Any student of computer history (or anyone with a book with a chapter on computer history such as this one)can tell you that the IBM PC was released in 1981 and by the end of that year was outselling Apple machines. 15 years ago [1985] IBM compatible PCs were already the dominant player in the desktop market. Thus the above post is either a troll(very likely from it's insulting manner) or was written by some prepubescent teen who thinks that just because he and his friends had Apple ]['s in 1985, they were somehow the dominant desktop platform.
From the article: The judge acknowledged that it's not totally clear whether property law should or shouldn't apply to Web domains, but emphasized that the job of clarifying the law rests with the legislature, not the courts. Legal experts seconded his opinion.
It seems the judge simply did not want to set a bad precedent and instead decided that congress should write laws that specifically govern "virtual real estate" instead of the pseudo-laws being created as the side effects of various lawsuits.
Then again, they didn't think the Internet would be that big a deal (witness first version of Windows 95 and the hoops you had to go through to get it onto the Internet. The then-non-Internet MSN was the way to go...). Microsoft certainly moved quick enough to embrace, extend, and capture much of THAT world...
There lies the answer to your question. MSFT has more cash (not assets or market value but cold hard cash) than any other company in the world.
With their assets they have bought their way into almost every possible field of computing: Operating Systems, PC Hardware, Game Consoles, Online Web Content, Internet Service Provider,
Database software, Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Desktop Publishing, Games, Interactive TV, Online Banking, Diagramming Software etc. If one aspect of computing stops being profitable they can drop it and buy their way into a profitable market ad infitum.
Also unlike IBM of old they can turn around on a dime if need be. Remember that Bill Gates once called the Internet a fad and said MSFT would ignore it. But guess what, now their browser is the number 1 browser on the internet, they are the second largest ISP (a distant second to AOL), and their software serves up a sizeable amount of web content (at least 25 per cent). All this from
a company that got into the Internet game late.
If I had money I'd buy some shares, the stock only has pne way to go (up) once the split is done.
PS: Why do you think they are pushing.NET and the ASP thing so hard? If eventually all apps are free(without support) then someone will make money renting them out and taking care of support issues.
Simply because Open Source projects do not use it does not make CORBA a failure. This is the same as saying Java/COM/iMacs/Oracle databases etc. are failures because you haven't seen an Open Source project that uses them.
There are a large number of closed source, large scale (millions of lines of code) products that use CORBA that the average sysadmin/linux hacker/whatever will never see or get to use. As an example, the company I worked at this summer (i2 technologiesITWO) has a been generating millions of dollars in revenue with a CORBA based Supply Chain Management application for the past couple of years.
You see Corba is broken. but only a little. In order to use it you must build something else on top that actually talks to your apps.
PS: I am a distributed computing junkie and am currently doing research into RMI/CORBA/DCOM and have found a bunch of interesting articles that break down these technologies for people who are wondering what exactly they are...here's an article that compares all three.
Napster's primary defence in this case has always been the service provider provision of the DMCA as has been reported on slashdot earlier. This provision exclusively limits the liability of service providers if illegal activities are carried out on their network.
If this case eventually causes that provision of the DMCA to be revoked or weakened via judicial review this will spell dire consequences for ISPs and other service providers, even messageboards (e.g. Slashdot) and USENET may not be safe.
Why would Toshiba diss a company they have invested in before the IPO if their claims do not have substance?
Unlike movie stars, stocks usually are affected negatively by bad publicity and react well to good publicity.
For Toshiba to damage potential payoffs from a successful IPO by badmouthing Transmeta must indicate that all is not kosher with the Intel killer.
Hanlon's Razor
The Author Doesn't Know What An OS is...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 3
I just read the article and most of it can be summed up in this quote from it
Unix is no longer an operating system. An operating system is the software that comes with a computer (or OS distribution) that programmers and users need to make themselves productive.
Anybody with a degree in CS (or anyone who's ever taken a college level intro to computing class) knows that this is not the definition of an OS. To put it simply an operating system is that is initially loaded when the computer is booted and manages the system resources as well as the other programs running on the computer.
The operating system's tasks include determining which applications should run, in what order and how much time should be allowed for each application before giving another application a turn, it also manages the sharing of internal memory among multiple applications, it handles input and output to and from attached hardware devices, such as hard disks, printers, and dial-up ports, it sends messages to the applications or the user about the status of operation and any errors that may have occurred.
Since Unix performs all these tasks it is an OS. Case closed
PS: Simply because Operating Systems now come with lots of applications bundled does not mean that the lack of a popularly bundled application (e.g. text editor) suddenly makes an operating system any less of an OS.
