Open-BAAN would probably result in various ventures that would take advantage of the Open Source, and it could propell BAAN to market leadership.
It won't work like this, for two reasons. Firstly, if you buy Oracle Financials, what you get is a) the support of Oracle Corporation and b) a big pile of PL/SQL. Then, using (a) when you need it, you modify (b) so it fits in with your business processes, legacy systems and whatnot. Oh, and most large corporations insist on escrow for vendor supplied source - i.e. "we'll put the source in the hands of lawyers, and if we go bust and cannot fulfil support arrangements, you can have it".
So, it doesn't need to be open source so you can alter it to suit you. And making it open source so the "community" can work on it is pointless, since you can't do that without knowing how it is to be implemented, each of which is bespoke.
Oh, and can you imagine the average linux d00d boasting on #warez (or wherever IRC users hang out, I dunno) that he got some k-rad accounts payable sK1Lz in his kernel???
The reports coming back from Bill (BTW did anyone see what Bill said on CNN last night?) seem to say that Microsoft still thinks that it hasn't broken any laws.
This raises a very important point: antitrust law is retroactive and arbitrary. Think about it. If, when Microsoft tried to sign their first OEM-lockup agreement, a lawyer had said "hang on, you can't do this, because of such-and-such legislation passed n years ago as a result of the precedent of someone vs. someone-else", this situation wouldn't exist today.
You must also realise that the US government has benefitted enormously from this so-called monopolistic behavior. If there's one thing governments like above everything else, it's taxes, and MS was a huge revenue stream for them, both directly and indirectly. How do they tax free software? Another thing governments like is employment, I don't know how many people (5? 10?) were employed in the local area for every MS employee who lived and spent there, but that's a lot of happy voters. How many people do Red Hat employ?
The third thing governments love is control. They tried to control MS with a lawsuit, but failed. What do you suppose will happen when they decide that they want to control the open source movement?
A special adapter cable, available this winter in Japan, will enables the entire PlayStation platform - including its 128-bit successor - to be connected to mobile phones,
Does any else think it's strange to connect a 128-bit processor to a 9600 baud modem!?
Ones that have heard of the concept of "local mirrors", for example.
On the contrary, this would presuppose that users chose their own routers, which is simply not the case. Perhaps there should be greater caching at ISPs, but this is difficult in a world of personalization, streaming content, and pages dynamically generated from real time data feeds.
Technologies such as those offered by Akamai claim to be able to address this. And, IIRC, it runs on Linux.
Being Microsoft. Not an option for most non-Microsoft companies. May result in antitrust proceedings.
Ok, I know this was just the obligatory slashbot clause, but I'll answer it anyway...
Microsoft are by no means the only company to define their own standards. For example, when IBM wanted a networking protocol, they just said "SNA" and the industry jumped. And "consensus" standards, despite the hype, are often not the best solutions. For example, SPX/IPX is arguably a better LAN protocol than TCP/IP, because it has much less of an administration overhead. DECNet also has many advantages over TCP/IP, not least of which is its designers were sensible enough to think that users as well as machines could be network principals.
And there are the de-facto standards due to popularity. For example, IBM's CICS (or Rexx, or MQ, or many others) product is a standard, because everyone uses it. The same could be said for Oracle's PL/SQL. IBM also have a firmer grip on the transaction processing market than MS have over the desktop. Java is an arbitrary Sun standard, no matter what noises they make about standards bodies. If Cisco say they want such-and-such feature in BGP, then it's there, no questions asked (or perhaps that should be "no questions answered").
Microsoft were correct when they realised that whoever controls the rules controls the game, but they didn't invent this model, and whatever the DOJ say, the rest of the industry isn't going to stop using that strategy competitively.
I think it is a good idea, and a good revune stream for them
Exactly. The poster might as well have said "it's unfair that some sites can afford better graphic designers" or "better servers" or "to publish more content". If Excite users don't like it, they'll vote with their feet. If rivals to content providers don't like it, then they have to either make their content more compelling, or pay for similar services.
Either way, the consumer gets a better deal. That's why it's called the free market.
