size() doesn't use "lazy" or "overeager" evaluation, it's an accessor method.
Evaluation is deemed overeager or eager if the value is computed as you go along instead of just when it is needed. The fact that the C++ vector implementation increments and decrements a counter on pushes and pops instead of when size() is called is eager evaluation .
for(int i = 0; i < vector.size(); i++)
do_something(vector.element_at(i));
This code potentialy has a O(n^2) complexity if the size of vector is calculated dynamically each time size() is called versus
int size = vector.size();
for(int i = 0; i < size; i++)
do_something(vector.element_at(i));
which should have O(n) complexity with regards to traversing the vector. The interesting thing is that the previous version could potentially be O(n) depending on how the size() method is implemented in the vector class. But how many people actually know if the size() method in the vector class in whatever library they use (e.g. Java, C++, etc) actually use lazy evaluation or overeager evaluation? <br><br>
NOTE: Regardless of which language used. If a benchmark is run using vectors which dynamically calculates their size and contain a large amount of elements then the code in the first part will ALWAYS run slower than the code in the second part even if the comparison is Java and C/C++.
Besides becoming fodder for flamewars I can't see what good a novice writing "Hello World" and it's equivalents in a dozen or so languages and claiming that it is a benchmark is supposed to achieve.
More like text editor for people who have better things to do than learn cryptic editor commands, if I wanted to do that shit, I'd still be using edlin.
As a TA for a class at GA Tech there were many reasons I encouraged students not to use pico, chief of which were
Lack of syntax highlighting.
Inability to save sessions, meaning all your code is lost if your X session disconnects, someone reboots teh machine you are remotely connected to (which happens a lot in colleges) or if the machine crashes.
Extremely unscriptable. In emacs I can call up the man page for a function by pressing F4, automatically go to a specific line number by pressing F5, browse inheritance tree structures of C++ classes with Ebrowse, create my own syntax highlighting mode for C# code and more. Vi users have similar power.
There are more reasons I do not encourage novice programmers to use pico but these are the ones that stand out the most.
The smart tags that are included with Office XP, from what I've heard, are entirely different ones than the ones that everyone was up in arms about for IE 6.0. From what I've read, the smart tags in Office are basically Microsoft finally realizing that users don't want their word processor assuming that they need help writing a letter. When a user does something that would trigger an automatic response in prior versions of the software, a smart tag pops up so that people can choose to have help with what they're doing, instead of having to hit undo a bunch of times and scream at their computer that they don't want the poor formatting from the text they just copied and pasted off the web.
I don't know what product you used but it definitely was not Office XP. In Outlook I noticed SmartTags in the following scenarios
I type a date and I get a Smart Tag menu that prompts me to see if I want to schedule a meeting on that date or if I want to see my calendar for that date.
I type a name and I get a Smart Tag menu that prompts me to see if I want to send the person an email or add the person to my contact list.
I type an address I get a Smart Tag menu that prompts me to see if I want driving directions that links Expedia .
This is the same technology that would have been used in MSIE just that most of the Smart Tags would have been of the last type. Do you actually use IE 6.0 or Office XP or was this just a speculative opinion?
Microsoft is simply doing what most companies that own several online properties have been flamed for not doing earlier. Why should I have several logins to a service run by the same company? (The original poster failed to mention that you already need a login to the MSDN subscriber site, the only new thing is that the login now goes through passport).
I don't remember references to World Domination (TM) and Revelations when AOL required me to get an AIM user ID once they purchased Netscape. I also know lots of people who complain about the fact that ICQ and AIM don't interoperate even though they by the same company. Quite frankly, the less logins I need to maintain especially to websites owned by the same company, the better. Does CmdrTaco also complain about the fact that Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finances, Yahoo Groups (formerly eGroups) and Geocities use the same ID?
This is probably one of the bigger non-issues picked up by Slashdot in recent history. This of course, makes more serious allegations become overlooked when there actually is something to complain about.
..does doing this violate whatever licenses the Open Source software their distro is based on?
The primary benefit of the GNU General Public License is that consumers of software have no distribution restrictions that prevent them from sharing software. I point particularly to
4.
You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
Now the question is whether their distro being merely a conglomeration of proprietary and Open Source software is immune from the above requirement of the GPL or whether they must specifically exclude GPL-based portions of their distro from their per-seat license. Interesting indeed.
