Your employer has already furnished you space at the place of employment.
Not necessarily. I've just been hired to work 75% out of my home, with the other 25% being travel, so there is no place of employment for me to go to. With the money employers save by not having to supply office space, I think it is not unreasonable to expect the employer to contribute to the health of my home work environment.
The advantage Inprise will get out of this is marketshare.
While people are learning or working on open source projects, not working on those big paying projects, they can't afford to pay for the $5000 database. Plus, a lot of people would rather go with an opensource product that they know they can use if they suddenly decide to make their project commercial (even if on a small scale) without having to pay for licensing the database. So people start using IB. Now you've got a large population of developers familiar with IB, and when they start spec-ing out some big paying project, they might very well push for something they're familiar with, as well as something that meets their OSS ethichal tastes and get the project to pay for the support package from Inprise, which puts money in Inprise's pocket.
Don't be surprised if this is not the last enterprise quality database to be opensourced. Oracle of course is heavily tied to their licensing revenue stream and M$ isn't about to start opening their code, but IBM makes a LOT of money on services already, and could afford to do just this, opening DB2 and selling support and development services while shepharding the further development of DB2 as an OSS project and widespread adoption of DB2 by developers. This would cut the legs out from under both M$ and Oracle, and would be a great strategic move.
This is similar to the price wars in the hard drive arena, where the prices have gone down so far as to push many of the players to the edge of bankruptcy, including Seagate, while IBM is big enough to not make money in that area.
Interesting times...
Re:Java is usable in the servlet arena, but...
on
Java Success Stories
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· Score: 1
The first problem with it is its lack of speed. On a server answering a ton of transactions, the JVM needs to have some sort of native machine code cache where Java bytecodes are stored as native code for sake of speed.
Check out BEA Systems WebLogic server... it's a J2EE implementation with EJB, Servlets, JSP, etc... BEA are THE transaction people, and their servers are VERY scalable. After all, it's not really the speed / processor that counts (although Java performance is now approaching that of natively compiled C++) but the SCALABILITY of the system that matters, and Java makes it much easier to build scalable systems.
Re:A lot of people seem to misunderstand the GPL.
on
RMS on Java and GPL
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· Score: 1
If the changes are bad then the fork will wither and die anyway.
And what if the changes are bad, or even just not something the lead developer of the project likes, but the person/group forking the code has a lot of clout and/or money to promote the new version? And what if that person or group is intentionally trying to fork the code by adding unacceptable code to the codebase that they know the code maintainers won't fold back in? And they just keep going?
Now you've got 2 versions, which are incompatible, but both opensourced under the GPL... The forked code is being pushed by an influential person/group and marketed, thus gaining marketshare, while the other, better, codebase continues on, but loses market share...
We're not dealing with only individual developers here. You need to think about this differently.
Well, I don't know what you're doing wrong, but it's definitely you, not Java. The level of WORA is incredible in Java, especially considering it's such a full-featured language. I mean really, how's the multi-thread support in Perl? Java is a real, OO language, not a scripting language, and it's the best thing around for cross platform development.
Re:the freedom to fork versus wrtie-once-run-anywh
on
RMS on Java and GPL
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· Score: 1
What's going on is that everyone in the linux kernel development community has wanted the same thing, a better Kernel, a better Linux, and for Linux to take over the world.... at least, that is, so far...
What happens when MSLinux comes out? MS will no doubt fork the kernel. They'll add in all kinds of things that Linus and crew will no doubt think is crap, but they'll be able to sell a lot of copies of MSLinux (hell, they might give away free CDs and books!) and get a lot of Linux marketshare because, hey, they're M$ and everyone's heard of them.... they might add a proprietary GUI on top and chuck out X-win...
now you'd have ISV's making apps for MSLinux that aren't compatible with any other Linux. They might do it subtly and slowly, so discrepancies slowly build up, and fracture the Linux market.
The problem here is that the GPL and OSS has never faced this kind of large-scale opposition from a foe willing to fork and sacrifice compatibility. Java has faced such a foe in the first round with M$, and it's still standing.
What happens for Linux when MSLinux comes out? Will it stay together? Will Linus and all be forced to add M$ patches to the kernel to stay MSLinux compatible?
The point of a free workalike implementation is to guarantee compatibility irrespective of a single company's shareholders' views.
