I hardly think the situation calls for insults, as its not at all clear. Yes, petroleum vehicles are taxed, but governments also lose large amounts of revenue on tax subsidies for the oil industry (in the case off federal), as well as hundreds of billions of dollars spent each year on highway and road maintenance (federal, state, and local), not to mention the costs of pollution.
If you can point to a study that measures the total cost spent on car-based transportation, including pollution, and compares that the amount collected in taxes I'd love to read it.
You can get strange sounds from almost any data
on
Eerie Sounds from Saturn
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As someone who's had a minor career in computer music, I've seen this type of thing again and again. You can take almost any sampled data and if it is something other than purely random you can massage the frequency response into the human hearing range. Its fun to do, but it usually doesn't tell you much.
The whole attitude that somehow open source is wanting more from Sun than it would contribute back is ignorant, uninformed, short sighted, etc. Sun and their apologists should get a clue. Open source would make it responsive to a much wider range of developers and would produce developments Sun was too blind to pursue or pursued way too late and too little. Any harm has already been done to a great extent by Sun's pig-headedness. They should go off in a corner and use it by themselves if they don't want to open it up.
This is yet another post that confuses source code with a specification. Java is a programming language, and having access to the source code doesn't help if you can't also change the specification. Fortunately anyone who actually wanted to change the java language can participate in the Java Community Process.
Making Java the language "open" so that anyone could define what the language meant would kill Java. One of the main reasons people can use Java is that it mostly runs without problems on a bunch of different platforms and JVMs. If anyone could create different language constructs and publish a new version of the java language or JVM, the new versions almost certainly would not be cross-platform, and most likely would make it so unreliable as to be unusable in mission critical applications.
If you'd like to point out another corporation doing a better job with their programming language, go right ahead. Name one.
Point One: Maureen O'Gara doesn't write for LinuxWorld, but another Sys-Con publication. People just assume because she writes on Linux topics and works for Sys-Con, that she writes for LinuxWorld, which isn't the case.
Point Two: No one on the LinuxWorld editorial staff is paid, its all volunteer because they love Linux.
To be "employed" would require payment, and no LinuxWorld editor, senior or otherwise receives any money. That's right, they work for free. There is no office.
The big problem with the Maureen O'Gara articles is while she has no affiliation with LinuxWorld, all of the Sys-Con Linux subject articles from other publications show up on the LinuxWorld website, giving readers the impression she writes for LinuxWorld. Every time O'Gara writes an article, not only do the Linuxworld editors get all upset that her crap is showing up on their website, they receive a boatload of nasty email that assume they ok'd it!
Why don't the editors just do something about it? Well, in the new world of "journalism", Sys-con central decides what goes on the websites, and the magazine editors only have a say over what goes in the print version.
Technical magazines never used to pay much for articles-- when I was writing articles $750 was average, but I'd spend weeks working on it. Now there's so many people still out of work they'll work for free just to keep a foot in the tech. industry somehow.
Its very clever of them to issue a press release with findings way before the study, because it makes the conclusions impossible to refute. If they released the actual study now people would be able to find out exactly how it was done and find the holes, which is impossible now. In every single "survey" of this type that I've read, if you read the actual details, the deck had been stacked to reach a certain conclusion. By the time the actual document comes up any complaints about the way the study was done won't be news any more, and all people will remember is the headline from the press release.
Its an interesting parallel to politics, where a politician can campaign for something, say like social security changes, without actually putting forth any concrete proposals. The lack of any concrete numbers in a proposal keeps anyone from making a concrete rebuttal, so that the politicians are free to sell the concept without having to be responsible for both the pros and cons of the changes.
Its outrageous to me that MS simultaneously attacked Java applets as being insecure when it had the most advanced security module for any dynamic code available, while they were touting ActiveX as an alternative, AND IT HAS NO SECURITY AT ALL!
I got fed up with Intuit's bug-ridden software and abysmal tech. support in 2003 and switched to MoneyDance. The GUI isn't as slick, but I ended up spending way less time on finances because the program's well-written and well supported. Instead of talking to tech. support people on the other side of the world who are just reading from a support database you can get email back from one of the developer's in a couple of hours and your questions are answered quickly, accurately, and for free.