This looks like a marketer's version of the Georgia Tech Aware Home Research Initiative which is more about building a house that is actually smart instead of just blindly adding IPs addresses and remote controls to a bunch of household devices.
Which doesn't necessarily mean you are distributing it with free software but that you used free software as a "tool" in its development. This would in fact cover many things as was mentioned in the original/. post.
From the EULA:
For purposes of the foregoing, "Potentially Viral Software" means software which is licensed pursuant to terms that:
(x) create, or purport to create, obligations for Microsoft with respect to the Software or (y) grant, or purport to grant, to any third party any rights to or immunities under Microsoft's intellectual property or proprietary rights in the Software.
Seems fair to me. You can't Open Source MSFT components or use software that requires you to Open Source MSFT components.
Given the never-ending security flaws found in other webservers, has a major turning point in web server design come about?"
I'm still trying to figure out who in his right mind is welcoming putting web servers directly in kernel space as a more secure design than having them run in kernel space. In a well designed and secure OS, even if the web server is compromised then all this does not signal that the entire system has been compromised, this is no longer the case when compromising the web server is now a kernel exploit.
There are some legitimate causes for complaint if a new work draws too substantially or too unoriginally from an older work; Lion King, Mononoke, and Atlantis may suffer from being on the borderline of this issue. But to say that Disney isn't putting something original or fresh into any of their adaptations of cultural classics is a big stretch.
If you had bothered to read the linked articles, then you would have seen that they aren't simply talking about Disney retelling classic story with a modern twist but ripping off of a large amount of the plot for their non-classic movies (Lion King, Atlantis) from recent works that are still under copyright which is and if this were the U.S. with it's Disney bought Sonny Bono act would be under copyright for decades more which is PLAIGAIRISM.
Slashdot overreacts sometimes, this isn't one of them.
than most other browsers out there. Mozilla and Konquerer are up there as well but they aren't close especially with regards to the newer XML related standards.
Color me confused. Wouldn't it be fairly simple to force any process or file to have only the permissions of its creator? I thought that in standard-flavor Linux it was impossible for any user to give a file or process permissions beyond the user's own?
That's fairly easy and rather insecure. The hard part is limiting permissions in small chunks to different programs. Basically, the assumption is that any program is potentially hostile so you want them to run with the minimum amount of permissions necessary. For example, just because I can delete files, send emails and edit the registry in Windows doesn't mean that it is the wisest thing to have any script that runs from my email program have the same permissions that I do, the same thing goes for *nix and all those buffer overflow bugs that exploit setuid(). Ideally I should be able to say "start [web server of choice] but the only thing it can do is listen on port 80 and serve read files from directories A, B, and C and everything else is explicitly disallowed to the apache process"
Okay, ignoring the ad-hominem "blatantly false and jingoistic" . . .
Sorry about that, its just sometimes people seem to just be as guilty of spreading FUD as the so-called "evil" corporations that it gets exasperating.
I apologise for those comments.
Now . . . you're saying, if I understand, that the NSA's SE Linux is just hacking the Linux kernel to put in some stuff that's been talked about and even done in other OSes for years?
And stuff that isn't even all that novel for Linux?
Yes and Yes. Actually what regular Linux is implementing (which is different from what the NSA is doing with SE Linux) is POSIX 1.e capabilities or "priviledges" which involves splitting up the permissions typically given to the root user (e.g. can connect to ports under 1024, can mount kernel modules, can change ownership of files, etc) into discrete entities that can be apportioned to other users and processes. This was something that the POSIX folks tried to agree on in the eighties (or is it seventies) but never came to an agreement on how best to implement it. Check out the Linux Capabilities FAQ for more information.
The NSA is working on "true capabilities" which is being able to grant and revoke extremely granular permissions to all objects/entities in the system. This concept is similar to java.policy files being maintained for every entity in the system. Making sure that policies can be tracked in such a manner that they are revokable is the most difficult part (e.g. if I lose permissions to connect on a certain port or write to a certain file, then every process or file that I've created should lose those permissions as well).
Now, I've worked with security-clearance-required data before. I think it's absolutely fascinating to consider encoding the clearance level and need-to-know requirements into the filesystem. As others have noted, Linux is the only OS extant they could have done this kind of work with.
This is probably the most false claim I've ever seen on Slashdot. SE Linux is based on research into
Capabilities: A concept that is literally over a decade old in OS design as can be seen by the POSIX 1.E standard that never got drafted (although some people prefer to call what POSIX suggested "privileges" and the fact that many operating systems support "encoding clearance into the filesystem and OS" otherwise known as capailities including Spring, EROS, KeyKOS, and Mungi.