Like the compatibility between Linux/*BSD/every other Unix or the compatibility between KDE and GNOME?
The fact is that WORA is a reality NOW for Java, and those of us who develop in Java don't want to see that stop. Sun is not the only company developing Java. IBM puts more money and people into Java than Sun, and builds better JVM's too, and for a LOT of platforms.
I would have no problem with opening the Java source code for bug fixes, etc, as long as we're guaranteed that anything called "Java" will be compatible. In fact, this is exactly what Sun is doing with the J2SE. As of Feb 1, 2000, the source code will be available with no royalties, etc attached, just compatibility constraints, so go crazy with it and wow us with your super-cool JVM.... nothing could make me happier.
If you really want to see what the Java developer community thinks of these issues, check out some of the discussions that went on in JavaLobby last week:
I know that for some reason, it's not "cool" to like Java on/., but for those of us who love Java and use it, there's no going back, so we're trying to make the best of what we've got, and what we can get.
This is evidence of the competing closed-source products and the business practices that drive them, not of a failure on the part of the marketplace to demand compatibility. The users have no *power* to enforce compatibility if the source is closed. If the source to both browsers were open, I think RMS would say that the incompatibilities and extensions would be written out or merged. In any case, his point is that the lack of freedom for the users creates an environment where such incompatibilities can arise.
Sort of like the source code compatibility between linux and *BSD, or between apps written for KDE and GNOME, right? Absolutely... everything in OSS is compatible...
Sun only support first-tier ports of the JDK to Solaris and (grudgingly) win32. Why won't they port to linux? FreeBSD? I'll tell you why - they aren't interested in seeing the language shine on these platforms.
That's interesting, considering Sun's JVMs usually show up first on win32, then Solaris, and they've been helping Blackdown port JDK1.2 to Linux. Plus, if you don't like Sun, check out IBM's JDK Plans. They're planning to have a JDK1.3 compatible JVM running on linux by 1Q 2000. Given that the 1.1.8 JVM from IBM on linux is the fastest JVM around, this sounds like a Good Thing to me...
Also, just because you don't understand OOP doesn't mean it's not the best thing running...
I'm not sure why the reponses to this article have devolved into a flamewar over the GPL, since this article was about John Lions, not the GPL.
I had never heard of John Lions before this article, but he sounds like he was an intelligent and wise man, and I wish I had had the chance to have him as a teacher. It's good to learn the history of the movement to open the source to the people, and fascinating to hear source code discussed and dissected like literature. These are the types of intelligent conversation that I wish I saw more of here, instead of petty bickering.
HP is going to release the code to its E-Speak platform under the GPL (the GNU Public License)... this is an interesting case where it was more important for HP to ensure that the platform went forward and was widely adopted than it was for them to try to make some revenue off of licensing it.
If you haven't seen stuff about E-Speak, it looks pretty cool. If you've ever read anything about Jini, JavaSpaces, or just Tuple Spaces in general, it's along those lines... lots of small components interacting through Broker objects to find each other and make deals, etc... they'll be kind of like automated agents for doing e-commerce.
HP has a lot invested in the technology and is rolling it out internally, so it's more important to them that the technology take off and lots of people use it than making money off of selling it...
I know a lot of/. readers don't like Java for X, Y, or Z reasons, but this is a really REALLY Good Thing (tm).
The direction middleware (such as application servers, transaction monitors, messaging servers, etc) is going is Java, like it or not (I happen to like it quite a bit). Enterprise Java is getting even more hype in these areas than Linux itself *grin*.
As I've personally just been doing an overview of a systems architecture for a large (fortune 50 or so) company's internal functions, I can tell you that Java support is really holding back a lot of the enterprise middleware products that are available for NT, Solaris, AIX, etc. I had to recommend not using Linux because these enterprise applications are not available for Linux. Hopefully, this move from Sun and IBM's great work on Linux JVM's will help to remedy this situation.
Plus, with the Apache Jakarta code finally having dropped (thanks again Sun!) it will be nice to have a fast, stable 1.2 JVM. I've heard that the Blackdown port is relatively stable, but the Volano benchmarks show it to be relatively slow.
