Office users - the ones I work with and don't know their asses from a hole in the ground - don't *want* Windows. They just want to read their email and surf the Web. They get mad when it breaks, but they could personally care less. They use Windows because it's what tech support will help them with and because they need to read Word docs. If the directive came from on high that we'd migrate to KDE by the end of third quarter, no one would stand up and vigorously fight the loss of his beloved Windows.
Okay, it may crash quite frequently, but let's face it; it's intuitive, and well-designed aesthetically.
Well, um, yes and no. See, if you use the same thing for long enough, your brain adapts to its features, bugs, and quirks, be it software, a car, or a favorite pen. After a month of using a particular GUI, it becomes intuitive to you since you've changed your thought process to better use it. As for aesthetics, try to imagine how many users use the default Windows theme and compare that number with the ones who customize.
Put someone in front of KDE or Ximian and force them to use only it for a month. They'll be as proficient with it as they are currently with Windows. And when they see the power and the non-crash feature, they'll never want to use Windows again.
Oh, and releasing the newest games for GNU/Linux couldn't hurt either.
It was appearing to sleep _way_ too long though. Thread.sleep(0,1) (one nanosecond) would sleep the same as Thread.sleep(10) (10 milliseconds). I began to think of why this might be.. and then it hit me.. it's the context switching.
Actually, no, it's simply that no currently available VM really supports time precision down to the nanosecond. Hardly surprising when you consider that the hardware clock in most widely available machines can't count that small. See Doug Lea's Concurrent Programming in Java for more, and you might check out the real-time Java project at java.sun.com.
I've done sites with perl, JSP and servlets. Experience has taught me that you're usually better served using what you're most comfortable with -- it's easier to learn new tricks with an old language. Admittedly, it is less fun, but when the boss is yellin', you need to get it out fast.
The difference, I think, is mostly that these options are reflections of certain approaches to programming. Whichever approach you feel most comfortable in, that winds up being what you use the most. Hardcore *nix will like Perl because it reminds them of long summer nights with sh and awk. Computer scientists will like Java since it's "clean" and "pretty" and "portable" <snicker>.
Use what's best for the job and leave the flamewars for Happy Hour.
Apparently they're working their collective asses off on it. Supposed to be something special. See here.
I hope they get it done soon; I actually used KDE the other day and found it a well-designed usable environment! Horrors! <using non-FSF software shake>:)
[snip]...when someone takes the Napster trademark and makes it available when the person has not received permission to do so, Napster Inc. cries foul.
The law specifies a difference between copyright and trademark in that vast propagation of the former does not diminish its value to the creator while it *does* diminish the value of a trademark.
Napster freely distributes material...[snip]...Napster is essentially saying, "We can steal your stuff but you can't steal ours."
*BZZT* Wrong, thanks for playing. Napster ITSELF, the legal entity "Napster Inc." is not "stealing" or "sharing" anything -- they are enabling a more efficient way of sharing mp3 files among their users. If those users decide to make available copyrighted mp3s that are not freely distributable, then the *users* are the ones in trouble, not Napster. (Yes, the judge said no, but the higher courts will overturn this.) They have a legal obligation to protect their own trademarks and respect the copyrights of the record industry -- insofar as they are not responsible for their users' behavior. If Napster finds out that users are trading copyrighted mp3s without satisfactory evidence that the users are entitled to download said mp3s, *then* Napster must shut down the users immediately.
Sorry for the legalese, but that's the way this situation has to work.
Whos to say we wont end up a society like Star Trek, where if they find out you've been geneticly engineered you're court martialled.
Well, if you had been overrun by a bunch of g-e supermen who basically caused untold death, destruction, and other nasty things because of their unintentionally enhanced ambition, you might take an unkind eye to it as well.:)
I'm glad they addressed this in DS9, BTW. It's probably worth emphasizing that these kinds of unknown results can come about when some clueless idiot decides to play with DNA.
And how is this different from a C binary (exe) or a Java class (class). The both have full access to the OS don't they? Yes they do. I can write a java program to delete *.mp3 just as easily as I can write a COM object to do the same thing. Yeesh.
It isn't, but it bugs me that we have one more method of passing un-inspectable trojans around. I guess it's not a criticism of C# in particular. Cheerfully withdrawn.
> When do I absolutely *HAVE* to use pointers? Device drivers. Malloc replacements. C interfaces.
Let me be more specific. When would you write those three, or anything requiring low-level twiddling, in a language like C# or Java? Wouldn't you use C++, C or even assembly for that?