I looked at some open source programs at the time, but the big draw for me to MoneyDance initially was it will automatically download transactions from my bank, and there's a great matching algorithm to stick the transactions in the right budget category.
Sun has always embraced open standards, so in that sense they have always been "open". What they haven't done is given away the source code to Solaris with all of the advantages it has over other operating systems. In a company where source code has been viewed as valuable intellectual property the temptation is great to hold on to it.
All the arguments I've read in favor of having Sun make Java "open source" never mention the difference between a specification and an implementation. As a former Sun employee, I can tell you the corporate strategy was to make all specifications public, and allow integration and competition by having each competitor do a separate implementation. This worked well with networking standards, but has run afoul of the open source crowd.
If Java was defined by its source rather than the specification MS or any other company would put out their own versions, and cross-platform compatibility would be destroyed in an instant. As it is anyone is free to do their own implementation of Java and open source it. Why not ask IBM to open source their JVM?
Yes a horse can chomp on oats, but would never chomp on a bit. For starters, their jaw has a section with no teeth which is where the bit goes. Bits work because they act on the jaw and gums, not the teeth. It would be very painful for a horse to actually place the bit on the teeth to chomp on it, which is why the term is different from chomping.
I realize some dictionaries don't make this distinction, but those definitions weren't written by an equestrian. The metaphore people are reaching for when they say "champing at the bit" is indeed one of holding back a race horse, not a horse mistakenly breaking their teeth by chomping on a very hard piece of metal.
While most months you would be right, in Nov. 2003 you are not. The update to Google this particular month featured a radical change in the algorithms used to rank sites. In previous months for the past several years the rankings would change little every month-- if you look at the top 10 sites for a particular search term you'd see some sites move up a few levels, and other sites move down a couple of rankings.
This time, however, from what I can estimate most of the topped ranked pages have changed for a particular search term, which indicates a major change in Google's algorithm, which is particularly newsworthy. If that isn't news, then what is?
The reason businesses are complaining is that there are tens of thousands of small businesses that make their living from customers who find them via Google, which is also newsworthy. And most aren't SEO professionals or scammers who've illictly tried to artificially boost their rankings, thank you very much.
Whether the change will also elicit complaints from searchers has yet to be seen-- some search terms seem to return relevant results and some do not.
As odd as it sounds, companies that do studies don't just pull "statistics" out of their ass, they are by and large sizable companies with good reputations doing honest work.
I beg to differ. It takes a lot of time and effort to analyze IT costs, and not many companies do. When an analyst says they've done a "study", you have to remember that usually people do what is fastest, cheapest, and easiest.
All they usually do is call a bunch of their customers, ask them questions, and put the results together. But what you have to remember is the vast majority of companies can't tell you the statistics, and so the "analyst" "extrapolates" the data, in other words "pulls statistics out of their ass".
Don't believe me? Ask your own company if someone can tell you the TCO details of their IT operations.
The actual source code in question isn't of primary importance at this point since the main SCO complaint is against IBM, and IBM's source code is in the Linux source tree because they donated it. Its public knowledge that IBM donated code to Linux, and SCO is just showing the code to selected neophytes for shock value. "SCO showed me source code from Linux and System V, and THEY WERE THE SAME! I'm shocked! IBM must be guilty".
SCO may eventually make other claims that all of Linux is their stolen property, but for the time being the focus should be on IBM, and in that case looking at the code does nothing but provide FUD fodder for clueless news outlets. The headlines will read "Industry analyst says lines of code are the same, SCO up 3 points".
The real issue here is this is a licensing dispute between two software companies, and it says nothing of value about the open source development process or Linux. Its in SCO's interest to bring these broader issues into the picture in order to put pressure on IBM to settle, but DON'T TAKE THE BAIT!
1) Sun VMs have taken a long time to match MS VMs in perfs.
