I have never read a shallower article. Sure VMWare is faster, but they have been around for much longer. MS Virtual Server was originally developed by some other company that MS took over. It's got a vastly superior API that makes app dev a lot easier. For VMWare you would have to buy the expensive Virtual Center, the C API that VMWare is releasing with their free server is in deep deep Beta. It's the usual MS strategy - make things easier for developers,ISV's, and partners first and worry about performance later. The flurry of moves that VMWare is making in the last three months is indication that they are far more aware of the very real threat from MS Virtual server than the average Slashdot Idiot.
this video, because Stephen Grady of RedMonks is not featured - he is not even quoted in the Video. I am forced to conclude that this software project is amateurish and not enterprise class.
Thanks for all the info. I wish you guys well and didn't mean to spite Chandler or Mitch, or anything of that sort. I have enormous respect for the hackers and Mitch's ideas in general. But it has been just frustrating waiting for so long for something that started out with so many innovative ideas.
Adding a page to the Chandler wiki that contrasts it with Evolution and such might not be a bad idea.
Seriously,Mitch Kapor should worry more about Chandler.
The project started in 2001 and they haven't been able to show even a barely useable version of the software till date. They have had an unbelievable amount of time, goodwill, and friendly press and the results are zero. Compare the progresss evolution made in its first three year period - you got to hand it to the Ximian monkeys - they are coding machines. Evolution has it's own indexer and plug-in framework and the real point that clinches it for evolution in most corporate environments is the excellent integration using Exchange Connector. I work for a company where we use Linux extensively and many windows folks are able to use evolution without any problem , and are in fact highly appreciative of it. Evolution 2.0 has even shed it's outlook look and feel - evolution is an example of what you get when you mix pragmatic product management with some awesome coding talent. The Chandler vision, on the other hand has been over-arching and massively confused from the beginning - initially they threw in whatever sounded cool - jabber, rdf etc, instead of deciding the technology based on the product requirements.
Claiming that they are breaking new ground just doesn't cut it - not even one innovative feature is on display after three years. As someone pointed out in a earlier post evolution 0.1 was more useable than chandler 0.4 - Heck I used it for day to day work , in spite of the warts.
When you have a bunch of talented programmers and still have nothing to show, it is really time to ask, 'What's up with Chandler ?'.
Bugbear, It would be nice if you could write an essay on outsourcing, esp software outsourcing. What kinds can outsourced ? Is it a good idea at all ? Why are all the suits obsessed with it ? Are they totally wrong ?
... is in serious doubt.C'mon,a couple of hundred resumes and you have a bandwidth problem ? Looks like Joel now believes he can write whtever he feels like writing about , however crappy it might be. Next time you want to rant about something, Mr.Spolsky give yourself 24-48 hrs before you put your pen to paper.
Exactly ! It's incredible that geeks who bang microsoft for every security bug , still hold romantic notions about software like sendmail and BIND. sendmail and BIND have together lowered the bar for most programmers in the UNIX world securitywise. Repeated criticisms of DJB on slashdot only prove that Unix fanatics are no better than their Windows clones. How can anyone in their right frame of mind defend sendmail's record or for that matter BIND ? It's dishonesty of the highest order and maybe it's one the reason's for the sorry state that the UNIX world finds itself in today.
I am glad that I got to install Qmail and gain first hand experience, before I learnt about DJBs personality. Now if it turns out that DJB works for some terrorist outfit , It wouldn't bother me - Why ? It's that good !
To tell the truth , few people in the world currently can write high performance software the way DJB does. DJB writes software that is very hard to match in terms security , performance and easy configurability by wannabe C/UNIX gurus. Qmail can eat sendmail, postfix etc for breakfast, lunch and dinner without a single burp.
Uninformed criticism of DJB's (1)licensing policies (2) Slanders by Postfix's author etc by slashdotters is nothing new . But I would invite the more discerning ones to check out DJBs website at http://cr.yp.to ( Incidentally on those rare days when the net seems to crawling, DJBs site is as quick as ever; it runs a lightning fast web server written by DJB )
It's not just Qmail - you will discover daemontools, djbdns,and whole lot of other stuff.
I once heard CmdrTaco, Mandrake and another guy in "Geeks in Space" making some tasteless remarks against programmers from India. It is the usual average geeks insecurity and unwarranted superiority complex that explains this obsession with this topic, making it one of the most discussed topics on/. along with Minor kernel patches, the color of Marcelo Tossati's hair...