One area in which C does not offer significant benefits over Java is in the area of network server programming, where the code spends most of its time executing system calls, rather than processing logic in userland.
The results of these numeric tests surprised me, but I'd like to have seen Watcom/Borland C compilers used, as both have a reputation for superior numeric code generation to Microsoft's Visual C++ product and GCC.
OK, having used them both on large scale projects, the only real difference is... JSP use Java Beans, and ASP uses COM objects. No, really, that's it. ASP and JSP are both simple page processing engines, for embedding programmatic logic in pages, and neither are particularly good at it (for example, look at the hoops you need to jump through in them both the iterate through a record set and output HTML for each row).
If page templating is all you need to do, then something like Allaire Cold Fusion is probably better. Use JSP if you have existing business logic in JBs/EJBs, and ASP if you have existing applications in COM.
Also note that old languages are still in use, too. (Just cause something's deprecated doesn't mean it's not used!) COBOL is still in use, probably APL, too.
Part of the problem is how people expect their careers to develop. These are two examples I have witnessed (altho' I am too young to have ever experienced old age discrimination, I am familiar with young age discrimination).
One example might be "you have 15 years experience of host based systems, but that's no use to us, because we're developing client/server". A friend (who's a contract IT trainer) told me a story of a time he was hired to train a group of IBM mainframe programmers into Visual Basic. Now, these were not stupid people: they averaged around 20 years experience, and in their day they had the hottest skills in the market (much like Java kids think they have today). But training them was almost impossible: they "thought" in terms of batch jobs, and couldn't (or weren't willing to) abandon those hard-won skills in favour of event-driven visual programming.
Another problem is the "I just want to write code" syndrome. These people, with years of experience, want to write code for a living. Nothing wrong with that, you might say. But their employers wanted client facing systems analysts and architects, people who could understand the business (and the business people) and translate that into 4GLs, or SSADM/UML/whatever artifacts. It simply wasn't economical to employ experienced people to write superb C++ when cheaper programmers could get the job done in less time using Oracle Forms (these are banking front office applications, which have lifetimes measured in weeks). Open toed sandals and beards are great in academic labs, but (forgive me if this sounds rude) too many people just aren't willing to grow up and put on a suit.
My proposed solution is this: why don't all the "old" programmers get together and found a software house? Show all the "kids" that experience counts, by producing code of superior quality to tight deadlines? Offer training, consulting and mentoring services? A sage (I don't remember which one) said words to the effect of "you can always win the game if you are willing to change the rules".
The economic rules are slightly different for dotcoms. Most of the cash they burn goes on advertising, the actual costs of doing business (altho' I haven't done any quant to confirm this) for boo.com would be much lower than, say, Nike Town. Once a dotcom gets funded, it could probably hang on for 6 months just by lying low.
If boo.com had worked out that marketing and advertising aren't the same thing, they'd probably have been a lot more successful. Consider a demographic who are constantly online with high powered equipment and plenty of bandwidth, have disposable income, and like to wear designer sportswear: the "new media" community, of course. Instead of the "viral" effect boo might of hoped for, the people who could have been their biggest market spent most of their time laughing at the site's ludicrous over-design - and everyone else couldn't get into the site at all!
It seems to me that the OpenDoc model, or something substantially like it, would be a great paradigm for development of free software, since competition isn't an issue anyway, and the whole point is to serve the user.
It already exists, although it's not open source. How do you suppose that you can include Excel spreadsheets, Video for Windows, and whatever else in Word documents? It's called OLE, for Object Linking and Embedding.
Some claim the functionality is tacked on, while others insist that it is insecure, impure, and obscure.
Perl is certainly something, and can be made to look vaguely OO like, but that's only likely to appeal to the "OO is just a fancy way to organise your source code" crowd.
Conway is not hesitent to break with OO tradition as expressed in languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk, or Eiffel.
Errr, right. Now, don't get me wrong, there is definitely a place for doing that, and perl has filled that niche many times since its inception in other areas.
But it is not, and never will be, a strongly typed language with classes, inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation and abstraction. It wouldn't be perl if it did.
Sorry, but if the program was written sensibly in the first place, there would BE no exceptions.
