Actually Gosling never said you can get close. That's just your opinion. What he said is that he got a close as it is possible to get. (Which ain't saying much)
My opinion is that there are no non-trivial tasks that can ignore the platform. And every platform will be different. So write once, run anywhere is really nothing more than a slogan. Unless you think it is reasonable to care about a language that can only write trivial applications. Then, by all means, care away.
What he's admitting, is that the perported reason for the existence of Java is actually something that can't be done EVEN IN THEORY. That makes Java (or at least the marketing of Java) as a hoax in my book.
Interesting language, but more of an 'ivory tower' language than a real world one.
Nonsense. The quote was accurate, as was his paraphrase.
Quoting the whole document doesn't change anything at all.
Gosling tries to minimize the importance of his admission by suggesting that anything LESS different than a toaster and a supercomputer will work. But he isn't enough of a liar to actually SAY so.
Even if you limit yourself to only the desktop PC, there are still plenty of coding problems that can't be done in a portable way even if the language that you code in is portable.
(Imagine writing a disk defragger in Java, for instance).
Thank god Gosling has more intellectual honesty than the average/. java troll...
It's not a misquote. Unless by misquote you meant leaving out the bit about weather and toasters.
That's an extreme example, but there are plenty more non extreme examples (like whether or not to expect a mouse that Gosling mentions).
Basically Write once, run anywhere IS marketing bullshit. This is so obvious, most programmers don't even bother to mention it.
Write once for the desktop, run on any desktop is closer to what they actually delivered. And they didn't even really pull that one off.
Gosling admitted as much, but then tried to minimize the impotance of that admission by 'pretending' that the only way they failed is between toasters and supercomputers.
But so what! Java is still a useful language, it only failed to deliver on the marketing hype, not on the design goals of Gosling et al.
Wow 3 comments, and 2 mistakes. Score 0. thank you for playing.
1) context menus were invented because they allow a small menu to be put up where the mouse already is that contains a subset of the main menu commands that are most likely to be useful in that context.
The are a vast improvement in efficiency for experts, which is what they were designed for.
2) is a hack because Apple realized that they needed context menus but didn't have a right mouse button.
3) Alt+F4 Always closes the app unless the programmer specifically disables that. Most programmers don't even know HOW. ctrl+x never does (it's part of the ctrl+x,ctrl+c,ctrl+v trio that does cut,copy,paste.)
I drive my Windows box almost exclusively by keyboard. It's true that developers for Windows don't follow the standards quite as consistently as those for the Mac. But all the professionally written apps do.
The biggest offenders are actually open source or shareware apps, like mozilla.
What wasn't a hole? How about the fact that it didn't contain any facts? How do you dispute an opinion piece without a single fact to back it up? It was basically a bully pulpit.
It made a bunch of broad generalizations, but didn't back them up with anything but rhetoric. (it's a real word, look it up).
He found that MS didn't foreclose Netscape from the market, yet at the same time was guilty of predation. How? He didn't say.
Trial evidence clearly indicates that MS made NO headway in taking market share from Netscape until AFTER they had a better product. (IE4).
He found that MS tried to split the market with Netscape. How exactly? No MS executive was at the meeting. Just a bunch of engineers. How many companies do you know of where rank and file engineers are empowered to make deals like that? I can gurantee that that is NOT the case at MS.
Not to mention that the evidence was mere heresay. The smart money says that a MS engineer said something like: "You can maybe make money selling Netscape for the Mac or Unix, but Windows is going to have a browser built in. In a little while there isn't going to BE a separate browser market on Windows."
I guess you could take that as an offer to split the market, but you'd be wrong.
Sure Windows 3.1 was nothing much, but consider the competition? It was far superior in the things that mattered to ordinary users.
The MAC? Sweet, but too expensive. OS/2? Doesn't run my DOS Apps and takes Too much memory to run. 4MB was a LOT in those days. DR.DOS? No GUI GEM? Who?
MS won the prize fair and square. Of all the choices, they sucked less.
Your knowledge of history is faulty. You must be one of those geeks who was still in diapers when Win3x first shipped. (did I peg you with this one or what?).
The appellate court is independant (after all there are 10 of them). While Jackson is not exactly a DOJ puppet, but he's so anti-ms that the result is the same as if he was.
The designers of X wisely adopted a philosophy of "presentation, not policy"
Wise? I don't think so. This was their biggest mistake. If X had handled Windowing, then you would have had a uniform set of conventions for windowing, AND you could have extended or improved X Windowing.
