Anyone know of a good unbiased comparison between J2EE to.NET? Or biased comparisons representing both sides and talking about the same general set of topics? I'm specifically interested in architectural advantages, not artificial performance tests.
They're a different as Coke and Pepsi, or McDonalds and Burger King. Seriously: there's nothing you can do in one that you can't do in the other. The decision about which one to adopt is not technological, it hinges on factors such as what language your existing code is written in, which developers are cheaper to hire in your industry or city, whether you already own lots of PCs or lots of Suns, and the personal preference of your CTO.
In short, MS got it's ass kicked. They quickly swept that defeat under the rug, and you rarely ever hear about it, which is I'm sure what will happen with this defeat.
You make it sound like that's a bad thing. There are very few organizations (especially of Microsoft's size) and CEOs in the world willing to say "OK, I was wrong, let's completely change direction". Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison are notorious for throwing money at doomed ventures (like NC) - their egos just won't let them admit to making a mistake. As for Richard Stallman, has he ever admitted to being wrong about anything?
Bill Gates put his ego to one side, and Microsoft's engineers (who'd just done a Death March to get Windows 95 out the door) got back to work, effectively redoing a lot of what they'd already done. Whatever you may think of Bill in particular and Microsoft in general, they deserve respect for their agility.
Submarines are built to withstand crushing *positive* pressures. Spaceships are built to withstand crushing negative pressures.
It's a big, sealed metal tube. I'm sure they can't be too different.
If a support system goes fruity, submarines can always surface. In space, if a system goes up, you're hosed.
A modern submarine very very rarely surfaces unscheduled. A Trident is designed to remain submerged for months at a time, indeed to operate in an enviroment where it cannot surface, whether because it's under the ice, because an enemy submarine will torpedo it, or because the atmosphere is full of radioactive fallout.
Plus, you have to worry about the long term effects of zero-g and radiation exposure on your crew's health.
Yes, but we have to worry about that now too. Didn't someone spend 447 days in orbit on Mir?
Oh, did I forget to mention that submarines tend to sink naturally after you fill up the ballast tanks? I don't know what it costs to send up a pound of stuff to earth orbit nowadays, but isn't it in the several thousand dollar range?
I'm kinda assuming that by the time we develop a stardrive, the problem of lifting cheaply into orbit will have been solved....
Yeah. Submarines are just like spaceships. Sheesh. I read Sci-Fi as much as the next guy, but this is just silly.
They're a closely related as rowboats and fleet carriers. It's just a matter of scale.
First off, no one likes him. No one. Nada. Not a single person.
There are 10M pre-pubescent girls that would disagree with you.
Personally, I find the whole "boy band" thing distasteful. Here are adult men hired for no other reason than their ability to be sexually attractive to 10-year-olds. What sort of a man would even want to do that?
Indeed capatalism is by nature risk averse, capatalists put in the bare minimum to get the maximum return
Check your definitions. Any venture capitalist will tell you that if 90% of his investments don't fail, he isn't taking enough risk. Any pharma R&D manager will tell you the same about drug development, any record company exec will tell you the same about new bands.
Capitalism is all about risk, it's governments that are risk-averse, because the source of their legitimacy is the status quo.
This would be the same computer technology that got started because of massive military and government subsidies and funding from ENIAC to the Internet?
Using money generated by a capitalist economy. The original poster's point stands.
Without NASA money supporting integrated circuit production lines and demonstrating a digital computer can be trusted for mission critical applications in the 1960's, round about now we'd all be getting excited by IBM's new 640K IBM-PC XT...
NASA has no money. The taxpayer's have money, and they made in in the capitalist economy. Your reasoning is reminiscent of the Europeans who believe that the State should run the utilities, the phone company, the airlines, the steel mills and so on.
I agree that private industry is the future of space, but there's still a long way to go before the "barriers to the marketplace" (physical and economic) can be lowered sufficiently to permit reasonable returns in short enough time frames for most investors
The major barrier right now is political, and it has to be removed before the technological barriers can be addressed. Who will invest in space when the government maintains a monopoly on launching? The whole thing needs to be deregulated, and quickly, otherwise as soon as someone develops a cheap safe launcher (and there have been many prototypes like the X33) the industry will up sticks and move to the least-regulated country suitable for launching from.
