For the purposes of mind expansion you could do much worse:-) than lurking on the EROS and E language mailing lists. Decentralization is another good one, though much less focused.
It's been couple years since I looked at these papers, and I'm probably didn't fully grok them then, but if I recall they could point to an alternative direction from the java bytecodes or.NET IL. From the first paper's abstract:
This paper presents the idea of the intention as an abstraction mechanism, and an integrated development system which may be used to develop systems using intentions. Software encoded intentionally can be said to be immortal, in that its meaning can be sustained independently of the long term progress in programming notation and implementation techniques. The independence and self-sufficiency of intentions might well create first a market in abstractions or "language features", followed by the long sought-after dream of a software componentry market. Legacy code can be integrated into the new paradigm with minimal or no loss of information and there are considerable prospects for "hot" re-engineering or continuous improvement, which can be performed while the legacy system is kept in operating condition.
The author has many valid criticisms, though I don't know how important they'll be in the long run. Certain language features may need to be implemented inefficiently, but programmer time is far more important than execution efficiency anyway. Beyond the criticism, the author notes that
There are, actually, many successful "common language runtimes", with names like Pentium, SPARC and others. Mainstream CPUs are equally fitted to very different languages as they only do the most fundamental, low-level operations, so they cannot be biased towards particular languages. There aren't many different ways to perform a conditional branch. However, there are radically different ways to support methods and functions, or most constructs found in high-level languages. The consequence is that every language needs different compilers and runtimes to implement their features, and different libraries to support their vision of software development.
So, anyone have a good explanation for why both Microsoft and Sun chose relatively high-level and language-specific primitives for their runtimes?
I don't think massive cross-platform applications on the desktop was ever Sun's primary goal for Java. As others have noted, before it was called Java it was aimed at embedded systems, and its initial hype was based on bringing "interactivity" to web pages, which it turned out people didn't care for (and Netscape's implementation was about as bad as it possibly could've been). Several third parties (notably Lotus and Corel) failed with Java desktop development, but AFAIK the only real major desktop Java project Sun attempted was the JavaStation(?) diskless terminal, and that would've failed regardless of the software since it was an overpriced, underpowered and incompatible hardware platform.
Also, I think you're needlessly conflating desktop and commercial software. There's plenty of non-commerical desktop software, and the non-desktop commercial software market is massive.
But after all that, I agree that free.NET implementation(s) may succeed on the libre software desktop (I don't care what it does on the unfree desktop), where Java has failed to gain any significant foothold.
I think C# and.NET are kinda neat despite their source (I could say the same about Java's source, they're both amoral corporations), and I hope that mono does meet all of Miguel de Icaza's expectations in terms of making free software developers more productive. I also think Java still has a chance on the libre desktop if and only if Sun wakes up and makes the JDK open source!
Amen. After the VCs took over the new management had a couple conference calls in which they invited the community to comment. People were very eager to contribute, but aD was absolutely intent on keeping all development in-house and completely hidden from the outside. Basically it appeared they considered the developer community built around ACS a headache. Here's what I wrote around that time (April 2001) on an aD bboard following a developer meeting in San Francisco:
The aD and OpenACS (Ben Adida) presentations were informative. Unfortunately it appears that ACS5 and OpenACS4+ are on divergent paths (I add the + as OpenACS4 isn't simply a PostgreSQL port as OpenACS3 was, OpenACS developers are doing considerable design on things like database independence). I believe Ben said that aD and OpenACS people are talking, though we could end up with two products, and that wouldn't be a bad thing.
I think two divergent products would be a bad thing. The developer community is small. I'd like to be able to take a package from aD, OpenACS, or a third party and port it to my particular ACS installation with minimal effort. Given that Tcl and Java versions will exist for the forseeable future, I suppose this means at least keeping the data models in sync. Preferably the SQL queries would also be common across Java and Tcl for a given database.
I hope that OpenACS developers don't do too much design and innovation within OpenACS, as it will only duplicate efforts from aD in the same problem space. The ball is really in aD's court here. It can open up all phases of the ACS5 developement process (that means now) and leverage the developer community, which I think will make ACS5 as well known and widespread as Apache (in a much smaller niche obviously), or it can see interacting with outside developers as a cost, increasing its long term engineering costs and descreasing the value it can provide to clients.