Saying that Java is hype because you used it to write software which is not its core competency is an instance of a poor worksman blaming his tools
Java's GUI API will always be slower than Native GUI toolkits. In most instances if the app is complex then it'll be almost unusably slow. Heck, even Sun has canned most of its Java GUI tools because they became unusable the larger they became.
Perl is the king of text processing languages (no contest) and C++ gives more fine grained control of sockets than Java.
Now for medium to large scale, cross platform, multithreaded, easily extensible, middleware applications that will need little or no maintainance but are easily maintenable, Java(TM) cannot be beat.
PS: Your rant is similar to someone bitching that C sucks because it is poor at text processing even though C was designed as a portable assembly language.
The Queue Principle
Obviously you are a troll. What does the language the OS is written in have to do with anything?
Windows 9x contains complex MFC/COM/DCOM C++ code that even seasoned developers have difficulty using. Does this somehow detract from the ease of use of the OS to the average Wintel using AOLer? No
Why is it that everytime Java is mentioned on slashdot some clueless person has to post some tripe about how they haven't seen any cool Java apps.
Now this is off the top of my head...
The new American Express credit cards use Java Card(TM) technology. That's right, American Express credit cards now run Java. Here's an
Oracle 8i and IBM's DB2 use Java extensively both for their DB administration GUIs as well as for middleware code. If you didn't know, these are the number 1 and number 2 Enterprise database systems in the world
Java servlets and JSP are used extensively on the web from sites like
mail.com to Firstunion.com. Hundreds of sites use Java(TM) to deliver dynamic content these two are simply the most prominent that come to mind.
Personal Java(TM) runs on
millions of settop cable boxes in the United States.
For more information on Cool Java Apps being deployed in the Real World (as opposed to some childish wannabe h4X0rs applet) check out Sun's industry news page. The Queue Principle
OptimizeIt - A Java Memory Leak Finder
on
Optimizing Java?
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· Score: 2
Optimizeit is a powerful profiling solution for Java developers looking to rapidly track down and fix performance issues such as memory leaks and performance bottlenecks in any Java programs.
Optimizeit is essential for the detection of performance issues in application server environments. Optimizeit provides instantly integration with most popular application servers, its overhead limiting features ensure scalability and new offline profiling coming soon in 4.0 allows testing of applications in production environments The Queue Principle
Being in competition does not give you a warrant to badmouth or even dislike your competitors. And even if they do, it does not mean that you should sink to their level.
PS: So what was your point again? The Queue Principle
This developer not only dissed the quality of Gnome but also their principles. Then believes that a quick backpedal at the end "I think some of them are cool hackers" will make up for this.
This is unconscionable, CmdrTaco, I know flamewars drive page views but causing enmity between KDE and Gnome by printing this obviously flamebait article will only hurt Open Source.
I investigated using Interbase for one of my projects and came away with the distinct impression that the project was in upheaval.
Sign I: My application needed to access the DB using ODBC, it turned out that the person writing the ODBC drivers (the original inventor of Interbase) refused to finish because Inprise welched on releasing as much of Interbase as they said they would. Currently there is no time frame for when ODBC drivers will be written.
Sign II: I nprise refused to spin off Interbase into a seperate company as they originally stated and this has troubled the Interbase community.
Sign III:
Inprise was not as forthcoming with GPLing stuff as was expected. The Queue Principle
Regardless of who is doing the porting, Microsoft apps for Linux sounds a little shady. Think about it: MS has got a pretty good stranglehold on the desktop market, and one of thier primary up-and-coming competitors is Linux.
If you had focussed on any of the articles on MSFT's.NET all this would become clearer to you.
In MSFT's vision of the future, all apps are hosted on the server and rented by clients. To do this clients will need browsers, audio and video players, libraries, etc that can view MSFT proprietary content. Since most of these hosted apps will use client side scripting and advanced DHTML/XML techniques making sure that browsers that can access all the.NET family exist on every platform can only be a plus.
Who cares if a few of the desktops run Linux? MSFT's major money makers have always been the Office line of products. If browsers are provided so that Linux users can now buy office licensees then this can only improve their bottom line. The Queue Principle
Thus it stands to reason that instead of trying to port the existing Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player code, they'll add functionaliy to their wrapper API's until MSIE and Media Player compile with no dependency problems.
Of course, references to C:\ drives and forward vs. backslashes will need to be fixed. From the looks of it this is no different from a *nix version of the Cygwin Project. The Queue Principle
The website you are complaining about is not refusing your user-agent for any privacy reasons but instead is doing so because of Javascript.
Lots of sites that contain javascript have different versions for MSIE and Netscape. Heck, my homepage has the similar browser sniffing code.
Unfortunately poor website developers forget that there exist more browsers than Netscape and MSIE, thus they do not create non-Javascript enabled versions of their site. A quick visit to the website confirms an excessive amount of javascript being used.
