I worked for a place that tried to standardize on it, but
rampant MS Office piracy and document compatibility pretty much killed that idea
One thing to note, though, is that SO has excellent Office import/export support, so it is reasonably easy to have 'mixed' workflow. Not perfect -- Office documents' layout is notoriously volatile, even between differen MS Office versions -- but usually good enough.
Something not many people have yet mentioned, that will become more important in future (I think) is that no matter how entrenched MS Office is on Windows (and to a degree on MacOS), on unix it just doesn't exist. It may well be that Star Office will become de facto "Unix Office Suite", and perhaps from there on it'll be easier to 'conquer' Windows desktop too. The only nasty thing about the current state of SO is that there is no (and apparently might not be) MacOS version.
Using OpenGL as a central element was interesting, and potentially very useful, but how well can
you make use of it? If you've still got a 2D world, but a 3D algorithm generating it, you've just
blown a whole lot of clock-cycles on nothing. It doesn't even have a coolness factor. Now, if you
can rotate -into- the screen, -that- would be cool.
Last, but by no means least -- CORBA as the communications layer???? And I thought I could be
stupid, at times. CORBA is a wash-out, due to too many corporations wanting to have
proprietary extensions to make it usable. It would have been a great technology, but either you
use the standard and have a gazillion lines of code to work round the limitations, OR you
"enhance" the standard, making it impossible for other systems to talk with it.
Also, with CORBA, the overheads are VAST. X is bad enough, but CORBA is a nightmare. One of the
important considerations in a system like this is who will use it. If you're talking home users,
then you need a protocol with as close to zero overhead as possible, whilst still allowing as much
flexibility & dynamicism as possible. CORBA doesn't cut it, either way.
You have some valid points about acceptance, but I think your complaints about Corba and OpenGL are based on prejudice and FUD than facts. Did you actually read any article about Berlin before commenting? I understand that first impression might be "those are slow", but the story doesn't (have to) end there.
It has already been said by n+1 people here that not only can OpenGL easily do 2D too (degenerate case of 3D), but that it may actually be faster; not because it's inherently faster but because gfx card makers have lately concentrated on 3D acceleration, and many advanced features (from basic texture mapping to transparency) are only available via 3D rendering. Thus, it need not be slower to use OpenGL. It might be faster, but what is reasonably sure is it'll be fast enough (ie. not order of magnitude slower). Another thing that helps is that h/w acceleration is easier to use with higher-level rendering requests (that Berlin uses, see below).
As to Corba; whether implementation is in the order of virtual method call (in local app/server case) or 10 times slower is not as relevant as with X-windows because the atomic operations being sent are much higher-level (read: bigger) on Berlin. That's what is on their FAQ; you don't draw bits on screen, you more likely transform more complicated (vector) graphics objects. Much of the stuff can also be made on server-side, thanks to integrated toolkit, removing the need to use Corba at all for much of the stuff X-protocol would need to use messaging.
Well, SuSE is a german company... So I'd guess fluctuations of euro are irrelevant in their "home" market, and don't have much need to exchange those to dollars?
How does a company like this have such a high cash burn rate when they are essentially just
enhancing free software?
Well SuSE has employees (not volunteers) that enhance, package, test, market and sell the complete end product; distribution consisting of (mostly) free software. In some cases employees also are the actual developers too. These people don't work for bananas (AFAIK), and you need a few of them. That's where the money goes. In addition SuSE has been sponsoring some outside development efforts, but most likely these are much smaller investments than the actual running costs of the company.
A quick calculation: let's say an average employee earns 50000$ a year. In Germany additional costs for employees (employee has to pay some soc. sec. costs, insurances etc) might bem say, 50%.
There are other indirect 'per employee' costs; PCs, facilities etc., so let's say each employee costs 100k$ a year (may be higher, but not much lower). So, for 1M$ you get 100 SuSE employees for one year. I'm not sure how many people SuSE employs; with 1000 employees 45 millions would be enough for 4 and 1/2 years. But that would be just for paying for people; there are other operational costs. So, even though it looks like buckets of money, it's not all that huge for medium-sized company?
I think that Suse is a really neat Linux distribution. I hope that everything will be find for Suse
now. Too bad they copped out on America, because without America, they will not survive. And
the price of Euros keeps sinking lower and lower.