Use the GC most of the time, and pointers only when you have to.
This is the situation I have a hard time imagining. When do I absolutely *HAVE* to use pointers? Performance isn't a good reason, since they apparently want to compile this to native. But then I don't understand how they implement their gc. Oh well. More info needed to condemn intelligently, I suppose:)
Also, you might note that you have to mark the method that pointers are used in as "unsafe", which allows you to start messing with them.
True, but that still begs the question of exactly what happens in there. How are these methods special? How are the objects that use them memory-managed? It seems they're trying to walk a very tight piece of string here...
.. by having variables in C# automatically initialized by the environment? Since WHEN has this been a good feature to have? I'd rather have a specific error come up, with the opportunity to fix this problem rather than having the program try to correct it...
This is a Java feature. The VM does sensible things like set booleans to false, obj refs to null, ints/floats to 0, and so forth. It only does this for instance vars, however, and will complain if you try to use a local variable w/o initialization at compile time.
So yes, this is a good idea *IN THEORY*, but as usual, MS has (intentionally?) bungled the implementation.
the following is from a reasonably serious Java developer's point of view:
Obviously this is a Java ripoff. That does not make it bad; in fact, if a language copies the good ideas in Java, that makes the new language good. In my *really* quick glance through the white papers, the best thing they've added are the new things that C# interfaces can define, like events and variables. Java interfaces don't have assertions, and sometimes those are really nice to have.
Bad things:
Combining pointers/gc. Are they INSANE? One or the other! How does the gc know when a user-created pointer is out of scope? How does the user free a pointer? By using something like malloc() and free(), right? So who's managing what? Do I collect my own pointers, leave them alone, or trust the gc to ALWAYS pick them up? Remember, Java makes no guarantees about WHEN an object is gc'd or even on which gc pass. It might hang around for two or three runs before the memory is needed. So very bad, this. What's the point of a gc if you have pointers?
Everything is a COM object. Oh good, another language to spread viruses with! Just compile your C# program making heavy use of native calls (ANOTHER idiotic idea) and pointers, pass it around as a COM, and boom! No language designer is this stupid. It HAS to be malice on the part of MS.
You can of course forget about running this on Mac or Un*x. If it's in Visual Studio, they're not gonna give a damn about where else it runs as long as they own 95% of the systems it CAN run on.
Speaking of Java itself, wanna bet that Microsoft deep-sixes J++ and discontinues its VM now that it has this, "suggesting" that new developers move to C#?
<spit> Lousy bastards. Would love to have those interfaces in Java, though.:)
What is a browser, fundamentally? It's a mechanism for displaying formatted text, which is in a well-specified format. That is incredibly useful! Just like "man" or "info" displays man pages, a browser can display help information is a very general way. You'll note that both KDE and Gnome use their browser for their help systems.
If you define browser that way, you've expanded it to include anything that renders some kind of markup language. There's nothing special about writing your doc in HTML as opposed to TeX, XML, nroff, or pod. Any of these "open" formats serve your documentation purpose equally well.
What if I don't want to install doc or a doc reader? What if I'm configuring a telecommunications server that will run in a rack for its entire lifetime and the users will never even know they're using it? I don't want it slowed down by unnecessary "enhancements" to the OS. (Yes, I separate the OS from the HTML browser. Again, nothing special about HTML. If Linus suddenly decreed that a TeX formatter were now part of the Linux kernel, we would look at him quite strangely, yes?:) No one thought the browser should be part of the OS until Microsoft said so.)
No one is forcing the consumer to use IE, they're just making it slightly more convenient, and everpresent. If i don't want to use IE (assuming i would use windows for anything other than a few games), then I can just opt not to click on that little blue E.
Yes, but in addition to that convenience, you pay the price of source code combination into the core Windows API. HTML/HTTP rendering code right next to memory swap drivers (and in some cases, even in the same files -- see the DOJ report for a full breakdown from their experts). What this means is that the OS's bugs are now the browser's bugs AND VICE VERSA. Think about it -- how many of us have had Windows crash simply because IE choked on some Java applet? Any benefit to the customer is offset, and some might say trivial in comparison, to the lowered stability (and therefore usability) of the whole OS. Plus, it cuts down consumer choice of OS. I might not want a browser on my 98 box. Maybe I'm making dedicated game machines. Not that this is a necessarily "evil" (tm) thing, but reducing customer choice isn't usually construed as being for their benefit.
The point is that M$ followed valid business practices.