This is obviously not a privacy issue but instead one of poor website design. Anyway all your user-agent contains is your browser version and OS version, hardly devastatingly private information. The Queue Principle
I posted this yesterday but probably no one read it due to the fact that it was one of the latter posts (past 400). Anyway here goes...
According to the original article the names of the proprietary databases benchmarked were not given because it violated licensing agreements. Flawed benchmarks like this are the reason why.
As someone who has downloaded, installed and used Oracle 8i, IBM's DB2 and Borland's Interbase I can testify that configuring any of these DB's properly is a non-trivial task that can easily be messed up by someone who has no idea what he/she is doing. Using non-native drivers, not indexing tables properly, improper tablespace sizing, choosing an improper number of data files, improperly managing data blocks, etc can all lead to creation of a suboptimal database application performance.
Most of the major DB companies provide DB's for independent benchmarking from organisations like the Transaction Processing Performance Council. As can be seen from this story these tests involve several thousand transactions per second and not several hundred as reached by this Great Bridge sponsored benchmark. I suggest that someone with a deep pockets or a vested interest in seeing Open Source DBs succeed should enter PostgreSQl or MySQL in these TPC-C tests. The Queue Principle
First of all, Napster plans to make money off their service. Venture capitalists have thrown millions of dollars at it and the company is merely in the loss leader-gaining mindshare phase. Eventually they'll either run banner ads or they'll become a pay service. Either way they will be making money off people who are downloading/distributing music that they have no right to download or distribute. Buy an issue of Fortune or Forbes sometime and hear what the CEOs and VCs have planned.
Secondly, so what if someone makes money off creating a website where people can easily find theses? After all your not making a living of it. Also they are providing a service by giving people an easy way too locate theses and are supporting this by charging for them. Do you think running websites costs nothing?
Now contrast this with you're Napster arguments that it is OK to give away music that musicians depend on to make a living.
It's one thing to distribute freely something that is not meant to be distributed freely (i.e. music) under current copyright laws (*), as in the Napster case, and it is another thing to distribute for a price something that is meant to be distributed for free.
I've read your post probably a six or seven times while reading this article and the above sentence still makes no sense at all.
People like you who are pro-Napster just because you want free music have missed most of what the Napster argument is about. The reason musicians are mad at Napster and why some slashdotters were originally mad at Contentville is because people are distributing works they have no right to distribute. Whether they are making money or not is incidental.
Question: If I go into an Arts and Craft store and shoplift some hand crafted items, then distribute them on street corners for free, am I suddenly right because I didn't sell them?
Your +4 Insightful post seems to say so.
The Queue Principle
...as someone who has downloaded, installed and used Oracle 8i, IBM's DB2 and Borland's Interbase I can testify that configuring any of these DB's properly is a non-trivial task that can easily be messed up by someone who has no idea what he/she is doing.
Most of the major DB companies provide DB's for independent benchmarking from organisations like the Transaction Processing Performance Council. As can be seen from this story these tests involve several thousand transactions per second and not several hundred as reached by this Great Bridge sponsored benchmark. The Queue Principle
I will use tipping in New York city as an example of how this can be a huge success.
$269 is a good gesture, but its only that -- a gesture. That doesn't pay bills, keep food on the table, or make it worth the hassle for the artist to keep on creating...reality, artists need money -- real money.
Most of my friends in NYC have worked as waiters at one time or the other and currently do so now while in school. One of them is a bright kid who is currently working on Nanotech research at the Rochester Institute of Technology yet he frequently waits tables while in school instead of looking for a better job. Why is this?
In New York city, everybody tips. There is a social stigma associated with people who do not tip. When Hilary Clinton ate a meal at a restuaraunt and didn't tip, it made front page news in some tabloids. Because of this it is normal for waiters to make anything from $100 to $200 a night depending on how busy the restaurant is. Working five days a week that is comparable to what most people make after a gruelling 4 year degree in college.
I think this is a good first step, but we need to improve on this idea. You can't really count on the generosity of others to make a living. What if waitresses didn't get a salary but instead relied entirely on tips?
They do, most waiters/waitresses make half of minimum wage. Obviously no one is making a living on $80 a week (after taxes) for 40 hours of work.
How do convince people that they are ethically obligated to donate money into this tip jar?
Easy, bombard people with information about tip sites until they feel socially obligated to do so. If all 20 million Napster users suddenly started getting hit with banner ads advocating tipping the artists whose music they were downloading, how many do you think wouldn't? Especially if the payment process was easy. Heck, if I could click a link from Napster everytime I downloaded a good song to throw a dollar or two at the artist I would. Multiply that by a few million and you have a new distribution model that pays artists a lot more than the current butt-fucking that the RIAA gives artists.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
A quick search on Platinum Certifications notes that Britney Spears has sold over fifteen million records in two years. If over fifteen million people are willing to pay over $10 for a CD, why wouldn't they tip considerably less if given the choice?