What, are you crazy? What on earth should I do if, say, a database connection fails because a process on another machine has failed? Either raise an exception, or just make up the record set from/dev/random?
Marketing is mostly lies and obfuscation. But you can't lie to people who already know the truth. Therefore marketing to people who are familiar with an industry is useless (unless you have a message with real content).
No, that's advertising. Marketing is about analysing customers, and doesn't directly communicate with the existing or potential customers. Instead, marketing analysis is used to inform product development, advertising, sales and other ways in which the company interacts with the outside world.
*BSD, most of the important Unix tools (thanks to GNU), Perl,
To be fair, it should be noted that GNU were busy developing and distributing software long before ESR coined the term "Open Source", as were many other groups. Perl similarly developed essentially independantly of the modern, primarily advocate-driven "Open Source" movement. It is likewise true that Mozilla, the "Open Source" flagship, has been floundering on the rocks for a significant period of time.
I guess we should note that the typical Linux distribution has very little code developed by the "Open Source" (i.e. post-ESR) movement, and lots developed by other groups.
Is this to lead us to believe that UNIX isn't stable or predictable?
Unix isn't predictable at all. For example, if I calculate that I will require 60% of the system's CPU for 8 hours to complete a job, which I start before I go home, whether or not it's completed the next day depends largely on whether or not someone else kicked off a large batch job too.
On a VMS node, I could create a batch queue which ensured that I had enough of the CPU to complete my job, no matter what else was on the system at the time, by forcing other queues to use less of the available resources.
Unix is great for many things, but if I made my living in a "complete this processing by this time or don't get paid" environment (as many financial services and engineering users do) I would be hesitant to rely on multi-user Unix systems. Similarly, in a real-time application (for example, a telephone switch) I would not use Unix.
It's simply a matter of the right tool for the right job.
Easy - run a talk (or IRC or whatever) daemon on the server, configured so it only accepts connections on the local loopback interface. Then everyone uses ssh to connect to the host, and then uses a regular client to connect to the server. 100% off the shelf components (which you probably already have) , no need to modify anything, and no additional procedures to follow, certs to distributes, etc.
, no shame, IBM wouldn't be the first company ruined by pandering to the open source community (see SGI, Netscape, etc.)!
IBM's drop in revenue originates in their consulting arm (IBM Global Services). It's nothing to do with their OS division - altho', given their current enthusiasm for Linux, that's probably about to change (think about it... the only way to make money on Linux is on yep, services).
Still, I think that MS has little chance in this arena because the palm already controls 70% of the PDA market and the Palm OS does what it does so well.
I have to ask, though, why do individuals need root access to their personal boxen?
Because Unix has a crude "all or nothing" security model - you're either the sysadmin, or you aren't. More mature operating systemd (VMS, for example) allow very fine-grained control over system privileges.
Slashdot Mirror
It won't work like this, for two reasons. Firstly, if you buy Oracle Financials, what you get is a) the support of Oracle Corporation and b) a big pile of PL/SQL. Then, using (a) when you need it, you modify (b) so it fits in with your business processes, legacy systems and whatnot. Oh, and most large corporations insist on escrow for vendor supplied source - i.e. "we'll put the source in the hands of lawyers, and if we go bust and cannot fulfil support arrangements, you can have it".
So, it doesn't need to be open source so you can alter it to suit you. And making it open source so the "community" can work on it is pointless, since you can't do that without knowing how it is to be implemented, each of which is bespoke.
Oh, and can you imagine the average linux d00d boasting on #warez (or wherever IRC users hang out, I dunno) that he got some k-rad accounts payable sK1Lz in his kernel???
This raises a very important point: antitrust law is retroactive and arbitrary. Think about it. If, when Microsoft tried to sign their first OEM-lockup agreement, a lawyer had said "hang on, you can't do this, because of such-and-such legislation passed n years ago as a result of the precedent of someone vs. someone-else", this situation wouldn't exist today.
You must also realise that the US government has benefitted enormously from this so-called monopolistic behavior. If there's one thing governments like above everything else, it's taxes, and MS was a huge revenue stream for them, both directly and indirectly. How do they tax free software? Another thing governments like is employment, I don't know how many people (5? 10?) were employed in the local area for every MS employee who lived and spent there, but that's a lot of happy voters. How many people do Red Hat employ?