If everyone hated the way scrollbars worked in X8, then in X9 they could change it and it would just work!! This is exactly what happened when M$ Went from Win3x to Win9x. Every application that used scrollbars in the 'usual' way. Got the new scrollbar look and feel for free.
"Presentation not policy" is PRECISELY why X is such a cluster-fsck. It's a completely inadequate design for use as a GUI.
Lessig has written extensively about the dangers of allowing proprietary software to become popular enough to define standards. He frequently cites MS as an example in these writings.
Here at/. we agree with these Lessigs opinions on open source and open standards, but that doesn't make him unbiased. That just makes his bias the same as ours.
A judge has the absolute responsibilty to be fair in his dealings with both parties of a case. This responsibility extends to the choices of people who represent him.
I have a great deal of respect for Lessig, he has a first rate mind and a unique grasp of how software influences the way the world works. BUT he clearly has an agenda that involves destroying MS (more as a side effect than a first goal I think) and that should have disqualified him from consideration as special master.
Also, if you read his brief on the current MS trial, he basically advised the Judge to ignore the prior appeals court ruling.
Now, at the beginning of the trial, Jackson stated that the appeals court ruling would guide his own decision. And MS use that as the centerpiece of their case. But after Lessig told Jackson that he could ignore it, he did.
If Jackson had told MS that up front, I'm sure that they would have presented a very different case. He basically changed the rules AFTER he had heard the arguments.
There are other examples of this sort of bad-faith acting by the judge. I don't have time to point them all out, but if you bother to look you will find them.
If MS had been given a FAIR trial and THEN found guilty, I'd be more impressed. As it is, I'm sure that the appeals court will reverse the whole thing. In the end, there will probably be fewer checks on MS power than if Jackson had done his job properly.
I've read the findings, and the conclusions. You aparently didn't read my post.
The ONLY illegal action that the Judge found was that MS was a monopoly, and as a monopoly, it was barred from doing things that a non monopoly would be allowed to do.
Since MS was not LEGALLY a monopoly when it did those things, it makes no sense to call them illegal actions UNLESS THEY CONTINUE.
The constitution prohibits ex post fact laws. The finding that MS was in the past, unknowingly a monopoly and past actions were illegal on that basis is a violation of that law.
Historically, the Sherman antitrust act has been used to recognise and punish past actions, but only when the fact that the company was a monopoly was an established fact in the past, or when the monopoly was obtained illegally.
Each and every one of these actions was legal, or did not happen.
If you get you information from/. then you can count on being misinformed about MS.
Recruiting from Borland is legal. Where on earth did you get the idea that recrutiting from a competitor is illegal?
MS. Didn't steal any code from stacker. The infringed on a patent. (See past/. articles on what we think of patenting software).
MS Didn't steal apples look and feel, the licensed it. Then apple tried to renege when Windows became more popular than MAC.
MS Java license SPECIFICALLY allows them to extend Java for the Windows platform.
MS Never broke any agreeme with the DOJ. That agreement gave them the right to add features to Windows, which they did.
What code exactly did they steal from IBM? This is news to me.
I guess you can call me ignorant abou this one. But considering your track record on the rest, I'm giving it about 10% chance that you know what you are talking about on any of this.
He appointed a special master when one wasn't called for. Then picked one with a clear and demonstrated anti-microsoft bias. The appeals court was right to overrule him.
Is't it obvious? How many times do they have to say that they haven't done anything illegal for you to understand that THEY HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING ILLEGAL.
The have been playing the schollyard bully for years now, but none of the things they have done are illegal. Even Jackson agreed with that.
What he found was a pattern of LEGAL actions that he says add up to an abuse of monopoly.
Jackson's ruling is weak in a variety of ways. And will almost certainly be reversed on appeal. The more over the top he goes with a penalty, the more likely it is that the appeals court will slap him down HARD.
So, it makes sense for MS to bait him. If they can get him to act in anger, they win. At this point it can do no harm. It's not like the man is going to rule FAIRLY, so there's not point in being nice to him.
Besides, I'm sure that Bill and company actually believe that they have done nothing illegal. I know for sure that I think so.
Obviously you haven't really READ any of the primary sources in this trial.
The LAST settlement specifically allowed integrating new things into the OS. M$ didn't violate it. The appeals court has already decided this, along the way they humilitiated Judge Jackson.
Lawrence Lessig gave Jackson the ammunition to say that he believes that this is a NEW antitrust behavior and not bound by the prior appeals court decision.
Cringley make the same mistake that most at/. seem to make as well. He seems to think that M$ is a single person with a single mind, and a single moral outlook.
Like I said, witless. This is an assumption that falls over with even the most casual scrutiny.
