Licensing protocols to other companies is not "opening up". And given that open source is becoming more and more important inside the EU, this may not satisfy the EU.
Most folks at Apple I know don't have time for an agenda.
Not only do they lack time for an agenda, they also lack time to support their beliefs with facts. Apple employees seem to take it as a given that OS X is secure, efficient, and user friendly. In fact, there is very little solid evidence that it is better in any of those areas than either Linux or Windows.
Don't get me wrong, Apple makes decent products, but their smugness and lack of looking beyond their own company is not only annoying, it's also going to be bad for the company in the long term.
There are plenty of things that companies do regularly to suppress competitive or disruptive technologies:
- buy the patents and hire the inventor
- write competing patents and entangle the inventor in patent litigation
- for a lot of long-term research, suppress research funding and/or discredit the field so that an initially good idea never gets developed much further
- create uncertainty about the expected costs, reliability, or safety of products
- create regulatory barriers
- even if you manage to make a product, interfere with distribution and marketing
While some bogus products ("200% fuel efficiency carburator") have made bogus claims about being suppressed in some of these ways, nevertheless, the above are standard business strategies. Microsoft has actually provided excellent examples for many of them.
Usually, companies try to go for the "we buy the technology for a few million dollars and let it die" route, because it's the least amount of hassle and risk and keeps everybody happy.
The Java API is rather brilliant in both its usability and its extensive features
Most of the Java API was created by the JCP, not Sun, often based on prior work by others (Swing basically came from Netscape).
not to mention its documentation.
Extracting comments from source code is not the basis for well-written documentation. In fact, Java is sorely lacking in both good documentation and any form of specification. The best documentation is probably the third party books that have been written on it.
The Java language is rather easy to learn (many, many universities use it as the first language of choice) and isn't too far from C++ to be easily learned. And it's memory protection and garbage collection make life *much* easier and safer. That is the reason why Java succeeded, and most, if not all of it (in the first years) by extensive help by Sun. And Sun is also responsible for keeping Java the clean language it is today, without pre-processor, without operator overloading, properties and all the other things that makes maintaining C++ so much *fun*.
Indeed, Java is a better, cleaner, simpler language than C++. So is Algol 60. And Java has garbage collection, but so has just about every language other than C++ designed after the 1970's.
I think Java primarily succeeded because it was so poorly designed: C++ programmers felt right at home in it and thought that it was "advanced" and "fun", which it was, relative to C++. Good strategy on the part of Gosling, bad language design nonetheless.
If Sun hopes that Ian will somehow make Solaris more attractive to the open source community, I don't think that's going to happen. Solaris is what it is, all the technical and legal arguments have been made, and people have made up their minds. Unlike golf-playing IT managers, people who pick open source software are generally not going to be swayed by figureheads.
What Ian can do, however, is effect changes inside Sun. For example, if he can convince Sun to drop dual licensing for Solaris, it could more easily become a mainstream open-source platform.
People should remember that Java started out as a set-top language and was released when that project failed. Then, it was supposed to turn the web into an application delivery platform, and it failed miserably at that, too (Ajax is now succeeding there).
The reason Java isn't a footnote in history is because of the enormous efforts people and companies other than Gosling and Sun have invested in fixing up its problems and turning Java into a decent platform for server-side development.
As far as I'm concerned, the main credit Gosling deserves is for saddling us with some bad design choices and some really ugly backwards compatibility problems in Java.
There's already a cross-platform runtime out there that has all those features: it's called Firefox (or xulrunner, if you prefer). In the next version, it will be getting support for off-line application development.
Let's not let the web get hijacked by Adobe or Microsoft again; we don't want to repeat ActiveX or Flash.
Finally, this is an important result. It is relevant to number theory, and to abstract mathematics in general. The fact that a (finite) computer calculation can help determining an infinite list of representation is very nice.
Well, maybe that's surprising to some mathematicians, but this sort of thing is nearly half a century old.
I think it's good that these are getting patented; maybe people will stop using them now. Multiply linked lists are a maintenance headache, and often a performance bottleneck, too.
They're all "leaf nodes". They have to be, that's why they are called "claims". They are simply customarily written in the order from preposterous to minutiae. Perhaps that's why you incorrectly thought that the first nodes are not leaf nodes.
While some marketing departments may believe that the only good publicity is good publicity, I don't think that's the case. Microsoft's biggest risk is becoming irrelevant, and even being criticized is better than being ignored. Besides, if the criticism is something fairly obvious, it's not like it's going to be news to people who have actually tried the product.
First of all, I remember seeing many instances where Apple manipulates market share figures. One example is their misrepresentation of the relative desktop usage of Macintosh and Linux, in particular in education. So, my heart doesn't exactly bleed for them if others do the same to them.