Hmmh, what does the currency exchange rate of Euro have to do with SuSE, esp. since they are not selling to US of A? If they did, it would be goog for them; same dollar price would get more euros etc., but...?
And as to USA being essential for survival; not necessarily so. With 5% of world population (although almost half of internet users AFAIR) it won't be the only player in linux-world for long. Poor countries have much more to benefit from the cheap OS than richer ones.
I think he was saying the vehicles were going same speed, not that the engines "speed" (output rotational speed whatever) was the same.
I've heard the rumour there's some kind of transmission technology in between engine and axels, which may kind of skew the actual RPMs of the wheels.:-)
Also, the tire sizes of mopeds are oftentimes slightly smaller than trucks', further complicating this complex mathematical equation!
Re:I'll get hammered, but Internet Explorer 6 is o
on
KOffice 1.1 Rolls Out
·
· Score: 1
I sure as hell didn't sign any of my rights away when I downloaded it.
You maybe didn't sign any rights away at that point, but he was saying was that you will if/when you use it, implicitly, by using a product one shouldn't trust. There is a subtle but significant difference here; laws and licences vs. straight-jacket implementations. De jure vs. de facto.
Hmmh, come to think of it... when downloading it you probably did click on "Accept" button under a huge piece of text, too, waiving a huge chunk of common sense rights, but that's your typical shrink-wrap thing, possibly being meaningless, possibly not.
I disagree. I love Konqy, *but* one of the goals of the Konqy project is to be as standards
compliant as possible. If it renders botched html, then they are falling short of their goal. Web
authors will never code to a standard if the browsers are too forgiving. I look forward to a day
when every browser conforms to a tight standard and most web authors write to that spec.
Actually, like someone else said, what a browser does with an invalid doc is already not defined; you may try to render it best as you can.
However, what IMO would be useful would be displaying 'correct' parts (I know, with runaway tags that's difficult) as well as you can, and indicate somehow that the rest is garbage, or if you can isolate problem part, indicate that. Bit like what is done for 'missing images', having an icon in place to indicate something is wrong is better than failing to display anything. That's why Netscape's table-handling really sucks; it seems to commit a harakiri on missing end tags, instead of at least displaying something. Sometimes you just end up wondering why the page won't load, when it in fact was done, contained 90% ok HTML, but last closing table tab(s) was/were missing. Bleech.
If the Internet bust has taught us anything - mindshare is completely worthless if you don't have products to sell.
I wasn't saying it would necessarily have tons of worth, I just pointed out that Sun considers it important (and I agree personally; mindshare or visitor count is irrelevant except for selling ads...). However, more to the point:
How is Sun making any money off of Java? It is not a revenue creator - quite
the contrary - it loses money for Sun. They will be forced to charge for J2EE and its JVMs sooner
or later.
No. That wouldn't make any sense. No one makes significant amount of money by selling standard, specs or guidelines. Money Sun would get would be peanuts, and most likely shrink the market itself (ie. Java/J2EE adopters).
However, note that Sun does sell products that implement the specifications. J2EE itself is but a specification; however, Sun sells IPlanet web/application server (with Netscape). Similarly, bare runtime engine/environment or language compiler can't really be sold (compare to libc and similar runtime libraries needed by other languages... or compilers). What can be sold are IDEs. And guess what? Sun sells Forte for Java (or whatever it's called these days).
This all is not to say Java would be profitable even after counting in IPlanet, Forte and other related products. And how much "mindshare" adds to h/w sales is of course debatable. However, Sun is clearly trying to find out how to benefit from its inventions/creations, and fortunately that doesn't include closing up things that need to be open to some degree (Java specs are reasonably open and available, ditto for J2EE, even if implementations have more restrictions)
I think I agree with the review. I bought my copy of the book (from Bookpool) few months ago when I had to start using a Solaris workstation (was using linux at home and work on some jobs, NT on others previously).
I know my Linux-box reasonably well, and although I was able to use the ultra-10 I have (with Solaris 8) ok, I knew there are lots of things that would make life easier. Unfortunately, the book was bit light on details. There were useful stuff in there (some of which may have been available on Linux too), but all in all it just left a stale taste.
The specific problems I had with the book that I can remember were:
I can use man-pages (or foobar -h) to get listing of command switches, I don't need the book. It would be more useful to explain the actual operation of the command bit more (instead of 2-liners), than to give command line switches with equally brief descriptions.