"Core" products are what the open source community does best. Consider the Linux kernel versus free word processors. The kernel is wildly successful, while open source word processors haven't been adopted despite several good efforts.
aD should learn from this and leverage the community to develop core ACS functionality. aD provides value to its customers through applications built on top of ACS (whether it be for hire or through licensing of future proprietary packages), not through developing ACS.
The resources committed to libre software by IBM, Sun and other major corporations since the.com crash now far outstrip the cumulative contributions of failed and/or former libre-only companies like VA and Eazel.
Nice news. We can always use another vendor and another contributor to libre software, which Sun already was, though I welcome what looks to be a broader and deeper effort. Way to go Sun!
HOWEVER, until Sun frees Java, they will always be viewed askance by the community. I'd understand keeping Java closed if it were a cash cow. It's not. Not freeing Java doesn't seem to make sense from a business or any other perspective. Sun execs and lawyers: wake up and smell the coffee!
What makes you think Corbin's in Atlanta? Last I heard (a couple years ago in a San Francisco Chronicle story) they were in Hollister, CA, the hinterland of silicon valley. Their website seems to confirm. I've seen a couple parked in SF, never seen one moving.
Don't forget O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator portal (defunct) and NaviServer, a web server that was ahead of its time (now libre as AOLServer).
AOL doesn't buy all the cool stuff. Apple bought NeXT. I'm a long time AOL and Mac hater, but I find myself liking some of the stuff they've bought! Time magazine &co. is still crap though. When AOL/TW buys the Economist, the world is about to end.
Bundling online backup is a great idea, I'd just like to see more than 100MB. Backup seems like a monster problem, particularly with typcial drives approaching 100GB. Or are modern drives reliable enough that the average person just doesn't care about the small risk of losing everything?
Also, I'm surprised nobody has noted the involvement of Corel alumni Eid Eid. Nice to see that a former Corelian(?) sees opportunity in Linux, despite Corel's failure to capitalize on that market.
Has interaction with the open source community contributed to any changes in Sun's internal development practices and/or toolset and/or do you see this happening in the future? I'm speculating that perhaps the toolset being developed at Tigris may be funded indirectly by Sun via CollabNet with an eye towards internal use in addition to use in Sun's collaboration with the community on projects like OpenOffice, Netbeans, and JXTA.
Someday, sure. Did business care about the web in 1993? KM is a big problem and a rapidly growing industry, but isn't the SemWeb any more than Lotus Notes was the web ~10 years ago. If there's a difference, it may be that today more people expect open standards to win commercially.
I don't think Cringely was talking about the semantic web, which is years off (modulo your expectations for the SemWeb) and business doesn't care about. He was talking about things like XML as a standard for passing data around, for B2B transactions, user profiles, etc. Which really doesn't count as a prediction, as it's been happening for a few years.
Two of your predictions is already well underway (Linux pushing out other Unices, Microsoft owning much of the rest) and the others are highly unlikely. Relative price/performance doesn't matter so much anymore, every machine sold is incredibly powerful. If Apple loses marketshare it will be for purely non-technical reasons. AFAICT IBM is doing very well with Linux, including mainframe wins ($$$). There's no way RedHat will wipe out other distros.
So says Red Hat's Michael Tiemann in yet another Linux in 2002 article at CNN. "There's no doubt that high-end graphics are going to be Linux-driven, as is high-end computing"
Very important point. Desktop share doesn't even need to increase for Linux to be an important desktop market segment, because the absolute number of desktop Linux users will continue to grow rapdily along with the absolute number of computer users.
I think the 0.24% number arrived at by WebSideStory may be a bit low, but they're probably right about Linux's desktop market share not increasing over the last few years, though the number of desktop Linux users certainly has increased (for every geek-like entitity I know that has migrated to Linux, dozens of people became first-time computer users, running Windows almost invariably).
For desktop share to increase, three things need to happen:
Best of breed web browser. Mozilla is real close.
Nearly seamless MSOffice replacement. OpenOffice is probably a year or so away.
Easily available hardware pre-installs. Don't know what will make this happen. #1 and #2 would help.
I'm excited about several potentially significant projects that may have their first "stable" releases next year. Everyone knows about OpenOffice, Apache 2 and Mozilla (I'm surprised that neither article mentioned the last two). Here are a few others:
Subversion version control rethought, could replace CVS as free software tool of choice
Adobe still needs to be punished for instigating the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov. He's now free, but Adobe never paid his legal costs and still supports the vile DMCA. Is there any way to support Gimp development financially? Are there other free software applications looking for financial support that offer viable alternatives to Adobe's core revenue-generating applications?