Slashdotters who continually bitch about how killing the RIAA will destroy Britney Spears types amaze me. There will always be a market for each generations equivalent of teenage bubblegum pop, killing the RIAA won't suddenly mean that the average teenage girl would suddenly see the Who or whatever as quality music and leave Britney Spears, N'Sync and the Backstreet Boys. In fact they will be reinforced since they cater to the lowest common musical denominator (kinda like how McDonald's is a major player even though their food is nowhere near the best) and will thus benefit more from artist centered music distribution schemes than fringe groups. If you doubt this...consider how many of their concerts are sold out.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
That was a very, very good article by Miguel. Unfortunately the first few posts I have read are from posters who obviously didn't read it and instead are making personal attacks at Miguel.
Miguel's article is spot on. I love everything about Unix except the fact that Component Based programming is so underused. If there is only one thing Microsoft has done right, it is the way they have developed and pushed COM. With COM, I can write a piece of software that performs a task (be it a Widget or piece of middleware) and COMify it. Once this is done, anyone can use it regardless of what language it was written in, fast XML parsers can be written in C++ and used in from Javascript or VB. This way developers of business apps do not have to make the choice between a.) putting up with a slow app or b.) writing one themselves with all the attendant bugs therein especially if they have little C++/C skills, also they can go on towards actually creating their application instead of worrying about if they malloced() enough space for their char*'s.
Lots of *nix people believe this implies laziness but fail to realize that reinventing the wheel dozens of times over is folly.
Example I: I am currently designing and implementing a project management system on Windows(TM) for a small business with a few of my friends. two of them are *nix hackers and they balked at using an XML based protocol to transfer data between the client and server. Now instead of simply designing our protocol then using one of the dozens of available parsers to do this, they decided that we should invent our own binary protocol and write our own parser to parse it.
Our project involves code written in both C++ and Javascript/ASP. We could have used a single COM based parser to consistly interact with the data both from the C++ and the Javascript code but instead its been 2 weeks and counting and our homegrown parser is still being written, tested and debugged. In my opinion this is nothing but a waste of time. When I ask them why not just use XML and an already existing parser their replies boil down to "It just feels wrong.". The chances that a bug or two will slip through in testing or that there is a buffer overflow in our parser is not unlikely considering that most early versions of parsers written in C++ have a few bugs like this hidden somewhere. in this situation component based programming would have allowed us to focus on building and designing our actual application instead of focusing time and energy on a tangential application.
Example II:
At work a MBA intern asked me if it was possible to create an application that housed a search engine that searched a database of MBA students based on criteria like concentration, work experience, graduation date, etc. and then displayed results with links to their resumes in MSFT Word(TM) or HTML format which could be stored on a CD to give recruiters at career fairs. Their first attempt had been to use VB and Access which turned out to be a disaster because of DLL Hell based issues. My simple solution was for them to store all the students in an XML file and to write a Javascript page that used the COM based XML parser (written in C++) to perform the search. Writing this page took less than 2 hours.
Now they have this search functionality they can press on a CD and give out at career fairs which any recruiter can view without needing more than MSIE 4.0 or greater. Without Component based programming their request would have been impossible to fill in their time frame and would have also required that the recruiters machines would need to fulfill a stricter set of requirements (like a Webserver being installed or they'd have to install an app).
In conclusion my question is "Why has it taken so long for a major *nix push towards component based technology?". After all we've had CORBA for almost a decade but there hasn't been that much a big push towards components. Frankly I am eagerly awaiting MSFT's.NET for one reason only...cross language inheritance. The thought that my C++ components can be inherited by my Perl, Java or Javascript objects makes me extremely *CENSORED*. FOOD FOR THOUGHT
But wouldn't it be more honourable if, say, they didn't patent the "cure"?
Then what's the incentive to spend billions of dollars on medical research if once you find a cure anybody can create it? Once the chemical formula for a drug is known, it can be replicated rather trivially (as opposed to finding out what it is).
Unlike free software where developers can hack code in thier free time on free operating systems while holding down a dayjob, medical research is very expensive and cannot be relegated to a hobby or leisure time filler. Equipment is expensive, doctors usually have six digit student loans (like my brother) and cannot afford to work for free, while expenses of having drugs tested and the process of having them approved by the FDA are also daunting.
It would be nice if drugs were not patented but this would result in less expensive medical research being done, and this would benefit no one. FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Slashdot Mirror
This post is obviously a troll.
