services all working together to make your life easier.
.NET, however. It seems that the people most excited about it are the VB types. .NET will probably end up displacing VB, not Java. Personally, I think James Gosling has a pretty good take on Java vs. .NET. After all, he invented both. :)
I don't think you can discount it so easily:
About the writer
Peter Wright is a software consultant and the author of numerous books on Visual Basic programming. He is currently working on two
Have you read some of these quotes?
Bill Gates has already changed the face of the world as we know it, but his magnum opus has yet to be fully appreciated. On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled Bill's greater masterpiece -- in the guise of the Visual Studio.Net development tools suite.
It would be easy to dismiss this as just another Microsoft product launch, just another example of the Redmond behemoth rolling ever onward in its quest to gain enough funds to brand a continent. Don't. Visual Studio.Net will have as profound an effect on the way that we live our lives as the labors of love Babbage and Gutenberg gave us. To dismiss Visual Studio.Net and the technology it encompasses is to go back in time and dismiss Henry Ford's automobile as a passing fad.
[several pages of excited babbling deleted]
As developers move to embrace
.Net marks the dawn of the third age of computing -- embrace it.
It reminded me of Will Ferrell's Actor's Studio sketch as well. ".Net is such a masterpiece that there are no words to describe it- so I will make one up: Scrumtrilescent."
I guess if you've been stuck with Visual Basic for the past several years, an MS ripoff of Java would look pretty interesting. I doubt that Java programmers are going to flock to
my god, thank-god you were never a slave or an opressed person at any time in history. you would just go around saying "well thats the way it is, lets just accept it"
bad attitude.
Bullshit. That's not what I'm saying at all - I'm saying that reality must be accepted, and in order to really change things, we need to deal with the fact that Microsoft is a major industry player who won't simply be swept aside. Technologies that they introduce will be deployed, no matter how much you and I know that they involve "Vendor lock-in" and "Embrace and Extend". Remember Spartacus? That's what happens when you try to do battle with an opponent with a superior position (read: marketshare, not technology) on thier terms - you run head long into being crucified.
Not me. I'd rather try to change the nature of the beast, and therefore change the nature of the struggle to terms I can actually deal with.
You can put your tin-foil hat back on now, BTW.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
...was easily the most nauseating thing I've read since I gave up visiting osOpinion. It's a shame it didn't have a huge banner at the top of the proclaiming it for what it was: a thinly veiled Microsoft PR piece.
Of course, Salon doesn't care since all they seem to be interested in lately is page hits so their advertising revenues increase. I only wish that they'd restricted this .Net article to their premium content subscribers.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I thought about this, but two things make it hard for me to dismiss it as just a troll:
I want to dismiss it as a troll. If there was any type of framing by the usual staff, or it was within a week of April 1st I wouldn't give it a second thought.
But now I keep coming back to the fact that the Microsoft PR machine can link to this seemingly glowing comment in "Linux friendly" Salon. We may know it's totally out of character, but a PHB concerned about Hailstorm or
That makes me wonder if I've been playing the fool on other stories. Salon has been valuable precisely because the articles often surprise me, but it's precisely because I'm not knowledgeable about those topics that I'll mistake a 'wink, wink, nudge, nudge' troll for a serious piece.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I find this interesting in light of the easy ride advertisers and sister companies get:
Yesterday Taco described Sourceforge's licence change as "not a big deal."
I find it hard to tell if the editors do this of their own volition, or under team orders.
Nonetheless, if Microsoft are going to be doing adverts on slashdot, are slashdot going to hold off on Microsoft. And if they do, then what stories are they going to run? A good 10% of the stories and 50% of the regular users (90% of the trolls
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
.NET was released well before that. you could download it off of MSDN for at least a month (release version). Yesterday was just the official launch.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Not only are they not owned by MS, but if you ever read them, you'll notice that 90% of their tech articles are as rabidly anti-Microsoft as anything you'd find here in /.
Frank Herbert had an interesting point in his books involving the Gowachin. Under their system, judges could be biased but not prejudiced. The former meant they would give one side every possible benefit of the doubt, and then some, but could still rule against them. The latter meant they would never rule against one side.
.Net does, nobody should mind the occasional piece pointing out the expected benefits. The piece can even gush a bit.
.Net years from now, but even that concession was meet with a lot of hostility by a lot of developers.