Access Control Lists: Again this is an ancient concept which has been implemented in quite a number of OSEs including some versions of Solaris, *BSD and Win2K.
Both of these concepts are things that Linux either does not support or supports in a limited manner. Currently Win2K outshines Linux in the granularity of the permissions and security model and filesystem support for things like encryption. I'm not an OS bigot and run both OSes at home but seeing something so blatantly false and jingoistic just begs to be challenged.
Interesting, there are about 18 comments as I post this and over half are jokes about unplugging the computer to make it safe. The truth of the matter is that by NSA guidelines no popular operating system is secure enough out of the box and has to be extremely looked down.
What is perhaps even more interesting is that at least Win2K can be secured to a level that is suitable for the NSA, they actually had to fork the Linux kernel to get the same functionality out of Linux.
The Michigan law may have been defeated but the Federal Attorney General, John Ashcroft has vowed to jail porn site owners for violating obscenity laws. He and a couple of republicans are trying to resurrect the Communications Decency Act, here's a quote from from the Wired article.
A number of Republicans asked Ashcroft to pledge to prosecute raunch and ribaldry, but Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia -- who also, unbelievably, is co-chair of the Internet Caucus -- was the most persistent.
"The failure of the (Clinton) administration to enforce those laws has led to a proliferation of obscenity, both online and off," Goodlatte said. "And I am particularly concerned about the safety of our children on the Internet, where they're subjected to child pornography and solicitation in a massive way."
Asked Goodlatte: "I'd like to know to what extent the Justice Department will use its resources to assist state and local enforcement in combating this cyberattack on our nation's children."
In other words, java - without the advantages of java.
Depends on what you mean by the "advantages of Java". The primary advantages of Java are a.) ease of development and b.) cross platform support.
C# is primarily a Java based language that fixes a couple of things Java got wrong (there is now a const keyword, there are out parameters, there is a foreach construct, there are enums, etc) and also has some annoying holdovers from C++ (what's the deal with the virtual keyword?).
For ease of development I'd rank them about equal. If the development is Windows based then C# beats the pants off of Java since it has access to certain APIs directly instead of having to go through JNI as would be done in Java.
Java is write once, run anywhere. This is a major advantage if you are running lots of client Java code on varying platforms. But since most Java development is server based then the fact that a program is WORA loses its charm. Secondly most Java communication between various platforms is done via RPC mechanisms (CORBA or RMI) and.NET supports an XML based RPC format called SOAP which is as cross platform as you can get since all the other platform needs is an HTTP server.
One place.NET shines over Java is that you are not forced to do all your development in Java but instead can use the right tool for the job in different parts of your project and combine them seemlessly. Utilizing Perl classes from VB or inheriting from C# classes in C++ is very attractive and extremely cool.
Developer View: .NET is the next generation of Microsoft's component technologies (COM, COM+, DCOM) which incorporates lessons learned from Java. COM is a technology that allows you to interact with components written in different languages transparently and is descended from OLE (Object Linking and Embedding which is the technology that was developed to allow being able to drag an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document) and . The languages that support COM are the Visual Studio languages as well as Object Pascal (Delphi). COM has its own binary format and while works almost transparently from Javascript, VB, and VBScript is a bitch to work with from C++. DCOM is the same as COM but it adds being able to do RPC (remote method invokation for the Java heads) from components irrespective of what language they are written in, kinda like CORBA without the ORBs.
.NET simplifies this by having a Common Language Runtime which is analogous to the Java JVM. COMable languages simply compile to the CLR format instead of to assembly code or a weird binary format. So this should lead to the best of both worlds by giving you all the functionality you have come to expect from the Java platform with the added benefit of using languages other than Java (C++, C#, VB, Javascript, VBScript, Perl and a few others) and transparently interact with objects written in these languages. Because all.NET languages have access to the CLR they can utilize it to extend themselves, e.g. Visual C++ has "managed extensions" that allows for garbage collection via the CLR.
The major goal is then to use this technology to build XML based web services.
PS: Please do not take this as some official MSFT response, I'm merely an intern and in fact this is a reprint of a post I made before I got to Redmond.
OK, so Jon Katz regurgitates information that anyone who bothers to keep track of the computer industry (i.e. the typical slashdot reader) already knows and turns this into an article? Why???