Kee -Rect ! The VFS used by Clearcase while providing a lot of it's cool features is also responsible for many drawbacks, including some of the ones you mention.
Scalability is the biggest downstream issue any manager has to consider before choosing Clearcase. It is extremely resource hungry and I used to work for a small company that deployed a Sun Enterprise server to support CLearcase for just 10-15 developers. Get ready with barrels of memory - shticks and drives.
The Steep learning curve is not something that u can wish away in a production environment.
In spite of all this, I remain fond of Clearcase - It was the first Version Control/Configuration System I used seriously and haven't found anything even remotely similar in terms of functionality. I felt like vomiting when I first used CVS after 4 years of CVS. Another nice feature is it integrates nicely with other Rational products like ClearDDTS the bug tracking system - Against a specific ticket you can check the list of related checkins/checkouts.
It was originally developed by a company called Atria and was later taken over by Rational.
And don't forget multisite. A Pig it is - but it provided lot of value for money, especially to comapnies that could afford it.
Abiword integrates well with Gnome, but is not a Gnome project. Morover Open Office has already been annointed by the powers in the Gnome Community. It's a different matter that most Gnome users actually prefer the lightweight Abiword.
We could use some quality C, C++, FORTRAN compilers. Gcc might be the holy grail for the free software Taliban. But anyone who has done serious work knows about it's limitations. And don't give that bull crap about "the best support available on the net" - does'nt work in production environments. It's very important for commercial compilers to be available on Linux as it makes increasing inroads into Games, High end Graphics, Scientific computing etc. Already a lot of engineering software and other kinds of performace-critical software has gone the NT/2000 way, one of the reasons being the lack of good compiler or compilers that are too expensive on other UNIX platforms.
Actually, Brett Glass has been poiting out for a long time how Gcc has glutted the market for good compilers.
Found this interesting entry in Miguel de Icaza's weblog - http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/activity-log.ht ml, dated Jul'28th -
I talked to Don Becker about GNU/Linux, and he had an interesting story to tell. Back in the day when he was at MIT and was an active contributor to gcc, he tried to get RMS to support Linux. RMS' answer back in the day went along the lines of `Linux is a waste of time, work on the Hurd instead, it is the future'.
An interesting twist to the Linux vs GNU/Linux debate.
Seems to confirm what RMS told Drepper. He seems to want it both ways . More developers need to come forward with their experiences - they will be doing the community a service.
Miguel,
I remember even Joel Spolsky was critical of.NET as marketing spin ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$ 133 ) . He wrote that more than a year back. So,it's not just uninformed people. Controversies seem to dog your efforts for some reason. May be you need to look into this. I am not trying to be judgemental one way of or the other. We have to wait for a couple of years to see how all this plays out.
Good Luck
I have been around softwareville for a while on a H1B. I don't have a job now and have been told explicitly by some recruting companies that it's going to be tough since there are a lot of local guys who are unemployed. The H1B legislation in force stipulates that American citizens have to given preference - Despite Norman Matloff and the likes's,stubborn refusal to believe this, most companies do follow this rule.
All the hard core programming/developer jobs are still done by American programmers. Most H1Bs are engaged in maintenance jobs. In the last two years a couple of development centers of American companies have been opened in India. But It's nothing compared with the development centers in Ireland or elsewhere in Europe. it's stange no one complains about development centers in Ireland, Germany and Britain. In fact these days there are lot of Russian programmers in any big American company - looks like you can tolerate even your former enemies. Am I seeing a pattern here ?
There is lot of anecdotal evidence floating around about Indian programmers who get very low pay compared with their American counterparts. Well in my opinion it's due to the stupid Visa rules. Most companies don't want to deal with Visa procedures and the lawyer overheads; so they hire contractors from recruiting agencies who get a cut - there are often 2 or more sub-contractors involved , which ensures that by the time the moolah reaches the programmer's pocket, it is far less than what the company pays to the recruting agency. During the height of the software boom , the Big Six consulting companies would charge anywhere between $250-$350 per hour for the programmers they subcontracted from an indian recruting company , which would get typically $50-$70 (from the Big Six )- you can imagine how much the programmer gets in such cases.
In most engineering environments there are plenty of older American sw engineers around, with highly specialised skills. Software Technologies that have become commoditised simply cannot ensure high salaries to lot of older programmers. There is no big conspiracy here.A lot of software technologies are one day going to be commoditised. It's a complex combination of economic and technical factors. Matloff pisses me off with his over simplification.