I just dont understand why space flight is so expensive. Is it all the people working on it? Could it be bad budgeting of NASA, you know $400 toilet seats and $200 haircuts, etc.? Do they use some rare materials that are hard to produce. I just don't get it, can anyone that has worked around the space program give some insight.
I'm nothing to do with the space programme, but I can answer your question: a lack of competition. Without the Soviets around to compete with, NASA should have been disbanded and the space programme run on open tender. So the government would say something like "$30 billion for the first to Mars and back!" and private teams would have raced to get there, winner take all. As it is, NASA is more interested in maintaining the status quo than anything else.
Forgive me if this sounds anal, but I really think you need to add an "IMO" to that. It's not a statement of fact and the scientific community would argue the point as being ludicrous. Perhaps the return on investment is not worth the cost to you, but the comment fails to stand up as a blanket statement.
Certainly a large proportion - probably a majority, altho' I don't have the numbers to hand - would rather the money had been spent on unmanned probes and on-planet science, such as fusion research. ISS is a political prestige project, its primary purpose is not scientific.
Real scientific research goes on up there in areas that will offer significant benefits to future off-planet manufacturing, mining and general exploration.
The ISS takes 2.5 people full time to operate it. With a crew of 8 then yes, real research could be done. With a crew of 3, there is one person spending half their time on research! Once again, it is obvious that science is not the driving force here.
Make no mistake, space exploration is a long-term project. To expect it to be anything but a money pit within the next 50 years is just silly. Hell, we haven't even been flying earth-bound for all that long. Keep things in perspective.
It didn't take 50 years for flight to become commercially viable. Right now, NASA is the biggest obstacle to commercial exploitation of space. The technology to mine on the moon has been around since the 70s, and as soon as we have need of those resources, they could be exploited relatively easily.
Making a ship which can actually go somewhere is a very different problem, and something that we've never even tried to tackle.
Exactly. Once you've got a stardrive, the rest is just an airtight box. And airtight-box technology is already pretty good. Hell, you could probably fit the stardrive to a present-day nuclear submarine, replace the sonar with a radar, and there's your starship right there, all set for a 6-month mission.
Anything good for you is something you most certainly won't feel in a day.
If I understand creatine's mechanism correctly, it enables you to train for longer. Essentially, the amount of work (reps at a given weight) to produce an increase in strength remains constant whether or not you use it, but the creatine enables you to do more reps in each training session and recover faster, so the "wall clock" time for an increase in strength is reduced. For example, maybe you could normally do 500 reps of a particular lift in 10 weeks, now you can do them in 5. You still have to do them, tho'.
So you would see the result in terms of being able to train harder after a very short time (possibly after the first use), altho' obviously actually developing the muscle will still take time. I've never used it myself, and would advise you check with a doctor if you are thinking about it.
In this society, ideas are not able to be protected by intellectual property laws. That said, good ideas are still the most precious intellectual capital anyone here has.
Ideas are cheap. You can walk into any meeting in any company in the world and for the price of a box of donuts get more ideas than anyone knows what to do with.
The secret of entrepreneurship is to take a basically simple idea and execute it as perfectly as possible. Look at Dell or Starbucks or Gap - what they do is not original at all, but they are successful because they know that it's all about execution.
Software Architecture: Organizational Principles and Patterns covers the VRAPS model and the organizational aspects of Software Architecture
You know, there's one thing worse than developing software without a methodology, and that's changing the methodology every time someone comes out with a new acronym. No-one can evaluate a method until they've done a few non-trivial projects with it, and that takes years. If all the people who jumped on the RUP bandwagon then the XP bandwagon jump on this, the industry's track record for delivering on time and within budget will only get worse.