The author apparently has never heard of ssh? Even though he did warn about telnet's problems, it's a crying shame no secure alternative was presented. Especially since ssh appears to be installed on Solaris 8 by default?
Related to previous; there was no mention of the fact that ftp is equally dangerous as telnet.
Scp fixes this nicely, too, but at least book should definitely warn about using ftp for file transfer (minus public ftp-sites with anon. login), so that people wouldn't have mistaken feel of safety ("it asks for password... how can it be totally insecure?")
I still have the book nearby, and occasionally do reference it. It's not completely useless... But I think it doesn't really live up to its title. Anyone have any suggestions for a better book?:-)
Actually, that would be a reasonably sure way to kill Java or J2EE. Stuff that starts out free has usually very tough time going back to for-profit.
One important thing to keep in mind, too, is that Sun is definitely not the only company or entity that has developed J2EE, or even Java itself. J2EE especially has been a big collaboration, and you could say many companies have already footed part of the bill by providing resources (from actual developers to committee members, ideas, feedback etc).
And saying they "merely implemented it" implies that you perhaps don't quite understand how much effort implementing the full J2EE suite (even without having to do JVM), including application servers and EJB systems actually takes. Really, if it was all that easy (and writing the specs was the hard part), there would be abundance of Free J2EE implementations, right? Well, there aren't (many? any?). One of the few essential Free/Open source things (and reasonably good one in some ways) in this area is Tomcat for Apache (servlet / JSP engine), but that appears to be about it.
Sun's Java strategy is more about collaboration than milking money from others, and that seems to more succesful way if measured by the rate of adoption. It doesn't generate direct revenue, but Sun has been more concerned with mindshare here. And being the leader kind of enhances value of the brand ("Ok these machines are made by same people who designed J2EE so I guess it's safe bet to buy Sun H/W to run J2EE-based systems") [I'm not saying this feeling is very sensible, but it's rather common from what I have seen]
I bought my CD-R along with my current PC 4 months ago. AFAIK I haven't done anything illegal with it since. I'm reasonably computer savvy (with 7 years of S/W Eng. experience) to count.
Alas, since RIAA wants to fight fair use out of existence, it may soon be debatable; I have created my own CD-compilations (songs from CDs I legally have bought), as well as ogg-collections so I can create my own 'all of Procol Harum' etc. collections on just one CD (with 192 kbps they fit in nicely). I haven't "shared" any of those with anyone, and I haven't downloaded any pirated music to burn on CDs (nor to store on my HD).
Is this so uncommon? I don't really think so... People tend to overgeneralize from their own experiences; being a thief does not everyone thief make (btw, not claiming you are a thief, but many people who do steal use arguments like that)
Perhaps his way of informing people was incorrect. I could understand, though, that the end-users -- whose site it is, really -- were first contacted, not just because its their work that is in danger (if someone changes pages etc), but also because they most likely care. ISPs should care too, of course... but often not before users complain loudly.
That is not to say it was right or sensible way of doing it. Especially working for ISPs competitor.
Still, there is a long jump from saying it was foolish to saying it was criminal, which should be the point in case. What was the punishment they seek? Five years in prison?
It should still be kept in mind that he did report the problem. He didn't try to abuse it, although prosecution will certainly try to present the case like he did. It's easy to whine about "incorrectly extinguished fire" (old fireman saying), but like everyone and their dog are saying, hindsight is 20/20.
Why does anyone complain
about this? If Microsoft should be forced to support Netscape APIs, should Netscape be forced to
support ActiveX?
Apples and oranges. Microsoft _had_ the feature, and they are removing it; Netscape _doesn't have_ any such feature. Whether MS can/should remove it is a different issue, but annoyance is more understandable over a soon-to-be-removed feature some people found useful. And also, given MS's less than good image in regards to abuse of monopoly power, they'll be more readily accused of all kinds of nasty schemes behind any action they take.
Yes, there are security concerns, but I think plug-ins can be/are useful when they act as "multimedia drivers", instead of as generic executable stuff. There has to be (or at least should be) a modular way to expand set of formats a browser supports (since new ones are introduced all the time), and it's better not to have to wait until browser maker creates those extensions. Thus, for testing new formats plug-in support is essential.