Any student of computer history (or anyone with a book with a chapter on computer history such as this one)can tell you that the IBM PC was released in 1981 and by the end of that year was outselling Apple machines. 15 years ago [1985] IBM compatible PCs were already the dominant player in the desktop market. Thus the above post is either a troll(very likely from it's insulting manner) or was written by some prepubescent teen who thinks that just because he and his friends had Apple ]['s in 1985, they were somehow the dominant desktop platform.
(-1 Troll)
From the article:
The judge acknowledged that it's not totally clear whether property law should or shouldn't apply to Web domains, but emphasized that the job of clarifying the law rests with the legislature, not the courts. Legal experts seconded his opinion.
It seems the judge simply did not want to set a bad precedent and instead decided that congress should write laws that specifically govern "virtual real estate" instead of the pseudo-laws being created as the side effects of various lawsuits.
(-1 Troll)
Then again, they didn't think the Internet would be that big a deal (witness first version of Windows 95 and the hoops you had to go through to get it onto the Internet. The then-non-Internet MSN was the way to go...). Microsoft certainly moved quick enough to embrace, extend, and capture much of THAT world...
.NET and the ASP thing so hard? If eventually all apps are free(without support) then someone will make money renting them out and taking care of support issues.
There lies the answer to your question. MSFT has more cash (not assets or market value but cold hard cash) than any other company in the world. With their assets they have bought their way into almost every possible field of computing: Operating Systems, PC Hardware, Game Consoles, Online Web Content, Internet Service Provider, Database software, Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Desktop Publishing, Games, Interactive TV, Online Banking, Diagramming Software etc. If one aspect of computing stops being profitable they can drop it and buy their way into a profitable market ad infitum.
Also unlike IBM of old they can turn around on a dime if need be. Remember that Bill Gates once called the Internet a fad and said MSFT would ignore it. But guess what, now their browser is the number 1 browser on the internet, they are the second largest ISP (a distant second to AOL), and their software serves up a sizeable amount of web content (at least 25 per cent). All this from a company that got into the Internet game late.
If I had money I'd buy some shares, the stock only has pne way to go (up) once the split is done.
PS: Why do you think they are pushing
(-1 Troll)
Simply because Open Source projects do not use it does not make CORBA a failure. This is the same as saying Java/COM/iMacs/Oracle databases etc. are failures because you haven't seen an Open Source project that uses them.
There are a large number of closed source, large scale (millions of lines of code) products that use CORBA that the average sysadmin/linux hacker/whatever will never see or get to use. As an example, the company I worked at this summer (i2 technologies ITWO) has a been generating millions of dollars in revenue with a CORBA based Supply Chain Management application for the past couple of years.
You see Corba is broken. but only a little. In order to use it you must build something else on top that actually talks to your apps.
Isn't that what the CORBA Component Model was designed to fix?
PS: I am a distributed computing junkie and am currently doing research into RMI/CORBA/DCOM and have found a bunch of interesting articles that break down these technologies for people who are wondering what exactly they are...here's an article that compares all three.
(-1 Troll)
Napster's primary defence in this case has always been the service provider provision of the DMCA as has been reported on slashdot earlier. This provision exclusively limits the liability of service providers if illegal activities are carried out on their network.
If this case eventually causes that provision of the DMCA to be revoked or weakened via judicial review this will spell dire consequences for ISPs and other service providers, even messageboards (e.g. Slashdot) and USENET may not be safe.
Hanlon's Razor
Why would Toshiba diss a company they have invested in before the IPO if their claims do not have substance?
Unlike movie stars, stocks usually are affected negatively by bad publicity and react well to good publicity. For Toshiba to damage potential payoffs from a successful IPO by badmouthing Transmeta must indicate that all is not kosher with the Intel killer.
Hanlon's Razor
I just read the article and most of it can be summed up in this quote from it
Unix is no longer an operating system. An operating system is the software that comes with a computer (or OS distribution) that programmers and users need to make themselves productive.
Anybody with a degree in CS (or anyone who's ever taken a college level intro to computing class) knows that this is not the definition of an OS. To put it simply an operating system is that is initially loaded when the computer is booted and manages the system resources as well as the other programs running on the computer.
The operating system's tasks include determining which applications should run, in what order and how much time should be allowed for each application before giving another application a turn, it also manages the sharing of internal memory among multiple applications, it handles input and output to and from attached hardware devices, such as hard disks, printers, and dial-up ports, it sends messages to the applications or the user about the status of operation and any errors that may have occurred.
Since Unix performs all these tasks it is an OS. Case closed
PS: Simply because Operating Systems now come with lots of applications bundled does not mean that the lack of a popularly bundled application (e.g. text editor) suddenly makes an operating system any less of an OS.
