I don't know, what does Apache let you do that nothing else can do?
When Apache came out, it was revolutionary. It was the first really usable, supported web server. That was 1995, the same year that Java was released. 1995 was a big year for the web.
Working within a framework instead leverages other people's efforts and provides opportunity for cooperation or interoperability between unrelated efforts.
Yes, but frameworks are boring. Everyone and their grandmother has built a framework at one time or another. Show me something USING that framework that can't be done with anything else out there, and I'm interested.
I downloaded the Jxta docs the day it came out, and as I was looking through it,
Sun seems to have forgotten the reason why Java took off. Java was doing something amazing in 1995. There was a tiny program running in a browser, and the same program running on both Windows and Solaris. This was something new. Of course, applets haven't worked so well in non-trivial cases, but it got interest going in Java.
Compare this to Jxta. What does Jxta let me do that nothing else can do? Writing a P2P app isn't rocket science; a freshman CS major can probably do a decent job of it. Maybe if Sun had released the Jxta killer app along with Jxta, it might be more interesting. For now, though, it looks like it's probably going to fizzle out.
I maintain that he is a moron. His arguments are logically invalid. One of the premises of his screed against cops in the US is the behavior of cops in Canada. That's a moron, in my book.
Now, compare this to his claim that all US cops are bloodthirsty sociopaths. I wish he'd give his name and address, so cops can know who NOT to protect when he needs them.
"As for what he is doing to stop police brutality in America, he is posting to Slashdot. Gee, how effective. "
You'll excuse me if I point out the irony of this statement. =)
The difference is that I don't think police brutality is a serious problem in the US. Are there brutal cops? Sure. Is there something institutionally rotten about cops? Nope. I maintain that, by and large, cops are decent human beings who put their lives on the line for complete strangers.
First of all, what does locking people up for using drugs have to do with anarchy? Isn't that the opposite of anarchy?
Secondly, by "cults" you are probably referring to Churches. Can you provide a citation for your quote? Can you show support for this citation's opinion from some 20's ministers organization?
Um, working without getting paid is being a slave. Spain does have welfare for the unemployed, no? Better to be unemployed on welfare than a slave.
If my company didn't pay me for two pay periods, I'd leave and not come back. Even if I couldn't find a tech job, I'd leave. Flipping burgers in McDonalds pays better than nothing. Staying around for SIX FREAKING MONTHS hoping to get paid is insane.
And you miss the point. Anyone who thinks the US sucks is free to leave. The moron poster he is replying to clearly thinks that cops in the US are animals on the warpath, while cops overseas are sweet and kind. I bet he has no experience with cops in most parts of the world. Maybe he should take a trip and see what they're like.
As for what he is doing to stop police brutality in America, he is posting to Slashdot. Gee, how effective. When I see him doing something besides posting absurd deductions from specific cases to generalizations (one of the most common logic flaws, but an annoying one in a place frequented by logicians), I'll take him seriously.
But for all of his passion about police brutality on Slashdot, his home page is dedicated to GNU projects and world overpopulation. Funny, that. If he thinks the world is overpopulated, he should find the nearest cliff and jump off of it. Or maybe he should attack one of those evil American cops, since apparently they're just mad killers.
Exactly how do you blow out of proportion a dude getting sodomized with a broken broom handle while in custody?
By generalizing from one to many. You know, the police officers who did that were men! All men just can't wait to sodomize other men with broom handles! Or so your logic goes.
-jon
Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories...
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 2
I haven't read American Gods yet (since it's not out), but the topic of the New Gods of America was covered amazingly well in Harlan Ellison's "Deathbird Stories". For a book written in 1975, it's attitudes on American values seem remarkably up-to-date. You might just think that nothing's really changed in the last 25 years...
No, there's more than OpenFirmware there; read the tech notes on the New World architecture. For example, the Ethernet driver is in the ROM, so Macs can be booted over the network (single System Folder on a server for a roomful of iMacs).
For the last few versions, the Mac OS has been loading it's "ROMs" off disk early in the boot process. Look in the system folder for a file named Mac OS ROM.
Yes, but there's still a boot ROM on the Macs. The ROM-in-RAM does load a "ROM" from a file on disk, but the Boot ROM (basically a BIOS) does quite a bit at startup. Here's info from the original iMac's developer notes:
"The Boot ROM contains the code needed to start up the computer, initialize and examine the hardware, provide a device tree to describe the hardware, provide hardware access services (RTAS), and control to the OS. The Boot ROM can be grouped into the following major pieces. "
Granted, this doesn't contain a significant portion of the OS, like the ROMs used to, but it's pretty key.
Darwin makes Mac cloning possible, at least for small operators.
No, it doesn't. Darwin alone isn't much more than a BSD variant, and I'd be pretty surprised if Apple isn't using the copyrighted ROMs on every Mac's motherboard as some sort of dongle for the higher-level Mac OS X functionality. You couldn't copy those ROMs without Apple's permission and that will happen over Steve's cold, dead body.
Whether or not Apple could survive under a licensing system is a different debate. But I doubt that it'd be possible technically without Apple's blessing.
. I'd personally like to see Apple take the initiative to install the operating system in a very secure state.
Uh, it is. By default, Mac OS X ships with Mac file sharing off, FTP off, Apache off, and ssh off. Telnet is disabled in all versions since 10.0.1. If you want to turn them on, it's just a checkbox, but 99% of all Mac users won't turn on any of them except for Mac file sharing, which should be pretty safe; I don't know of any AppleTalk exploits.
MacOS X sports native GUI support for Java. I've only heard good about it, never tried it though, anyone have experience?
I've got some experience. I have a small (80K) client-side Java app, written in Swing, which tracks my Fantasy Baseball league. It runs well under OS 9's Java (with Swing 1.1.1 installed) and under various Win32 JDKs. Under OS X's Java, one table has its TableHeader smooshed out of existance (and I'm not hard-coding widget heights; I'm using the proper layout managers). Performance is also notably slower. There are several tables with large number of rows (>500) and redraw rates on them are not fast.
Here's the surreal bit. The same machine running the same.jar file within the Classic environment or Mac OS 9.1 is much faster. You can actually have both running at the same time, by using two different launchers.
So Java on Mac OS X has a ways to go still. But having JDK 1.3 present makes up for a heck of a lot of sins.
...and as I've mentioned elsewhere, this does not take into account the DEFLATIONARY nature of computer hardware pricing. The most expensive component on many cheap PCs is the operating system. How can that be, when it has the lowest mass production costs of any component and similar development costs as a microprocessor?
Well actually given in 1981 PC-DOS cost $60 when purchased with an IBM PC, and today Windows 2000 costs around $125 when purchased with a PC...
The prices are basically equivalent when factoring in inflation.
You're figuring at the bundling cost. Figure at the stand-alone cost, instead. MS gives a price break with bundling to ensure that no one else can get a toe in the door.
You're absolutely wrong... MS-DOS + Windows 3.X costs about the same as Windows 2000 and more than Windows 98/Me.
Are you talking in constant dollars (without inflation)? Because if you are, you're wrong. And if you're not, you are comparing apples to oranges.
That's an easy one... the cost of manufacturing hardware has dropped dramatically... the cost of producing memory, hard drives, you name it, has gone down considerably. The cost of good programmers, however, has gone up. That's why you don't see the difference in cost.
The cost for mass-producing software is far, far lower than the cost for mass producing hardware. And the cost for good electrical engineers has gone up just as much as the cost for good programmers. Who do you think designs all this hardware, the Firmware Fairy?
Six years ago, the cost of Word and Wordperfect was some $350. Today, you can get Word, Works, Streets and Trips and Encarta for less than $100
Bullshit. I've got a copy of MacConnection right here. The cost for Word 2001 (in 2001 dollars) is $360. Gee, that's $10 more than the price you named, not even counting 6 years of inflation. Excel 2001 is also $360. Office 2001 for Mac (which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage) is $449. I'm quite sure the PC prices are just as high.
Please don't try to make up facts to support your position.
There are TWO groups of people who MS can screw, game developers and end users. Say MS doesn't raise the end-user cost much as they get monopoly position in the console industry. They can still drastically raise the license fees they charge game developers. And, in classic MS fashion, they can just deliver a clone of the game developer's best title (or hire away their best programmers) if the developer tells them to piss off.
considering Microsoft's past history of NOT RAISING PRICES once they've attained a monopoly situation
This is untrue. MS has raised prices, both relative to the cost of the entire system and in absolute dollars. Or are you going to tell me that MS DOS 2.0 cost the same as Windows 2000 in both constant and inflated dollars?
Before you consider that an absurd comparison, compare the cost of hard drive space or CPU speed or graphics cards over time. Somehow it's expected that the hard drives and CPUs get cheaper as they do more, but the OS doesn't?
MS has raised prices as they've gained a monopoly, and only an apologist or someone who is completely ignorant of economics couldn't see that.
Actually, as much as you'd like to think that, no console maker makes money on the box itself. They all make money off software designed for it. Sony and Nintendo all lose money on the hardware.
Yes, but MS is probably losing more than any of the others. Early reports are that MS will lose about $150/box. I'd also heard that licencing fees for XBox games were a lot lower than those for PS2 and Game Cube; I don't know if this is true, though.
When MS plans to LOSE 3-4 BILLION DOLLARS, you know there's something up their sleeves. Dumping is their strategy; don't be fooled.
MS' plan is to drive Sony and Nintendo out of the console business. They don't expect to make any money on XBox 1.0.
When XBox 2.0 comes out, and there are no other consoles, then watch MS jack up the prices on consoles and royalties.
Illegal? Sure. But do you seriously expect Dubya to get the Justice Dept. to prosecute MS' predatory behavior against two FOREIGN companies, esp. when MS can legally give donations to the GOP and Sony/Nintendo can't?
The problem with using Passport and Hailstorm on top of using IIS, NT/2000, SQL Server, Exchange, Word/Excell, MSC++, etc. is that you don't know what back doors there are in these apps. They are all getting more and more integrated together. Do you packet-sniff your lines? Are you sure what data is being sent where? Do you know what extra code is being placed in your code by MS' C++ compiler?
I'm not saying there are back doors, or even that MS _as a company_ wants to do that. But there are 30,000+ Microsoft employees. All it takes is a couple of programmers in a couple of different departments, working together to put in a set of related trojans. With millions of lines of code, they'll probably slip through code reviews. Heck, with some misleading comments in the code, they'd pass through a code review pretty easily.
How much effort would it be for someone to add code to Excel to automatically email any document which has the words "Payroll Report" in it? Cross-reference the names with people who have Microsoft Passport accounts. Maybe we can find some direct deposit records and have those automagically sent off. I could probably get a fairly complete picture of all information about you, to use as I see fit.
Paranoid? Maybe. But it only takes a couple of rogue programmers.
You misunderstand Ken Thompson. In fact, he's proving the point about Microsoft's closed software. He is pointing out that you cannot trust one source for all of your software. The compiler and the telnet daemon were both written by the same person, and he put in the back door in both.
MS selling you the OS, the compiler, the web server, the mail server, the database, the office applications...it's a very dangerous situation if your company takes its privacy seriously. Combine that with Microsoft Passport and Hailstorm and you'd have to be either psychotic or stupid (possibly both) to use.NET.
Slashdot Mirror
When Apache came out, it was revolutionary. It was the first really usable, supported web server. That was 1995, the same year that Java was released. 1995 was a big year for the web.
Working within a framework instead leverages other people's efforts and provides opportunity for cooperation or interoperability between unrelated efforts.
Yes, but frameworks are boring. Everyone and their grandmother has built a framework at one time or another. Show me something USING that framework that can't be done with anything else out there, and I'm interested.
-jon
Sun seems to have forgotten the reason why Java took off. Java was doing something amazing in 1995. There was a tiny program running in a browser, and the same program running on both Windows and Solaris. This was something new. Of course, applets haven't worked so well in non-trivial cases, but it got interest going in Java.
Compare this to Jxta. What does Jxta let me do that nothing else can do? Writing a P2P app isn't rocket science; a freshman CS major can probably do a decent job of it. Maybe if Sun had released the Jxta killer app along with Jxta, it might be more interesting. For now, though, it looks like it's probably going to fizzle out.
-jon
-jon
Yay! More ad hominem. =)
I maintain that he is a moron. His arguments are logically invalid. One of the premises of his screed against cops in the US is the behavior of cops in Canada. That's a moron, in my book.
Now, compare this to his claim that all US cops are bloodthirsty sociopaths. I wish he'd give his name and address, so cops can know who NOT to protect when he needs them.
"As for what he is doing to stop police brutality in America, he is posting to Slashdot. Gee, how effective. "
You'll excuse me if I point out the irony of this statement. =)
The difference is that I don't think police brutality is a serious problem in the US. Are there brutal cops? Sure. Is there something institutionally rotten about cops? Nope. I maintain that, by and large, cops are decent human beings who put their lives on the line for complete strangers.
-jon
Secondly, by "cults" you are probably referring to Churches. Can you provide a citation for your quote? Can you show support for this citation's opinion from some 20's ministers organization?
-jon
If my company didn't pay me for two pay periods, I'd leave and not come back. Even if I couldn't find a tech job, I'd leave. Flipping burgers in McDonalds pays better than nothing. Staying around for SIX FREAKING MONTHS hoping to get paid is insane.
-jon
As for what he is doing to stop police brutality in America, he is posting to Slashdot. Gee, how effective. When I see him doing something besides posting absurd deductions from specific cases to generalizations (one of the most common logic flaws, but an annoying one in a place frequented by logicians), I'll take him seriously.
But for all of his passion about police brutality on Slashdot, his home page is dedicated to GNU projects and world overpopulation. Funny, that. If he thinks the world is overpopulated, he should find the nearest cliff and jump off of it. Or maybe he should attack one of those evil American cops, since apparently they're just mad killers.
-jon
By generalizing from one to many. You know, the police officers who did that were men! All men just can't wait to sodomize other men with broom handles! Or so your logic goes.
-jon
-jon
-jon
Yes, but there's still a boot ROM on the Macs. The ROM-in-RAM does load a "ROM" from a file on disk, but the Boot ROM (basically a BIOS) does quite a bit at startup. Here's info from the original iMac's developer notes:
"The Boot ROM contains the code needed to start up the computer, initialize and examine the hardware, provide a device tree to describe the hardware, provide hardware access services (RTAS), and control to the OS. The Boot ROM can be grouped into the following major pieces. "
Granted, this doesn't contain a significant portion of the OS, like the ROMs used to, but it's pretty key.
-jon
No, it doesn't. Darwin alone isn't much more than a BSD variant, and I'd be pretty surprised if Apple isn't using the copyrighted ROMs on every Mac's motherboard as some sort of dongle for the higher-level Mac OS X functionality. You couldn't copy those ROMs without Apple's permission and that will happen over Steve's cold, dead body.
Whether or not Apple could survive under a licensing system is a different debate. But I doubt that it'd be possible technically without Apple's blessing.
-jon
Uh, it is. By default, Mac OS X ships with Mac file sharing off, FTP off, Apache off, and ssh off. Telnet is disabled in all versions since 10.0.1. If you want to turn them on, it's just a checkbox, but 99% of all Mac users won't turn on any of them except for Mac file sharing, which should be pretty safe; I don't know of any AppleTalk exploits.
-jon
I've got some experience. I have a small (80K) client-side Java app, written in Swing, which tracks my Fantasy Baseball league. It runs well under OS 9's Java (with Swing 1.1.1 installed) and under various Win32 JDKs. Under OS X's Java, one table has its TableHeader smooshed out of existance (and I'm not hard-coding widget heights; I'm using the proper layout managers). Performance is also notably slower. There are several tables with large number of rows (>500) and redraw rates on them are not fast.
Here's the surreal bit. The same machine running the same .jar file within the Classic environment or Mac OS 9.1 is much faster. You can actually have both running at the same time, by using two different launchers.
So Java on Mac OS X has a ways to go still. But having JDK 1.3 present makes up for a heck of a lot of sins.
-jon
Because the number of people killed by incompetent computer usage is vanishingly small.
-jon
-jon
-jon
The prices are basically equivalent when factoring in inflation.
You're figuring at the bundling cost. Figure at the stand-alone cost, instead. MS gives a price break with bundling to ensure that no one else can get a toe in the door.
-jon
Are you talking in constant dollars (without inflation)? Because if you are, you're wrong. And if you're not, you are comparing apples to oranges.
That's an easy one... the cost of manufacturing hardware has dropped dramatically... the cost of producing memory, hard drives, you name it, has gone down considerably. The cost of good programmers, however, has gone up. That's why you don't see the difference in cost.
The cost for mass-producing software is far, far lower than the cost for mass producing hardware. And the cost for good electrical engineers has gone up just as much as the cost for good programmers. Who do you think designs all this hardware, the Firmware Fairy?
Six years ago, the cost of Word and Wordperfect was some $350. Today, you can get Word, Works, Streets and Trips and Encarta for less than $100
Bullshit. I've got a copy of MacConnection right here. The cost for Word 2001 (in 2001 dollars) is $360. Gee, that's $10 more than the price you named, not even counting 6 years of inflation. Excel 2001 is also $360. Office 2001 for Mac (which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage) is $449. I'm quite sure the PC prices are just as high.
Please don't try to make up facts to support your position.
-jon
There are TWO groups of people who MS can screw, game developers and end users. Say MS doesn't raise the end-user cost much as they get monopoly position in the console industry. They can still drastically raise the license fees they charge game developers. And, in classic MS fashion, they can just deliver a clone of the game developer's best title (or hire away their best programmers) if the developer tells them to piss off.
-jon
This is untrue. MS has raised prices, both relative to the cost of the entire system and in absolute dollars. Or are you going to tell me that MS DOS 2.0 cost the same as Windows 2000 in both constant and inflated dollars?
Before you consider that an absurd comparison, compare the cost of hard drive space or CPU speed or graphics cards over time. Somehow it's expected that the hard drives and CPUs get cheaper as they do more, but the OS doesn't?
MS has raised prices as they've gained a monopoly, and only an apologist or someone who is completely ignorant of economics couldn't see that.
-jon
Yes, but MS is probably losing more than any of the others. Early reports are that MS will lose about $150/box. I'd also heard that licencing fees for XBox games were a lot lower than those for PS2 and Game Cube; I don't know if this is true, though.
When MS plans to LOSE 3-4 BILLION DOLLARS, you know there's something up their sleeves. Dumping is their strategy; don't be fooled.
-jon
MS' plan is to drive Sony and Nintendo out of the console business. They don't expect to make any money on XBox 1.0.
When XBox 2.0 comes out, and there are no other consoles, then watch MS jack up the prices on consoles and royalties.
Illegal? Sure. But do you seriously expect Dubya to get the Justice Dept. to prosecute MS' predatory behavior against two FOREIGN companies, esp. when MS can legally give donations to the GOP and Sony/Nintendo can't?
-jon
The problem with using Passport and Hailstorm on top of using IIS, NT/2000, SQL Server, Exchange, Word/Excell, MSC++, etc. is that you don't know what back doors there are in these apps. They are all getting more and more integrated together. Do you packet-sniff your lines? Are you sure what data is being sent where? Do you know what extra code is being placed in your code by MS' C++ compiler?
I'm not saying there are back doors, or even that MS _as a company_ wants to do that. But there are 30,000+ Microsoft employees. All it takes is a couple of programmers in a couple of different departments, working together to put in a set of related trojans. With millions of lines of code, they'll probably slip through code reviews. Heck, with some misleading comments in the code, they'd pass through a code review pretty easily.
How much effort would it be for someone to add code to Excel to automatically email any document which has the words "Payroll Report" in it? Cross-reference the names with people who have Microsoft Passport accounts. Maybe we can find some direct deposit records and have those automagically sent off. I could probably get a fairly complete picture of all information about you, to use as I see fit.
Paranoid? Maybe. But it only takes a couple of rogue programmers.
-jon
MS selling you the OS, the compiler, the web server, the mail server, the database, the office applications...it's a very dangerous situation if your company takes its privacy seriously. Combine that with Microsoft Passport and Hailstorm and you'd have to be either psychotic or stupid (possibly both) to use .NET.
-jon