I might be showing my ignorence but why do we need TLDs? Why can't domains be single names and go from there? It just seems like an out dated idea that isn't working. Why can't I just type http://slashdot and be done with it or at the max http://www.slashdot and that's it (although that does look weird). Why do we need all these.com,.net,.org,.museums any how? If we need them to categorize sites by type we would need an infinate number of TLDs to effectively categorize sites. Jesus, look at how many categories yahoo has for instance.
Well, in the ancient days, there was this bizarre idea that the name of something should in some way represent what it actually was..net was intended for network infrastructure. So a company might have a.com domain for its public face, and any infrastructure that it operated that needed to be addressed from outside, say caches or routers or whatever, would all be.net.
That's before idiots decided that.tv meant "television" and not "Tuvalu" or that.to could be come.to instead of Tonga. In short, the system is screwed because the people in charge of looking after it, like ICANN, are idiots. No other word for it, they are utterly incompetent and got their jobs by being "old geezers" who happened to be around when jobs were being assigned, and now they are clinging on to their vestiges of power as hard as they can.
The solution is a free-for-all: you get whatever domains are being hosted on whatever root servers you want to use, no central authority. There's no need for one, there never really was.
I am on salary where I work and I was told I would get Quarterly bonuses. I have yet to receive one of theese mystical checks, None of my co-workers have recevied them either.. I have been promoted 2 times in the last year, I guess I am doing a good job, Yet no bonus!
I worked for a company like this once. Almost every day we would be encouraged to work harder, to save money etc in order to earn the quarterly bonus, which was calculated both on revenue and profit. Of course, profit is whatever the accountant says it is, since it's very easy to shuffle expenses back and forth by a few months, or to spend money on unnecessary things. So, we'd often make the revenue target, but mysteriously only 99% of the profitability target... so no bonus. Of course, that sort of trick only works for a couple of quarters, then the employees start to realize that the only way they're going to see anything is to pad expense reports, take long lunches, steal office supplies, and it ends up costing the company far more than paying the bonuses fairly would have. But managers who would try to screw their employees like that are far too stupid to realize this.
I made a decision back then that when I started my own company, no-one's getting screwed. Not because I'm overly sentimental, but because screwing the people who generate your revenue is just counterproductive.
Yeah, it was nice to see that the british accent is genetic
Actually, it is genetic. If you have two British parents, you also get the rules of cricket, all the Beatles' lyrics and an assortment of Monty Python quotes too. The sense of humour has to be learnt, tho'.
I predict that we'll have software that can write major software at just the same time as we have software that can write convincing novels. In both cases you have the task of putting together language that respresents a broad swath of messy reality.
Actually, we do already have software that can write software, it's called CASE, Comupter Aided Software Engineering.
Unfortunately, it's takes about as much effort to explain to CASE what you want your application to do as it would to write the application yourself anyway!
You can't abstract away problems. And software is designed to be customized more than plug-in and exchange like lego blocks.
You are exactly right. I believe Grady Booch said it best: The task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity. The corollary of that is that you can never eliminate complexity, you can only shuffle it from one part of a system to another.
I don't think there is any practical problem that would prevent another moon mission. A moon rocket could be sent up in parts and assembled in space, using the ISS as a base of operations. The problem is that there aren't any scientific breakthroughs to be expected from landing more people on the moon and having them jump around for a few days. A permanent moon base OTOH would IMHO be a worhtwhile project, because it would give us the experience we'd need to start a mars mission. Maybe they could also set up a telescope, while they're at it.
Exactly. The only motivation for getting back into space is economic, since practially all the science that can be done can be done remotely. That means mineral extraction, manufacturing that can benefit from low gravity and plenty of vaccuum, and space tourism. It's high time that the governments and scientists got out of the way and let commercial interests take over space exploration.
I'm sure you all remember Belluzzo being pushed out of Microsoft earlier this year. ComputerWorld has a short, but interesting interview with him where he talks about why his new employer, Quantum uses Linux in their appliances." From reading the interview, Belluzzo seems to be pretty amicable to whatever will get the job done, and in this case, it's Linux.