Natural selection pretty much took care of babies who were too ill or sickly to survive. However, people tend to take care of them now. If they want to do that, it's their business, their money, and their lives. If they want the right to decide whether a baby who wouldn't normally live should be allowed to, I suppose that's their right, but there would need to be some guidelines to prevent abuse. Genetic screening might help too.
First of all, it's not their business, it's BIG business, and it's not necessarily their money, a lot of times, it's OUR money, in the form of tax dollars and insurance premiums. Whose rights are we really trying to defend here, the parent's or the child's? Does a baby which has zero chance of ever being self-aware or concious, who can't and won't be able to survive without life-support have a RIGHT to be kept alive for as long as possible, no matter what the cost? I'm not claiming to have any answers to these questions, but they're excellent questions to be raised, and I'm glad that they have been raised, and hope they aren't just shouted down by people for whom the answer is so "obvious" that they don't even have to think about it.
I wouldn't trust genetic engineering yet until it is well-proven. Why implement a technology when you know you don't understand its ramifications?
Exactly, but when will we know these ramifications? Too many scientists take a too-short sighted approach to long-term consequences.... witness the Manhattan Project... everyone was so eager to make the bomb work, not looking at what might come of it.... later in life, Openheimer (sp?) quoted a Buddhist text, saying "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.."
With evolution (assuming you still believe in that) taking millions of years, how long is long enough to see the consequences of this kind of tinkering?
I'm disappointed to see so little discussion of PostgreSQL in the article and the comments. I've just recently begun looking at PostgreSQL, as I'm looking to start developing database apps on Linux . I'm currently developing java apps on NT/Solaris with Oracle at work, and while that's a great platform, it sure would be expensive if I wanted to start up a cool database driven web-site running on Solaris with Oracle as the back end....
One thing I didn't realize was that a lot of the nice features of RDBMS's like Oracle, the Object-Relational stuff for instance, were pioneered in PostgreSQL back when it was plain old Postgres and it was a research project at Berkeley. PostgreSQL really has a lot to offer as a RDBMS, even if it's not quite at the level of Oracle, DB2, Sybase, or Informix. For one thing, it's free, and Open Source. I looked at mSQL and MySQL, too, but I'm a SQL-weenie and I really like transactions, correlated sub-queries, etc...
Anyway, just wanted to say that people should give PostgreSQL a look if they need a full featured RDBMS and don't have the budget for one of the Big Boys... Now if they can just add SQLJ and Java triggers/Stored Procs...
Re:What about proxies?
on
CALEA update
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· Score: 1
Mmmm... can you say Nueromancer?
One of the things that Gibson had as his backdrop for his world were the offshore data farms.. One of the few things he predicted that hasn't popped up in the mainstream yet, but it will.
I think off-shore data farms will be mainly targeted at big corporations who need to save data that they "officially" don't have.... can you say Microsoft's internal email? Major tobacco companies' r&d data on the new strain of genetically altered crops? Even smaller countries who need to store data...
I think we'll see little fortresses built up on abandoned off-shore oil rigs with their own security in the real and cyber worlds...
and then come the cowboys.... I can't wait to jack in.
Of course RedHat is only offering INSTALLATION support... anything fancy or after the install, and you're on your own, unless you want to pay a per-incident charge... the installation is the part they made easy, so why only support that?
I'm sorry, what do you write your programs in? Do you just type in the hex codes for the binary executable?
If not, you're probably writing it in text. And before you start some "it's not real programming unless it's compiled" rant, tell it to a perl hacker...
Well, I saw it on Tuesday, and I assumed everyone else did too, in this article right here on slashdot. Check the comments... One of the score=2 (the highest score of any of the comments in that posting) is entitled "XFS is being released GPL"
Actually, the Maya modeling studio runs under NT... I played with a Beta version of it, and it's pretty slick, even running on NT... Seemed fast enough for modeling, but the rendering was a little slower even than the old SGIs I had used previously... if you could model in NT (for now, until they get the modeling software to Linux) and render to a linux rendering farm, that would be pretty sweet...
Well, in the Performance Computing Article I read, it said that IBMs current processors have 15 million and 12 million transistors... The Power4 is supposed to have 170 million... fun, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
Your employer has already furnished you space at the place of employment.
Not necessarily. I've just been hired to work 75% out of my home, with the other 25% being travel, so there is no place of employment for me to go to. With the money employers save by not having to supply office space, I think it is not unreasonable to expect the employer to contribute to the health of my home work environment.
