MS added classes to the java.* package hierarchy, in contravention to the terms of their licence. That's why Sun sued. Had MS put their classes in a com.microsoft package hierarchy like you're supposed to, Sun wouldn't have cared (or had a leg to stand on).
That was only the half of it. Microsoft also extended the Java language by adding Delegates (see C#), and a form of native code binding that was not JNI (see C#).
Both these features required non-standard and incompatible JVM opcodes that crashed other VMs. It was also something that couldn't be fixed without working with Sun to alter the standard (and Sun was in no mood to do so).
So, it was a much deeper issue than some class locations. I think if MS could have easily tweaked J++, they probably would have, but ulitimately the legal requirements on J++ removed any reason for it to exist.
. Do we really want to go to any great lengths to make life any easier for people who just want to be automatons?
Well if "we" is American Capitalism, then the answer is resoundingly YES.
I'm sympathetic to what you're saying here, but the facts are that MS Office is requried but not very highly rewarded skill, and therefore there's a fair amount of automatons in the secretarial/mid-managerial ranks.
And, if you can't hack the Help Desk, I strongly suggest finding a job where you're at least 2nd Tier rather turning into yet another dickheaded "computer guy".
I said this in the other comment, but there is an argument that the new MS Office UI will be so good/effecient/fantabulous that it will be worth training people for.
OTOH, I don't think you could make that argument about OpenOffice's UI, so the training becomes an "expense" and not an "investment".
Oh, there's been a metric shitload of bitching about the OS X UI as well. Maybe if you just switched you missed the first three years of OS 9 Backlash.
For like 12 years MS hasn't changed the Office UI singificantly because of "training" issues, and everyone here flamed them for rehashing the same product over-and-over.
Then they rethink the UI and people start going "OMG! Training!". Let's be realistic here -- a substantial portion of the userbase is still on MS Office 2000 -- companies will have at least 5 years to get ready to adapt to this, and by that time it will be quite easy to hire people who know the new UI.
Slashdot is the kind of place where everyone thinks that enveryone should all switch to Linux/Mac/OpenOffice/Whatever tomorrow as the magic bullet. Nobody here ever seems to care about training until MS Office comes up.
Pointless knowledge now, but Airplane was largely a parody of the Airport series of TV movies (Airport '77, etc), even to the point of using a lot of the same washed-up B-actors.
As far as most Java developers are concerned Applets are rarely used.
Of course, but the only place an average endluser ever sees Java is in an applet. Which is why just the word Java brings out all the flamers on slashdot.
I do think that if MS & Sun weren't so pigheaded and could have come to agreement about something like the MSJVM, that Java would much more accepted on the client-side.
Problem with this argument is that almost nobody runs Windows just to use uTorrent, while quite a lot of people run Java just for Azureus. The resources required for Windows are used by all applications (*including Java*), but most desktop users only infrequently use Java apps.
I'm not going to defend LAMP garbage, but I think there's the reasonable criticism that Java does not scale down well to smaller webapps, and even the smallest thing seems to end up with a half-dozen third party frameworks.
That might be mainly programmer culture more than anything else, because you certainly can write PHP-style JSP code.
Microsoft's JVM was actually one of the fastest in the day and had extentions for a native GUI similar to eclipse. (Of course those extentions relied on illegal JVM tricks.) It was certainly much better than Netscape Java or early releases of Sun Java.
The main reason Java has a terrible reputation (IMO) is/was it's tendancy to hang/lockup/freeze your browser when an applet loads, and general clunkyness with Swing.
1) Franklin was an Apple II clone with pirated Apple firmware. Nothing to do with Macs
2) In the 68K days, many Macs came with ROMs socketed in SIMM slots, so they were very easy to remove and use in a clone system. At my university, these ROM SIMMs were frequently stolen by dasterdly Amigians and Atarians.
3) Some of the later official PPC clones had ROMs, but they were soldered on rather than socketed. At this point the ROM was basically a copy-protection dongle rather than something that saved cost.