"Rocket" Rick Belluzzo is also the man responsible for SGI's disastrous attempt to drop IRIX and MIPS in favour of x86 workstations running Windows NT. He also dropped the uber-groovy SGI cube logo for the lame "sgi". His "reward" for almost destroying a competitor was a cushy job at Microsoft. SGI have yet to recover and it's by no means certain that they will.
One method of debugging silicon is to shave off the back of the die and monitor photon emissions to watch the gates switch. So yes, the die does give off light.
Under normal operating conditions, those photons will be absorbed by the case and end up as heat.
There is no way this ends up good, if MS makes the sale. But here's a question. At what point does MS own too much of the computing world? With MS buying Borland and Rational, does this signify the end developments for other OS's? If not this, then how much more does MS need to buy before they do own practically everything.
Neither Borland nor Rational are OS vendors. Further, pretty much all of Borland's products only run on Windows anyway. So the impact on the wider industry is minimal.
Most likely, the bosses concern is that it might be more difficult to hire people who understand pthreads than people who understand forking. This is a very valid concern. That's one of the reasons for the popularity of Solaris, Windows, Oracle, Motif, Java etc - there's a huge pool of people who know how to develop and maintain applications on them. For a given application, Smalltalk might be the best language on purely technical grounds and for the next project it might be LISP, but most sane organizations will do both projects in C because everyone knows C.
There's a job called 'systems analyst' that covers this. Back in the 80s I was one (later I became a programmer). The job was to act as liaison between the customer (user) and the computer people, and speak both their languages.
They still exist... I know because I am one! My background is a few years programming and a couple of years as a management consultant, plus a Master's degree in Systems Analysis.
It's a profession that may have fallen out of favor in rapid startups
More likely these startups have never even heard of software engineering, and had no idea what they were doing! That's why so many of them aren't around anymore.
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Anyone know of a good unbiased comparison between J2EE to .NET? Or biased comparisons representing both sides and talking about the same general set of topics? I'm specifically interested in architectural advantages, not artificial performance tests.
They're a different as Coke and Pepsi, or McDonalds and Burger King. Seriously: there's nothing you can do in one that you can't do in the other. The decision about which one to adopt is not technological, it hinges on factors such as what language your existing code is written in, which developers are cheaper to hire in your industry or city, whether you already own lots of PCs or lots of Suns, and the personal preference of your CTO.
In short, MS got it's ass kicked. They quickly swept that defeat under the rug, and you rarely ever hear about it, which is I'm sure what will happen with this defeat.
You make it sound like that's a bad thing. There are very few organizations (especially of Microsoft's size) and CEOs in the world willing to say "OK, I was wrong, let's completely change direction". Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison are notorious for throwing money at doomed ventures (like NC) - their egos just won't let them admit to making a mistake. As for Richard Stallman, has he ever admitted to being wrong about anything?
Bill Gates put his ego to one side, and Microsoft's engineers (who'd just done a Death March to get Windows 95 out the door) got back to work, effectively redoing a lot of what they'd already done. Whatever you may think of Bill in particular and Microsoft in general, they deserve respect for their agility.
Submarines are built to withstand crushing *positive* pressures. Spaceships are built to withstand crushing negative pressures.
It's a big, sealed metal tube. I'm sure they can't be too different.
If a support system goes fruity, submarines can always surface. In space, if a system goes up, you're hosed.
A modern submarine very very rarely surfaces unscheduled. A Trident is designed to remain submerged for months at a time, indeed to operate in an enviroment where it cannot surface, whether because it's under the ice, because an enemy submarine will torpedo it, or because the atmosphere is full of radioactive fallout.
Plus, you have to worry about the long term effects of zero-g and radiation exposure on your crew's health.
Yes, but we have to worry about that now too. Didn't someone spend 447 days in orbit on Mir?
Oh, did I forget to mention that submarines tend to sink naturally after you fill up the ballast tanks? I don't know what it costs to send up a pound of stuff to earth orbit nowadays, but isn't it in the several thousand dollar range?
I'm kinda assuming that by the time we develop a stardrive, the problem of lifting cheaply into orbit will have been solved....