Of course, there is a huge difference between plug-ins (that need some user interaction for installation) and 'implicitly embedded code' (read activeX) that may not need any interaction, depending on security settings. Also, plugins only need to be installed once, and hopefully from thereon that particular content type can be displayed without further problems (security or otherwise)
Does one avoid taking this kind of study with a grain of salt simply because it
supports a Slashdot Approved Technology
Are we reading the same thread here? To me it seems that majority of posters are commenting more along lines "Java is stupid, Java is slow, I don't like Java, C/C++ for Kernel, Java is evil, it's just a toy" etc. etc. I don't see it as "Slashdot Approved" in any way. Personally I think "right tool for the job" should be the guideline, YMMV, whatever rocks your boat etc. etc., but for many Java itself is a red flag (smaller than Microsoft but still). I'm bit surprised to see people saying "it's unfortunate that Java is being used as the teaching language", without much reasoning why that is bad.
The fact that IBM sponsored the study is of course different matter; IBM is the biggest sponsor of Java bar none. They have committed to using it, perhaps even more than Sun has. I personally don't think IBM influenced the study directly in any way, but they sure have use for its results. And everyone knows how both methodology of the study and the way results are published has huge impact on what the results look (sound) like.
Umh. Not so fast (no pun intended). In all likelihood low-level drivers (DVD/CD-R) are and should be written in language that allows fast and full access to hardware. On top of that there's no (fundamental) reason why apps couldn't be written in practical any full-featured programming language.
As to Office Suite, there is no reason why it _couldn't_ be written in Java. However, there might not be much incentive in creating one now either (in any language, actually)... It's not like there weren't N+1 office suites available. It's more about inertia; existing huge popular shrink-wrapped apps were written mostly in C (some in Pascal, esp. on Mac, some newer on C++), and although there is constantly need for some rewrite, dumping the implementation isn't something high level managers like to hear.
As to office suites, the fact that there's one failure doesn't prove it being impossible (Corel / WP). It does imply that at the time it was impractical to do; whether it still is or not is another question.
However, right now the biggest reasons no new big java _applications_ are being developed (outside internal enterprise networks) are:
Everyone and their dog in corporate world loves 'web applications', ie. browser-based UIs with server-side business logic (usually with 3 or more tiers). Java is the language of the choice
(not the only choice but dominant) on server side.
Since JVMs have been a moving target, and not installed by default on (most) OSes, installing a Java-app has been difficult or impractical. Situation would be different if you could just assume a suitable JVM exists, and distribute bytecode 'binaries'
Finally; Java performance. I think what puzzles most people is that with Java you do need to tune your code more than with C or C++. You'll spend much much much less time debugging weird memory-overwrite crashes or memory leaks. But you do need to do more performance tuning. For me that's a fair trade-off. Performance of number-crunching (after optimizing) seems to be (in general) something like 20-40% slower (at worst might be up to 100%, ie. operations take twice as long). However, with UI the differences are negligible. This is of course assuming you have a decent JVM and know how to write efficient code.
That this one thing could for a
moment make people think that coming to the US from another country is a frightening thing
ranks right up there with Prohibition and the Red Scares.
First of all, you'd probably need to change "people" to "certain people", like computer security experts and researchers. That this doesn't matter to majority of all people isn't quite as relevant as how big portion of Slashdot readers this potentially might affect. And that's significantly higher percentage than for normal population.
In some ways it may sound overblown, but think about it for a moment. Many chinese dissidents living outside China (in USA for example) are afraid to visit China for pretty similar reasons as researchers after Skylarov. Criticizing companies (by showing the problems with their systems) vs. critizing the ruling party/government (by showing the problem with their system).
Many people avoid going to Colombia or South Africa (not to mention countries that have full-blown civil war) because of the potential risks. Right now probability of being abducted by US govt (based on flaky DMCA-based claims) is still reasonably small, but the trend is what is alarming. It may become standard procedure in future for FBI to keep a list of 'known DMCA-violators'. I don't want to sound like another overly paranoid geek, but really, the road ahead looks bit too slippery...
Ouch, stupid me; you are right it wasn't Richard. Actually, I meant Frederick Barbarossa...
Well, that's what Microsoft games do to your history knowledge.:-)
("crusades schmusades"... some dude drowned somewhere, leading a crusade)
I'll need to check Louis case too. Gotta love Google... In any case, it is amazing how many ancient heroes/villains died in most embarrassing ways (like Attila).
That's probably true, as it has been for past 20 years, from earliest 'game-capable' home computers (vic-20 et al).