4) I believe starting with MacOS 9, they removed the ROM requirement from the OS. Of course now they use TCPA for similar purposes.
Their Mac numbers are definately higher than normally seen in webstat surveys, probably due to having Mac-biased sites in their pool.
But I've never seen any sort of webstat averages that puts Linux above 1% -- it's usually around 0.5% which is basically below the margin of error in these things and barely above bot-noise.
I definitely hear people who have been hit by malware ask about Apple computers.
That's nice, but "Switchers" are about 0.3% of MS's installed base (virtually all of whom have to deal with malware to some degree), so it is statistically insiginificant.
Hmm, I always thought the filemanager in OS/2 was gawdawful. I usually resorted to winfile. The Gnome one is a million times better despite it's faults.
Which raises another issue -- the entire WPS was an abstraction stored in a binary database that had nothing to do with what was going on in your C: drive.
I'm sorry, it's been more than 10 years since I've used OS/2 day-to-day, so I may be off on some of the details.
As for Lotus/IBM SmartCenter, I'm fairly certain it was modeled on preview releases of Win95/Chicago which had been around for years.
I don't agree. Most users had plenty of experience using a mouse by 1992.
A year or two eariler, most computers didn't ship with a mouse. So I doubt it. Even so, I think OS/2's "right-drag" metaphors would be too complex for many modern users, much less those in 1992. Sad but true.
WPS had some great ideas and features, but it was hampered by poor execution and the lack of a cohesive design. Throwing a bunch of folders on the desktop and calling it a day is not the way to build a good UI.
Assuming that $1.2B existed -- there was accusations of various Enron-style accounting tricks going on at Apple.
> The point is the cash from MS didn't save them.
True. What saved them was a big asset firesale (ARM), and a home-run product (iMac). According to the WSJ, Apple actually had Chapter 11 papers drawn up at one point if they couldn't float a loan, so "almost bankrupt" is a correct statement.
Except we know that Vista will have numerous security improvements that aren't just market baloney -- LUA security, neutered IE, built-in anti-spyware, etc. Probably won't eliminate malware, but you have to admit that it looks a million times better "on paper" than XP did. XP didn't even have a software firewall at first.
Whoops... allow me to clarify. The "malware" issue is an advantage in Mac user's minds, but it really isn't a platform driver for Windows alterntives. Just based on raw statistics, people are not buying Macs because they got hit by malware.
Furthermore, the worst is probably already over for Windows malware issues. Vista will improve things. It's not a permenant advantage for non-Windows OSes.
They were told by Microsoft that they could either receive virtually no support whatsoever for getting Windows 95 to run on IBM computers, paying through the nose for the copies they bought,... or they could get rid of OS/2 and the Lotus office suite
That is a one-sided version of the story, so here is an equally one-sided version:
IBM had a sweetheart deal on Windows 3.1 ($11/copy!) due to their history with Microsoft. IBM threatend MS with sabotaging the Windows 95 launch with a big OS/2 ad campaign, unless Microsoft gave them the same sweetheart deal on Windows 95.
Because IBM was already backing away from OS/2, they really wanted Windows 95, and they wanted it cheap. And Microsoft gave in to their threats.
Anyway, any story about poor widdle IBM being bullied by big mean Microsoft is obviously silly. They're all big boys.
Interesting idea, but I don't think Apple has ever put much effort into making Carbon nicer for Win32 programmers.
Random piece of info: At one point, Microsoft ported MFC to Macs and had a Mac cross-compiler. Perhaps Apple could pick this up and do something with it.
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MS added classes to the java.* package hierarchy, in contravention to the terms of their licence. That's why Sun sued. Had MS put their classes in a com.microsoft package hierarchy like you're supposed to, Sun wouldn't have cared (or had a leg to stand on).
That was only the half of it. Microsoft also extended the Java language by adding Delegates (see C#), and a form of native code binding that was not JNI (see C#).