A small sample of a VERY long list:
offering Netscape to divide browser market -- illegal
threatening OEMs to keep them from getting bright ideas about non-Microsoft ways of doing things (Compaq, Gateway, etc.) -- anticompetitive
hijacking Java and simply *raping* their agreement with Sun (pardon my French)
My point is the judge found that Microsoft has a documented history of breaking the spirit and the letter of the law when it suited its purposes.
Time to stop complaining and just make something undeniably better. MS gets to stay intact, albeit smaller. The product that's the best wins...then we all win.
This is a pleasant fiction that is inscribed on the gravestones of hundreds of computer companies. How many great ideas in computing, and in almost any field, have never really caught on or exploited by savvy investors years down the line? People do not judge on merit alone, unfortuantely. (of course, having no universal standard of merit hurts too.)
Ah well, life sucks sometimes. Microsoft will no doubt experience this fact firsthand before long.
Although I've nothing against IDE's, I personally prefer a plain text-editor and the command-line compiler tools. I just wonder who else is like me and dislikes IDE's.:-)
We do Java where I work, and the tools of choice were Visual Cafe and Visual J++, in that order. We do servlets and JSP a lot, and J++ doesn't really support them, so ppl with it wound up cooking a lot of.bat files to automate their build process, launch Win32 apache, restart jrun, etc. Cafe supports servlets (by "supports" I mean runs natively in the visual debugger) but crashes so often that it's almost impossible to use. So my GNU/Linux-using friend and I set up emacs with the JDE on them and our productivity has surged. Now the rest of the developers are considering moving to Linux and emacs. (What a damn shame, no?:) Anyway, when I moved to GNU/Linux I realized that the problem was not that the IDE locked us in anyhow, nor that we couldn't program Java outside of it, but the instability of the software was keeping us from producing. If you know the language you're programming (which you can really only do by using the bare minimum tools), you can work through any IDE, I think. Once you do that, you get hooked on things like gdb, make, and emacs because they provide the most control over your development.
*BUT*, you cannot praise enough the visual debugging of a good IDE. Unless you like reading C core dumps or Java bytecode, debugging is made so much easier with breakpoints, stepping in/out/over, and tracking the values of variables. So I guess you start with the basics to get your feet wet and break out the most convenient IDE for your purposes when it's time to get into serious bug hunting.
Microsoft is so bloody arrogant, both to the DoJ and to its customers, because they think they're smarter than everyone else. And, in many ways, they are. It's amusing, in a painful way, to watch Microsoft make fools of the DoJ's experts at trial. Their contempt for the trial, the judge, the prosecuting attorneys -- these are not acts of reckless stupidity, though it may seem that way.
Gates, Ballmer, and the other members of the elite circle at Microsoft who make the big decisions.. reality check... ARE NOT STUPID. They know the market inside and out. They are master manipulators of people and of technology. Through any means necessary, they gained their present position of power. They're good at getting their way.
They fear nothing from anyone. They have enough money to conquer anyone and they're strong enough to drag a breakup plan through the mud for years.
It sucks to have to say this, especially here, but they got to where they are by being better (clever, ruthless, whatever was necessary) and by being survivors. The only way consumers can benefit is by the breaking of Microsoft's ego and spirit. Then they'll behave responsibly. As long as they have nothing to fear, they'll keep acting like *bleeep*. Did I miss anything?:)
What a lot of people here may not know/realize is that we have a very, very good reason (those of us with DCs, anyway) to come out in strong support of bleemcast. Sony sued bleem!, over and over again, trying to bankrupt them, because they were losing control of their media. So they tried to stop bleem!'s release on the grounds that the programmer had reverse engineered it and in doing so had violated a slew of Sony patents and copyrights.
Sound familiar to anyone? How about Jon Johansen? The bleem! case is VERY applicable to a lot of us because bleem! WON their case against Sony. That case may come up as a precedent in the inevitable DVD lawsuits. In fact, I'm surprised the EFF lawyers didn't mention it when DeCSS was yanked.
In any case, even though bleem! is proprietary software (sorry:), we should support it and back it up with money. The company has shown grit and stamina in fighting the good fight. I'm sure many of us would like to emulate (pun intended) their successes against the evil corporations. Put $30 behind bleem! or bleemcast. It contributes to a good company with our interests at heart.
Of course you can't stop spammers from sending to thousands of email addresses, but the service provider has the responsibility and the ability to control this.
My employer sells software that takes incoming email and sends it to wireless networks. Included in that are spamproofing techniques, such as banning everything from an IP, a domain, etc. We also can allow specified IPs/domains to send as much as they want, exempt from spam checking.