But really, what is more interesting in the end is the number of copies sold. In many ways that is the only significant piece of data for companies. Although some rought estimate on maximum 'potential' sales figures (include pirate copies) may be useful for a thought exercise, it's impossible to really reliably have any estimations on how much pirated copies actually hurt the company. I'm not defending cheap-ass game stealers, but it is a fact that someone with 1000+ pirated games wouldn't ever by anything like that amount; most of those copies were probably only played once or twice. Some people just have weird fetism for collecting all kinds of stolen stuff.:-)
As these game companies expand their product lines, multiple
games are going to join into a single multipurpose game engine. The games themselves will only
become a part of the social experience you're buying, you'll be able to wander around the "waiting
rooms" with your avatar and talk to people. Exciting.
This sounds a lot like MUDs... It's amazing how much "social" things mean; even with muds that are not specifically chat-oriented, the main attraction really appears to be the community.
(and having been a mud-admin for 10 years I have seen it... even though have been semi-retired for past 3 years or so).
However, MUDs never developed to fully interconnected 'mega-games', nor did most succesful worlds 'kill' others. Probably because it was and is very easy to set up your own mud. Then again, companies might have more interest in getting multiple games interconnected, bundled, syndicated if you will.
Too bad good ole Richard knew not how to swim... But didn't he die on his way to the Holy Land, and thus didn't yet have a chance to be held for a ransom?
Slashdot Mirror
I worked for a place that tried to standardize on it, but
rampant MS Office piracy and document compatibility pretty much killed that idea
One thing to note, though, is that SO has excellent Office import/export support, so it is reasonably easy to have 'mixed' workflow. Not perfect -- Office documents' layout is notoriously volatile, even between differen MS Office versions -- but usually good enough.
Something not many people have yet mentioned, that will become more important in future (I think) is that no matter how entrenched MS Office is on Windows (and to a degree on MacOS), on unix it just doesn't exist. It may well be that Star Office will become de facto "Unix Office Suite", and perhaps from there on it'll be easier to 'conquer' Windows desktop too. The only nasty thing about the current state of SO is that there is no (and apparently might not be) MacOS version.
Didn't Sun just
give a sneak preview of Star Office 6.0 at a linux show, a week or so ago? (where are all the links when I need them!)
At least home page mentions soon-to-be downloadable 6.0 beta version.
("Star Office 6.0 beta alert")
However, this only emphasizes my point; the amount SuSE gets is not all that big. It'd then be more like 450 employees for one year.
Using OpenGL as a central element was interesting, and potentially very useful, but how well can
you make use of it? If you've still got a 2D world, but a 3D algorithm generating it, you've just
blown a whole lot of clock-cycles on nothing. It doesn't even have a coolness factor. Now, if you
can rotate -into- the screen, -that- would be cool.
Last, but by no means least -- CORBA as the communications layer???? And I thought I could be
stupid, at times. CORBA is a wash-out, due to too many corporations wanting to have
proprietary extensions to make it usable. It would have been a great technology, but either you
use the standard and have a gazillion lines of code to work round the limitations, OR you
"enhance" the standard, making it impossible for other systems to talk with it.
Also, with CORBA, the overheads are VAST. X is bad enough, but CORBA is a nightmare. One of the
important considerations in a system like this is who will use it. If you're talking home users,
then you need a protocol with as close to zero overhead as possible, whilst still allowing as much
flexibility & dynamicism as possible. CORBA doesn't cut it, either way.
You have some valid points about acceptance, but I think your complaints about Corba and OpenGL are based on prejudice and FUD than facts. Did you actually read any article about Berlin before commenting? I understand that first impression might be "those are slow", but the story doesn't (have to) end there.
It has already been said by n+1 people here that not only can OpenGL easily do 2D too (degenerate case of 3D), but that it may actually be faster; not because it's inherently faster but because gfx card makers have lately concentrated on 3D acceleration, and many advanced features (from basic texture mapping to transparency) are only available via 3D rendering. Thus, it need not be slower to use OpenGL. It might be faster, but what is reasonably sure is it'll be fast enough (ie. not order of magnitude slower). Another thing that helps is that h/w acceleration is easier to use with higher-level rendering requests (that Berlin uses, see below).