As broadband becomes a reality and colloborative development tools become more sophisticated, you will undoubtedly see a lot of companies re-locating jobs to wherever it makes business sense. The greatest threat is not H1B - you are gonna' get sided by technology.
Till date, I have never seen any hard numbers on the number of Ameircan programmers thrown out of their job due to the H1B program.
This discussion is actually about Prima Donna Wannabes. Are Prima Donna's like Linus or K &R such PITAs ? I don't think so. So this is about those wannabes without any perspective. Not documenting code/work, refusing to share information, trying to act overly cool, stubborn refusal to recognise the needs of a production environment, master-of-all-I-survey attitude are all signs 2 well known to anyone who has spent some time in sw companies. The best way to avoid these jerks is to filter them at the interview stage itself. It's very very difficult to get rid of them once they are in , since most of them manage to appear technically competent and at present there are way too many PHB managers in sw groups who are blind to the faults of these Wannabe's. It's especially difficult if these types are from some top school, then the managers won't even hear of it.
I used to suffer from the typical knee-jerk "America is screwing the world" attitude on this issue. Then I started reading conservative columnists like Thomas Sowell ( http://www.tsowell.com ), a couple of other conservative news sites and started listening to different takes on this issue - And, I have come away with the clear understanding that there is too much politics and the whole issue has been hijacked by washed up leftists who converted to the church of environmentalism, after the collapse of Communism. Consider a few facts :
1. We now have climate records going back 1000's of years and have been unable to establish clearly a coincidence between temperature changes and levels of carbon didoxide in the past.
2. Al Gore's book "Earth in Balance" is based heavily on the work of a four-star scientist ( forgot his name ) who has since revised many of his views - he is not even sure if it's Co2 is the main culprit.
3. The National Academy of Sciences report makes it look like there is a great deal of unanimity among scientists - this is just manufactured consent. Many scientists who were dissented had their names on their report without even being asked.
4. At a technical level the Kyoto treaty has generated lot of hysteria among the more-moral-than-thou and Komodo-dragons-are-my-son-in-law brigade. Do you know that those predictions are made on the basis of mathematical models that are trying to model a complex system with infinite feedbacks, these are numerical calculations of the solutions of partial diff equations and small wonder that , few of these models ever agree with each other.
Lot of folks - scientists, self-annointed intellectuals, the media need global warming. Please, Please try to learn about global warming at a scientific level; Let not the media be your guide. Gordon Moore ( not sure about the name ) one of the former heads of Green Peace regretted recently that the whole env. movement has been hijacked by anti-corporate and other political interests.
On a related note , Ximian is in a nice position to work on the ultimate User Interface for Web Services, now that they seem to have decided to get into this area as well. At present user interfaces for web services like online banking, buying books are all browser based for the most part and functional - but they don't blend in seamlessly with the rest of the desktop ( GnuCash is an exception in some ways ) . One way would be integrate it into the RSS channels on Evolution. Somehow Micorsoft has not thought of doing this with Outlook. Each web service has a separate application attached to it and I don't somehow feel comfortable with it. It's high time commonly used Web Services like on line banking, book purchases, etc are integrated into applications like Evolution.
Actually, It was not all that big # of coders-wise( jus' the # people who actually wrote the code ). Way 2 much money was spent on other areas . It did introduce some new areas like SVG in file managers which has not seen daylight even on Windows. Overall it did indicate some tasteful design - something sorely required in the Linux desktop world.
You know Deirdre, views like yours are unpopular among "testosterone-driven-twenty somethings". I have tried pointing out the business aspects of OSS only to find that they are not very well received. Noone wants to hear anything bad - everyone,despite all the dot-bombs are behaving like dopists on a high. I guess it will take a couple of more Eazel's to bring people down to earth. I can't help wondering what Ximian's state of finances is , at a great risk to my personal safety;-).
Anyway , Deeny thanks for your comments - they are always a very refreshing break from the run of the mill stuff. Why don't you put down your thoughts on your web page ?
Regards
Edna is a streaming MP3 server that allows network access of mp3 files over HTTP. I also found another useful article on the O'Reilly network about analyzing sound files in python
Slashdot Mirror
I have never read a shallower article. Sure VMWare is faster, but they have been around for much longer. MS Virtual Server was originally developed by some other company that MS took over. It's got a vastly superior API that makes app dev a lot easier. For VMWare you would have to buy the expensive Virtual Center, the C API that VMWare is releasing with their free server is in deep deep Beta. It's the usual MS strategy - make things easier for developers,ISV's, and partners first and worry about performance later. The flurry of moves that VMWare is making in the last three months is indication that they are far more aware of the very real threat from MS Virtual server than the average Slashdot Idiot.
this video, because Stephen Grady of RedMonks is not featured - he is not even quoted in the Video. I am forced to conclude that this software project is amateurish and not enterprise class.