Furthermore, whatever Apple's marketshare may be, we have to ask whether that's even an interesting number. I have a couple of Macs. What do I do with them? I run Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium, OpenOffice, VLC, DVDplayer, iTunes, and TeX. I suspect that's pretty typical for many Mac users. I can run the same applications on other platforms; nothing really ties me to Macintosh. Even if you use Safari and Apple Mail, there's nothing really Mac specific about those.
In fact, as we move to free, open source, cross-platform applications, the concept of "market share" of particular manufacturers becomes less important. An increasing Apple market share these days doesn't mean success for OS X, it merely means that people like the MacMini and the MacBook hardware.
You're totally nuts. You've swallowed a corporatist agenda hook, line, and sinker, and your right wing hysteria is McCarthyist.
The areas in which we have actually been able to limit damage (ozone hole, local reversion of desertification, limits to population growth) have been due to aggressive policies based on scientific results, the kinds of results that people in this thread have been calling "crying wolf".
That's all well and good, but it's not relevant. If you get hired for an IT position, you should not expect that any of those activities are part of your job, and you shouldn't complain when they aren't. If your company gives you the freedom to expand into those other areas and you take it, good for you. If that affects your regular job duties, they should fire your sorry ass.
If all you want is your IT people to be drones and say: "Yes, SIR!".. and "NO, SIR"... then you need to be in the military.
The military is run with much more autonomy than your usual US corporation, and that is as it should be. People in the military often have no way for going up the chain of command, but in a corporation, you can and you should ask your boss.
Do you have any idea how many times the 'earth doomers' have said we were going to kill ourseles off? If not global warming, then global cooling, over-population, thermonuclear war, genetic (plant) modification, etc. - and all their projected times for extinction or some other cataclysmic life-ending event are well in the past. For instance, I distinctly recall hearing in elementary school that by the year 2000, the world would be too over-populated to feed itself. This, to gullible and impressionable kids! That's reprehensible.
Famine is worse than ever and desertification, loss of agricultural lands, and overpopulation are enormous problems, as predicted. Global cooling and thermonuclear war were things that were averted because people raised those issues and warned about them. Genetic engineering wasn't a serious issue until very recently because it wasn't widely deployed. Now that it is, we are starting to see serious consequences.
The scientific community has been good about predicting and (when possible) averting problems. It's their foresight and swift action that has permitted uninformed, spoiled brats like you to continue to live in relative luxury and safety.
Of course, the operative phrase is "relative", because, objectively, the environment has deteriorated tremendously over the last century and our quality of life has been affected tremendously. You're simply too young and too uninformed to even notice.
Dilbertized -- micromanaged, bureaucratic and stifled creatively.
I think IT employees have gotten spoiled by the wild dotCom days, where management hadn't figured out how to manage IT yet, where salaries were high, and where people in IT were left to do whatever they wanted.
In the end, IT is little different from accounting or any other administrative function: it's not about self-actualization, independence or creativity, it's about performing a business function reliably, predictably, and efficiently. It's about implementing what management, sales, and designers tell you to implement.
If you want to be creative and/or independent, IT is the wrong function. The people who can be creative inside a business are marketing, R&D, graphic design, strategic planning, and management.
Have we 'cried wolf' too many times with global warming?
"Crying wolf" applies if people repeatedly warn about something and it doesn't come to pass; it implies that there is evidence of incompetence or deliberate deception, based on repeated incorrect predictions.
In the history of climate research, scientists have seriously warned about global warming only once so far. The evidence is strong, the consequences are potentially devastating, and it appears to be happening faster than anybody initially thought.
If anything, boneheads that ask questions like you do still don't get how f*cking serious this is. Even if, against the odds, global warming turns out to be less of a threat than current scientific consensus says, acting decisively is completely justified.
Archive.org re-publishes other sites' content. That's breaking copyright, period.
Copyright does not give the copyright holder complete control over who may copy or republish his content; some activities fall under fair use (at least in the US), and the Internet Archive has gotten fair use exemptions for much more contentious content than this woman's home page.
robots.txt is a nice convention, but its absence doesn't allow anyone to break copyright. Where does that idea come from??
"Conventions" are what a lot of the law is about. If the convention is that permission to spider/not spider is indicated by a robots.txt file, then the woman has to comply with that. It's a reasonable convention, it's easy to do, and there are no alternative conventions in common use.
That's OK, the analogy you were going for is flawed,
No, it's not. Intel C++ and MinGW are merely compilers, Eclipse C/C++ doesn't work well, and Borland C++ is outdated. VS is the only one that allows C/C++ and.NET integration and development, and that's no accident: it's typical Microsoft, setting proprietary standards so that nobody can catch up.