As to Corba; whether implementation is in the order of virtual method call (in local app/server case) or 10 times slower is not as relevant as with X-windows because the atomic operations being sent are much higher-level (read: bigger) on Berlin. That's what is on their FAQ; you don't draw bits on screen, you more likely transform more complicated (vector) graphics objects. Much of the stuff can also be made on server-side, thanks to integrated toolkit, removing the need to use Corba at all for much of the stuff X-protocol would need to use messaging.
Well, SuSE is a german company... So I'd guess fluctuations of euro are irrelevant in their "home" market, and don't have much need to exchange those to dollars?
How does a company like this have such a high cash burn rate when they are essentially just
enhancing free software?
Well SuSE has employees (not volunteers) that enhance, package, test, market and sell the complete end product; distribution consisting of (mostly) free software. In some cases employees also are the actual developers too. These people don't work for bananas (AFAIK), and you need a few of them. That's where the money goes. In addition SuSE has been sponsoring some outside development efforts, but most likely these are much smaller investments than the actual running costs of the company.
A quick calculation: let's say an average employee earns 50000$ a year. In Germany additional costs for employees (employee has to pay some soc. sec. costs, insurances etc) might bem say, 50%.
There are other indirect 'per employee' costs; PCs, facilities etc., so let's say each employee costs 100k$ a year (may be higher, but not much lower). So, for 1M$ you get 100 SuSE employees for one year. I'm not sure how many people SuSE employs; with 1000 employees 45 millions would be enough for 4 and 1/2 years. But that would be just for paying for people; there are other operational costs. So, even though it looks like buckets of money, it's not all that huge for medium-sized company?
now. Too bad they copped out on America, because without America, they will not survive. And
the price of Euros keeps sinking lower and lower.
Hmmh, what does the currency exchange rate of Euro have to do with SuSE, esp. since they are not selling to US of A? If they did, it would be goog for them; same dollar price would get more euros etc., but...?
And as to USA being essential for survival; not necessarily so. With 5% of world population (although almost half of internet users AFAIR) it won't be the only player in linux-world for long. Poor countries have much more to benefit from the cheap OS than richer ones.
I think he was saying the vehicles were going same speed, not that the engines "speed" (output rotational speed whatever) was the same. :-)
I've heard the rumour there's some kind of transmission technology in between engine and axels, which may kind of skew the actual RPMs of the wheels.
Also, the tire sizes of mopeds are oftentimes slightly smaller than trucks', further complicating this complex mathematical equation!
I sure as hell didn't sign any of my rights away when I downloaded it.
You maybe didn't sign any rights away at that point, but he was saying was that you will if/when you use it, implicitly, by using a product one shouldn't trust. There is a subtle but significant difference here; laws and licences vs. straight-jacket implementations. De jure vs. de facto.
Hmmh, come to think of it... when downloading it you probably did click on "Accept" button under a huge piece of text, too, waiving a huge chunk of common sense rights, but that's your typical shrink-wrap thing, possibly being meaningless, possibly not.
I disagree. I love Konqy, *but* one of the goals of the Konqy project is to be as standards
compliant as possible. If it renders botched html, then they are falling short of their goal. Web
authors will never code to a standard if the browsers are too forgiving. I look forward to a day
when every browser conforms to a tight standard and most web authors write to that spec.
Actually, like someone else said, what a browser does with an invalid doc is already not defined; you may try to render it best as you can.
However, what IMO would be useful would be displaying 'correct' parts (I know, with runaway tags that's difficult) as well as you can, and indicate somehow that the rest is garbage, or if you can isolate problem part, indicate that. Bit like what is done for 'missing images', having an icon in place to indicate something is wrong is better than failing to display anything. That's why Netscape's table-handling really sucks; it seems to commit a harakiri on missing end tags, instead of at least displaying something. Sometimes you just end up wondering why the page won't load, when it in fact was done, contained 90% ok HTML, but last closing table tab(s) was/were missing. Bleech.
If the Internet bust has taught us anything - mindshare is completely worthless if you don't have products to sell.
I wasn't saying it would necessarily have tons of worth, I just pointed out that Sun considers it important (and I agree personally; mindshare or visitor count is irrelevant except for selling ads...). However, more to the point:
How is Sun making any money off of Java? It is not a revenue creator - quite
the contrary - it loses money for Sun. They will be forced to charge for J2EE and its JVMs sooner
or later.
