i understand your line of thought, BUT, it would appear to me that the danger is that frequently, totally independent people reverse engineering the same product via black box inspection (but knowing some part of the publicly released api's) come to almost the same conclusions when implementing. sometimes the source code can be shockingly similar. i've seen this at least once some years back.
given that, it is possible that this similarity is enough for microsoft to litigate to the point of financial starvation, arguing that the source code didn't strictly make it into the product, but the intellectual property conveyed in the sourcecode is too similar to be a mere coincidence (given their history for innovation (eek)).
they simply need to cast reasonable doubt on the claims of the open source project, and the money will start pouring out the doors to lawyers...
i personally find this improbable, but not beyond the realm of possibility. were someone *really* evil, they could squelch competitors this way...
i knew friends who were into protecting touch-screens of this fashion (including palms but not the "traditional" electrically triggered touch screens) a very long time ago.
they abused them so much on them that they actually put 3m tape on them to accomplish *BOTH* goals: both paper-like feel (in the time of the palm) and to reduce wearing on the surface of the polymer screen without the tape.
it has nothing to do with the *amount of tax paid by the corporation*.
it has to do with the profit & loss on the balance sheet at the end of the fiscal quarter (the only thing that matters any longer), and the dilution of the shareholder's stock value.
1) have made no (or very little) profit due to the stock options you've granted, or
2) you have turned a profit ($0.33 per share, in this case)
this is a long-standing convention on the accounting balance sheets that i think is truly a scheister's game through and through. its an interesting system that allows its corporations to have vastly different accounting practices than we individual taxpayers can squeak by with.
i wish i could do such shady deals and hide under the guise of "but everyone is doing it! it's a 'best practice'!"
Microsoft was building on the work of the TPM engines + lots of best-practices designs for the services built around/within them. They built MTS, Sun lifts the design for the EJB spec.
i *love* java (not necessarily sun), but this was plainly obvious as the honker on my face the day the EJB 0.8 (or whichever the first i touched was) spec shipped:)
i'm still not sure i agree with Bjarne on this topic.
it is, afterall, *just typing* when it comes down to it... the implementation of the last 3 software projects i worked on took less than 25% of the total clock-time for those projects. those couple thousand characters really didn't matter.
if it makes it extraordinarily clear to:
1) the humans reading the code, and
2) the computers parsing the code
how can it be considered that horrible for those cosmetic reasons only? now, i'm not referring to you here, but i rarely hear anyone actually provide any substantial evidence that it is *really* a problem.
i've tried to read lots of arguments on the topic, but most come down to subjective / stylistic human choice, not real substantive flaws.
as one who has written about as much software as i've had to maintain other peoples' i can without a doubt say that the software that is well engineered in *either* paradigm is easily maintained (while the converse is clearly true).
now, where it got interesting was when we actually examined the software engineered by novices. the o.o. paradigm forced more thought to be placed into the structure of the application's design, thus typically resulted in easier to maintain software.
that software written in c, cobol, basic, pascal, you name it, that was easy to maintain was only that written by the really experienced. the novices in the crowd made our lives very painful. my experience seems to show me that o.o. languages are less lenient toward rush-jobs at design-time.
just wanted to suggest you go check on the adjustments made in the jdk 1.3 implementation of threading (and specifically how they pseudo-pool automatically for you).
i have definitely created thread pools that get dispatched into when incoming socket connections arrive, so while i do understand your criticisms, i believe they are surmountable in most cases.
when the pseudo-pooling of jdk1.3's threading implementation becomes understood, i think it drastically changes the way we think about threading in java..
i think one example that might be relevant is the concept of predictability in a real-time application. for example, the entire reason the folks working on the java real time specification decided to come up with the pool of memory that is never collectable to have predictable real-time threads that don't have their objects get garbage collected and therefore the thread doesn't get preempted by the g.c. (for example).
this is probably the most important use of such a pool i can quickly come up with...
on their web site (bell labs' that is) i thought i read something along the lines of "certain applications do *not* work cleanly with this methodology" or something like that.
i thought the mentioned netscape, but alas, i need to go to sleep so i can't go check up on it..
see my comments to the above poster. they certainly apply wholly to you.
how i can reply with a respectful set of points and get flamed truly shows that we live in a pathetic world of "good ol' uncle sam" bigots indeed. (yeah, right. us = evil, everyone else = perfect, i've heard this all somewhere before)
the hostility that exudes out all of your writings is truly astounding... as if you all don't have anything better to do...
i'm off now... don't worry, i won't waste my time coming back. you have your way; you win.