Hanlon's Razor
Saying that Java is hype because you used it to write software which is not its core competency is an instance of a poor worksman blaming his tools
Java's GUI API will always be slower than Native GUI toolkits. In most instances if the app is complex then it'll be almost unusably slow. Heck, even Sun has canned most of its Java GUI tools because they became unusable the larger they became.
Perl is the king of text processing languages (no contest) and C++ gives more fine grained control of sockets than Java.
Now for medium to large scale, cross platform, multithreaded, easily extensible, middleware applications that will need little or no maintainance but are easily maintenable, Java(TM) cannot be beat.
PS: Your rant is similar to someone bitching that C sucks because it is poor at text processing even though C was designed as a portable assembly language.
The Queue Principle
Obviously you are a troll. What does the language the OS is written in have to do with anything?
Windows 9x contains complex MFC/COM/DCOM C++ code that even seasoned developers have difficulty using. Does this somehow detract from the ease of use of the OS to the average Wintel using AOLer? No
Go troll elsewhere.
The Queue Principle
Now this is off the top of my head...
- Personal Java(TM) runs on
- millions of settop cable boxes in the United States.
For more information on Cool Java Apps being deployed in the Real World (as opposed to some childish wannabe h4X0rs applet) check out Sun's industry news page.The Queue Principle
Optimizeit is a powerful profiling solution for Java developers looking to rapidly track down and fix performance issues such as memory leaks and performance bottlenecks in any Java programs. Optimizeit is essential for the detection of performance issues in application server environments. Optimizeit provides instantly integration with most popular application servers, its overhead limiting features ensure scalability and new offline profiling coming soon in 4.0 allows testing of applications in production environments
The Queue Principle
You don't say good things about the compitition (When was the last time you heard Linus say Windows was great?).
Here's a link to an interview where Linus says he likes PowerPoint and thinks that VB is a good product. Last I checked they were MSFT products that only run on Windows(TM)
Being in competition does not give you a warrant to badmouth or even dislike your competitors. And even if they do, it does not mean that you should sink to their level.
PS: So what was your point again?
The Queue Principle
I am ashamed that Slashdot printed this article.
This developer not only dissed the quality of Gnome but also their principles. Then believes that a quick backpedal at the end "I think some of them are cool hackers" will make up for this. This is unconscionable, CmdrTaco, I know flamewars drive page views but causing enmity between KDE and Gnome by printing this obviously flamebait article will only hurt Open Source.
This is truly sad.
The Queue Principle
I investigated using Interbase for one of my projects and came away with the distinct impression that the project was in upheaval.
Sign I:
My application needed to access the DB using ODBC, it turned out that the person writing the ODBC drivers (the original inventor of Interbase) refused to finish because Inprise welched on releasing as much of Interbase as they said they would. Currently there is no time frame for when ODBC drivers will be written.
Sign II:
I nprise refused to spin off Interbase into a seperate company as they originally stated and this has troubled the Interbase community.
Sign III:
Inprise was not as forthcoming with GPLing stuff as was expected.
The Queue Principle
Regardless of who is doing the porting, Microsoft apps for Linux sounds a little shady. Think about it: MS has got a pretty good stranglehold on the desktop market, and one of thier primary up-and-coming competitors is Linux.
.NET all this would become clearer to you.
.NET family exist on every platform can only be a plus.
If you had focussed on any of the articles on MSFT's
In MSFT's vision of the future, all apps are hosted on the server and rented by clients. To do this clients will need browsers, audio and video players, libraries, etc that can view MSFT proprietary content. Since most of these hosted apps will use client side scripting and advanced DHTML/XML techniques making sure that browsers that can access all the
Who cares if a few of the desktops run Linux? MSFT's major money makers have always been the Office line of products. If browsers are provided so that Linux users can now buy office licensees then this can only improve their bottom line.
The Queue Principle
As has been previously mentioned the company MainSoft has a product called MainWin which is simply an API wrapper library similar to WINe.
Thus it stands to reason that instead of trying to port the existing Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player code, they'll add functionaliy to their wrapper API's until MSIE and Media Player compile with no dependency problems.
Of course, references to C:\ drives and forward vs. backslashes will need to be fixed. From the looks of it this is no different from a *nix version of the Cygwin Project.
The Queue Principle
The website you are complaining about is not refusing your user-agent for any privacy reasons but instead is doing so because of Javascript.
Lots of sites that contain javascript have different versions for MSIE and Netscape. Heck, my homepage has the similar browser sniffing code.
Unfortunately poor website developers forget that there exist more browsers than Netscape and MSIE, thus they do not create non-Javascript enabled versions of their site. A quick visit to the website confirms an excessive amount of javascript being used.