That depends on how you define a "long time". Java came out in '95, and wasn't even taken seriously until '96. Non- Microsoft VMs overtook MS performance in late '97, (after the lawsuit) and haven't improved since.
The event you're talking about, a short period of time when the MS virtual machine was fastest, was FIVE YEARS AGO!
3) Sun hasn't done much good in client-side support. Java applications are memory-hungry and just slow. Chances are that MS would have done better.
I've been writing fast Java GUIs since '96, and am tired of people blaming slow programs on the language. Its possible to write Java GUIs that run on windows and are indistinguishable from MFC apps in either performance or look and feel. Customers can't tell the difference and don't care.
If the "proof" of performance seems to be you saw a slow application written in Java, then C++ is also slow, as I've seen slow applications written in that language too.
You're absolutely right. To get some cash while bootstrapping
a startup I took short 1 week assignments teaching Java programming. I'd
run into people who claimed to have four year computer
science degrees, but yet didn't know the difference
between integers and floating point numbers, and some
who couldn't even copy the labs off of a floppy!
There's obviously a huge amount of resume faking
going on. Try teaching a programming class where half of the people are
good programmers, and just don't know Java yet, and
the rest of the class if full of people who lied on their resumes
and don't even understand concepts like files and
directories!
If RealPlayer and every other competitor were allowed to compete on features, then what you say might be true. The problem is MS isn't content to allow their products to compete on features, and according to two federal courts, instead relied on illegal exclusive contracts to compete.
What they do is make their "partners" sign contracts saying they won't promote competing products. This means that Dell can't install RealPlayer at the factory, for example, and other partners can't use RealPlayer. Another example is the deal AOL made with MS that, in exchange for MS allowing a link to AOL to be included on the desktop for new computers, AOL has agreed to make all of their media content available in Windows Media Format exclusively.
These facts are easy to check. Just read the conclusions from the Appeals Court's review of the the court case.Its specifically sites many examples of exclusionary and illegal contracts.
The result is that companies aren't allowed to decide the best products to use, since if you do business with Microsoft you can't do business with the competition. Its all MS or nothing.
So, your assertion that "Windows isn't keeping Real off the desktop" is demonstrably false. MS is actively trying to get any and all competitors off of their desktop.
The problem is, not only is the coverage poor, but as a former BellSouth Mobility customer, I can tell you that the performance, service, and pricing is bad too.
At least in NC, the coverage of the towers is such that you're unlikely to get coverage more than a mile or two from a major highway. Even if you have a lifestyle that keeps you within coverage, the prices are 40% higher that compeitors in the area.
For example, to get 550 hours of combined local and long distance minutes will cost you $70 with the VisorPhone. I'm currently paying $50/month for the same thing with Sprint, and to top it off, Sprint has much better coverage and better customer service.
[I originally wasn't going to write a response to this, thinking that the whole premise was ludicrous. ]
I couldn't agree more. The idea that because the author likes Linux and doesn't like Java everyone else thinks the same way IS LUDICROUS. Now, if there was at least a poll or something, there'd be a reason to call attention.
As long as one's person experience mirrors the entire world, *every* *single* software company that I am familiar with writes their code in Java, and uses Linux as their development environment. Here's just a few links:
You haven't read iBilio's or Metalab's charter. Its not their responsiblity to write Linux documentation. Since when does a library have a responsibility to write its contents?
The court has turned the meaning of this protection around by prohibiting public displays of religion.
The above statement is a grossly inaccurate distortion made by "prayer in schools" advocacy groups. The actual prohibition is the same as its always been: government is not allowed to practice religion. Governmental bodies such as schools are not allowed to sponsor the practicing of a religion. Since praying is by definition worshiping god, having a school sponsored prayer would be a government sponsored religious ceremony, and thus prohibited.
Another distortion made the "prayer in school" advocacy groups is that religion is totally banned from schools. This too, is false. An example of religious displays that are allowed in schools particularly are student religious clubs, and the study of the bible from a historical perspective, both of which are common where I live, at least. And of course, students are allowed to quitely pray any time they wish.