i'll leave and kill myself immediately for i'm so stupid and useless; a typical american!
it's astounding to me that you could even construe what i said to imply what you *assume* i said.
if you choose to read what i wrote in that way, that's certainly your perogative, but I despise bribery in any form, the smallest to the largest. it's the largest cancer in our society today imho. how you ever took my words as otherwise, i won't guess.
on your second point, if you don't believe that every single country in europe or asia hasn't got a case of the bribery blues, i really suggest you visit there and try to start a business. every chinese immigrant i met in college bought their way out of china. EVERY SINGLE ONE. i have first hand experience with business in europe, and i can guarantee you there are many laws formed through the veil of nationalism that are simply based on bribery.
you know, i don't understand why the hostility from all you folks. you and the next poster are simply incapable of seeing anyone you vilify as having any intelligent thought. sorry you are both so insecure.
every time you propagate another myth that every american is a bigoted, greedy bastard, puts you right back into the most dangerous of situations. ignorant stereotyping. haven't we learned that this isn't really a wise move by now?
seems like you have nothing better to do with your time than argue with me instead of actually *thinking* about what i wrote.. i thought about your arguments. are you so closed minded and arrogant that you have to assume "you're a stupid fucking american. i won't waste my time listening"?
off to do something productive instead of reading slashdot.....
clearly, we have some folks always looking for a fight wandering around here.
i'll remind myself to stop posting and ignore slashdot from here on out.
now, not that i'm defending anyone here, i'd just like to point out a few things:
1) people hate the u.s. because it has been successful. it really doesn't boil down to much more than that:( 3 centuries ago when britain was in that seat, everyone hated them. next century when some other country is in that seat, everyone will hate them. this is, sadly, *HUMAN NATURE*.
2) every economically powerful government in the world spies on others. simply fact.
3) i have many friends in other countries that find it *odd* when they come to the u.s. that they can't bribe just about anyone for anything... they're so used to bribing that they ***MISS IT*** this shows us that bribery is, in fact, a cultural characteristic. it's foolish of the u.s. to expect we can change it. the does not, however, mean we are required to adopt it.
4) i think that the u.s.'s tolerance for those not in power speaks mostly for itself. try saying what either of you just said in iraq. me thinks the thought police might have a censorship authority:)
you bring up many good points. i need to go and *really* learn lisp.
i only learned as much lisp as i *needed* to do my job (specifically, writing some modes in emacs).
if there's one thing that really intruiged me about it was that it is dynamically scoped, opposing just about every other language in common use throughout the world. this, unfortunately, is so confusing to the masses, while being WILDLY useful to those who know how to harness it's power...;)
is it that feature that you can triangulate down to when you think about what *really* stands out in lisp?
again, it comes down to:
**I** believe i can learn any computer language in the world and be productive. It's my hobby. Functional languages are my toy right now.
on the other hand, the folks who are not "into" learning languages & the science of computing don't have the persistence i seem to. it's not that i don't *wish* they would, i just must pragmatically accept that they will not. we have different priorities, and that's a *good thing*.
so, seeing as software maintenance is so incredibly important to me (and plays a significant majority-role in software lifecycles), can i expect most software engineers to quickly acquaint themselves with the paradigms behind java? i feel fairly confident in saying yes, because the language is not *that* different to what the masses are accustomed. i'm not certain i can say this about lisp, as much as it intrigues me.