Plug aside, you need to call your service providers and insist that they fix this. It is *THEIR* problem. If they refuse to do anything about it, switch.
...I don't see why a software company needs to dominate nano-technology, supercomputers, or genetic research to be rake in cash from an operating system used in most personal computers in the world.
Simple. Because these new technologies will eventually take the place of Microsoft's bread and butter, Windows. Do you think we'll be using PCs in their current form forever? Already the changes are coming -- PDAs that can surf the web, WAP over wireless handsets, set-top boxes, network computers, etc. Do you doubt that these things will some not-so-far-off day dominate our technical lives the way the PC does today?
Of COURSE Microsoft wants to dominate all these new frontiers. They know damn well the PC won't be around forever. They want to be the power they are today in 20 years. They will do that by trying to ensure that those technologies develop on their terms. They will accomplish this by squishing, attacking, or purchasing competing technologies like Java and Netscape.
In a nutshell, I don't think Unix-like systems are disappearing anytime soon.
The open source Unixes (Linux, *BSD, etc.) are the least likely to disappear. Because so many hands are involved in creating these systems, the inner knowledge of how they work is disseminated very quickly. And since the target audience (power users and programmers) are the same people *writing* those systems right now, there's sort of a feedback loop building. The more I learn about Linux, the more I can do with it, and the less I want to use something else. Accordingly, the more I know about Linux, the easier I can hack it into whatever I want it to be. So the skills base in Unix is strong enough to ensure that it will stick around in one form or another. It will certainly evolve, just as Linux is nothing near the first AT&T release of Unix, but the basic concepts are still there.
Speaking of basic concepts -- there's something about good ideas, especially in computers. They're never forgotten, but they're almost never appreciated when they appear. Xerox had no clue how revolutionary the laser printer, the GUI, and Ethernet were. Atari, when it had a chance to buy Apple in 1976, didn't realize that personal computers would become what they are today. Yet all these things came about anyway. Without getting into too much detail (since I'm not an OS guru) I will say that there are some good ideas in Unix and that it is a well-thought-out system. This is why it is still around after 30 years. Contrast Windows 3.1 or DOS 2.0. No one other than hobbyists is a 3.1 "power user" anymore, since all Windows machines are 9* or NT. In five years, NT skills will probably be forgotten since W2K will be the standard Windows then.
Unix will certainly change, but it ain't going nowhere.
To expect a company that has spent 20 odd years in fierce competition to suddenly drop all that and "get" the idea of giving stuff away is asking too much. It'll be done in steps, and we should support and offer useful criticism rather than just dismissal.
Progress? HAH! Try devolution.
Anybody else remember the good old days when Sun was an arrogant upstart run by former Berkeley hackers? Their big selling point back then was them giving away -- GIVING -- source code for all kinds of neat things, like NFS. They were one of the first companies to make a living off of free-as-in-beer software that also came with source code. And they were terrific innovators in hardware. SPARC processors, anyone?
Sun has lost touch with its roots. It is jealously guarding Java, somehow believing that it can maintain control of the language while simultaneously making it a more appealing choice than, say, Windows. Sun would be Microsoft IN AN INSTANT if they had the chance. We do well to remember that.
It seems to me that we nerds have religious attachments to whatever our toy-of-choice is. That's why flame wars and public arguments erupt. One of the problems in developer communication comes from the formation of an open source process: since anyone can come in at any time, different philosophies of approaching the same problem are constantly introduced. The positive effect of this is sometimes overweighed by the inevitable "that's a stupid way to do that. Everybody with half a brain (read: everyone who thinks like I do) knows that the best way to do that is x.")
Since programming is usually such a solitary exercise, I wonder if we get too used to working in our own worlds and have a hard time learning to operate in someone else's. What some of us forget from time to time, though, is that for the process to work, we HAVE to compromise occasionally. <ASBESTOS> Wish someone had told the xemacs crowd that...</ASBESTOS>:)
I have had it up the socket with people complaining about nearly every story on/., saying that it "doesn't belong" or isn't "news for nerds" or it isn't "stuff that matters". Last I checked, no one had defined those in a universally acceptable way.