M$ is a company that employs about 30 THOUSAND people. Even if you ignore about but.01% of them, you still end up with 30 guys with the power to set policy. You think they agree on everything? not hardly....
Also, it's stupid to ignore the rest. EVERY developer at M$ has some control of the output, even of the rest of the employees don't. Buggy software comes out of individual devleopers, NOT out some moral Vacuum of generated by Bill and Steve.
So it's quite possible so belive that the Judge is of one mind about this trial. But nonsense to suppose that M$ is similarly of one mind, or one intent.
He does have one interesting thing to say though: This trial has been run VERY strangely.
Like Cringley, I find it interesting that the Judge has drawn this whole process out. I suspect that he is right, the purpose has been to humiliate M$. But I think the rest of his conclusions are nonsense.
After all, what right does a JUDGE have to manipulate the legal process to add humiliation to legal action? He makes a mockery of the whole process to satisfy his need to make M$ look bad?
That sort of behavior from a Judge doesn't really lend much support to the idea that the trial was FAIR does it?
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After all, the only reason Linux doesn't ever have blue screens is because when it crashes, it never tells you why.
A simple trap handler in the kernel will solve that. Then you could customize your Linux install to allow for Red or Green screens of death as well.
tj
How about a link to that paper?
thx,
tj
Actually Gosling never said you can get close. That's just your opinion. What he said is that he got a close as it is possible to get. (Which ain't saying much)
My opinion is that there are no non-trivial tasks that can ignore the platform. And every platform will be different. So write once, run anywhere is really nothing more than a slogan. Unless you think it is reasonable to care about a language that can only write trivial applications. Then, by all means, care away.
What he's admitting, is that the perported reason for the existence of Java is actually something that can't be done EVEN IN THEORY. That makes Java (or at least the marketing of Java) as a hoax in my book.
Interesting language, but more of an 'ivory tower' language than a real world one.
tj
Nonsense. The quote was accurate, as was his paraphrase.
/. java troll...
Quoting the whole document doesn't change anything at all.
Gosling tries to minimize the importance of his admission by suggesting that anything LESS different than a toaster and a supercomputer will work. But he isn't enough of a liar to actually SAY so.
Even if you limit yourself to only the desktop PC, there are still plenty of coding problems that can't be done in a portable way even if the language that you code in is portable.
(Imagine writing a disk defragger in Java, for instance).
Thank god Gosling has more intellectual honesty than the average
It's not a misquote. Unless by misquote you meant leaving out the bit about weather and toasters.
That's an extreme example, but there are plenty more non extreme examples (like whether or not to expect a mouse that Gosling mentions).
Basically Write once, run anywhere IS marketing bullshit. This is so obvious, most programmers don't even bother to mention it.
Write once for the desktop, run on any desktop is closer to what they actually delivered. And they didn't even really pull that one off.
Gosling admitted as much, but then tried to minimize the impotance of that admission by 'pretending' that the only way they failed is between toasters and supercomputers.
But so what! Java is still a useful language, it only failed to deliver on the marketing hype, not on the design goals of Gosling et al.
tj
Wow 3 comments, and 2 mistakes. Score 0.
thank you for playing.
1) context menus were invented because they allow a small menu to be put up where the mouse already is that contains a subset of the main menu commands that are most likely to be useful in that context.
The are a vast improvement in efficiency for experts, which is what they were designed for.
2) is a hack because Apple realized that they needed context menus but didn't have a right mouse button.
3) Alt+F4 Always closes the app unless the programmer specifically disables that. Most programmers don't even know HOW. ctrl+x never does (it's part of the ctrl+x,ctrl+c,ctrl+v trio that does cut,copy,paste.)
I drive my Windows box almost exclusively by keyboard. It's true that developers for Windows
don't follow the standards quite as consistently as those for the Mac. But all the professionally written apps do.
The biggest offenders are actually open source or shareware apps, like mozilla.
No. MS does none of these things.
/. for months, but there's simply no truth in them.
Where do you get your information?
These allegations have been floating around
do your homework...
What, are you high?
He defined the browser as 'middleware'.
but he never defined 'middleware' in any way.
"Whatever 'middleware' is. I'm sure that browser is part of it"
Ya, that's real helpful...
MS repeatedly asked the DOJ to specify what specific files comprised IE. and the DOJ never did. Jackson certainly never did.
I read it too. Even better, I understood it.
What wasn't a hole? How about the fact that it didn't contain any facts? How do you dispute an opinion piece without a single fact to back it up? It was basically a bully pulpit.