Slashdot Mirror
I hardly think the situation calls for insults, as its not at all clear. Yes, petroleum vehicles are taxed, but governments also lose large amounts of revenue on tax subsidies for the oil industry (in the case off federal), as well as hundreds of billions of dollars spent each year on highway and road maintenance (federal, state, and local), not to mention the costs of pollution.
If you can point to a study that measures the total cost spent on car-based transportation, including pollution, and compares that the amount collected in taxes I'd love to read it.
As someone who's had a minor career in computer music, I've seen this type of thing again and again. You can take almost any sampled data and if it is something other than purely random you can massage the frequency response into the human hearing range. Its fun to do, but it usually doesn't tell you much.
The whole attitude that somehow open source is wanting more from Sun than it would contribute back is ignorant, uninformed, short sighted, etc. Sun and their apologists should get a clue. Open source would make it responsive to a much wider range of developers and would produce developments Sun was too blind to pursue or pursued way too late and too little. Any harm has already been done to a great extent by Sun's pig-headedness. They should go off in a corner and use it by themselves if they don't want to open it up.
This is yet another post that confuses source code with a specification. Java is a programming language, and having access to the source code doesn't help if you can't also change the specification. Fortunately anyone who actually wanted to change the java language can participate in the Java Community Process.
Making Java the language "open" so that anyone could define what the language meant would kill Java. One of the main reasons people can use Java is that it mostly runs without problems on a bunch of different platforms and JVMs. If anyone could create different language constructs and publish a new version of the java language or JVM, the new versions almost certainly would not be cross-platform, and most likely would make it so unreliable as to be unusable in mission critical applications.
If you'd like to point out another corporation doing a better job with their programming language, go right ahead. Name one.
Point One: Maureen O'Gara doesn't write for LinuxWorld, but another Sys-Con publication. People just assume because she writes on Linux topics and works for Sys-Con, that she writes for LinuxWorld, which isn't the case.
Point Two: No one on the LinuxWorld editorial staff is paid, its all volunteer because they love Linux.
To be "employed" would require payment, and no LinuxWorld editor, senior or otherwise receives any money. That's right, they work for free. There is no office.
The big problem with the Maureen O'Gara articles is while she has no affiliation with LinuxWorld, all of the Sys-Con Linux subject articles from other publications show up on the LinuxWorld website, giving readers the impression she writes for LinuxWorld. Every time O'Gara writes an article, not only do the Linuxworld editors get all upset that her crap is showing up on their website, they receive a boatload of nasty email that assume they ok'd it!
Why don't the editors just do something about it? Well, in the new world of "journalism", Sys-con central decides what goes on the websites, and the magazine editors only have a say over what goes in the print version.
Technical magazines never used to pay much for articles-- when I was writing articles $750 was average, but I'd spend weeks working on it. Now there's so many people still out of work they'll work for free just to keep a foot in the tech. industry somehow.
Its very clever of them to issue a press release with findings way before the study, because it makes the conclusions impossible to refute. If they released the actual study now people would be able to find out exactly how it was done and find the holes, which is impossible now. In every single "survey" of this type that I've read, if you read the actual details, the deck had been stacked to reach a certain conclusion. By the time the actual document comes up any complaints about the way the study was done won't be news any more, and all people will remember is the headline from the press release.
Its an interesting parallel to politics, where a politician can campaign for something, say like social security changes, without actually putting forth any concrete proposals. The lack of any concrete numbers in a proposal keeps anyone from making a concrete rebuttal, so that the politicians are free to sell the concept without having to be responsible for both the pros and cons of the changes.
Its outrageous to me that MS simultaneously attacked Java applets as being insecure when it had the most advanced security module for any dynamic code available, while they were touting ActiveX as an alternative, AND IT HAS NO SECURITY AT ALL!
So why isn't there a huge anti-ActiveX backlash?
From within your account click on the "Online" menu, and you will see all of the options for downloading transactions directly from your bank.
I got fed up with Intuit's bug-ridden software and abysmal tech. support in 2003 and switched to MoneyDance. The GUI isn't as slick, but I ended up spending way less time on finances because the program's well-written and well supported. Instead of talking to tech. support people on the other side of the world who are just reading from a support database you can get email back from one of the developer's in a couple of hours and your questions are answered quickly, accurately, and for free.