This is obviously not a privacy issue but instead one of poor website design. Anyway all your user-agent contains is your browser version and OS version, hardly devastatingly private information.
The Queue Principle
I posted this yesterday but probably no one read it due to the fact that it was one of the latter posts (past 400). Anyway here goes...
According to the original article the names of the proprietary databases benchmarked were not given because it violated licensing agreements. Flawed benchmarks like this are the reason why.
As someone who has downloaded, installed and used Oracle 8i, IBM's DB2 and Borland's Interbase I can testify that configuring any of these DB's properly is a non-trivial task that can easily be messed up by someone who has no idea what he/she is doing. Using non-native drivers, not indexing tables properly, improper tablespace sizing, choosing an improper number of data files, improperly managing data blocks, etc can all lead to creation of a suboptimal database application performance.
Most of the major DB companies provide DB's for independent benchmarking from organisations like the Transaction Processing Performance Council. As can be seen from this story these tests involve several thousand transactions per second and not several hundred as reached by this Great Bridge sponsored benchmark. I suggest that someone with a deep pockets or a vested interest in seeing Open Source DBs succeed should enter PostgreSQl or MySQL in these TPC-C tests.
The Queue Principle
First of all, Napster plans to make money off their service. Venture capitalists have thrown millions of dollars at it and the company is merely in the loss leader-gaining mindshare phase. Eventually they'll either run banner ads or they'll become a pay service. Either way they will be making money off people who are downloading/distributing music that they have no right to download or distribute. Buy an issue of Fortune or Forbes sometime and hear what the CEOs and VCs have planned.
Secondly, so what if someone makes money off creating a website where people can easily find theses? After all your not making a living of it. Also they are providing a service by giving people an easy way too locate theses and are supporting this by charging for them. Do you think running websites costs nothing?
Now contrast this with you're Napster arguments that it is OK to give away music that musicians depend on to make a living.
Twisted isn't it?
The Queue Principle
It's one thing to distribute freely something that is not meant to be distributed freely (i.e. music) under current copyright laws (*), as in the Napster case, and it is another thing to distribute for a price something that is meant to be distributed for free.
I've read your post probably a six or seven times while reading this article and the above sentence still makes no sense at all.
People like you who are pro-Napster just because you want free music have missed most of what the Napster argument is about. The reason musicians are mad at Napster and why some slashdotters were originally mad at Contentville is because people are distributing works they have no right to distribute. Whether they are making money or not is incidental.
Question: If I go into an Arts and Craft store and shoplift some hand crafted items, then distribute them on street corners for free, am I suddenly right because I didn't sell them?
Your +4 Insightful post seems to say so.
The Queue Principle
...as someone who has downloaded, installed and used Oracle 8i, IBM's DB2 and Borland's Interbase I can testify that configuring any of these DB's properly is a non-trivial task that can easily be messed up by someone who has no idea what he/she is doing.
Most of the major DB companies provide DB's for independent benchmarking from organisations like the Transaction Processing Performance Council. As can be seen from this story these tests involve several thousand transactions per second and not several hundred as reached by this Great Bridge sponsored benchmark.
The Queue Principle
I will use tipping in New York city as an example of how this can be a huge success.
$269 is a good gesture, but its only that -- a gesture. That doesn't pay bills, keep food on the table, or make it worth the hassle for the artist to keep on creating...reality, artists need money -- real money.
Most of my friends in NYC have worked as waiters at one time or the other and currently do so now while in school. One of them is a bright kid who is currently working on Nanotech research at the Rochester Institute of Technology yet he frequently waits tables while in school instead of looking for a better job.
Why is this?
In New York city, everybody tips. There is a social stigma associated with people who do not tip. When Hilary Clinton ate a meal at a restuaraunt and didn't tip, it made front page news in some tabloids. Because of this it is normal for waiters to make anything from $100 to $200 a night depending on how busy the restaurant is. Working five days a week that is comparable to what most people make after a gruelling 4 year degree in college.
I think this is a good first step, but we need to improve on this idea. You can't really count on the generosity of others to make a living. What if waitresses didn't get a salary but instead relied entirely on tips?
They do, most waiters/waitresses make half of minimum wage. Obviously no one is making a living on $80 a week (after taxes) for 40 hours of work.
How do convince people that they are ethically obligated to donate money into this tip jar?
Easy, bombard people with information about tip sites until they feel socially obligated to do so. If all 20 million Napster users suddenly started getting hit with banner ads advocating tipping the artists whose music they were downloading, how many do you think wouldn't? Especially if the payment process was easy. Heck, if I could click a link from Napster everytime I downloaded a good song to throw a dollar or two at the artist I would. Multiply that by a few million and you have a new distribution model that pays artists a lot more than the current butt-fucking that the RIAA gives artists.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
NO MORE BRITNEY SPEARS!