Here are my ideas on possible reasons, feel free to reply with more.
Jon Katz wants the slashdot community which seems to consist of people who primarily use slashdot as their major source of news to realize that all their ideas that Linux and Open Source were crushing Microsoft were premature celebration. Unlike most other tech companies not only has MSFT not had massive firing binges in the past six months but they have lots of cash and are involved in several projects that will probably bring them success in the near and far off future.
This is not a time to rest on your laurels.
The Slashdot readership has begun to lose its anti-MSFT focus as can be seen by the number of highly moderated posts which say "MSFT isn't all that bad" that have become common over the last few months and Jon Katz is part of the Slashdot vanguard that is trying to reverse this trend by showing exactly why MSFT is evil to all the slashdot newbies that didn't realize that this was a pro-Linux/OpenSource, anti-MSFT/corporations website.
The banner add market is getting tighter and since anti-MSFT articles always generate high page views there is now a quota of anti-MSFT articles that must be churned out weekly by Slashdot and if there is no news ("Open Source is a Cancer") then Slashdot authors are required to conjure it up out of available information.
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Re:Do you have Britney Spears home address?
on
Napster Going Legit
·
· Score: 2
So tell me, fellow Slashbots, am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen divas and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?
Slashdot Mirror
size() doesn't use "lazy" or "overeager" evaluation, it's an accessor method.
Evaluation is deemed overeager or eager if the value is computed as you go along instead of just when it is needed. The fact that the C++ vector implementation increments and decrements a counter on pushes and pops instead of when size() is called is eager evaluation .
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Microsoft, Corel Open .NET
Is BSD The Tortoise?
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Here's a good example of this:
for(int i = 0; i < vector.size(); i++)
do_something(vector.element_at(i));
This code potentialy has a O(n^2) complexity if the size of vector is calculated dynamically each time size() is called versus
int size = vector.size();
for(int i = 0; i < size; i++)
do_something(vector.element_at(i));
which should have O(n) complexity with regards to traversing the vector. The interesting thing is that the previous version could potentially be O(n) depending on how the size() method is implemented in the vector class. But how many people actually know if the size() method in the vector class in whatever library they use (e.g. Java, C++, etc) actually use lazy evaluation or overeager evaluation? <br><br>
NOTE: Regardless of which language used. If a benchmark is run using vectors which dynamically calculates their size and contain a large amount of elements then the code in the first part will ALWAYS run slower than the code in the second part even if the comparison is Java and C/C++.
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Seriously - very interesting project
Besides becoming fodder for flamewars I can't see what good a novice writing "Hello World" and it's equivalents in a dozen or so languages and claiming that it is a benchmark is supposed to achieve.
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it's not open source, but I know that many of our über-geeks prefer pico to any other text editor, just because of the simplicity of it.
If that isn't a sign of the Apocalypse I don't know what is...
--
As a TA for a class at GA Tech there were many reasons I encouraged students not to use pico, chief of which were
- Lack of syntax highlighting.
- Inability to save sessions, meaning all your code is lost if your X session disconnects, someone reboots teh machine you are remotely connected to (which happens a lot in colleges) or if the machine crashes.
- Extremely unscriptable. In emacs I can call up the man page for a function by pressing F4, automatically go to a specific line number by pressing F5, browse inheritance tree structures of C++ classes with Ebrowse, create my own syntax highlighting mode for C# code and more. Vi users have similar power.
There are more reasons I do not encourage novice programmers to use pico but these are the ones that stand out the most.--
http://www.microsoft.com/japan/
--
I don't know what product you used but it definitely was not Office XP. In Outlook I noticed SmartTags in the following scenarios
- I type a date and I get a Smart Tag menu that prompts me to see if I want to schedule a meeting on that date or if I want to see my calendar for that date.
- I type a name and I get a Smart Tag menu that prompts me to see if I want to send the person an email or add the person to my contact list.
- I type an address I get a Smart Tag menu that prompts me to see if I want driving directions that links Expedia .
This is the same technology that would have been used in MSIE just that most of the Smart Tags would have been of the last type. Do you actually use IE 6.0 or Office XP or was this just a speculative opinion?--
Microsoft is simply doing what most companies that own several online properties have been flamed for not doing earlier. Why should I have several logins to a service run by the same company? (The original poster failed to mention that you already need a login to the MSDN subscriber site, the only new thing is that the login now goes through passport).