The third thing governments love is control. They tried to control MS with a lawsuit, but failed. What do you suppose will happen when they decide that they want to control the open source movement?
Just something to think about.
IIRC, it's because of the encryption incorporated into the GSM standard.
A special adapter cable, available this winter in Japan, will enables the entire PlayStation platform - including its 128-bit successor - to be connected to mobile phones,
Does any else think it's strange to connect a 128-bit processor to a 9600 baud modem!?
On the contrary, this would presuppose that users chose their own routers, which is simply not the case. Perhaps there should be greater caching at ISPs, but this is difficult in a world of personalization, streaming content, and pages dynamically generated from real time data feeds.
Technologies such as those offered by Akamai claim to be able to address this. And, IIRC, it runs on Linux.
Ok, I know this was just the obligatory slashbot clause, but I'll answer it anyway...
Microsoft are by no means the only company to define their own standards. For example, when IBM wanted a networking protocol, they just said "SNA" and the industry jumped. And "consensus" standards, despite the hype, are often not the best solutions. For example, SPX/IPX is arguably a better LAN protocol than TCP/IP, because it has much less of an administration overhead. DECNet also has many advantages over TCP/IP, not least of which is its designers were sensible enough to think that users as well as machines could be network principals.
And there are the de-facto standards due to popularity. For example, IBM's CICS (or Rexx, or MQ, or many others) product is a standard, because everyone uses it. The same could be said for Oracle's PL/SQL. IBM also have a firmer grip on the transaction processing market than MS have over the desktop. Java is an arbitrary Sun standard, no matter what noises they make about standards bodies. If Cisco say they want such-and-such feature in BGP, then it's there, no questions asked (or perhaps that should be "no questions answered").
Microsoft were correct when they realised that whoever controls the rules controls the game, but they didn't invent this model, and whatever the DOJ say, the rest of the industry isn't going to stop using that strategy competitively.
Exactly. The poster might as well have said "it's unfair that some sites can afford better graphic designers" or "better servers" or "to publish more content". If Excite users don't like it, they'll vote with their feet. If rivals to content providers don't like it, then they have to either make their content more compelling, or pay for similar services.
Either way, the consumer gets a better deal. That's why it's called the free market.
The results of these numeric tests surprised me, but I'd like to have seen Watcom/Borland C compilers used, as both have a reputation for superior numeric code generation to Microsoft's Visual C++ product and GCC.
If page templating is all you need to do, then something like Allaire Cold Fusion is probably better. Use JSP if you have existing business logic in JBs/EJBs, and ASP if you have existing applications in COM.
Part of the problem is how people expect their careers to develop. These are two examples I have witnessed (altho' I am too young to have ever experienced old age discrimination, I am familiar with young age discrimination).
One example might be "you have 15 years experience of host based systems, but that's no use to us, because we're developing client/server". A friend (who's a contract IT trainer) told me a story of a time he was hired to train a group of IBM mainframe programmers into Visual Basic. Now, these were not stupid people: they averaged around 20 years experience, and in their day they had the hottest skills in the market (much like Java kids think they have today). But training them was almost impossible: they "thought" in terms of batch jobs, and couldn't (or weren't willing to) abandon those hard-won skills in favour of event-driven visual programming.
Another problem is the "I just want to write code" syndrome. These people, with years of experience, want to write code for a living. Nothing wrong with that, you might say. But their employers wanted client facing systems analysts and architects, people who could understand the business (and the business people) and translate that into 4GLs, or SSADM/UML/whatever artifacts. It simply wasn't economical to employ experienced people to write superb C++ when cheaper programmers could get the job done in less time using Oracle Forms (these are banking front office applications, which have lifetimes measured in weeks). Open toed sandals and beards are great in academic labs, but (forgive me if this sounds rude) too many people just aren't willing to grow up and put on a suit.
My proposed solution is this: why don't all the "old" programmers get together and found a software house? Show all the "kids" that experience counts, by producing code of superior quality to tight deadlines? Offer training, consulting and mentoring services? A sage (I don't remember which one) said words to the effect of "you can always win the game if you are willing to change the rules".