Some things don't matter to some people. Some things do. Sometimes I care about a/. posting. Sometimes I don't. If I don't find it interesting, I can skip it, and I can even configure my account to filter out stuff I'm not interested in. WE'RE ALL DIFFERENT (tm) HERE. Why do some feel the need to decrease the s/n ratio by complaining about stories they don't feel are relevant to *their* beliefs on what's important? Imagine if the same thing happened everytime someone spammed a usenet group... <ugh>
Frankly, it seems quite arrogant to me to run around telling people in a public forum that a story posted here isn't relevant to/.'s purpose (tm) and that we shouldn't be reading about it here. We WANT to read it here to see what kind of reactions/thoughts other people "like" us give it!
The/. authors post a wide variety of topics and stories to cater to the widest possible audience of nerds. They realize, unlike others, that "nerd" is near impossible to pigeonhole and that nerd interests run a wide gamut, some of which is campy horror movies. Get off their backs, people, they're doing their job. (And, I must say, doing it well; I've never missed an important update on something *I* care about from/.. Has anybody else?)
I think my point is clear. Sorry for the rambling. </RANT>
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Your average office user though WANTS Windows.
Office users - the ones I work with and don't know their asses from a hole in the ground - don't *want* Windows. They just want to read their email and surf the Web. They get mad when it breaks, but they could personally care less. They use Windows because it's what tech support will help them with and because they need to read Word docs. If the directive came from on high that we'd migrate to KDE by the end of third quarter, no one would stand up and vigorously fight the loss of his beloved Windows.
Okay, it may crash quite frequently, but let's face it; it's intuitive, and well-designed aesthetically.
Well, um, yes and no. See, if you use the same thing for long enough, your brain adapts to its features, bugs, and quirks, be it software, a car, or a favorite pen. After a month of using a particular GUI, it becomes intuitive to you since you've changed your thought process to better use it. As for aesthetics, try to imagine how many users use the default Windows theme and compare that number with the ones who customize.
Put someone in front of KDE or Ximian and force them to use only it for a month. They'll be as proficient with it as they are currently with Windows. And when they see the power and the non-crash feature, they'll never want to use Windows again.
Oh, and releasing the newest games for GNU/Linux couldn't hurt either.
It was appearing to sleep _way_ too long though. Thread.sleep(0,1) (one nanosecond) would sleep the same as Thread.sleep(10) (10 milliseconds). I began to think of why this might be.. and then it hit me.. it's the context switching.
Actually, no, it's simply that no currently available VM really supports time precision down to the nanosecond. Hardly surprising when you consider that the hardware clock in most widely available machines can't count that small. See Doug Lea's Concurrent Programming in Java for more, and you might check out the real-time Java project at java.sun.com.
I've done sites with perl, JSP and servlets. Experience has taught me that you're usually better served using what you're most comfortable with -- it's easier to learn new tricks with an old language. Admittedly, it is less fun, but when the boss is yellin', you need to get it out fast.
The difference, I think, is mostly that these options are reflections of certain approaches to programming. Whichever approach you feel most comfortable in, that winds up being what you use the most. Hardcore *nix will like Perl because it reminds them of long summer nights with sh and awk. Computer scientists will like Java since it's "clean" and "pretty" and "portable" <snicker>.
Use what's best for the job and leave the flamewars for Happy Hour.
Apparently they're working their collective asses off on it. Supposed to be something special. See here.
I hope they get it done soon; I actually used KDE the other day and found it a well-designed usable environment! Horrors! <using non-FSF software shake> :)
You are a god to us as well. Where can we paypal you $10 of beer money for your trouble? :)
how did THAT get past the lameness filter? :)
[snip]...when someone takes the Napster trademark and makes it available when the person has not received permission to do so, Napster Inc. cries foul.
The law specifies a difference between copyright and trademark in that vast propagation of the former does not diminish its value to the creator while it *does* diminish the value of a trademark.
Napster freely distributes material...[snip]...Napster is essentially saying, "We can steal your stuff but you can't steal ours."
*BZZT* Wrong, thanks for playing. Napster ITSELF, the legal entity "Napster Inc." is not "stealing" or "sharing" anything -- they are enabling a more efficient way of sharing mp3 files among their users. If those users decide to make available copyrighted mp3s that are not freely distributable, then the *users* are the ones in trouble, not Napster. (Yes, the judge said no, but the higher courts will overturn this.) They have a legal obligation to protect their own trademarks and respect the copyrights of the record industry -- insofar as they are not responsible for their users' behavior. If Napster finds out that users are trading copyrighted mp3s without satisfactory evidence that the users are entitled to download said mp3s, *then* Napster must shut down the users immediately.
Sorry for the legalese, but that's the way this situation has to work.
my g/f's saturn got rear-ended at 30 mph and *slightly* dislocated the bumper and trunk hood. Maybe $50. Gotta like a car that behaves that well.