I don't remember references to World Domination (TM) and Revelations when AOL required me to get an AIM user ID once they purchased Netscape. I also know lots of people who complain about the fact that ICQ and AIM don't interoperate even though they by the same company. Quite frankly, the less logins I need to maintain especially to websites owned by the same company, the better. Does CmdrTaco also complain about the fact that Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finances, Yahoo Groups (formerly eGroups) and Geocities use the same ID?
This is probably one of the bigger non-issues picked up by Slashdot in recent history. This of course, makes more serious allegations become overlooked when there actually is something to complain about.
--
The primary benefit of the GNU General Public License is that consumers of software have no distribution restrictions that prevent them from sharing software. I point particularly to Now the question is whether their distro being merely a conglomeration of proprietary and Open Source software is immune from the above requirement of the GPL or whether they must specifically exclude GPL-based portions of their distro from their per-seat license. Interesting indeed.
--
This looks like a marketer's version of the Georgia Tech Aware Home Research Initiative which is more about building a house that is actually smart instead of just blindly adding IPs addresses and remote controls to a bunch of household devices.
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Q:Mommy, How can I become a good karma whore.
/., the champions of open source, aren't using a Linux box with a few NICs and some hacked-together code as a load balancer?
A: Steal posts from kuro5hin.
I wonder why
Exhibit A
Funny that when Microsoft's router failed (probably a Cisco also) it was catastrophic incompetence but for you guy's it's just bad luck.
Exhibit B
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From the EULA: Seems fair to me. You can't Open Source MSFT components or use software that requires you to Open Source MSFT components.
--
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There are some legitimate causes for complaint if a new work draws too substantially or too unoriginally from an older work; Lion King, Mononoke, and Atlantis may suffer from being on the borderline of this issue. But to say that Disney isn't putting something original or fresh into any of their adaptations of cultural classics is a big stretch.
If you had bothered to read the linked articles, then you would have seen that they aren't simply talking about Disney retelling classic story with a modern twist but ripping off of a large amount of the plot for their non-classic movies (Lion King, Atlantis) from recent works that are still under copyright which is and if this were the U.S. with it's Disney bought Sonny Bono act would be under copyright for decades more which is PLAIGAIRISM.
Slashdot overreacts sometimes, this isn't one of them.
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As far as I know, Internet Explorer performs better at Standards Conformance tests such as
- Todd Fahrner's Box Acid Test
- Inoshiro's browser test with a screenshot from IE 5 on the Mac courtesy of The Answer is 42
than most other browsers out there. Mozilla and Konquerer are up there as well but they aren't close especially with regards to the newer XML related standards.--
Color me confused. Wouldn't it be fairly simple to force any process or file to have only the permissions of its creator? I thought that in standard-flavor Linux it was impossible for any user to give a file or process permissions beyond the user's own?
That's fairly easy and rather insecure. The hard part is limiting permissions in small chunks to different programs. Basically, the assumption is that any program is potentially hostile so you want them to run with the minimum amount of permissions necessary. For example, just because I can delete files, send emails and edit the registry in Windows doesn't mean that it is the wisest thing to have any script that runs from my email program have the same permissions that I do, the same thing goes for *nix and all those buffer overflow bugs that exploit setuid(). Ideally I should be able to say "start [web server of choice] but the only thing it can do is listen on port 80 and serve read files from directories A, B, and C and everything else is explicitly disallowed to the apache process"
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Okay, ignoring the ad-hominem "blatantly false and jingoistic" . . .
Sorry about that, its just sometimes people seem to just be as guilty of spreading FUD as the so-called "evil" corporations that it gets exasperating.
I apologise for those comments.
Now . . . you're saying, if I understand, that the NSA's SE Linux is just hacking the Linux kernel to put in some stuff that's been talked about and even done in other OSes for years? And stuff that isn't even all that novel for Linux?
Yes and Yes. Actually what regular Linux is implementing (which is different from what the NSA is doing with SE Linux) is POSIX 1.e capabilities or "priviledges" which involves splitting up the permissions typically given to the root user (e.g. can connect to ports under 1024, can mount kernel modules, can change ownership of files, etc) into discrete entities that can be apportioned to other users and processes. This was something that the POSIX folks tried to agree on in the eighties (or is it seventies) but never came to an agreement on how best to implement it. Check out the Linux Capabilities FAQ for more information.