You sure those people aren't twisted ?
Thanks for all the info. I wish you guys well and didn't mean to spite Chandler or Mitch, or anything of that sort. I have enormous respect for the hackers and Mitch's ideas in general. But it has been just frustrating waiting for so long for something that started out with so many innovative ideas.
Adding a page to the Chandler wiki that contrasts it with Evolution and such might not be a bad idea.
Good luck.
Seriously,Mitch Kapor should worry more about Chandler.
.
The project started in 2001 and they haven't been able to show even a barely useable version of the software till date. They have had an unbelievable amount of time, goodwill, and friendly press and the results are zero. Compare the progresss evolution made in its first three year period - you got to hand it to the Ximian monkeys - they are coding machines. Evolution has it's own indexer and plug-in framework and the real point that clinches it for evolution in most corporate environments is the excellent integration using Exchange Connector. I work for a company where we use Linux extensively and many windows folks are able to use evolution without any problem , and are in fact highly appreciative of it. Evolution 2.0 has even shed it's outlook look and feel - evolution is an example of what you get when you mix pragmatic product management with some awesome coding talent. The Chandler vision, on the other hand has been over-arching and massively confused from the beginning - initially they threw in whatever sounded cool - jabber, rdf etc, instead of deciding the technology based on the product requirements.
Claiming that they are breaking new ground just doesn't cut it - not even one innovative feature is on display after three years. As someone pointed out in a earlier post evolution 0.1 was more useable than chandler 0.4 - Heck I used it for day to day work , in spite of the warts.
When you have a bunch of talented programmers and still have nothing to show, it is really time to ask, 'What's up with Chandler ?'
Bugbear, It would be nice if you could write an essay on outsourcing, esp software outsourcing. What kinds can outsourced ? Is it a good idea at all ? Why are all the suits obsessed with it ? Are they totally wrong ?
Thanks
... is in serious doubt.C'mon ,a couple of hundred resumes and you have a bandwidth problem ? Looks like Joel now believes he can write whtever he feels like writing about , however crappy it might be. Next time you want to rant about something, Mr.Spolsky give yourself 24-48 hrs before you put your pen to paper.
Exactly ! It's incredible that geeks who bang microsoft for every security bug , still hold romantic notions about software like sendmail and BIND. sendmail and BIND have together lowered the bar for most programmers in the UNIX world securitywise. Repeated criticisms of DJB on slashdot only prove that Unix fanatics are no better than their Windows clones. How can anyone in their right frame of mind defend sendmail's record or for that matter BIND ? It's dishonesty of the highest order and maybe it's one the reason's for the sorry state that the UNIX world finds itself in today.
I am glad that I got to install Qmail and gain first hand experience, before I learnt about DJBs personality. Now if it turns out that DJB works for some terrorist outfit , It wouldn't bother me - Why ? It's that good !
,and whole lot of other stuff.
To tell the truth , few people in the world currently can write high performance software the way DJB does. DJB writes software that is very hard to match in terms security , performance and easy configurability by wannabe C/UNIX gurus. Qmail can eat sendmail, postfix etc for breakfast, lunch and dinner without a single burp.
Uninformed criticism of DJB's (1)licensing policies (2) Slanders by Postfix's author etc by slashdotters is nothing new . But I would invite the more discerning ones to check out DJBs website at http://cr.yp.to ( Incidentally on those rare days when the net seems to crawling, DJBs site is as quick as ever; it runs a lightning fast web server written by DJB )
It's not just Qmail - you will discover daemontools, djbdns
I once heard CmdrTaco, Mandrake and another guy in "Geeks in Space" making some tasteless remarks against programmers from India. It is the usual average geeks insecurity and unwarranted superiority complex that explains this obsession with this topic, making it one of the most discussed topics on /. along with Minor kernel patches, the color of Marcelo Tossati's hair ...
Kee -Rect ! The VFS used by Clearcase while providing a lot of it's cool features is also responsible for many drawbacks, including some of the ones you mention.
Scalability is the biggest downstream issue any manager has to consider before choosing Clearcase. It is extremely resource hungry and I used to work for a small company that deployed a Sun Enterprise server to support CLearcase for just 10-15 developers. Get ready with barrels of memory - shticks and drives.