Well, if you had been overrun by a bunch of g-e supermen who basically caused untold death, destruction, and other nasty things because of their unintentionally enhanced ambition, you might take an unkind eye to it as well. :)
I'm glad they addressed this in DS9, BTW. It's probably worth emphasizing that these kinds of unknown results can come about when some clueless idiot decides to play with DNA.
It isn't, but it bugs me that we have one more method of passing un-inspectable trojans around. I guess it's not a criticism of C# in particular. Cheerfully withdrawn.
Let me be more specific. When would you write those three, or anything requiring low-level twiddling, in a language like C# or Java? Wouldn't you use C++, C or even assembly for that?
This is the situation I have a hard time imagining. When do I absolutely *HAVE* to use pointers? Performance isn't a good reason, since they apparently want to compile this to native. But then I don't understand how they implement their gc. Oh well. More info needed to condemn intelligently, I suppose :)
Also, you might note that you have to mark the method that pointers are used in as "unsafe", which allows you to start messing with them.
True, but that still begs the question of exactly what happens in there. How are these methods special? How are the objects that use them memory-managed? It seems they're trying to walk a very tight piece of string here...
This is a Java feature. The VM does sensible things like set booleans to false, obj refs to null, ints/floats to 0, and so forth. It only does this for instance vars, however, and will complain if you try to use a local variable w/o initialization at compile time.
So yes, this is a good idea *IN THEORY*, but as usual, MS has (intentionally?) bungled the implementation.
the following is from a reasonably serious Java developer's point of view:
Obviously this is a Java ripoff. That does not make it bad; in fact, if a language copies the good ideas in Java, that makes the new language good. In my *really* quick glance through the white papers, the best thing they've added are the new things that C# interfaces can define, like events and variables. Java interfaces don't have assertions, and sometimes those are really nice to have.
Bad things:
Speaking of Java itself, wanna bet that Microsoft deep-sixes J++ and discontinues its VM now that it has this, "suggesting" that new developers move to C#?
<spit> Lousy bastards. Would love to have those interfaces in Java, though. :)
What is a browser, fundamentally? It's a mechanism for displaying formatted text, which is in a well-specified format. That is incredibly useful! Just like "man" or "info" displays man pages, a browser can display help information is a very general way. You'll note that both KDE and Gnome use their browser for their help systems.
If you define browser that way, you've expanded it to include anything that renders some kind of markup language. There's nothing special about writing your doc in HTML as opposed to TeX, XML, nroff, or pod. Any of these "open" formats serve your documentation purpose equally well.
What if I don't want to install doc or a doc reader? What if I'm configuring a telecommunications server that will run in a rack for its entire lifetime and the users will never even know they're using it? I don't want it slowed down by unnecessary "enhancements" to the OS. (Yes, I separate the OS from the HTML browser. Again, nothing special about HTML. If Linus suddenly decreed that a TeX formatter were now part of the Linux kernel, we would look at him quite strangely, yes? :) No one thought the browser should be part of the OS until Microsoft said so.)
No one is forcing the consumer to use IE, they're just making it slightly more convenient, and everpresent. If i don't want to use IE (assuming i would use windows for anything other than a few games), then I can just opt not to click on that little blue E.
Yes, but in addition to that convenience, you pay the price of source code combination into the core Windows API. HTML/HTTP rendering code right next to memory swap drivers (and in some cases, even in the same files -- see the DOJ report for a full breakdown from their experts). What this means is that the OS's bugs are now the browser's bugs AND VICE VERSA. Think about it -- how many of us have had Windows crash simply because IE choked on some Java applet? Any benefit to the customer is offset, and some might say trivial in comparison, to the lowered stability (and therefore usability) of the whole OS. Plus, it cuts down consumer choice of OS. I might not want a browser on my 98 box. Maybe I'm making dedicated game machines. Not that this is a necessarily "evil" (tm) thing, but reducing customer choice isn't usually construed as being for their benefit.
The point is that M$ followed valid business practices.
A small sample of a VERY long list:
My point is the judge found that Microsoft has a documented history of breaking the spirit and the letter of the law when it suited its purposes.
Time to stop complaining and just make something undeniably better. MS gets to stay intact, albeit smaller. The product that's the best wins...then we all win.
This is a pleasant fiction that is inscribed on the gravestones of hundreds of computer companies. How many great ideas in computing, and in almost any field, have never really caught on or exploited by savvy investors years down the line? People do not judge on merit alone, unfortuantely. (of course, having no universal standard of merit hurts too.)