The advantage Inprise will get out of this is marketshare.
While people are learning or working on open source projects, not working on those big paying projects, they can't afford to pay for the $5000 database. Plus, a lot of people would rather go with an opensource product that they know they can use if they suddenly decide to make their project commercial (even if on a small scale) without having to pay for licensing the database. So people start using IB. Now you've got a large population of developers familiar with IB, and when they start spec-ing out some big paying project, they might very well push for something they're familiar with, as well as something that meets their OSS ethichal tastes and get the project to pay for the support package from Inprise, which puts money in Inprise's pocket.
Don't be surprised if this is not the last enterprise quality database to be opensourced. Oracle of course is heavily tied to their licensing revenue stream and M$ isn't about to start opening their code, but IBM makes a LOT of money on services already, and could afford to do just this, opening DB2 and selling support and development services while shepharding the further development of DB2 as an OSS project and widespread adoption of DB2 by developers. This would cut the legs out from under both M$ and Oracle, and would be a great strategic move.
This is similar to the price wars in the hard drive arena, where the prices have gone down so far as to push many of the players to the edge of bankruptcy, including Seagate, while IBM is big enough to not make money in that area.
Interesting times...
The first problem with it is its lack of speed. On a server answering a ton of transactions, the JVM needs to have some sort of native machine code
cache where Java bytecodes are stored as native code for sake of speed.
Check out BEA Systems WebLogic server... it's a J2EE implementation with EJB, Servlets, JSP, etc... BEA are THE transaction people, and their servers are VERY scalable. After all, it's not really the speed / processor that counts (although Java performance is now approaching that of natively compiled C++) but the SCALABILITY of the system that matters, and Java makes it much easier to build scalable systems.
If the changes are bad then the fork will wither and die anyway.
And what if the changes are bad, or even just not something the lead developer of the project likes, but the person/group forking the code has a lot of clout and/or money to promote the new version? And what if that person or group is intentionally trying to fork the code by adding unacceptable code to the codebase that they know the code maintainers won't fold back in? And they just keep going?
Now you've got 2 versions, which are incompatible, but both opensourced under the GPL... The forked code is being pushed by an influential person/group and marketed, thus gaining marketshare, while the other, better, codebase continues on, but loses market share...
We're not dealing with only individual developers here. You need to think about this differently.
Well, I don't know what you're doing wrong, but it's definitely you, not Java. The level of WORA is incredible in Java, especially considering it's such a full-featured language. I mean really, how's the multi-thread support in Perl? Java is a real, OO language, not a scripting language, and it's the best thing around for cross platform development.
What's going on is that everyone in the linux kernel development community has wanted the same thing, a better Kernel, a better Linux, and for Linux to take over the world.... at least, that is, so far...
What happens when MSLinux comes out? MS will no doubt fork the kernel. They'll add in all kinds of things that Linus and crew will no doubt think is crap, but they'll be able to sell a lot of copies of MSLinux (hell, they might give away free CDs and books!) and get a lot of Linux marketshare because, hey, they're M$ and everyone's heard of them.... they might add a proprietary GUI on top and chuck out X-win...
now you'd have ISV's making apps for MSLinux that aren't compatible with any other Linux. They might do it subtly and slowly, so discrepancies slowly build up, and fracture the Linux market.
The problem here is that the GPL and OSS has never faced this kind of large-scale opposition from a foe willing to fork and sacrifice compatibility. Java has faced such a foe in the first round with M$, and it's still standing.
What happens for Linux when MSLinux comes out? Will it stay together? Will Linus and all be forced to add M$ patches to the kernel to stay MSLinux compatible?
The point of a free workalike implementation is to guarantee compatibility irrespective of a single company's shareholders' views.
Like the compatibility between Linux/*BSD/every other Unix or the compatibility between KDE and GNOME?
The fact is that WORA is a reality NOW for Java, and those of us who develop in Java don't want to see that stop. Sun is not the only company developing Java. IBM puts more money and people into Java than Sun, and builds better JVM's too, and for a LOT of platforms.