The Steep learning curve is not something that u can wish away in a production environment.
In spite of all this, I remain fond of Clearcase - It was the first Version Control/Configuration System I used seriously and haven't found anything even remotely similar in terms of functionality. I felt like vomiting when I first used CVS after 4 years of CVS. Another nice feature is it integrates nicely with other Rational products like ClearDDTS the bug tracking system - Against a specific ticket you can check the list of related checkins/checkouts.
It was originally developed by a company called Atria and was later taken over by Rational.
And don't forget multisite. A Pig it is - but it provided lot of value for money, especially to comapnies that could afford it.
Abiword integrates well with Gnome, but is not a Gnome project. Morover Open Office has already been annointed by the powers in the Gnome Community. It's a different matter that most Gnome users actually prefer the lightweight Abiword.
We could use some quality C, C++, FORTRAN compilers. Gcc might be the holy grail for the free software Taliban. But anyone who has done serious work knows about it's limitations. And don't give that bull crap about "the best support available on the net" - does'nt work in production environments. It's very important for commercial compilers to be available on Linux as it makes increasing inroads into Games, High end Graphics, Scientific computing etc. Already a lot of engineering software and other kinds of performace-critical software has gone the NT/2000 way, one of the reasons being the lack of good compiler or compilers that are too expensive on other UNIX platforms.
Actually, Brett Glass has been poiting out for a long time how Gcc has glutted the market for good compilers.
Anyone know how good the Intel compilers are ?
Found this interesting entry in Miguel de Icaza's weblog - http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/activity-log.ht ml, dated Jul'28th -
I talked to Don Becker about GNU/Linux, and he had an interesting story to tell. Back in the day when he was at MIT and was an active contributor to gcc, he tried to get RMS to support Linux. RMS' answer back in the day went along the lines of `Linux is a waste of time, work on the Hurd instead, it is the future'.
An interesting twist to the Linux vs GNU/Linux debate.
Seems to confirm what RMS told Drepper. He seems to want it both ways . More developers need to come forward with their experiences - they will be doing the community a service.
Miguel, I remember even Joel Spolsky was critical of .NET as marketing spin ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$ 133 ) . He wrote that more than a year back. So,it's not just uninformed people. Controversies seem to dog your efforts for some reason. May be you need to look into this. I am not trying to be judgemental one way of or the other. We have to wait for a couple of years to see how all this plays out.
Good Luck
I have been around softwareville for a while on a H1B. I don't have a job now and have been told explicitly by some recruting companies that it's going to be tough since there are a lot of local guys who are unemployed. The H1B legislation in force stipulates that American citizens have to given preference - Despite Norman Matloff and the likes's ,stubborn refusal to believe this, most companies do follow this rule.
All the hard core programming/developer jobs are still done by American programmers. Most H1Bs are engaged in maintenance jobs. In the last two years a couple of development centers of American companies have been opened in India. But It's nothing compared with the development centers in Ireland or elsewhere in Europe. it's stange no one complains about development centers in Ireland, Germany and Britain. In fact these days there are lot of Russian programmers in any big American company - looks like you can tolerate even your former enemies. Am I seeing a pattern here ?
There is lot of anecdotal evidence floating around about Indian programmers who get very low pay compared with their American counterparts. Well in my opinion it's due to the stupid Visa rules. Most companies don't want to deal with Visa procedures and the lawyer overheads; so they hire contractors from recruiting agencies who get a cut - there are often 2 or more sub-contractors involved , which ensures that by the time the moolah reaches the programmer's pocket, it is far less than what the company pays to the recruting agency. During the height of the software boom , the Big Six consulting companies would charge anywhere between $250-$350 per hour for the programmers they subcontracted from an indian recruting company , which would get typically $50-$70 (from the Big Six )- you can imagine how much the programmer gets in such cases.
In most engineering environments there are plenty of older American sw engineers around, with highly specialised skills. Software Technologies that have become commoditised simply cannot ensure high salaries to lot of older programmers. There is no big conspiracy here.A lot of software technologies are one day going to be commoditised. It's a complex combination of economic and technical factors. Matloff pisses me off with his over simplification.
As broadband becomes a reality and colloborative development tools become more sophisticated, you will undoubtedly see a lot of companies re-locating jobs to wherever it makes business sense. The greatest threat is not H1B - you are gonna' get sided by technology.
Till date, I have never seen any hard numbers on the number of Ameircan programmers thrown out of their job due to the H1B program.