For quite some time now, we've all watched the worldwide criticism of specialized hardware that implements a more abstract instruction set, lisp, java, smalltalk (not sure if the latter actually was turned into hardware), etc. Why is the criticism so harsh? I've not yet really seen anyone GIVE IT A CHANCE before discarding it as a toy. First, a disclaimer: I happen to think java is the best language (ok, toolkit, platform, etc.) that's come around in a long time for general-purpose programming (NOT for operating systems, but hear me out here...). Like it or not, the vast majority (i'd venture a guess at 90%) of software written is NOT (and need not be) of operating system calibre in terms of robustness, quality, performance, maintainability, etc. In many cases, the life expectancy of the software is far too short, because needs, requirements, etc. change very quickly, to warrant the additional time spent in development. Now, remember, i'm a purist by heart, but i do have a pragmatic side to me too. Occationally, the costs just don't justify the benefits. Again, like it or not, i have worked with a great many people that are under too much pressure, lack the skills, or simply don't care enough about the quality of their work to do a good enough job with an "easy" language, let alone one that lets them shoot their foot even more effectively... Anyone who truly thinks that java is "too slow" on modern hardware with modern dynamic compilation technolgies really does need to do a bit more experimentation on their own. There are few problems that i've needed to solve in the last few years that i couldn't *easily* solve with Java, and never did i think that the quality or performance suffered (especially now with heuristic compilers). Remember now, I wasn't building 30,000 user systems, maybe 3,000. Is it the best tool for *every* job? Hell no. Does it solve some things VERY effectively? Absolutely. Would i still write any software requiring the utmost performance in c or c++? Hell yes. As history has taught me, profiling my code shows that 90% of my time is spent in 5% of the software. Again, what percentage of the software I've written has requirements demanding utmost performance? less than 5 percent. Now, i'm biased, that's clear. But, seeing in the first 3 posts, not one constructive thing could be said, i felt it my duty to *try* and present a more pragmatic opinion... i, personally, would LOVE to take a shot at using a higher-level-of-abstraction instruction set, just to see for myself whether or not they're of utility. i don't have the experience with them to either condemn or praise them. i wish the same humility were infectious. as always, my opinions are mine alone, i speak for only myself, and i apologize if i offend. Peter
Slashdot Mirror
i understand your line of thought, BUT, it would appear to me that the danger is that frequently, totally independent people reverse engineering the same product via black box inspection (but knowing some part of the publicly released api's) come to almost the same conclusions when implementing. sometimes the source code can be shockingly similar. i've seen this at least once some years back.
given that, it is possible that this similarity is enough for microsoft to litigate to the point of financial starvation, arguing that the source code didn't strictly make it into the product, but the intellectual property conveyed in the sourcecode is too similar to be a mere coincidence (given their history for innovation (eek)).
they simply need to cast reasonable doubt on the claims of the open source project, and the money will start pouring out the doors to lawyers...
i personally find this improbable, but not beyond the realm of possibility. were someone *really* evil, they could squelch competitors this way...
i hope nothing like this every comes about...
Peter
i disagree with your claim.
i knew friends who were into protecting touch-screens of this fashion (including palms but not the "traditional" electrically triggered touch screens) a very long time ago.
they abused them so much on them that they actually put 3m tape on them to accomplish *BOTH* goals: both paper-like feel (in the time of the palm) and to reduce wearing on the surface of the polymer screen without the tape.
cheers.
Peter
DING DING DING!
give this man a prize.
it has nothing to do with the *amount of tax paid by the corporation*.
it has to do with the profit & loss on the balance sheet at the end of the fiscal quarter (the only thing that matters any longer), and the dilution of the shareholder's stock value.
cheers.
peter
sorry, i don't agree.
see, this is a matter of book-cooking.
you can't have it both ways...
either you:
1) have made no (or very little) profit due to the stock options you've granted, or
2) you have turned a profit ($0.33 per share, in this case)
this is a long-standing convention on the accounting balance sheets that i think is truly a scheister's game through and through. its an interesting system that allows its corporations to have vastly different accounting practices than we individual taxpayers can squeak by with.
i wish i could do such shady deals and hide under the guise of "but everyone is doing it! it's a 'best practice'!"
Peter
uh...
since when did microsoft start paying out dividends?
i've certainly never seen them (nor just about any "high tech" (whatever that means) stock do so)
Peter
i use the gnome and win32 clients.
both very successfully.
i have contacts using msn, yahoo, aol, and icq.
i can not complain given the liberty involved here.
Peter
no offense intended, of course, but if had asked for advice, i'd tell you that you need to watch the discovery network's channels more often :) :)
;)
family, learning, discovery, history, etc...
the best stuff out there (imho)
cheers...
Peter
as much as i generally dislike microsoft's tactics, i believe you're off-base here.
:)
microsoft ABSOLUTELY DID build the basis for the EJB specification first.
HOWEVER, it is NOT fair to say that microsoft innovated here too terribly much, either.
the order of operations is more plausibly:
Tux/CICS/Various TPM's + Services Begat MTS Begat EJB
Microsoft was building on the work of the TPM engines + lots of best-practices designs for the services built around/within them. They built MTS, Sun lifts the design for the EJB spec.
i *love* java (not necessarily sun), but this was plainly obvious as the honker on my face the day the EJB 0.8 (or whichever the first i touched was) spec shipped
just my 0.02
cheers.
Peter
i'm still not sure i agree with Bjarne on this topic.
it is, afterall, *just typing* when it comes down to it... the implementation of the last 3 software projects i worked on took less than 25% of the total clock-time for those projects. those couple thousand characters really didn't matter.
if it makes it extraordinarily clear to:
1) the humans reading the code, and
2) the computers parsing the code
how can it be considered that horrible for those cosmetic reasons only? now, i'm not referring to you here, but i rarely hear anyone actually provide any substantial evidence that it is *really* a problem.
i've tried to read lots of arguments on the topic, but most come down to subjective / stylistic human choice, not real substantive flaws.
just my 0.02.