I would have no problem with opening the Java source code for bug fixes, etc, as long as we're guaranteed that anything called "Java" will be compatible. In fact, this is exactly what Sun is doing with the J2SE. As of Feb 1, 2000, the source code will be available with no royalties, etc attached, just compatibility constraints, so go crazy with it and wow us with your super-cool JVM.... nothing could make me happier.
If you really want to see what the Java developer community thinks of these issues, check out some of the discussions that went on in JavaLobby last week:
/., but for those of us who love Java and use it, there's no going back, so we're trying to make the best of what we've got, and what we can get.
Java and GPL
WORA scorecard
CVS for Java2 Standard Edition - Do You Want It?
I know that for some reason, it's not "cool" to like Java on
Because some of the changes people would like to make to Java, such as Generic types, are not able to be compiled to Java compatible bytecode.
This is evidence of the competing closed-source products and the business practices that drive them, not of a failure on the part of the marketplace to
demand compatibility. The users have no *power* to enforce compatibility if the source is closed. If the source to both browsers were open, I think
RMS would say that the incompatibilities and extensions would be written out or merged. In any case, his point is that the lack of freedom for the
users creates an environment where such incompatibilities can arise.
Sort of like the source code compatibility between linux and *BSD, or between apps written for KDE and GNOME, right? Absolutely... everything in OSS is compatible...
Sun only support first-tier ports of the JDK to Solaris and (grudgingly) win32. Why won't they port to linux? FreeBSD? I'll tell you why - they aren't interested in seeing the language
shine on these platforms.
That's interesting, considering Sun's JVMs usually show up first on win32, then Solaris, and they've been helping Blackdown port JDK1.2 to Linux. Plus, if you don't like Sun, check out IBM's JDK Plans. They're planning to have a JDK1.3 compatible JVM running on linux by 1Q 2000. Given that the 1.1.8 JVM from IBM on linux is the fastest JVM around, this sounds like a Good Thing to me...
Also, just because you don't understand OOP doesn't mean it's not the best thing running...
I'm not sure why the reponses to this article have devolved into a flamewar over the GPL, since this article was about John Lions, not the GPL.
I had never heard of John Lions before this article, but he sounds like he was an intelligent and wise man, and I wish I had had the chance to have him as a teacher. It's good to learn the history of the movement to open the source to the people, and fascinating to hear source code discussed and dissected like literature. These are the types of intelligent conversation that I wish I saw more of here, instead of petty bickering.
Thanks, John, and I hope to read your book soon.
But you've left one of the most interesting possible instruction sets that the transmeta chip could support.... JAVA BYTECODES!
Imagine Java running natively... ease of development and native speed.
HP is going to release the code to its E-Speak platform under the GPL (the GNU Public License)... this is an interesting case where it was more important for HP to ensure that the platform went forward and was widely adopted than it was for them to try to make some revenue off of licensing it.
If you haven't seen stuff about E-Speak, it looks pretty cool. If you've ever read anything about Jini, JavaSpaces, or just Tuple Spaces in general, it's along those lines... lots of small components interacting through Broker objects to find each other and make deals, etc... they'll be kind of like automated agents for doing e-commerce.
HP has a lot invested in the technology and is rolling it out internally, so it's more important to them that the technology take off and lots of people use it than making money off of selling it...
I know a lot of /. readers don't like Java for X, Y, or Z reasons, but this is a really REALLY Good Thing (tm).
The direction middleware (such as application servers, transaction monitors, messaging servers, etc) is going is Java, like it or not (I happen to like it quite a bit). Enterprise Java is getting even more hype in these areas than Linux itself *grin*.
As I've personally just been doing an overview of a systems architecture for a large (fortune 50 or so) company's internal functions, I can tell you that Java support is really holding back a lot of the enterprise middleware products that are available for NT, Solaris, AIX, etc. I had to recommend not using Linux because these enterprise applications are not available for Linux. Hopefully, this move from Sun and IBM's great work on Linux JVM's will help to remedy this situation.
Plus, with the Apache Jakarta code finally having dropped (thanks again Sun!) it will be nice to have a fast, stable 1.2 JVM. I've heard that the Blackdown port is relatively stable, but the Volano benchmarks show it to be relatively slow.
Natural selection pretty much took care of babies who were too ill or sickly to survive. However, people tend to take care of them now. If they want to do that, it's their business, their money, and their lives. If they want the right to decide whether a baby who wouldn't normally live should be allowed to, I suppose that's their right, but there would need to be some guidelines to prevent abuse. Genetic screening might help too.