I looked at some open source programs at the time, but the big draw for me to MoneyDance initially was it will automatically download transactions from my bank, and there's a great matching algorithm to stick the transactions in the right budget category.
They may not have known how to prevent a buffer overflow, but probably know what happens when you throw rocks in a lake.
They like both kinds of music, country and western!
http://www.nederpoparchief.nl/bluesbrothers/scr
Sun has always embraced open standards, so in that sense they have always been "open". What they haven't done is given away the source code to Solaris with all of the advantages it has over other operating systems. In a company where source code has been viewed as valuable intellectual property the temptation is great to hold on to it.
If Java was defined by its source rather than the specification MS or any other company would put out their own versions, and cross-platform compatibility would be destroyed in an instant. As it is anyone is free to do their own implementation of Java and open source it. Why not ask IBM to open source their JVM?
Yes a horse can chomp on oats, but would never chomp on a bit. For starters, their jaw has a section with no teeth which is where the bit goes. Bits work because they act on the jaw and gums, not the teeth. It would be very painful for a horse to actually place the bit on the teeth to chomp on it, which is why the term is different from chomping.
2 .h tm
http://www.unce.unr.edu/publications/FS95/FS950
I realize some dictionaries don't make this distinction, but those definitions weren't written by an equestrian. The metaphore people are reaching for when they say "champing at the bit" is indeed one of holding back a race horse, not a horse mistakenly breaking their teeth by chomping on a very hard piece of metal.
For future reference, the term is "champing at the bit", not "chomping at the bit":
http://www.brainydictionary.com/words/ch/champ1
Its a equine/race track metaphor. When a horse wants to run and you hold it back it impatiently grinds its teeth.
Chapel Hill, NC
While most months you would be right, in Nov. 2003 you are not. The update to Google this particular month featured a radical change in the algorithms used to rank sites. In previous months for the past several years the rankings would change little every month-- if you look at the top 10 sites for a particular search term you'd see some sites move up a few levels, and other sites move down a couple of rankings.
This time, however, from what I can estimate most of the topped ranked pages have changed for a particular search term, which indicates a major change in Google's algorithm, which is particularly newsworthy. If that isn't news, then what is?
The reason businesses are complaining is that there are tens of thousands of small businesses that make their living from customers who find them via Google, which is also newsworthy. And most aren't SEO professionals or scammers who've illictly tried to artificially boost their rankings, thank you very much.
Whether the change will also elicit complaints from searchers has yet to be seen-- some search terms seem to return relevant results and some do not.
I beg to differ. It takes a lot of time and effort to analyze IT costs, and not many companies do. When an analyst says they've done a "study", you have to remember that usually people do what is fastest, cheapest, and easiest.
All they usually do is call a bunch of their customers, ask them questions, and put the results together. But what you have to remember is the vast majority of companies can't tell you the statistics, and so the "analyst" "extrapolates" the data, in other words "pulls statistics out of their ass".
Don't believe me? Ask your own company if someone can tell you the TCO details of their IT operations.
The actual source code in question isn't of primary importance at this point since the main SCO complaint is against IBM, and IBM's source code is in the Linux source tree because they donated it. Its public knowledge that IBM donated code to Linux, and SCO is just showing the code to selected neophytes for shock value. "SCO showed me source code from Linux and System V, and THEY WERE THE SAME! I'm shocked! IBM must be guilty".
SCO may eventually make other claims that all of Linux is their stolen property, but for the time being the focus should be on IBM, and in that case looking at the code does nothing but provide FUD fodder for clueless news outlets. The headlines will read "Industry analyst says lines of code are the same, SCO up 3 points".
The real issue here is this is a licensing dispute between two software companies, and it says nothing of value about the open source development process or Linux. Its in SCO's interest to bring these broader issues into the picture in order to put pressure on IBM to settle, but DON'T TAKE THE BAIT!