Yeah. Submarines are just like spaceships. Sheesh. I read Sci-Fi as much as the next guy, but this is just silly.
They're a closely related as rowboats and fleet carriers. It's just a matter of scale.
First off, no one likes him. No one. Nada. Not a single person.
There are 10M pre-pubescent girls that would disagree with you.
Personally, I find the whole "boy band" thing distasteful. Here are adult men hired for no other reason than their ability to be sexually attractive to 10-year-olds. What sort of a man would even want to do that?
Indeed capatalism is by nature risk averse, capatalists put in the bare minimum to get the maximum return
Check your definitions. Any venture capitalist will tell you that if 90% of his investments don't fail, he isn't taking enough risk. Any pharma R&D manager will tell you the same about drug development, any record company exec will tell you the same about new bands.
Capitalism is all about risk, it's governments that are risk-averse, because the source of their legitimacy is the status quo.
This would be the same computer technology that got started because of massive military and government subsidies and funding from ENIAC to the Internet?
Using money generated by a capitalist economy. The original poster's point stands.
Without NASA money supporting integrated circuit production lines and demonstrating a digital computer can be trusted for mission critical applications in the 1960's, round about now we'd all be getting excited by IBM's new 640K IBM-PC XT...
NASA has no money. The taxpayer's have money, and they made in in the capitalist economy. Your reasoning is reminiscent of the Europeans who believe that the State should run the utilities, the phone company, the airlines, the steel mills and so on.
I agree that private industry is the future of space, but there's still a long way to go before the "barriers to the marketplace" (physical and economic) can be lowered sufficiently to permit reasonable returns in short enough time frames for most investors
The major barrier right now is political, and it has to be removed before the technological barriers can be addressed. Who will invest in space when the government maintains a monopoly on launching? The whole thing needs to be deregulated, and quickly, otherwise as soon as someone develops a cheap safe launcher (and there have been many prototypes like the X33) the industry will up sticks and move to the least-regulated country suitable for launching from.
I just dont understand why space flight is so expensive. Is it all the people working on it? Could it be bad budgeting of NASA, you know $400 toilet seats and $200 haircuts, etc.? Do they use some rare materials that are hard to produce. I just don't get it, can anyone that has worked around the space program give some insight.
I'm nothing to do with the space programme, but I can answer your question: a lack of competition. Without the Soviets around to compete with, NASA should have been disbanded and the space programme run on open tender. So the government would say something like "$30 billion for the first to Mars and back!" and private teams would have raced to get there, winner take all. As it is, NASA is more interested in maintaining the status quo than anything else.
Forgive me if this sounds anal, but I really think you need to add an "IMO" to that. It's not a statement of fact and the scientific community would argue the point as being ludicrous. Perhaps the return on investment is not worth the cost to you, but the comment fails to stand up as a blanket statement.
Certainly a large proportion - probably a majority, altho' I don't have the numbers to hand - would rather the money had been spent on unmanned probes and on-planet science, such as fusion research. ISS is a political prestige project, its primary purpose is not scientific.
Real scientific research goes on up there in areas that will offer significant benefits to future off-planet manufacturing, mining and general exploration.
The ISS takes 2.5 people full time to operate it. With a crew of 8 then yes, real research could be done. With a crew of 3, there is one person spending half their time on research! Once again, it is obvious that science is not the driving force here.
Make no mistake, space exploration is a long-term project. To expect it to be anything but a money pit within the next 50 years is just silly. Hell, we haven't even been flying earth-bound for all that long. Keep things in perspective.
It didn't take 50 years for flight to become commercially viable. Right now, NASA is the biggest obstacle to commercial exploitation of space. The technology to mine on the moon has been around since the 70s, and as soon as we have need of those resources, they could be exploited relatively easily.
Making a ship which can actually go somewhere is a very different problem, and something that we've never even tried to tackle.
Exactly. Once you've got a stardrive, the rest is just an airtight box. And airtight-box technology is already pretty good. Hell, you could probably fit the stardrive to a present-day nuclear submarine, replace the sonar with a radar, and there's your starship right there, all set for a 6-month mission.