It made a bunch of broad generalizations, but didn't back them up with anything but rhetoric.
(it's a real word, look it up).
He found that MS didn't foreclose Netscape from the market, yet at the same time was guilty of predation. How? He didn't say.
Trial evidence clearly indicates that MS made NO headway in taking market share from Netscape until AFTER they had a better product. (IE4).
He found that MS tried to split the market with Netscape. How exactly? No MS executive was at the meeting. Just a bunch of engineers. How many companies do you know of where rank and file engineers are empowered to make deals like that?
I can gurantee that that is NOT the case at MS.
Not to mention that the evidence was mere heresay.
The smart money says that a MS engineer said something like: "You can maybe make money selling Netscape for the Mac or Unix, but Windows is going to have a browser built in. In a little while there isn't going to BE a separate browser market on Windows."
I guess you could take that as an offer to split the market, but you'd be wrong.
Sure Windows 3.1 was nothing much, but consider the competition? It was far superior in the things that mattered to ordinary users.
The MAC? Sweet, but too expensive.
OS/2? Doesn't run my DOS Apps and takes
Too much memory to run. 4MB was a LOT
in those days.
DR.DOS? No GUI
GEM? Who?
MS won the prize fair and square. Of all the choices, they sucked less.
Your knowledge of history is faulty. You must be one of those geeks who was still in diapers when Win3x first shipped. (did I peg you with this one or what?).
tj
How much easier would it be to bribe a single Judge (Jackson) than a whole COURT (10 Judges).
I doubt that either has happened, but I'm SURE
that there's no way you could bribe a whole
appeals court and keep it quiet.
it messes with your (simplistic) view of reality.
Because Microsoft has been legally in the right.
The appellate court is independant (after all there are 10 of them). While Jackson is not exactly a DOJ puppet, but he's so anti-ms that the result is the same as if he was.
Perhaps you meant that X should have had a standard toolkit, and forced everyone to use it.
No, I mean that X and a standard tookit should be the same thing.
Having one without the other is useless.
And if X and the toolkit WERE integrated, then the wire traffic could be done at a much higher level for common user interface tasks.
Think: move scrollbar thumb to possition 8 on window foo
Instead of: several K of bitmaps, or many many colored linedraw operations
The designers of X wisely adopted a philosophy of "presentation, not policy"
Wise? I don't think so. This was their biggest mistake. If X had handled Windowing, then you would have had a uniform set of conventions for windowing, AND you could have extended or improved X Windowing.
If everyone hated the way scrollbars worked in X8, then in X9 they could change it and it would just work!! This is exactly what happened when M$ Went from Win3x to Win9x. Every application that used scrollbars in the 'usual' way. Got the new scrollbar look and feel for free.
"Presentation not policy" is PRECISELY why X is such a cluster-fsck. It's a completely inadequate design for use as a GUI.
That's only one of the points MS made.
/. we agree with these Lessigs opinions on open source and open standards, but that doesn't make him unbiased. That just makes his bias the same as ours.
Lessig has written extensively about the dangers of allowing proprietary software to become popular enough to define standards. He frequently cites MS as an example in these writings.
Here at
A judge has the absolute responsibilty to be fair in his dealings with both parties of a case. This responsibility extends to the choices of people who represent him.
I have a great deal of respect for Lessig, he has a first rate mind and a unique grasp of how software influences the way the world works. BUT he clearly has an agenda that involves destroying MS (more as a side effect than a first goal I think) and that should have disqualified him from
consideration as special master.
Also, if you read his brief on the current MS trial, he basically advised the Judge to ignore the prior appeals court ruling.
Now, at the beginning of the trial, Jackson stated that the appeals court ruling would guide his own decision. And MS use that as the centerpiece of their case. But after Lessig told Jackson that he could ignore it, he did.
If Jackson had told MS that up front, I'm sure that they would have presented a very different case. He basically changed the rules AFTER he had heard the arguments.
There are other examples of this sort of bad-faith acting by the judge. I don't have time to point them all out, but if you bother to look you will find them.
If MS had been given a FAIR trial and THEN found guilty, I'd be more impressed. As it is, I'm sure that the appeals court will reverse the whole thing. In the end, there will probably be fewer
checks on MS power than if Jackson had done his job properly.
tj
I've read the findings, and the conclusions. You aparently didn't read my post.
The ONLY illegal action that the Judge found was that MS was a monopoly, and as a monopoly, it was barred from doing things that a non monopoly would be allowed to do.
Since MS was not LEGALLY a monopoly when it did those things, it makes no sense to call them illegal actions UNLESS THEY CONTINUE.