Functionally, however, you're right: VS has stopped being the leading IDE long ago; these days, people use it because they know it or because they have no choice.
There are several Microsoft packages that are "popular" beyond MS Office and MS Windows, but they are not successful products.
Visual Studio is probably a money loser, given how much effort it takes to develop. And Microsoft is barely keeping up with other, better development efforts.
and you believed Google's assertion that it was encrypted and private???....ah....how cute!
I don't have to... I can check, since the application is a script (i.e., executable source code). And people have checked. It's legit.
I'm going to make an assumption here and guess that you believe that Google is going to form it's own cellular phone network and allow you unfettered access to it.
No. The news reports seem to be saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that Google is going to release a phone that works with existing carriers, comes with Google apps, and, in addition, is programmable in Java and C++ by anybody. That's the kind of phone I want.
From reports that I've heard, the iPhone is programmable as well...
Of course, it's "programmable"--by Apple and their business partners, just like iPod is. And that's the kind of phone I don't want, in particular, if I have to pay $500+ for it.
Whatever, nevermind that you have not used/owned an iPhone,
I don't need to use/own one in order to know that a $500-$600, closed, non-programmable phone that uses desktop synchronization sucks. How do I know that? Because I have owned plenty of smartphones.
And what the hell is this alleged "fact" you've thrown in about Steve Jobs lying about why it's closed? I missed the evidence supporting that claim, and since we're taking so many hits from the CrazyBong, I'm not taking your word for it.
Jobs claims that he was forced to close the iPhone because Cingular demanded it in order to protect their network. But that's bullshit: you can go on-line with Cingular using fully programmable devices, including a Palm, Windows Mobile, Windows laptop, or even an OS X laptop.
I wanna know how the hell you can claim to know anything about this mythical GPhone, and how it works without violating any NDAs.
I'm just saying that if the rumors are true, it sounds like it's going to be a great phone.
Dude, are you on CRACK?
No, but you apparently have had too much of Jobs' magic cool-aid.
Slashdot Mirror
Licensing protocols to other companies is not "opening up". And given that open source is becoming more and more important inside the EU, this may not satisfy the EU.
Most folks at Apple I know don't have time for an agenda.
Not only do they lack time for an agenda, they also lack time to support their beliefs with facts. Apple employees seem to take it as a given that OS X is secure, efficient, and user friendly. In fact, there is very little solid evidence that it is better in any of those areas than either Linux or Windows.
Don't get me wrong, Apple makes decent products, but their smugness and lack of looking beyond their own company is not only annoying, it's also going to be bad for the company in the long term.
There are plenty of things that companies do regularly to suppress competitive or disruptive technologies:
- buy the patents and hire the inventor
- write competing patents and entangle the inventor in patent litigation
- for a lot of long-term research, suppress research funding and/or discredit the field so that an initially good idea never gets developed much further
- create uncertainty about the expected costs, reliability, or safety of products
- create regulatory barriers
- even if you manage to make a product, interfere with distribution and marketing
While some bogus products ("200% fuel efficiency carburator") have made bogus claims about being suppressed in some of these ways, nevertheless, the above are standard business strategies. Microsoft has actually provided excellent examples for many of them.
Usually, companies try to go for the "we buy the technology for a few million dollars and let it die" route, because it's the least amount of hassle and risk and keeps everybody happy.
The Java API is rather brilliant in both its usability and its extensive features
Most of the Java API was created by the JCP, not Sun, often based on prior work by others (Swing basically came from Netscape).
not to mention its documentation.
Extracting comments from source code is not the basis for well-written documentation. In fact, Java is sorely lacking in both good documentation and any form of specification. The best documentation is probably the third party books that have been written on it.
The Java language is rather easy to learn (many, many universities use it as the first language of choice) and isn't too far from C++ to be easily learned. And it's memory protection and garbage collection make life *much* easier and safer. That is the reason why Java succeeded, and most, if not all of it (in the first years) by extensive help by Sun. And Sun is also responsible for keeping Java the clean language it is today, without pre-processor, without operator overloading, properties and all the other things that makes maintaining C++ so much *fun*.
Indeed, Java is a better, cleaner, simpler language than C++. So is Algol 60. And Java has garbage collection, but so has just about every language other than C++ designed after the 1970's.
I think Java primarily succeeded because it was so poorly designed: C++ programmers felt right at home in it and thought that it was "advanced" and "fun", which it was, relative to C++. Good strategy on the part of Gosling, bad language design nonetheless.