Anything good for you is something you most certainly won't feel in a day.
If I understand creatine's mechanism correctly, it enables you to train for longer. Essentially, the amount of work (reps at a given weight) to produce an increase in strength remains constant whether or not you use it, but the creatine enables you to do more reps in each training session and recover faster, so the "wall clock" time for an increase in strength is reduced. For example, maybe you could normally do 500 reps of a particular lift in 10 weeks, now you can do them in 5. You still have to do them, tho'.
So you would see the result in terms of being able to train harder after a very short time (possibly after the first use), altho' obviously actually developing the muscle will still take time. I've never used it myself, and would advise you check with a doctor if you are thinking about it.
In this society, ideas are not able to be protected by intellectual property laws. That said, good ideas are still the most precious intellectual capital anyone here has.
Ideas are cheap. You can walk into any meeting in any company in the world and for the price of a box of donuts get more ideas than anyone knows what to do with.
The secret of entrepreneurship is to take a basically simple idea and execute it as perfectly as possible. Look at Dell or Starbucks or Gap - what they do is not original at all, but they are successful because they know that it's all about execution.
Software Architecture: Organizational Principles and Patterns covers the VRAPS model and the organizational aspects of Software Architecture
You know, there's one thing worse than developing software without a methodology, and that's changing the methodology every time someone comes out with a new acronym. No-one can evaluate a method until they've done a few non-trivial projects with it, and that takes years. If all the people who jumped on the RUP bandwagon then the XP bandwagon jump on this, the industry's track record for delivering on time and within budget will only get worse.
I might be showing my ignorence but why do we need TLDs? Why can't domains be single names and go from there? It just seems like an out dated idea that isn't working. Why can't I just type http://slashdot and be done with it or at the max http://www.slashdot and that's it (although that does look weird). Why do we need all these .com,.net,.org,.museums any how? If we need them to categorize sites by type we would need an infinate number of TLDs to effectively categorize sites. Jesus, look at how many categories yahoo has for instance.
.net was intended for network infrastructure. So a company might have a .com domain for its public face, and any infrastructure that it operated that needed to be addressed from outside, say caches or routers or whatever, would all be .net.
.tv meant "television" and not "Tuvalu" or that .to could be come.to instead of Tonga. In short, the system is screwed because the people in charge of looking after it, like ICANN, are idiots. No other word for it, they are utterly incompetent and got their jobs by being "old geezers" who happened to be around when jobs were being assigned, and now they are clinging on to their vestiges of power as hard as they can.
Well, in the ancient days, there was this bizarre idea that the name of something should in some way represent what it actually was.
That's before idiots decided that
The solution is a free-for-all: you get whatever domains are being hosted on whatever root servers you want to use, no central authority. There's no need for one, there never really was.
I am on salary where I work and I was told I would get Quarterly bonuses. I have yet to receive one of theese mystical checks, None of my co-workers have recevied them either.. I have been promoted 2 times in the last year, I guess I am doing a good job, Yet no bonus!
I worked for a company like this once. Almost every day we would be encouraged to work harder, to save money etc in order to earn the quarterly bonus, which was calculated both on revenue and profit. Of course, profit is whatever the accountant says it is, since it's very easy to shuffle expenses back and forth by a few months, or to spend money on unnecessary things. So, we'd often make the revenue target, but mysteriously only 99% of the profitability target... so no bonus. Of course, that sort of trick only works for a couple of quarters, then the employees start to realize that the only way they're going to see anything is to pad expense reports, take long lunches, steal office supplies, and it ends up costing the company far more than paying the bonuses fairly would have. But managers who would try to screw their employees like that are far too stupid to realize this.
I made a decision back then that when I started my own company, no-one's getting screwed. Not because I'm overly sentimental, but because screwing the people who generate your revenue is just counterproductive.
Yeah, it was nice to see that the british accent is genetic
Actually, it is genetic. If you have two British parents, you also get the rules of cricket, all the Beatles' lyrics and an assortment of Monty Python quotes too. The sense of humour has to be learnt, tho'.