Peter
lol.
:)
this is my life story too!
funny, that.
Peter
as one who has written about as much software as i've had to maintain other peoples' i can without a doubt say that the software that is well engineered in *either* paradigm is easily maintained (while the converse is clearly true).
now, where it got interesting was when we actually examined the software engineered by novices. the o.o. paradigm forced more thought to be placed into the structure of the application's design, thus typically resulted in easier to maintain software.
that software written in c, cobol, basic, pascal, you name it, that was easy to maintain was only that written by the really experienced. the novices in the crowd made our lives very painful. my experience seems to show me that o.o. languages are less lenient toward rush-jobs at design-time.
just my 0.02
Peter
out of curiousity.
do you believe it is the java *language*, *toolkit*, or *platform* that is flawed?
realistically, i believe the language is quite good. the toolkit does have some room for improvement, and the platform always can be improved...
thoughts?
Peter
just wanted to suggest you go check on the adjustments made in the jdk 1.3 implementation of threading (and specifically how they pseudo-pool automatically for you).
i have definitely created thread pools that get dispatched into when incoming socket connections arrive, so while i do understand your criticisms, i believe they are surmountable in most cases.
when the pseudo-pooling of jdk1.3's threading implementation becomes understood, i think it drastically changes the way we think about threading in java..
just my 0.02.
Peter
hi all.
i think one example that might be relevant is the concept of predictability in a real-time application. for example, the entire reason the folks working on the java real time specification decided to come up with the pool of memory that is never collectable to have predictable real-time threads that don't have their objects get garbage collected and therefore the thread doesn't get preempted by the g.c. (for example).
this is probably the most important use of such a pool i can quickly come up with...
Peter
i second third and fourth this motion.
cheers.
Peter
just fyi:
i've tried almost all the opendwg-based software and compared it to vdraft, and found all of the opendwg based decoders to be quite inadequate...
the folks at vdraft did a much more capable job at the reverse engineering (imho).
just my 0.02
Peter
in the last 2 years i've seen some *beautiful* applications written in java and implemented using swing..
just because the average bear might not be able to build great applications with the toolkit does *not* mean the toolkit is horribly deficient.
check out argouml, togetherj, etc, etc, etc.
there are some really well done ui's these days in swing..
cheers.
just fyi:
on their web site (bell labs' that is) i thought i read something along the lines of "certain applications do *not* work cleanly with this methodology" or something like that.
i thought the mentioned netscape, but alas, i need to go to sleep so i can't go check up on it..
cheers.
Peter
see my comments to the above poster. they certainly apply wholly to you.
how i can reply with a respectful set of points and get flamed truly shows that we live in a pathetic world of "good ol' uncle sam" bigots indeed. (yeah, right. us = evil, everyone else = perfect, i've heard this all somewhere before)
the hostility that exudes out all of your writings is truly astounding... as if you all don't have anything better to do...
i'm off now...
don't worry, i won't waste my time coming back.
you have your way; you win.
i'll leave and kill myself immediately for i'm so stupid and useless; a typical american!
Peter
it's astounding to me that you could even construe what i said to imply what you *assume* i said.
if you choose to read what i wrote in that way, that's certainly your perogative, but I despise bribery in any form, the smallest to the largest. it's the largest cancer in our society today imho. how you ever took my words as otherwise, i won't guess.
on your second point, if you don't believe that every single country in europe or asia hasn't got a case of the bribery blues, i really suggest you visit there and try to start a business. every chinese immigrant i met in college bought their way out of china. EVERY SINGLE ONE. i have first hand experience with business in europe, and i can guarantee you there are many laws formed through the veil of nationalism that are simply based on bribery.
you know, i don't understand why the hostility from all you folks. you and the next poster are simply incapable of seeing anyone you vilify as having any intelligent thought. sorry you are both so insecure.
every time you propagate another myth that every american is a bigoted, greedy bastard, puts you right back into the most dangerous of situations. ignorant stereotyping. haven't we learned that this isn't really a wise move by now?
seems like you have nothing better to do with your time than argue with me instead of actually *thinking* about what i wrote.. i thought about your arguments. are you so closed minded and arrogant that you have to assume "you're a stupid fucking american. i won't waste my time listening"?
off to do something productive instead of reading slashdot.....
clearly, we have some folks always looking for a fight wandering around here.
i'll remind myself to stop posting and ignore slashdot from here on out.