If Sun hopes that Ian will somehow make Solaris more attractive to the open source community, I don't think that's going to happen. Solaris is what it is, all the technical and legal arguments have been made, and people have made up their minds. Unlike golf-playing IT managers, people who pick open source software are generally not going to be swayed by figureheads.
What Ian can do, however, is effect changes inside Sun. For example, if he can convince Sun to drop dual licensing for Solaris, it could more easily become a mainstream open-source platform.
People should remember that Java started out as a set-top language and was released when that project failed. Then, it was supposed to turn the web into an application delivery platform, and it failed miserably at that, too (Ajax is now succeeding there).
The reason Java isn't a footnote in history is because of the enormous efforts people and companies other than Gosling and Sun have invested in fixing up its problems and turning Java into a decent platform for server-side development.
As far as I'm concerned, the main credit Gosling deserves is for saddling us with some bad design choices and some really ugly backwards compatibility problems in Java.
There's already a cross-platform runtime out there that has all those features: it's called Firefox (or xulrunner, if you prefer). In the next version, it will be getting support for off-line application development.
Let's not let the web get hijacked by Adobe or Microsoft again; we don't want to repeat ActiveX or Flash.
Finally, this is an important result. It is relevant to number theory, and to abstract mathematics in general. The fact that a (finite) computer calculation can help determining an infinite list of representation is very nice.
Well, maybe that's surprising to some mathematicians, but this sort of thing is nearly half a century old.
I think it's good that these are getting patented; maybe people will stop using them now. Multiply linked lists are a maintenance headache, and often a performance bottleneck, too.
They're all "leaf nodes". They have to be, that's why they are called "claims". They are simply customarily written in the order from preposterous to minutiae. Perhaps that's why you incorrectly thought that the first nodes are not leaf nodes.
While some marketing departments may believe that the only good publicity is good publicity, I don't think that's the case. Microsoft's biggest risk is becoming irrelevant, and even being criticized is better than being ignored. Besides, if the criticism is something fairly obvious, it's not like it's going to be news to people who have actually tried the product.
I think that would have been more interesting...
First of all, I remember seeing many instances where Apple manipulates market share figures. One example is their misrepresentation of the relative desktop usage of Macintosh and Linux, in particular in education. So, my heart doesn't exactly bleed for them if others do the same to them.
Furthermore, whatever Apple's marketshare may be, we have to ask whether that's even an interesting number. I have a couple of Macs. What do I do with them? I run Firefox, Thunderbird, Adium, OpenOffice, VLC, DVDplayer, iTunes, and TeX. I suspect that's pretty typical for many Mac users. I can run the same applications on other platforms; nothing really ties me to Macintosh. Even if you use Safari and Apple Mail, there's nothing really Mac specific about those.
In fact, as we move to free, open source, cross-platform applications, the concept of "market share" of particular manufacturers becomes less important. An increasing Apple market share these days doesn't mean success for OS X, it merely means that people like the MacMini and the MacBook hardware.
Funny thing, though: I have a couple of thousand packages installed on my Linux machine and it doesn't seem to hurt boot-up speed.
So, why should I have to do that on Windows?
You're totally nuts. You've swallowed a corporatist agenda hook, line, and sinker, and your right wing hysteria is McCarthyist.
The areas in which we have actually been able to limit damage (ozone hole, local reversion of desertification, limits to population growth) have been due to aggressive policies based on scientific results, the kinds of results that people in this thread have been calling "crying wolf".
What if your IT people [...]
That's all well and good, but it's not relevant. If you get hired for an IT position, you should not expect that any of those activities are part of your job, and you shouldn't complain when they aren't. If your company gives you the freedom to expand into those other areas and you take it, good for you. If that affects your regular job duties, they should fire your sorry ass.
If all you want is your IT people to be drones and say: "Yes, SIR!".. and "NO, SIR"... then you need to be in the military.
The military is run with much more autonomy than your usual US corporation, and that is as it should be. People in the military often have no way for going up the chain of command, but in a corporation, you can and you should ask your boss.
Do you have any idea how many times the 'earth doomers' have said we were going to kill ourseles off? If not global warming, then global cooling, over-population, thermonuclear war, genetic (plant) modification, etc. - and all their projected times for extinction or some other cataclysmic life-ending event are well in the past. For instance, I distinctly recall hearing in elementary school that by the year 2000, the world would be too over-populated to feed itself. This, to gullible and impressionable kids! That's reprehensible.
Famine is worse than ever and desertification, loss of agricultural lands, and overpopulation are enormous problems, as predicted. Global cooling and thermonuclear war were things that were averted because people raised those issues and warned about them. Genetic engineering wasn't a serious issue until very recently because it wasn't widely deployed. Now that it is, we are starting to see serious consequences.