I predict that we'll have software that can write major software at just the same time as we have software that can write convincing novels. In both cases you have the task of putting together language that respresents a broad swath of messy reality.
Actually, we do already have software that can write software, it's called CASE, Comupter Aided Software Engineering.
Unfortunately, it's takes about as much effort to explain to CASE what you want your application to do as it would to write the application yourself anyway!
You can't abstract away problems. And software is designed to be customized more than plug-in and exchange like lego blocks.
You are exactly right. I believe Grady Booch said it best: The task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity. The corollary of that is that you can never eliminate complexity, you can only shuffle it from one part of a system to another.
Ok. Just becuase it Marc Andreessen doens't mean that it's news. This is an editorial, not an article.
You mean Marc Andressen of Loudcloud, who sell server and datacentre management services, and who are desperate for revenue? That Marc Andressen?
It isn't even an editorial, it's free advertising disguised as a story. I hope they're paying whoever owns Slashdot this week for it.
I don't think there is any practical problem that would prevent another moon mission. A moon rocket could be sent up in parts and assembled in space, using the ISS as a base of operations. The problem is that there aren't any scientific breakthroughs to be expected from landing more people on the moon and having them jump around for a few days. A permanent moon base OTOH would IMHO be a worhtwhile project, because it would give us the experience we'd need to start a mars mission. Maybe they could also set up a telescope, while they're at it.
Exactly. The only motivation for getting back into space is economic, since practially all the science that can be done can be done remotely. That means mineral extraction, manufacturing that can benefit from low gravity and plenty of vaccuum, and space tourism. It's high time that the governments and scientists got out of the way and let commercial interests take over space exploration.
I'm sure you all remember Belluzzo being pushed out of Microsoft earlier this year. ComputerWorld has a short, but interesting interview with him where he talks about why his new employer, Quantum uses Linux in their appliances." From reading the interview, Belluzzo seems to be pretty amicable to whatever will get the job done, and in this case, it's Linux.
"Rocket" Rick Belluzzo is also the man responsible for SGI's disastrous attempt to drop IRIX and MIPS in favour of x86 workstations running Windows NT. He also dropped the uber-groovy SGI cube logo for the lame "sgi". His "reward" for almost destroying a competitor was a cushy job at Microsoft. SGI have yet to recover and it's by no means certain that they will.
Does Linux really need supporters like this?
One method of debugging silicon is to shave off the back of the die and monitor photon emissions to watch the gates switch. So yes, the die does give off light.
Under normal operating conditions, those photons will be absorbed by the case and end up as heat.
There is no way this ends up good, if MS makes the sale. But here's a question. At what point does MS own too much of the computing world? With MS buying Borland and Rational, does this signify the end developments for other OS's? If not this, then how much more does MS need to buy before they do own practically everything.
Neither Borland nor Rational are OS vendors. Further, pretty much all of Borland's products only run on Windows anyway. So the impact on the wider industry is minimal.
Then there's inherent contradictions.
Most likely, the bosses concern is that it might be more difficult to hire people who understand pthreads than people who understand forking. This is a very valid concern. That's one of the reasons for the popularity of Solaris, Windows, Oracle, Motif, Java etc - there's a huge pool of people who know how to develop and maintain applications on them. For a given application, Smalltalk might be the best language on purely technical grounds and for the next project it might be LISP, but most sane organizations will do both projects in C because everyone knows C.
I'm not trusting a company who has spent "15" million dollars and can't even get the installer to work correctly.
:-)
They were probably Canadian dollars
There's a job called 'systems analyst' that covers this. Back in the 80s I was one (later I became a programmer). The job was to act as liaison between the customer (user) and the computer people, and speak both their languages.
They still exist... I know because I am one! My background is a few years programming and a couple of years as a management consultant, plus a Master's degree in Systems Analysis.
It's a profession that may have fallen out of favor in rapid startups
More likely these startups have never even heard of software engineering, and had no idea what they were doing! That's why so many of them aren't around anymore.