Ah well, life sucks sometimes. Microsoft will no doubt experience this fact firsthand before long.
Although I've nothing against IDE's, I personally prefer a plain text-editor and the command-line compiler tools. I just wonder who else is like me and dislikes IDE's. :-)
We do Java where I work, and the tools of choice were Visual Cafe and Visual J++, in that order. We do servlets and JSP a lot, and J++ doesn't really support them, so ppl with it wound up cooking a lot of .bat files to automate their build process, launch Win32 apache, restart jrun, etc. Cafe supports servlets (by "supports" I mean runs natively in the visual debugger) but crashes so often that it's almost impossible to use. So my GNU/Linux-using friend and I set up emacs with the JDE on them and our productivity has surged. Now the rest of the developers are considering moving to Linux and emacs. (What a damn shame, no? :) Anyway, when I moved to GNU/Linux I realized that the problem was not that the IDE locked us in anyhow, nor that we couldn't program Java outside of it, but the instability of the software was keeping us from producing. If you know the language you're programming (which you can really only do by using the bare minimum tools), you can work through any IDE, I think. Once you do that, you get hooked on things like gdb, make, and emacs because they provide the most control over your development.
*BUT*, you cannot praise enough the visual debugging of a good IDE. Unless you like reading C core dumps or Java bytecode, debugging is made so much easier with breakpoints, stepping in/out/over, and tracking the values of variables. So I guess you start with the basics to get your feet wet and break out the most convenient IDE for your purposes when it's time to get into serious bug hunting.
No surprise there...
Microsoft is so bloody arrogant, both to the DoJ and to its customers, because they think they're smarter than everyone else. And, in many ways, they are. It's amusing, in a painful way, to watch Microsoft make fools of the DoJ's experts at trial. Their contempt for the trial, the judge, the prosecuting attorneys -- these are not acts of reckless stupidity, though it may seem that way.
Gates, Ballmer, and the other members of the elite circle at Microsoft who make the big decisions .. reality check... ARE NOT STUPID. They know the market inside and out. They are master manipulators of people and of technology. Through any means necessary, they gained their present position of power. They're good at getting their way.
They fear nothing from anyone. They have enough money to conquer anyone and they're strong enough to drag a breakup plan through the mud for years.
It sucks to have to say this, especially here, but they got to where they are by being better (clever, ruthless, whatever was necessary) and by being survivors. The only way consumers can benefit is by the breaking of Microsoft's ego and spirit. Then they'll behave responsibly. As long as they have nothing to fear, they'll keep acting like *bleeep*. Did I miss anything? :)
What a lot of people here may not know/realize is that we have a very, very good reason (those of us with DCs, anyway) to come out in strong support of bleemcast. Sony sued bleem!, over and over again, trying to bankrupt them, because they were losing control of their media. So they tried to stop bleem!'s release on the grounds that the programmer had reverse engineered it and in doing so had violated a slew of Sony patents and copyrights.
Sound familiar to anyone? How about Jon Johansen? The bleem! case is VERY applicable to a lot of us because bleem! WON their case against Sony. That case may come up as a precedent in the inevitable DVD lawsuits. In fact, I'm surprised the EFF lawyers didn't mention it when DeCSS was yanked.
In any case, even though bleem! is proprietary software (sorry :), we should support it and back it up with money. The company has shown grit and stamina in fighting the good fight. I'm sure many of us would like to emulate (pun intended) their successes against the evil corporations. Put $30 behind bleem! or bleemcast. It contributes to a good company with our interests at heart.
Of course you can't stop spammers from sending to thousands of email addresses, but the service provider has the responsibility and the ability to control this.
My employer sells software that takes incoming email and sends it to wireless networks. Included in that are spamproofing techniques, such as banning everything from an IP, a domain, etc. We also can allow specified IPs/domains to send as much as they want, exempt from spam checking.
Plug aside, you need to call your service providers and insist that they fix this. It is *THEIR* problem. If they refuse to do anything about it, switch.
Simple. Because these new technologies will eventually take the place of Microsoft's bread and butter, Windows. Do you think we'll be using PCs in their current form forever? Already the changes are coming -- PDAs that can surf the web, WAP over wireless handsets, set-top boxes, network computers, etc. Do you doubt that these things will some not-so-far-off day dominate our technical lives the way the PC does today?