Peter
now, not that i'm defending anyone here, i'd just like to point out a few things:
:( 3 centuries ago when britain was in that seat, everyone hated them. next century when some other country is in that seat, everyone will hate them. this is, sadly, *HUMAN NATURE*.
:)
1) people hate the u.s. because it has been successful. it really doesn't boil down to much more than that
2) every economically powerful government in the world spies on others. simply fact.
3) i have many friends in other countries that find it *odd* when they come to the u.s. that they can't bribe just about anyone for anything... they're so used to bribing that they ***MISS IT*** this shows us that bribery is, in fact, a cultural characteristic. it's foolish of the u.s. to expect we can change it. the does not, however, mean we are required to adopt it.
4) i think that the u.s.'s tolerance for those not in power speaks mostly for itself. try saying what either of you just said in iraq. me thinks the thought police might have a censorship authority
:)
Peter
thanks :)
:)
didn't realize this one.
shows my ignorance
cheers!
Peter
you bring up many good points. i need to go and *really* learn lisp.
;)
;)
i only learned as much lisp as i *needed* to do my job (specifically, writing some modes in emacs).
if there's one thing that really intruiged me about it was that it is dynamically scoped, opposing just about every other language in common use throughout the world. this, unfortunately, is so confusing to the masses, while being WILDLY useful to those who know how to harness it's power...
is it that feature that you can triangulate down to when you think about what *really* stands out in lisp?
again, it comes down to:
**I** believe i can learn any computer language in the world and be productive. It's my hobby. Functional languages are my toy right now.
on the other hand, the folks who are not "into" learning languages & the science of computing don't have the persistence i seem to. it's not that i don't *wish* they would, i just must pragmatically accept that they will not.
we have different priorities, and that's a *good thing*.
so, seeing as software maintenance is so incredibly important to me (and plays a significant majority-role in software lifecycles), can i expect most software engineers to quickly acquaint themselves with the paradigms behind java? i feel fairly confident in saying yes, because the language is not *that* different to what the masses are accustomed. i'm not certain i can say this about lisp, as much as it intrigues me.
regardless, **I** need to go learn more lisp
Peter
ack. my apologies for losing the formatting :( gosh that's as ugly as anything i've ever seen :) sorry bout that... Peter
For quite some time now, we've all watched the worldwide criticism of specialized hardware that implements a more abstract instruction set, lisp, java, smalltalk (not sure if the latter actually was turned into hardware), etc. Why is the criticism so harsh? I've not yet really seen anyone GIVE IT A CHANCE before discarding it as a toy. First, a disclaimer: I happen to think java is the best language (ok, toolkit, platform, etc.) that's come around in a long time for general-purpose programming (NOT for operating systems, but hear me out here...). Like it or not, the vast majority (i'd venture a guess at 90%) of software written is NOT (and need not be) of operating system calibre in terms of robustness, quality, performance, maintainability, etc. In many cases, the life expectancy of the software is far too short, because needs, requirements, etc. change very quickly, to warrant the additional time spent in development. Now, remember, i'm a purist by heart, but i do have a pragmatic side to me too. Occationally, the costs just don't justify the benefits. Again, like it or not, i have worked with a great many people that are under too much pressure, lack the skills, or simply don't care enough about the quality of their work to do a good enough job with an "easy" language, let alone one that lets them shoot their foot even more effectively... Anyone who truly thinks that java is "too slow" on modern hardware with modern dynamic compilation technolgies really does need to do a bit more experimentation on their own. There are few problems that i've needed to solve in the last few years that i couldn't *easily* solve with Java, and never did i think that the quality or performance suffered (especially now with heuristic compilers). Remember now, I wasn't building 30,000 user systems, maybe 3,000. Is it the best tool for *every* job? Hell no. Does it solve some things VERY effectively? Absolutely. Would i still write any software requiring the utmost performance in c or c++? Hell yes. As history has taught me, profiling my code shows that 90% of my time is spent in 5% of the software. Again, what percentage of the software I've written has requirements demanding utmost performance? less than 5 percent. Now, i'm biased, that's clear. But, seeing in the first 3 posts, not one constructive thing could be said, i felt it my duty to *try* and present a more pragmatic opinion... i, personally, would LOVE to take a shot at using a higher-level-of-abstraction instruction set, just to see for myself whether or not they're of utility. i don't have the experience with them to either condemn or praise them. i wish the same humility were infectious. as always, my opinions are mine alone, i speak for only myself, and i apologize if i offend. Peter