.Net model has some serious and fundamental security flaws that will be hard to close. and rushing it towards production just makes it harder to fix these problems.
.net did was wrong, none of the critics have valid points, hell there aren't really any serious critics at all!
I, and I suspect most other people, have the same attitude about journalism. We don't mind that there's a slant, but we want there to be at least an attempt at balance.
Since there's a lot of uncertainty over exactly what
But this article made it sound like the Gnome team was ecstatic to follow Bill's brilliant lead. In fact, one key guy said that it will have to work with
This article made it sound like Microsoft had a few minor problems with security in the past, but the have bright people working on the problem and it's all behind us now. In fact, many of us believe that the
Finally he assured everyone that there would be plenty of authentication services other than Passport, despite the fact that this is one area that Microsoft is holding close to its chest and it's far from certain that the alternate authentication services will be useful.
Overall, this piece wasn't biased, it was flat-out prejudiced. Nothing
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
First off, we could not drink anymore as popular definition defines someone who drinks alone as an alcoholic.
William Shatner's character (Bill Shatner) in Free Enterprise said something just like this! This is the ultimate movie that proves Captain Kirk is *not* a drunk. :)
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Why am I reminded of Monty Python and the Holy Grail... "Help help! I'm being oppressed!"
Since what you wrote would be bordering on getting you fired in many C++ jobs, here is a listing that shows what you were trying to do.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
string buffer;
cout << "enter string ->";
getline(cin, buffer);
cout << "Your text \"" << buffer << "\" did not cause a buffer overflow." << endl;
return 0;
}
That's now overflow-safe, and missing the newbie mistakes.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I don't think sun is laying or hiding things from us; 1. It's not an 'unsafe' mode like in the CLR, it apears to be just a wrapper around some JNI calls. It's not the same thing.
2. It may be undocumented but you can do the exact same thing with the documented java.nio.ByteBuffer
3. It's not that 'unsafe' you can only access bytes in memory you have allocated yourself
Rep. John Conyers questions Ashcroft's integrity in handling Microsoft case - guess who got money from Microsoft?
On a personal note, I'd like to take a moment to bitch about the consultant that told our engineering team yesterday that we'd be switching from good 'ol reliable SMTP Unix mail servers (last outage: well, actually I don't think there has been one...) to Exchange (home of the global address list shut-down-your-worldwide-business-for-a-week bug, remember?) and virus-a-minute Outlook "for reasons of security". Amazingly, this pronouncement was completed with a straight face.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
When you go to the activestate site and look under more betas you will find perl for asp.net, .net version of perl.
.NET as it does outside
.NET applications using .NET components
.NET components
.NET components written in Perl
.NET component with Perl "
l NE T/)
.NET compiler is written using CPython. It compiles Python source code, and uses the .NET Reflection::Emit library to generate a .NET assembly."
.NET is the performance of both the compiler and the runtime. The speed of the runtime must be the more critical issue, as the fastest compiler in the world would not be used if the generated code is too slow to be useful."
h on _whitepaper.doc) sorry word-doc.
which seems to be a
they say on the web-site:
"PerlNET provides the following functionality:
Perl code runs at the same speed within
All extension modules, including the ones using XS code, are supported
PerlNET code is completely compatible with the standard Perl language, including the string form of eval and the runtime use of require
Features
Create
Wrap existing Perl modules into
Create new
Extend existing
(http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/Per
It seems that they really have done it !
python.net seems to be in a pre-alpha stage, as they say here:
"The Python for
and further:
"Probably the biggest single issue with Python for
(http://www.activestate.com/Initiatives/NET/Pyt
But it is only a matter of time that a python.net will exist.
I reported the Salon piece because I didn't notice it linked with all of these others. It REALLY should be on it's own story - I am simply amazed Salon let this through.
.Net when it comes it's current overly marketed and under explained status.
.Net is great, fine. ArsTechnica did a great job of explaining it's strengths, I thought. This is nothing but fluff, and poorly written fluff as well.
/. for absent mindly submitting already posted news :( )
This isn't an anti-MS thing. That piece is some of the worst writing I've seen on a professional site in years, if not ever, on the web. It overly glorifies hyped up marketing concepts without going into any real details. It makes outlandshish claims about bringing about nirvana, a Star Trekkian society, and the "third age of computing".