That depends on how you define a "long time". Java came out in '95, and wasn't even taken seriously until '96. Non- Microsoft VMs overtook MS performance in late '97, (after the lawsuit) and haven't improved since.
The event you're talking about, a short period of time when the MS virtual machine was fastest, was FIVE YEARS AGO!
3) Sun hasn't done much good in client-side support. Java applications are memory-hungry and just slow. Chances are that MS would have done better.
I've been writing fast Java GUIs since '96, and am tired of people blaming slow programs on the language. Its possible to write Java GUIs that run on windows and are indistinguishable from MFC apps in either performance or look and feel. Customers can't tell the difference and don't care.
If the "proof" of performance seems to be you saw a slow application written in Java, then C++ is also slow, as I've seen slow applications written in that language too.
You're absolutely right. To get some cash while bootstrapping
a startup I took short 1 week assignments teaching Java programming. I'd
run into people who claimed to have four year computer
science degrees, but yet didn't know the difference
between integers and floating point numbers, and some
who couldn't even copy the labs off of a floppy!
There's obviously a huge amount of resume faking
going on. Try teaching a programming class where half of the people are
good programmers, and just don't know Java yet, and
the rest of the class if full of people who lied on their resumes
and don't even understand concepts like files and
directories!
If RealPlayer and every other competitor were allowed to compete on features, then what you say might be true. The problem is MS isn't content to allow their products to compete on features, and according to two federal courts, instead relied on illegal exclusive contracts to compete.
What they do is make their "partners" sign contracts saying they won't promote competing products. This means that Dell can't install RealPlayer at the factory, for example, and other partners can't use RealPlayer. Another example is the deal AOL made with MS that, in exchange for MS allowing a link to AOL to be included on the desktop for new computers, AOL has agreed to make all of their media content available in Windows Media Format exclusively.
These facts are easy to check. Just read the conclusions from the Appeals Court's review of the the court case.Its specifically sites many examples of exclusionary and illegal contracts.
The result is that companies aren't allowed to decide the best products to use, since if you do business with Microsoft you can't do business with the competition. Its all MS or nothing.
So, your assertion that "Windows isn't keeping Real off the desktop" is demonstrably false. MS is actively trying to get any and all competitors off of their desktop.
The problem is, not only is the coverage poor, but as a former BellSouth Mobility customer, I can tell you that the performance, service, and pricing is bad too.
At least in NC, the coverage of the towers is such that you're unlikely to get coverage more than a mile or two from a major highway. Even if you have a lifestyle that keeps you within coverage, the prices are 40% higher that compeitors in the area.
For example, to get 550 hours of combined local and long distance minutes will cost you $70 with the VisorPhone. I'm currently paying $50/month for the same thing with Sprint, and to top it off, Sprint has much better coverage and better customer service.
[I originally wasn't going to write a response to this, thinking that the whole premise was ludicrous. ]
I couldn't agree more. The idea that because the author likes Linux and doesn't like Java everyone else thinks the same way IS LUDICROUS. Now, if there was at least a poll or something, there'd be a reason to call attention.
As long as one's person experience mirrors the entire world, *every* *single* software company that I am familiar with writes their code in Java, and uses Linux as their development environment. Here's just a few links:
http://www.nametree.com
http://www.calendarcentral.com
http://www.opennms.org
You haven't read iBilio's or Metalab's charter. Its not their responsiblity to write Linux documentation. Since when does a library have a responsibility to write its contents?
The above statement is a grossly inaccurate distortion made by "prayer in schools" advocacy groups. The actual prohibition is the same as its always been: government is not allowed to practice religion. Governmental bodies such as schools are not allowed to sponsor the practicing of a religion. Since praying is by definition worshiping god, having a school sponsored prayer would be a government sponsored religious ceremony, and thus prohibited.
Another distortion made the "prayer in school" advocacy groups is that religion is totally banned from schools. This too, is false. An example of religious displays that are allowed in schools particularly are student religious clubs, and the study of the bible from a historical perspective, both of which are common where I live, at least. And of course, students are allowed to quitely pray any time they wish.