Of COURSE Microsoft wants to dominate all these new frontiers. They know damn well the PC won't be around forever. They want to be the power they are today in 20 years. They will do that by trying to ensure that those technologies develop on their terms. They will accomplish this by squishing, attacking, or purchasing competing technologies like Java and Netscape.
In a nutshell, I don't think Unix-like systems are disappearing anytime soon.
The open source Unixes (Linux, *BSD, etc.) are the least likely to disappear. Because so many hands are involved in creating these systems, the inner knowledge of how they work is disseminated very quickly. And since the target audience (power users and programmers) are the same people *writing* those systems right now, there's sort of a feedback loop building. The more I learn about Linux, the more I can do with it, and the less I want to use something else. Accordingly, the more I know about Linux, the easier I can hack it into whatever I want it to be. So the skills base in Unix is strong enough to ensure that it will stick around in one form or another. It will certainly evolve, just as Linux is nothing near the first AT&T release of Unix, but the basic concepts are still there.
Speaking of basic concepts -- there's something about good ideas, especially in computers. They're never forgotten, but they're almost never appreciated when they appear. Xerox had no clue how revolutionary the laser printer, the GUI, and Ethernet were. Atari, when it had a chance to buy Apple in 1976, didn't realize that personal computers would become what they are today. Yet all these things came about anyway. Without getting into too much detail (since I'm not an OS guru) I will say that there are some good ideas in Unix and that it is a well-thought-out system. This is why it is still around after 30 years. Contrast Windows 3.1 or DOS 2.0. No one other than hobbyists is a 3.1 "power user" anymore, since all Windows machines are 9* or NT. In five years, NT skills will probably be forgotten since W2K will be the standard Windows then.
Unix will certainly change, but it ain't going nowhere.
To expect a company that has spent 20 odd years in fierce competition to suddenly drop all that and "get" the idea of giving stuff away is asking too much. It'll be done in steps, and we should support and offer useful criticism rather than just dismissal.
Progress? HAH! Try devolution.
Anybody else remember the good old days when Sun was an arrogant upstart run by former Berkeley hackers? Their big selling point back then was them giving away -- GIVING -- source code for all kinds of neat things, like NFS. They were one of the first companies to make a living off of free-as-in-beer software that also came with source code. And they were terrific innovators in hardware. SPARC processors, anyone?
Sun has lost touch with its roots. It is jealously guarding Java, somehow believing that it can maintain control of the language while simultaneously making it a more appealing choice than, say, Windows. Sun would be Microsoft IN AN INSTANT if they had the chance. We do well to remember that.
It seems to me that we nerds have religious attachments to whatever our toy-of-choice is. That's why flame wars and public arguments erupt. One of the problems in developer communication comes from the formation of an open source process: since anyone can come in at any time, different philosophies of approaching the same problem are constantly introduced. The positive effect of this is sometimes overweighed by the inevitable "that's a stupid way to do that. Everybody with half a brain (read: everyone who thinks like I do) knows that the best way to do that is x.")
Since programming is usually such a solitary exercise, I wonder if we get too used to working in our own worlds and have a hard time learning to operate in someone else's. What some of us forget from time to time, though, is that for the process to work, we HAVE to compromise occasionally. <ASBESTOS> Wish someone had told the xemacs crowd that...</ASBESTOS> :)
<RANT>
I have had it up the socket with people complaining about nearly every story on /., saying that it "doesn't belong" or isn't "news for nerds" or it isn't "stuff that matters". Last I checked, no one had defined those in a universally acceptable way.
Some things don't matter to some people. Some things do. Sometimes I care about a /. posting. Sometimes I don't. If I don't find it interesting, I can skip it, and I can even configure my account to filter out stuff I'm not interested in. WE'RE ALL DIFFERENT (tm) HERE. Why do some feel the need to decrease the s/n ratio by complaining about stories they don't feel are relevant to *their* beliefs on what's important? Imagine if the same thing happened everytime someone spammed a usenet group... <ugh>
Frankly, it seems quite arrogant to me to run around telling people in a public forum that a story posted here isn't relevant to /.'s purpose (tm) and that we shouldn't be reading about it here. We WANT to read it here to see what kind of reactions/thoughts other people "like" us give it!
The /. authors post a wide variety of topics and stories to cater to the widest possible audience of nerds. They realize, unlike others, that "nerd" is near impossible to pigeonhole and that nerd interests run a wide gamut, some of which is campy horror movies. Get off their backs, people, they're doing their job. (And, I must say, doing it well; I've never missed an important update on something *I* care about from /.. Has anybody else?)
I think my point is clear. Sorry for the rambling. </RANT>