Microsoft should be beggin Salon to pull this piece - it's horrible advertising. Comparing Bill Gates to Henry Ford is not exactly going to help their current PR angle. Plus, the over-glorification only reinforces common myths about
I urge everyone to write Salon and ask them to do a better job editing. If someone is going to write a piece explaining why
inky
(apologies to
There was a presentation by the author of "XML and ASP.NET".
He started by indicating the Microsoft "gets it" as regards unhappiness WRT its philosophy of "embrace and extend". He even showed a page with a list of standards with which Microsoft's new XML technology is compliant.
He then, without blush, went on to describe Microsoft extensions that make the XML technology more "usable".
In his discussion of C#, he pitched the language, not as a Java-killer, but rather as a compromise language easy enough for VB know-nothings (not his phrase, but the import of his language) and with the features beloved by C++ bigots. (Pointers!)
He described how easy it is to put tags in generated HTML (CSS, anyone?) before going on to describe Microsoft's newest idea in XML technology, the iterator. Of course, the methods available from various iterators over various classes are different, so learning how one works does not guarantee understanding of how all works.
I know a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind, but this boggles.
Anyway, a number of things came to me from the talk:
1. There are a lot of VB programmers out there. They're not terribly smart, and Microsoft wants to protect their rice bowl.
2. Microsoft is making it very easy for people to generate really crappy HTML from XML.
3. There are a lot of great ideas in the Java world that Microsoft is glomming onto.
The author is quite a nice guy, and bore well my comments about billg as Satan.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
About the writer
Peter Wright is a software consultant and the author of numerous books on Visual Basic programming. He is currently working on two .Net titles for Apress slated for release later this year.
This is not a troll, nor is it MS hype. It is the truth - .Net is going to be big, if soley for the one reason that MS is behind it. That fact alone is going to push THOUSANDS of projects around it, both from inside MS and also outside, as developers ramp up into all the nifty things Visual Studio .Net is capable of.
Sure, it's beed done before. Sure, it's alot like java. The difference is that the worl's biggest software monopoly is behind it. You think if Joe hacker had come up with this idea of an IL and common runtime and submitted it to the ECMA, it'd be this big a deal? No, but the fact that the operating system that sits on 90% of the worlds desktops is going to be running this stuff makes it one.
.Net isn't something to be taken lightly, nor is it something to be bashed. Miguel has the right idea, .Net can be AWESOME for linux if a capable Open Source development environment and runtime can be created. Think about it - no more wine. Programs compiled for windows instantly run on Linux. GTK and QT programs run on Linux. Instant interoperability. It will be all the things Java promised to be, but never delivered on. Mainly because it's backed by this goliath, MS. Sure, Sun had their chance, but they ruined it. Not to mention that .Net GUi programs will run light-years faster than Java ones, mainly because the System.Window.Forms classes will have low-level access to the MS api's, as will their GTK counterparts.
Seriously, Don't be so quick to bash it. This thing is going to have huge implications for everyone.
Developers can treat Passport as an object in their code and instantly make use of a thoroughly tested and validated service that works just fine with 160 million user accounts around the globe. Such reuse not only speeds deployment of applications but also increases their reliability after delivery.
Only a guy who makes his living selling Microsoft manuals would have the chutzpah to say that in public. May I have some of what he is smoking?
sulli
RTFJ.
Impressive funeral music for the damned. Somebody had a wicked sense of humor. Thanks.
The Microsoft emblem. Doesn't the trailing edge look like it's been out in the elements too long. Shattered. (Well it is Windows)
"Microsoft servers for small business let you connect with customers in ways you never have before." Somehow that sounds omnious.
My guess is that he has to say something, has nothing to say, and starts blithering.
it's time to accept Microsoft as an industry leader. You just have to think of them in the same way that you do a clueless PHB.
A clueless PHB is an industry leader. Buggy whip industry maybe?
I do think of Microsoft in the same way that I do a clueless PHB. As something I would be better off without.
there are some things machines do better than people and ringing up groceries is only one of them
We have that in Dallas, too. It has its uses, but if I have a lot of produce to weigh, or weird-shaped items to bag, I'll take a human cashier. Not only do they bag your stuff for you, they don't ask you to "PLACE THE ITEM BACK IN THE BAG" every 30 frickin' seconds.
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
I'm sorry. They are DIFFERENT from those around them. They are as different as John Dillinger- and have had roughly the same sort of success.