The constitution prohibits ex post fact laws. The finding that MS was in the past, unknowingly a monopoly and past actions were illegal on that basis is a violation of that law.
Historically, the Sherman antitrust act has been used to recognise and punish past actions, but only when the fact that the company was a monopoly was an established fact in the past, or when the monopoly was obtained illegally.
Neither of those situations apply here.
tj
Each and every one of these actions was legal,
/. then you can count on being misinformed about MS.
/. articles on what we think of patenting software).
or did not happen.
If you get you information from
Recruiting from Borland is legal. Where on earth did you get the idea that recrutiting from a competitor is illegal?
MS. Didn't steal any code from stacker. The infringed on a patent. (See past
MS Didn't steal apples look and feel, the licensed it. Then apple tried to renege when Windows became more popular than MAC.
MS Java license SPECIFICALLY allows them to extend Java for the Windows platform.
MS Never broke any agreeme with the DOJ. That agreement gave them the right to add features to Windows, which they did.
What code exactly did they steal from IBM? This is news to me.
I guess you can call me ignorant abou this one. But considering your track record on the rest, I'm giving it about 10% chance that you know what you are talking about on any of this.
tj
Actually, it was the Judge who acted like an ass.
He appointed a special master when one wasn't called for. Then picked one with a clear and demonstrated anti-microsoft bias. The appeals court was right to overrule him.
tj
Is't it obvious? How many times do they have to say that they haven't done anything illegal for you to understand that THEY HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING ILLEGAL.
The have been playing the schollyard bully for years now, but none of the things they have done are illegal. Even Jackson agreed with that.
What he found was a pattern of LEGAL actions that he says add up to an abuse of monopoly.
Jackson's ruling is weak in a variety of ways. And will almost certainly be reversed on appeal.
The more over the top he goes with a penalty, the more likely it is that the appeals court will slap him down HARD.
So, it makes sense for MS to bait him. If they can get him to act in anger, they win. At this point it can do no harm. It's not like the man is going to rule FAIRLY, so there's not point in being nice to him.
Besides, I'm sure that Bill and company actually believe that they have done nothing illegal. I know for sure that I think so.
tj
In fact, there are about a dozen PUBLISHED API's
on NT that allow you to authenticate users in various ways.
SQL Server is designed to work well with NT,
so it uses NT API's to authenticate users, and
it trusts that to be sufficient.
Your other database just wasn't written to work with NT, so it didn't trust or use NT's authentication.
tj
The Judge had his mind made up before the case even started. M$ took no risks in insulting him.
That would only have been a risk if he had an open mind to start with.
You have this backwards. If MS had settled,
then they would NOT have been admitting guilt
and the 'findings of fact' would effectively
cease to exist.
M$ would have LOVED to have settled, but only
if the terms were better than the scorched earth
that the DOJ & States were offering.
And he just got finished saying that Netscape had 85% of the browser market. That's more than M$ ownership of the OS market...
Obviously you haven't really READ any of the primary sources in this trial.
The LAST settlement specifically allowed integrating new things into the OS. M$ didn't violate it. The appeals court has already decided this, along the way they humilitiated Judge Jackson.
Lawrence Lessig gave Jackson the ammunition to say that he believes that this is a NEW antitrust behavior and not bound by the prior appeals court decision.
Interesting. Witless, but interesting.
/. seem to make as well. He seems to think that M$ is a single person with a single mind, and a single moral outlook.
.01% of them, you still end up with 30 guys with the power to set policy. You think they agree on everything? not hardly....
Cringley make the same mistake that most at
Like I said, witless. This is an assumption that falls over with even the most casual scrutiny.
M$ is a company that employs about 30 THOUSAND people. Even if you ignore about but
Also, it's stupid to ignore the rest. EVERY developer at M$ has some control of the output, even of the rest of the employees don't. Buggy software comes out of individual devleopers, NOT out some moral Vacuum of generated by Bill and Steve.
So it's quite possible so belive that the Judge is of one mind about this trial. But nonsense to suppose that M$ is similarly of one mind, or one intent.
He does have one interesting thing to say though: This trial has been run VERY strangely.
Like Cringley, I find it interesting that the Judge has drawn this whole process out. I suspect that he is right, the purpose has been to humiliate M$. But I think the rest of his conclusions are nonsense.
After all, what right does a JUDGE have to manipulate the legal process to add humiliation to legal action? He makes a mockery of the whole process to satisfy his need to make M$ look bad?
That sort of behavior from a Judge doesn't really lend much support to the idea that the trial was FAIR does it?