The NSA is working on "true capabilities" which is being able to grant and revoke extremely granular permissions to all objects/entities in the system. This concept is similar to java.policy files being maintained for every entity in the system. Making sure that policies can be tracked in such a manner that they are revokable is the most difficult part (e.g. if I lose permissions to connect on a certain port or write to a certain file, then every process or file that I've created should lose those permissions as well).
--
This is probably the most false claim I've ever seen on Slashdot. SE Linux is based on research into
- Capabilities: A concept that is literally over a decade old in OS design as can be seen by the POSIX 1.E standard that never got drafted (although some people prefer to call what POSIX suggested "privileges" and the fact that many operating systems support "encoding clearance into the filesystem and OS" otherwise known as capailities including Spring, EROS, KeyKOS, and Mungi.
- Access Control Lists: Again this is an ancient concept which has been implemented in quite a number of OSEs including some versions of Solaris, *BSD and Win2K.
Both of these concepts are things that Linux either does not support or supports in a limited manner. Currently Win2K outshines Linux in the granularity of the permissions and security model and filesystem support for things like encryption. I'm not an OS bigot and run both OSes at home but seeing something so blatantly false and jingoistic just begs to be challenged.--
Interesting, there are about 18 comments as I post this and over half are jokes about unplugging the computer to make it safe. The truth of the matter is that by NSA guidelines no popular operating system is secure enough out of the box and has to be extremely looked down.
What is perhaps even more interesting is that at least Win2K can be secured to a level that is suitable for the NSA, they actually had to fork the Linux kernel to get the same functionality out of Linux.
--
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Depends on what you mean by the "advantages of Java". The primary advantages of Java are a.) ease of development and b.) cross platform support.
- C# is primarily a Java based language that fixes a couple of things Java got wrong (there is now a const keyword, there are out parameters, there is a foreach construct, there are enums, etc) and also has some annoying holdovers from C++ (what's the deal with the virtual keyword?).
- Java is write once, run anywhere. This is a major advantage if you are running lots of client Java code on varying platforms. But since most Java development is server based then the fact that a program is WORA loses its charm. Secondly most Java communication between various platforms is done via RPC mechanisms (CORBA or RMI) and
.NET supports an XML based RPC format called SOAP which is as cross platform as you can get since all the other platform needs is an HTTP server.
One placeFor ease of development I'd rank them about equal. If the development is Windows based then C# beats the pants off of Java since it has access to certain APIs directly instead of having to go through JNI as would be done in Java.
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What, exactly, is .Net?
.NET is the next generation of Microsoft's component technologies (COM, COM+, DCOM) which incorporates lessons learned from Java. COM is a technology that allows you to interact with components written in different languages transparently and is descended from OLE (Object Linking and Embedding which is the technology that was developed to allow being able to drag an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document) and . The languages that support COM are the Visual Studio languages as well as Object Pascal (Delphi). COM has its own binary format and while works almost transparently from Javascript, VB, and VBScript is a bitch to work with from C++. DCOM is the same as COM but it adds being able to do RPC (remote method invokation for the Java heads) from components irrespective of what language they are written in, kinda like CORBA without the ORBs.
.NET simplifies this by having a Common Language Runtime which is analogous to the Java JVM. COMable languages simply compile to the CLR format instead of to assembly code or a weird binary format. So this should lead to the best of both worlds by giving you all the functionality you have come to expect from the Java platform with the added benefit of using languages other than Java (C++, C#, VB, Javascript, VBScript, Perl and a few others) and transparently interact with objects written in these languages. Because all .NET languages have access to the CLR they can utilize it to extend themselves, e.g. Visual C++ has "managed extensions" that allows for garbage collection via the CLR.
.NET is Microsoft's XML Web services platform. This is the next generation of Internet computing, using XML to communicate among loosely coupled XML Web services that are collaborating to perform a particular task. Microsoft's .NET strategy delivers a software platform to build new .NET experiences, a programming model and tools to build and integrate XML Web services, and a set of programmable Web interfaces.
Developer View:
The major goal is then to use this technology to build XML based web services.
Marketting View:
Microsoft
PS: Please do not take this as some official MSFT response, I'm merely an intern and in fact this is a reprint of a post I made before I got to Redmond.
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Here are my ideas on possible reasons, feel free to reply with more.
This is not a time to rest on your laurels.
--
So tell me, fellow Slashbots, am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen divas and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?
Yup.
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