No. That wouldn't make any sense. No one makes significant amount of money by selling standard, specs or guidelines. Money Sun would get would be peanuts, and most likely shrink the market itself (ie. Java/J2EE adopters).
However, note that Sun does sell products that implement the specifications. J2EE itself is but a specification; however, Sun sells IPlanet web/application server (with Netscape). Similarly, bare runtime engine/environment or language compiler can't really be sold (compare to libc and similar runtime libraries needed by other languages... or compilers). What can be sold are IDEs. And guess what? Sun sells Forte for Java (or whatever it's called these days).
This all is not to say Java would be profitable even after counting in IPlanet, Forte and other related products. And how much "mindshare" adds to h/w sales is of course debatable. However, Sun is clearly trying to find out how to benefit from its inventions/creations, and fortunately that doesn't include closing up things that need to be open to some degree (Java specs are reasonably open and available, ditto for J2EE, even if implementations have more restrictions)
I know my Linux-box reasonably well, and although I was able to use the ultra-10 I have (with Solaris 8) ok, I knew there are lots of things that would make life easier. Unfortunately, the book was bit light on details. There were useful stuff in there (some of which may have been available on Linux too), but all in all it just left a stale taste.
The specific problems I had with the book that I can remember were:
Scp fixes this nicely, too, but at least book should definitely warn about using ftp for file transfer (minus public ftp-sites with anon. login), so that people wouldn't have mistaken feel of safety ("it asks for password... how can it be totally insecure?")
I still have the book nearby, and occasionally do reference it. It's not completely useless... But I think it doesn't really live up to its title. Anyone have any suggestions for a better book?
One important thing to keep in mind, too, is that Sun is definitely not the only company or entity that has developed J2EE, or even Java itself. J2EE especially has been a big collaboration, and you could say many companies have already footed part of the bill by providing resources (from actual developers to committee members, ideas, feedback etc).
And saying they "merely implemented it" implies that you perhaps don't quite understand how much effort implementing the full J2EE suite (even without having to do JVM), including application servers and EJB systems actually takes. Really, if it was all that easy (and writing the specs was the hard part), there would be abundance of Free J2EE implementations, right? Well, there aren't (many? any?). One of the few essential Free/Open source things (and reasonably good one in some ways) in this area is Tomcat for Apache (servlet / JSP engine), but that appears to be about it.
Sun's Java strategy is more about collaboration than milking money from others, and that seems to more succesful way if measured by the rate of adoption. It doesn't generate direct revenue, but Sun has been more concerned with mindshare here. And being the leader kind of enhances value of the brand ("Ok these machines are made by same people who designed J2EE so I guess it's safe bet to buy Sun H/W to run J2EE-based systems") [I'm not saying this feeling is very sensible, but it's rather common from what I have seen]
Alas, since RIAA wants to fight fair use out of existence, it may soon be debatable; I have created my own CD-compilations (songs from CDs I legally have bought), as well as ogg-collections so I can create my own 'all of Procol Harum' etc. collections on just one CD (with 192 kbps they fit in nicely). I haven't "shared" any of those with anyone, and I haven't downloaded any pirated music to burn on CDs (nor to store on my HD).
Is this so uncommon? I don't really think so... People tend to overgeneralize from their own experiences; being a thief does not everyone thief make (btw, not claiming you are a thief, but many people who do steal use arguments like that)
That is not to say it was right or sensible way of doing it. Especially working for ISPs competitor.
Still, there is a long jump from saying it was foolish to saying it was criminal, which should be the point in case. What was the punishment they seek? Five years in prison?
It should still be kept in mind that he did report the problem. He didn't try to abuse it, although prosecution will certainly try to present the case like he did. It's easy to whine about "incorrectly extinguished fire" (old fireman saying), but like everyone and their dog are saying, hindsight is 20/20.
Apples and oranges. Microsoft _had_ the feature, and they are removing it; Netscape _doesn't have_ any such feature. Whether MS can/should remove it is a different issue, but annoyance is more understandable over a soon-to-be-removed feature some people found useful. And also, given MS's less than good image in regards to abuse of monopoly power, they'll be more readily accused of all kinds of nasty schemes behind any action they take.
Anyone else have any pointers to current browser usage statistics?