First of all, it's not their business, it's BIG business, and it's not necessarily their money, a lot of times, it's OUR money, in the form of tax dollars and insurance premiums. Whose rights are we really trying to defend here, the parent's or the child's? Does a baby which has zero chance of ever being self-aware or concious, who can't and won't be able to survive without life-support have a RIGHT to be kept alive for as long as possible, no matter what the cost? I'm not claiming to have any answers to these questions, but they're excellent questions to be raised, and I'm glad that they have been raised, and hope they aren't just shouted down by people for whom the answer is so "obvious" that they don't even have to think about it.
I wouldn't trust genetic engineering yet until it is well-proven. Why implement a technology when you know you don't understand its ramifications?
Exactly, but when will we know these ramifications? Too many scientists take a too-short sighted approach to long-term consequences.... witness the Manhattan Project... everyone was so eager to make the bomb work, not looking at what might come of it.... later in life, Openheimer (sp?) quoted a Buddhist text, saying "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.."
With evolution (assuming you still believe in that) taking millions of years, how long is long enough to see the consequences of this kind of tinkering?
I'm disappointed to see so little discussion of PostgreSQL in the article and the comments. I've just recently begun looking at PostgreSQL, as I'm looking to start developing database apps on Linux . I'm currently developing java apps on NT/Solaris with Oracle at work, and while that's a great platform, it sure would be expensive if I wanted to start up a cool database driven web-site running on Solaris with Oracle as the back end....
One thing I didn't realize was that a lot of the nice features of RDBMS's like Oracle, the Object-Relational stuff for instance, were pioneered in PostgreSQL back when it was plain old Postgres and it was a research project at Berkeley. PostgreSQL really has a lot to offer as a RDBMS, even if it's not quite at the level of Oracle, DB2, Sybase, or Informix. For one thing, it's free, and Open Source. I looked at mSQL and MySQL, too, but I'm a SQL-weenie and I really like transactions, correlated sub-queries, etc...
Anyway, just wanted to say that people should give PostgreSQL a look if they need a full featured RDBMS and don't have the budget for one of the Big Boys... Now if they can just add SQLJ and Java triggers/Stored Procs...
Mmmm... can you say Nueromancer?
One of the things that Gibson had as his backdrop for his world were the offshore data farms.. One of the few things he predicted that hasn't popped up in the mainstream yet, but it will.
I think off-shore data farms will be mainly targeted at big corporations who need to save data that they "officially" don't have.... can you say Microsoft's internal email? Major tobacco companies' r&d data on the new strain of genetically altered crops? Even smaller countries who need to store data...
I think we'll see little fortresses built up on abandoned off-shore oil rigs with their own security in the real and cyber worlds...
and then come the cowboys.... I can't wait to jack in.
Of course RedHat is only offering INSTALLATION support... anything fancy or after the install, and you're on your own, unless you want to pay a per-incident charge... the installation is the part they made easy, so why only support that?
It's not worth it to me....
I'm sorry, what do you write your programs in? Do you just type in the hex codes for the binary executable?
If not, you're probably writing it in text. And before you start some "it's not real programming unless it's compiled" rant, tell it to a perl hacker...
I thought the big thing added in 2.0 was going to be the choice to have a single multi-threaded process instead of spawning separate processes...
Maybe I'm wrong...
So will this thing interfere with the 2.4GHz 11MBps wireless LAN I WILL be setting up?
Well, I saw it on Tuesday, and I assumed everyone else did too, in this article right here on slashdot. Check the comments... One of the score=2 (the highest score of any of the comments in that posting) is entitled "XFS is being released GPL"
/.
Maybe you should read
Actually, the Maya modeling studio runs under NT... I played with a Beta version of it, and it's pretty slick, even running on NT... Seemed fast enough for modeling, but the rendering was a little slower even than the old SGIs I had used previously... if you could model in NT (for now, until they get the modeling software to Linux) and render to a linux rendering farm, that would be pretty sweet...
Well, in the Performance Computing Article I read, it said that IBMs current processors have 15 million and 12 million transistors... The Power4 is supposed to have 170 million... fun, huh?