This discussion is actually about Prima Donna Wannabes. Are Prima Donna's like Linus or K &R such PITAs ? I don't think so. So this is about those wannabes without any perspective. Not documenting code/work, refusing to share information, trying to act overly cool, stubborn refusal to recognise the needs of a production environment, master-of-all-I-survey attitude are all signs 2 well known to anyone who has spent some time in sw companies. The best way to avoid these jerks is to filter them at the interview stage itself. It's very very difficult to get rid of them once they are in , since most of them manage to appear technically competent and at present there are way too many PHB managers in sw groups who are blind to the faults of these Wannabe's. It's especially difficult if these types are from some top school, then the managers won't even hear of it.
I used to suffer from the typical knee-jerk "America is screwing the world" attitude on this issue. Then I started reading conservative columnists like Thomas Sowell ( http://www.tsowell.com ), a couple of other conservative news sites and started listening to different takes on this issue - And, I have come away with the clear understanding that there is too much politics and the whole issue has been hijacked by washed up leftists who converted to the church of environmentalism, after the collapse of Communism. Consider a few facts : 1. We now have climate records going back 1000's of years and have been unable to establish clearly a coincidence between temperature changes and levels of carbon didoxide in the past. 2. Al Gore's book "Earth in Balance" is based heavily on the work of a four-star scientist ( forgot his name ) who has since revised many of his views - he is not even sure if it's Co2 is the main culprit. 3. The National Academy of Sciences report makes it look like there is a great deal of unanimity among scientists - this is just manufactured consent. Many scientists who were dissented had their names on their report without even being asked. 4. At a technical level the Kyoto treaty has generated lot of hysteria among the more-moral-than-thou and Komodo-dragons-are-my-son-in-law brigade. Do you know that those predictions are made on the basis of mathematical models that are trying to model a complex system with infinite feedbacks, these are numerical calculations of the solutions of partial diff equations and small wonder that , few of these models ever agree with each other. Lot of folks - scientists, self-annointed intellectuals, the media need global warming. Please, Please try to learn about global warming at a scientific level; Let not the media be your guide. Gordon Moore ( not sure about the name ) one of the former heads of Green Peace regretted recently that the whole env. movement has been hijacked by anti-corporate and other political interests.
On a related note , Ximian is in a nice position to work on the ultimate User Interface for Web Services, now that they seem to have decided to get into this area as well. At present user interfaces for web services like online banking, buying books are all browser based for the most part and functional - but they don't blend in seamlessly with the rest of the desktop ( GnuCash is an exception in some ways ) . One way would be integrate it into the RSS channels on Evolution. Somehow Micorsoft has not thought of doing this with Outlook. Each web service has a separate application attached to it and I don't somehow feel comfortable with it. It's high time commonly used Web Services like on line banking, book purchases, etc are integrated into applications like Evolution.
Nice post. Thanks for the tips. BTW, Please check the links on your page - may be it's just a problem with ASP that my browser has.
The situation is too complicated to say things like Java is in demand©In fact, That's plain irresponsible© Large sections of the Java market have been completely wiped out in this dot-com collapse and a large number of Java programmers are without jobs© I have no experience with Java server side - I am told it's doing better there© But JFC/Swing is an unmitigated disaster - ask any real programmer; they will tell you about the sucking noise that Swing makes, unless of course you work for one of those places where they have more than sense© Simson Garfinkel wrote a very perceptive article on Java in Salon - search the archives©
Actually, It was not all that big # of coders-wise( jus' the # people who actually wrote the code ). Way 2 much money was spent on other areas . It did introduce some new areas like SVG in file managers which has not seen daylight even on Windows. Overall it did indicate some tasteful design - something sorely required in the Linux desktop world.
You know Deirdre, views like yours are unpopular among "testosterone-driven-twenty somethings". I have tried pointing out the business aspects of OSS only to find that they are not very well received. Noone wants to hear anything bad - everyone ,despite all the dot-bombs are behaving like dopists on a high. I guess it will take a couple of more Eazel's to bring people down to earth. I can't help wondering what Ximian's state of finances is , at a great risk to my personal safety ;-).
Anyway , Deeny thanks for your comments - they are always a very refreshing break from the run of the mill stuff. Why don't you put down your thoughts on your web page ?
Regards
Take a look at the Puppy
Edna is a streaming MP3 server that allows network access of mp3 files over HTTP. I also found another useful article on the O'Reilly network about analyzing sound files in python