Of course, there is a huge difference between plug-ins (that need some user interaction for installation) and 'implicitly embedded code' (read activeX) that may not need any interaction, depending on security settings. Also, plugins only need to be installed once, and hopefully from thereon that particular content type can be displayed without further problems (security or otherwise)
Are we reading the same thread here? To me it seems that majority of posters are commenting more along lines "Java is stupid, Java is slow, I don't like Java, C/C++ for Kernel, Java is evil, it's just a toy" etc. etc. I don't see it as "Slashdot Approved" in any way. Personally I think "right tool for the job" should be the guideline, YMMV, whatever rocks your boat etc. etc., but for many Java itself is a red flag (smaller than Microsoft but still). I'm bit surprised to see people saying "it's unfortunate that Java is being used as the teaching language", without much reasoning why that is bad.
The fact that IBM sponsored the study is of course different matter; IBM is the biggest sponsor of Java bar none. They have committed to using it, perhaps even more than Sun has. I personally don't think IBM influenced the study directly in any way, but they sure have use for its results. And everyone knows how both methodology of the study and the way results are published has huge impact on what the results look (sound) like.
As to Office Suite, there is no reason why it _couldn't_ be written in Java. However, there might not be much incentive in creating one now either (in any language, actually)... It's not like there weren't N+1 office suites available. It's more about inertia; existing huge popular shrink-wrapped apps were written mostly in C (some in Pascal, esp. on Mac, some newer on C++), and although there is constantly need for some rewrite, dumping the implementation isn't something high level managers like to hear.
As to office suites, the fact that there's one failure doesn't prove it being impossible (Corel / WP). It does imply that at the time it was impractical to do; whether it still is or not is another question.
However, right now the biggest reasons no new big java _applications_ are being developed (outside internal enterprise networks) are:
Finally; Java performance. I think what puzzles most people is that with Java you do need to tune your code more than with C or C++. You'll spend much much much less time debugging weird memory-overwrite crashes or memory leaks. But you do need to do more performance tuning. For me that's a fair trade-off. Performance of number-crunching (after optimizing) seems to be (in general) something like 20-40% slower (at worst might be up to 100%, ie. operations take twice as long). However, with UI the differences are negligible. This is of course assuming you have a decent JVM and know how to write efficient code.
First of all, you'd probably need to change "people" to "certain people", like computer security experts and researchers. That this doesn't matter to majority of all people isn't quite as relevant as how big portion of Slashdot readers this potentially might affect. And that's significantly higher percentage than for normal population.
In some ways it may sound overblown, but think about it for a moment. Many chinese dissidents living outside China (in USA for example) are afraid to visit China for pretty similar reasons as researchers after Skylarov. Criticizing companies (by showing the problems with their systems) vs. critizing the ruling party/government (by showing the problem with their system).
Many people avoid going to Colombia or South Africa (not to mention countries that have full-blown civil war) because of the potential risks. Right now probability of being abducted by US govt (based on flaky DMCA-based claims) is still reasonably small, but the trend is what is alarming. It may become standard procedure in future for FBI to keep a list of 'known DMCA-violators'. I don't want to sound like another overly paranoid geek, but really, the road ahead looks bit too slippery...
("crusades schmusades"... some dude drowned somewhere, leading a crusade)
I'll need to check Louis case too. Gotta love Google... In any case, it is amazing how many ancient heroes/villains died in most embarrassing ways (like Attila).
But really, what is more interesting in the end is the number of copies sold. In many ways that is the only significant piece of data for companies. Although some rought estimate on maximum 'potential' sales figures (include pirate copies) may be useful for a thought exercise, it's impossible to really reliably have any estimations on how much pirated copies actually hurt the company. I'm not defending cheap-ass game stealers, but it is a fact that someone with 1000+ pirated games wouldn't ever by anything like that amount; most of those copies were probably only played once or twice. Some people just have weird fetism for collecting all kinds of stolen stuff. :-)
This sounds a lot like MUDs... It's amazing how much "social" things mean; even with muds that are not specifically chat-oriented, the main attraction really appears to be the community. (and having been a mud-admin for 10 years I have seen it... even though have been semi-retired for past 3 years or so).
However, MUDs never developed to fully interconnected 'mega-games', nor did most succesful worlds 'kill' others. Probably because it was and is very easy to set up your own mud. Then again, companies might have more interest in getting multiple games interconnected, bundled, syndicated if you will.
Too bad good ole Richard knew not how to swim... But didn't he die on his way to the Holy Land, and thus didn't yet have a chance to be held for a ransom?