The scientific community has been good about predicting and (when possible) averting problems. It's their foresight and swift action that has permitted uninformed, spoiled brats like you to continue to live in relative luxury and safety.
Of course, the operative phrase is "relative", because, objectively, the environment has deteriorated tremendously over the last century and our quality of life has been affected tremendously. You're simply too young and too uninformed to even notice.
Dilbertized -- micromanaged, bureaucratic and stifled creatively.
I think IT employees have gotten spoiled by the wild dotCom days, where management hadn't figured out how to manage IT yet, where salaries were high, and where people in IT were left to do whatever they wanted.
In the end, IT is little different from accounting or any other administrative function: it's not about self-actualization, independence or creativity, it's about performing a business function reliably, predictably, and efficiently. It's about implementing what management, sales, and designers tell you to implement.
If you want to be creative and/or independent, IT is the wrong function. The people who can be creative inside a business are marketing, R&D, graphic design, strategic planning, and management.
Have we 'cried wolf' too many times with global warming?
"Crying wolf" applies if people repeatedly warn about something and it doesn't come to pass; it implies that there is evidence of incompetence or deliberate deception, based on repeated incorrect predictions.
In the history of climate research, scientists have seriously warned about global warming only once so far. The evidence is strong, the consequences are potentially devastating, and it appears to be happening faster than anybody initially thought.
If anything, boneheads that ask questions like you do still don't get how f*cking serious this is. Even if, against the odds, global warming turns out to be less of a threat than current scientific consensus says, acting decisively is completely justified.
Archive.org re-publishes other sites' content. That's breaking copyright, period.
Copyright does not give the copyright holder complete control over who may copy or republish his content; some activities fall under fair use (at least in the US), and the Internet Archive has gotten fair use exemptions for much more contentious content than this woman's home page.
robots.txt is a nice convention, but its absence doesn't allow anyone to break copyright. Where does that idea come from??
"Conventions" are what a lot of the law is about. If the convention is that permission to spider/not spider is indicated by a robots.txt file, then the woman has to comply with that. It's a reasonable convention, it's easy to do, and there are no alternative conventions in common use.
That's OK, the analogy you were going for is flawed,
.NET integration and development, and that's no accident: it's typical Microsoft, setting proprietary standards so that nobody can catch up.
No, it's not. Intel C++ and MinGW are merely compilers, Eclipse C/C++ doesn't work well, and Borland C++ is outdated. VS is the only one that allows C/C++ and
Functionally, however, you're right: VS has stopped being the leading IDE long ago; these days, people use it because they know it or because they have no choice.
There are several Microsoft packages that are "popular" beyond MS Office and MS Windows, but they are not successful products.
Visual Studio is probably a money loser, given how much effort it takes to develop. And Microsoft is barely keeping up with other, better development efforts.
and you believed Google's assertion that it was encrypted and private???....ah....how cute!
I don't have to... I can check, since the application is a script (i.e., executable source code). And people have checked. It's legit.
I'm going to make an assumption here and guess that you believe that Google is going to form it's own cellular phone network and allow you unfettered access to it.
No. The news reports seem to be saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that Google is going to release a phone that works with existing carriers, comes with Google apps, and, in addition, is programmable in Java and C++ by anybody. That's the kind of phone I want.
From reports that I've heard, the iPhone is programmable as well...
Of course, it's "programmable"--by Apple and their business partners, just like iPod is. And that's the kind of phone I don't want, in particular, if I have to pay $500+ for it.
Whatever, nevermind that you have not used/owned an iPhone,
I don't need to use/own one in order to know that a $500-$600, closed, non-programmable phone that uses desktop synchronization sucks. How do I know that? Because I have owned plenty of smartphones.
And what the hell is this alleged "fact" you've thrown in about Steve Jobs lying about why it's closed? I missed the evidence supporting that claim, and since we're taking so many hits from the CrazyBong, I'm not taking your word for it.
Jobs claims that he was forced to close the iPhone because Cingular demanded it in order to protect their network. But that's bullshit: you can go on-line with Cingular using fully programmable devices, including a Palm, Windows Mobile, Windows laptop, or even an OS X laptop.
I wanna know how the hell you can claim to know anything about this mythical GPhone, and how it works without violating any NDAs.
I'm just saying that if the rumors are true, it sounds like it's going to be a great phone.
Dude, are you on CRACK?
No, but you apparently have had too much of Jobs' magic cool-aid.
OneCare will soon be replaced by Microsoft Care 2.0, and it will be slightly less buggy and twice as expensive.