A quick search on Platinum Certifications notes that Britney Spears has sold over fifteen million records in two years. If over fifteen million people are willing to pay over $10 for a CD, why wouldn't they tip considerably less if given the choice?
Slashdotters who continually bitch about how killing the RIAA will destroy Britney Spears types amaze me. There will always be a market for each generations equivalent of teenage bubblegum pop, killing the RIAA won't suddenly mean that the average teenage girl would suddenly see the Who or whatever as quality music and leave Britney Spears, N'Sync and the Backstreet Boys. In fact they will be reinforced since they cater to the lowest common musical denominator (kinda like how McDonald's is a major player even though their food is nowhere near the best) and will thus benefit more from artist centered music distribution schemes than fringe groups. If you doubt this...consider how many of their concerts are sold out.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
That was a very, very good article by Miguel. Unfortunately the first few posts I have read are from posters who obviously didn't read it and instead are making personal attacks at Miguel.
.NET for one reason only...cross language inheritance. The thought that my C++ components can be inherited by my Perl, Java or Javascript objects makes me extremely *CENSORED*.
Miguel's article is spot on. I love everything about Unix except the fact that Component Based programming is so underused. If there is only one thing Microsoft has done right, it is the way they have developed and pushed COM. With COM, I can write a piece of software that performs a task (be it a Widget or piece of middleware) and COMify it.
Once this is done, anyone can use it regardless of what language it was written in, fast XML parsers can be written in C++ and used in from Javascript or VB. This way developers of business apps do not have to make the choice between a.) putting up with a slow app or b.) writing one themselves with all the attendant bugs therein especially if they have little C++/C skills, also they can go on towards actually creating their application instead of worrying about if they malloced() enough space for their char*'s.
Lots of *nix people believe this implies laziness but fail to realize that reinventing the wheel dozens of times over is folly.
Example I:
I am currently designing and implementing a project management system on Windows(TM) for a small business with a few of my friends. two of them are *nix hackers and they balked at using an XML based protocol to transfer data between the client and server. Now instead of simply designing our protocol then using one of the dozens of available parsers to do this, they decided that we should invent our own binary protocol and write our own parser to parse it.
Our project involves code written in both C++ and Javascript/ASP. We could have used a single COM based parser to consistly interact with the data both from the C++ and the Javascript code but instead its been 2 weeks and counting and our homegrown parser is still being written, tested and debugged. In my opinion this is nothing but a waste of time. When I ask them why not just use XML and an already existing parser their replies boil down to "It just feels wrong.". The chances that a bug or two will slip through in testing or that there is a buffer overflow in our parser is not unlikely considering that most early versions of parsers written in C++ have a few bugs like this hidden somewhere. in this situation component based programming would have allowed us to focus on building and designing our actual application instead of focusing time and energy on a tangential application.
Example II:
At work a MBA intern asked me if it was possible to create an application that housed a search engine that searched a database of MBA students based on criteria like concentration, work experience, graduation date, etc. and then displayed results with links to their resumes in MSFT Word(TM) or HTML format which could be stored on a CD to give recruiters at career fairs. Their first attempt had been to use VB and Access which turned out to be a disaster because of DLL Hell based issues. My simple solution was for them to store all the students in an XML file and to write a Javascript page that used the COM based XML parser (written in C++) to perform the search. Writing this page took less than 2 hours.
Now they have this search functionality they can press on a CD and give out at career fairs which any recruiter can view without needing more than MSIE 4.0 or greater.
Without Component based programming their request would have been impossible to fill in their time frame and would have also required that the recruiters machines would need to fulfill a stricter set of requirements (like a Webserver being installed or they'd have to install an app).
In conclusion my question is "Why has it taken so long for a major *nix push towards component based technology?". After all we've had CORBA for almost a decade but there hasn't been that much a big push towards components. Frankly I am eagerly awaiting MSFT's
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
But wouldn't it be more honourable if, say, they didn't patent the "cure"?
Then what's the incentive to spend billions of dollars on medical research if once you find a cure anybody can create it? Once the chemical formula for a drug is known, it can be replicated rather trivially (as opposed to finding out what it is).
Unlike free software where developers can hack code in thier free time on free operating systems while holding down a dayjob, medical research is very expensive and cannot be relegated to a hobby or leisure time filler. Equipment is expensive, doctors usually have six digit student loans (like my brother) and cannot afford to work for free, while expenses of having drugs tested and the process of having them approved by the FDA are also daunting.
It would be nice if drugs were not patented but this would result in less expensive medical research being done, and this would benefit no one.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT