As much as I hate M$, I think that.NET will be big. One thing
the M$ has done right lately, is getting in league with language developers.
For example, the Mercury team were given an opportunity to take sneak peak at alot of the.NET
technology, and to port Mercury to the.NET runtime. Having support
for a wide range of programming languages will certainly bolster.NET, and may lead to lot's of non-M$ software available for it.
Of course, it would have been nice if M$ had have extended a similar
courtesy to the Java community:-(
I disagree. Free/open source software can/should be innovative.
I think we're entering a golden era for free software, where there's
a critical mass of people with the appropriate talents and interests
involved, that free software can stop just imitating, and start innovating.
Not that there's anything wrong with imitating a good idea/technology
if it works. But when you get a diverse range of people involved in
free software, rather than just hackers, you can start getting some
interesting results. e.g., the GNOME folks are really starting to
do some interesting user interface stuff, KDE is starting to look
perty due to the artists getting involved, documentation is getting
better for a lot of projects, etc.
SOAP is a much more flexible Distributed Object Model. Essentially, it lets objects interoperate without them needing to have exactly matching interfaces.
That lets object implementations evolve over time (i.e. changing the
interface to an object doesn't necessarily break all its clients), and
it paves the way to more dynamic forms of interoperability, where objects
can discover each other's interfaces on the fly.
I think that the differences between SOAP and CORBA/DCOM are analogous to the differences between Python's object model and that of C++ or Java (although Java does a little
better here). Both SOAP and Python allow you a lot of flexibility and dynamic forms of interaction, but both come at the cost of efficiency and static type checking.
SOAP can also be viewed as analogous to UNIX pipes and sockets in many ways. Because SOAP is so much simpler than systems like CORBA, and
because of its reliance on XML, the hope is that it will be much easier for programs to interoperate. Much like UNIX programs can be "glued" together using pipes, to do things that the original designers of the program never foresaw.
This is slightly off topic, but there's currently a bit of a debate raging here in Australia about the security
and privacy issues surrounding online medical records. Basically the AMA is trying to put all records online so that doctors and hospitals can get access to them when you e.g. change physician, go to a
doctor "out of town", and (I suppose) for emergency situations in hospital ERs. I'm not sure where I stand
on the issue yet. Clearly it could be of great practical benefit when used for the reasons for which it's
intended. But, like many others, I'm pretty concerned about the security problems associated with it.
We've had a web-based help desk here for years (longer than I've been round anyway). It seems to work pretty well. It keeps track of all unsolved and solved problems (which helps users to see if someone else has already encountered a problem and how it was fixed for them). It asks the user to post a problem under a category, or under "misc" if they can't find an appropriate one. The system's also used to facilitate tasks such as requests for new user accounts etc.
The sysadmins use it to delegate tasks among themselves too, I believe. Although I'm not completely clear on the infrastructure on their side.
Unfortunately we're behind a particularly nasty firewall here, so it's no use posting the URL. But, basically, I believe it's a great idea for all concerned. Of course, as many people have already commented, it's not much good if you've got a major problem and can't access the help desk in the first place. But it's a good first point of call for more benign problems.
1) I believe that most scientists (don't know about atheists) are less likely to regard theories as fact - they may be very passionate about them, but if they have any regard for the fundamental principles of science, then they will be open to the possibility of such theories being incorrect or inaccurate.
2) The use of the term "proof" with regard to religious matters. Religion deals with articles of faith: things which cannot be proved or disproved. If you desire proof for your religious beliefs, then I'd say you've got a bit of a crisis of faith on your hands.
Ummm... I hate to break it to you, but that "throwing out" theories is part of the scientific process. Truth (whatever that may mean) is the pursuit of science just as much as religion. The two search for it in different domains however: science tries to answer the whats, hows, whens, etc.; whereas religion tries to answer the whys. I'm not trying to fuel a religion vs. science debate here. Creation stories such as Genesis are not necessarily inconsistent with scientific theories of the universe's creation and evolution. It's entirely possible to believe that "God created the heavens and the Earth", and also believe that the universe has evolved from a big bang, etc. The whats, whens and hows of Genesis are unimportant compared to the whys (I won't try pointing out those here!) BTW, was that the same absolute truth that Copernicus and Galileo so foolishly ignored?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it would have been nice if M$ had have extended a similar courtesy to the Java community :-(
I think that the differences between SOAP and CORBA/DCOM are analogous to the differences between Python's object model and that of C++ or Java (although Java does a little better here). Both SOAP and Python allow you a lot of flexibility and dynamic forms of interaction, but both come at the cost of efficiency and static type checking.
SOAP can also be viewed as analogous to UNIX pipes and sockets in many ways. Because SOAP is so much simpler than systems like CORBA, and because of its reliance on XML, the hope is that it will be much easier for programs to interoperate. Much like UNIX programs can be "glued" together using pipes, to do things that the original designers of the program never foresaw.
This is slightly off topic, but there's currently a bit of a debate raging here in Australia about the security and privacy issues surrounding online medical records. Basically the AMA is trying to put all records online so that doctors and hospitals can get access to them when you e.g. change physician, go to a doctor "out of town", and (I suppose) for emergency situations in hospital ERs. I'm not sure where I stand on the issue yet. Clearly it could be of great practical benefit when used for the reasons for which it's intended. But, like many others, I'm pretty concerned about the security problems associated with it.
The sysadmins use it to delegate tasks among themselves too, I believe. Although I'm not completely clear on the infrastructure on their side.
Unfortunately we're behind a particularly nasty firewall here, so it's no use posting the URL. But, basically, I believe it's a great idea for all concerned. Of course, as many people have already commented, it's not much good if you've got a major problem and can't access the help desk in the first place. But it's a good first point of call for more benign problems.
1) I believe that most scientists (don't know about atheists) are less likely to regard theories as fact - they may be very passionate about them, but if they have any regard for the fundamental principles of science, then they will be open to the possibility of such theories being incorrect or inaccurate.
2) The use of the term "proof" with regard to religious matters. Religion deals with articles of faith: things which cannot be proved or disproved. If you desire proof for your religious beliefs, then I'd say you've got a bit of a crisis of faith on your hands.
Ummm... I hate to break it to you, but that "throwing out" theories is part of the scientific process. Truth (whatever that may mean) is the pursuit of science just as much as religion. The two search for it in different domains however: science tries to answer the whats, hows, whens, etc.; whereas religion tries to answer the whys. I'm not trying to fuel a religion vs. science debate here. Creation stories such as Genesis are not necessarily inconsistent with scientific theories of the universe's creation and evolution. It's entirely possible to believe that "God created the heavens and the Earth", and also believe that the universe has evolved from a big bang, etc. The whats, whens and hows of Genesis are unimportant compared to the whys (I won't try pointing out those here!) BTW, was that the same absolute truth that Copernicus and Galileo so foolishly ignored?