Both these features required non-standard and incompatible JVM opcodes that crashed other VMs. It was also something that couldn't be fixed without working with Sun to alter the standard (and Sun was in no mood to do so).
So, it was a much deeper issue than some class locations. I think if MS could have easily tweaked J++, they probably would have, but ulitimately the legal requirements on J++ removed any reason for it to exist.
. Do we really want to go to any great lengths to make life any easier for people who just want to be automatons?
Well if "we" is American Capitalism, then the answer is resoundingly YES.
I'm sympathetic to what you're saying here, but the facts are that MS Office is requried but not very highly rewarded skill, and therefore there's a fair amount of automatons in the secretarial/mid-managerial ranks.
And, if you can't hack the Help Desk, I strongly suggest finding a job where you're at least 2nd Tier rather turning into yet another dickheaded "computer guy".
I'm yet to see a BSOD.
People who talk about BSODs are not welcome at Slashdot anymore. Because, you know, it shows that you pretty much suck at being a computer nerd.
I said this in the other comment, but there is an argument that the new MS Office UI will be so good/effecient/fantabulous that it will be worth training people for.
OTOH, I don't think you could make that argument about OpenOffice's UI, so the training becomes an "expense" and not an "investment".
Oh, there's been a metric shitload of bitching about the OS X UI as well. Maybe if you just switched you missed the first three years of OS 9 Backlash.
Here's the counter argument:
MICROSOFT: Are you retraining everyone for something better, or are you using something that's "10 years behind" like OpenOffice.
The idea being that the new Office UI improves effeciency and therefore has a Training ROI and isn't just gratuitiously different.
For like 12 years MS hasn't changed the Office UI singificantly because of "training" issues, and everyone here flamed them for rehashing the same product over-and-over.
Then they rethink the UI and people start going "OMG! Training!". Let's be realistic here -- a substantial portion of the userbase is still on MS Office 2000 -- companies will have at least 5 years to get ready to adapt to this, and by that time it will be quite easy to hire people who know the new UI.
Slashdot is the kind of place where everyone thinks that enveryone should all switch to Linux/Mac/OpenOffice/Whatever tomorrow as the magic bullet. Nobody here ever seems to care about training until MS Office comes up.
Pointless knowledge now, but Airplane was largely a parody of the Airport series of TV movies (Airport '77, etc), even to the point of using a lot of the same washed-up B-actors.
As far as most Java developers are concerned Applets are rarely used.
Of course, but the only place an average endluser ever sees Java is in an applet. Which is why just the word Java brings out all the flamers on slashdot.
I do think that if MS & Sun weren't so pigheaded and could have come to agreement about something like the MSJVM, that Java would much more accepted on the client-side.
Problem with this argument is that almost nobody runs Windows just to use uTorrent, while quite a lot of people run Java just for Azureus. The resources required for Windows are used by all applications (*including Java*), but most desktop users only infrequently use Java apps.
Where did you read that F# would be included in VisualStudio?
I'm not going to defend LAMP garbage, but I think there's the reasonable criticism that Java does not scale down well to smaller webapps, and even the smallest thing seems to end up with a half-dozen third party frameworks.
That might be mainly programmer culture more than anything else, because you certainly can write PHP-style JSP code.
Microsoft's JVM was actually one of the fastest in the day and had extentions for a native GUI similar to eclipse. (Of course those extentions relied on illegal JVM tricks.) It was certainly much better than Netscape Java or early releases of Sun Java.
The main reason Java has a terrible reputation (IMO) is/was it's tendancy to hang/lockup/freeze your browser when an applet loads, and general clunkyness with Swing.
Sure, but a soldered ROM probably would have killed the commercial viability of those Amiga addon boards.
A few points:
1) Franklin was an Apple II clone with pirated Apple firmware. Nothing to do with Macs
2) In the 68K days, many Macs came with ROMs socketed in SIMM slots, so they were very easy to remove and use in a clone system. At my university, these ROM SIMMs were frequently stolen by dasterdly Amigians and Atarians.