The economic rules are slightly different for dotcoms. Most of the cash they burn goes on advertising, the actual costs of doing business (altho' I haven't done any quant to confirm this) for boo.com would be much lower than, say, Nike Town. Once a dotcom gets funded, it could probably hang on for 6 months just by lying low.
If boo.com had worked out that marketing and advertising aren't the same thing, they'd probably have been a lot more successful. Consider a demographic who are constantly online with high powered equipment and plenty of bandwidth, have disposable income, and like to wear designer sportswear: the "new media" community, of course. Instead of the "viral" effect boo might of hoped for, the people who could have been their biggest market spent most of their time laughing at the site's ludicrous over-design - and everyone else couldn't get into the site at all!
It already exists, although it's not open source. How do you suppose that you can include Excel spreadsheets, Video for Windows, and whatever else in Word documents? It's called OLE, for Object Linking and Embedding.
Oracle Forms is a GUI builder for a wide range of operating systems, it's easy to use and quite powerful.
Man, I wish I hadn't posted to this thread so I could moderate that up.
Perl is certainly something, and can be made to look vaguely OO like, but that's only likely to appeal to the "OO is just a fancy way to organise your source code" crowd.
Conway is not hesitent to break with OO tradition as expressed in languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk, or Eiffel.
Errr, right. Now, don't get me wrong, there is definitely a place for doing that, and perl has filled that niche many times since its inception in other areas.
But it is not, and never will be, a strongly typed language with classes, inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation and abstraction. It wouldn't be perl if it did.
What, are you crazy? What on earth should I do if, say, a database connection fails because a process on another machine has failed? Either raise an exception, or just make up the record set from /dev/random?
No, that's advertising. Marketing is about analysing customers, and doesn't directly communicate with the existing or potential customers. Instead, marketing analysis is used to inform product development, advertising, sales and other ways in which the company interacts with the outside world.
To be fair, it should be noted that GNU were busy developing and distributing software long before ESR coined the term "Open Source", as were many other groups. Perl similarly developed essentially independantly of the modern, primarily advocate-driven "Open Source" movement. It is likewise true that Mozilla, the "Open Source" flagship, has been floundering on the rocks for a significant period of time.
I guess we should note that the typical Linux distribution has very little code developed by the "Open Source" (i.e. post-ESR) movement, and lots developed by other groups.
Unix isn't predictable at all. For example, if I calculate that I will require 60% of the system's CPU for 8 hours to complete a job, which I start before I go home, whether or not it's completed the next day depends largely on whether or not someone else kicked off a large batch job too.
On a VMS node, I could create a batch queue which ensured that I had enough of the CPU to complete my job, no matter what else was on the system at the time, by forcing other queues to use less of the available resources.
Unix is great for many things, but if I made my living in a "complete this processing by this time or don't get paid" environment (as many financial services and engineering users do) I would be hesitant to rely on multi-user Unix systems. Similarly, in a real-time application (for example, a telephone switch) I would not use Unix.
It's simply a matter of the right tool for the right job.
Easy - run a talk (or IRC or whatever) daemon on the server, configured so it only accepts connections on the local loopback interface. Then everyone uses ssh to connect to the host, and then uses a regular client to connect to the server. 100% off the shelf components (which you probably already have) , no need to modify anything, and no additional procedures to follow, certs to distributes, etc.
IBM's drop in revenue originates in their consulting arm (IBM Global Services). It's nothing to do with their OS division - altho', given their current enthusiasm for Linux, that's probably about to change (think about it... the only way to make money on Linux is on yep, services).
Kinda like Netscape in the web browser market?
Because Unix has a crude "all or nothing" security model - you're either the sysadmin, or you aren't. More mature operating systemd (VMS, for example) allow very fine-grained control over system privileges.
Who cares about a Tomb Raider movie? Final Fantasy will be released next year!! :0)
I cite FpML as an example of w functioning, efficient industry led initiative to develop an XML based standard.
(I'm on an FpML working group, so maybe I'm biased :0) )