3) Some of the later official PPC clones had ROMs, but they were soldered on rather than socketed. At this point the ROM was basically a copy-protection dongle rather than something that saved cost.
4) I believe starting with MacOS 9, they removed the ROM requirement from the OS. Of course now they use TCPA for similar purposes.
Wrong, and wrong. Enjoy your imaginary feature, I'm sure you'll find it very useful. har.
Their Mac numbers are definately higher than normally seen in webstat surveys, probably due to having Mac-biased sites in their pool.
But I've never seen any sort of webstat averages that puts Linux above 1% -- it's usually around 0.5% which is basically below the margin of error in these things and barely above bot-noise.
I definitely hear people who have been hit by malware ask about Apple computers.
That's nice, but "Switchers" are about 0.3% of MS's installed base (virtually all of whom have to deal with malware to some degree), so it is statistically insiginificant.
Hmm, I always thought the filemanager in OS/2 was gawdawful. I usually resorted to winfile. The Gnome one is a million times better despite it's faults.
Which raises another issue -- the entire WPS was an abstraction stored in a binary database that had nothing to do with what was going on in your C: drive.
I'm sorry, it's been more than 10 years since I've used OS/2 day-to-day, so I may be off on some of the details.
As for Lotus/IBM SmartCenter, I'm fairly certain it was modeled on preview releases of Win95/Chicago which had been around for years.
I don't agree. Most users had plenty of experience using a mouse by 1992.
A year or two eariler, most computers didn't ship with a mouse. So I doubt it. Even so, I think OS/2's "right-drag" metaphors would be too complex for many modern users, much less those in 1992. Sad but true.
WPS had some great ideas and features, but it was hampered by poor execution and the lack of a cohesive design. Throwing a bunch of folders on the desktop and calling it a day is not the way to build a good UI.
> bucket compared to $1.2bil
Assuming that $1.2B existed -- there was accusations of various Enron-style accounting tricks going on at Apple.
> The point is the cash from MS didn't save them.
True. What saved them was a big asset firesale (ARM), and a home-run product (iMac). According to the WSJ, Apple actually had Chapter 11 papers drawn up at one point if they couldn't float a loan, so "almost bankrupt" is a correct statement.
Except we know that Vista will have numerous security improvements that aren't just market baloney -- LUA security, neutered IE, built-in anti-spyware, etc. Probably won't eliminate malware, but you have to admit that it looks a million times better "on paper" than XP did. XP didn't even have a software firewall at first.
Whoops ... allow me to clarify. The "malware" issue is an advantage in Mac user's minds, but it really isn't a platform driver for Windows alterntives. Just based on raw statistics, people are not buying Macs because they got hit by malware.
Furthermore, the worst is probably already over for Windows malware issues. Vista will improve things. It's not a permenant advantage for non-Windows OSes.
They were told by Microsoft that they could either receive virtually no support whatsoever for getting Windows 95 to run on IBM computers, paying through the nose for the copies they bought, ... or they could get rid of OS/2 and the Lotus office suite
That is a one-sided version of the story, so here is an equally one-sided version:
IBM had a sweetheart deal on Windows 3.1 ($11/copy!) due to their history with Microsoft. IBM threatend MS with sabotaging the Windows 95 launch with a big OS/2 ad campaign, unless Microsoft gave them the same sweetheart deal on Windows 95.
Because IBM was already backing away from OS/2, they really wanted Windows 95, and they wanted it cheap. And Microsoft gave in to their threats.
Anyway, any story about poor widdle IBM being bullied by big mean Microsoft is obviously silly. They're all big boys.
Interesting idea, but I don't think Apple has ever put much effort into making Carbon nicer for Win32 programmers.
Random piece of info: At one point, Microsoft ported MFC to Macs and had a Mac cross-compiler. Perhaps Apple could pick this up and do something with it.