Hai! I get a strong sense of deja vu reading this non-news headline. Anyone remember Ambra? I remember trying to run Windoze NT 3.5 on one with a IBM 386SLC cpu. Very slow, and could only be booted from a floppy due to lack of NT drivers for the then-highly integrated on-board controller, or something like that.
Where does it say anything about VOD in San Francisco? The article's byline says San Francisco, that's all. Also, you don't have to fit around the broadcast schedule. That's Pay Per View. The article makes the difference between PPV and VOD pretty clear.
Slashdot Mirror
For the purposes of mind expansion you could do much worse :-) than lurking on the EROS and E language mailing lists. Decentralization is another good one, though much less focused.
'"intentional language" language' in the parent should be '"intentional programming" research'. Excuse me.
- The Death of Computer Languages, The Birth of Intentional Programming (1995)
- Transformation in Intentional Programming (1998)
It's been couple years since I looked at these papers, and I'm probably didn't fully grok them then, but if I recall they could point to an alternative direction from the java bytecodes orAlso, I think you're needlessly conflating desktop and commercial software. There's plenty of non-commerical desktop software, and the non-desktop commercial software market is massive.
But after all that, I agree that free .NET implementation(s) may succeed on the libre software desktop (I don't care what it does on the unfree desktop), where Java has failed to gain any significant foothold.
I think C# and .NET are kinda neat despite their source (I could say the same about Java's source, they're both amoral corporations), and I hope that mono does meet all of Miguel de Icaza's expectations in terms of making free software developers more productive. I also think Java still has a chance on the libre desktop if and only if Sun wakes up and makes the JDK open source!
The resources committed to libre software by IBM, Sun and other major corporations since the .com crash now far outstrip the cumulative contributions of failed and/or former libre-only companies like VA and Eazel.
HOWEVER, until Sun frees Java, they will always be viewed askance by the community. I'd understand keeping Java closed if it were a cash cow. It's not. Not freeing Java doesn't seem to make sense from a business or any other perspective. Sun execs and lawyers: wake up and smell the coffee!
Of course I don't expect anything is done for 7.3! I was just looking for a wishlist/roadmap of things that might get done for 7.3.
The TODO list says "A dash (-) marks changes that will appear in the upcoming 7.3 release" but I don't see any dashes.
Nevermind, eevolution is Atlanta-based, though they're just a Corbin dealer.
What makes you think Corbin's in Atlanta? Last I heard (a couple years ago in a San Francisco Chronicle story) they were in Hollister, CA, the hinterland of silicon valley. Their website seems to confirm. I've seen a couple parked in SF, never seen one moving.
AOL doesn't buy all the cool stuff. Apple bought NeXT. I'm a long time AOL and Mac hater, but I find myself liking some of the stuff they've bought! Time magazine &co. is still crap though. When AOL/TW buys the Economist, the world is about to end.
Also, I'm surprised nobody has noted the involvement of Corel alumni Eid Eid. Nice to see that a former Corelian(?) sees opportunity in Linux, despite Corel's failure to capitalize on that market.
English is spoken by just about everyone in Singapore and very widely in Malaysia and the Philippines
Has interaction with the open source community contributed to any changes in Sun's internal development practices and/or toolset and/or do you see this happening in the future? I'm speculating that perhaps the toolset being developed at Tigris may be funded indirectly by Sun via CollabNet with an eye towards internal use in addition to use in Sun's collaboration with the community on projects like OpenOffice, Netbeans, and JXTA.
Note plural. No?
Someday, sure. Did business care about the web in 1993? KM is a big problem and a rapidly growing industry, but isn't the SemWeb any more than Lotus Notes was the web ~10 years ago. If there's a difference, it may be that today more people expect open standards to win commercially.
Two of your predictions is already well underway (Linux pushing out other Unices, Microsoft owning much of the rest) and the others are highly unlikely. Relative price/performance doesn't matter so much anymore, every machine sold is incredibly powerful. If Apple loses marketshare it will be for purely non-technical reasons. AFAICT IBM is doing very well with Linux, including mainframe wins ($$$). There's no way RedHat will wipe out other distros.
So says Red Hat's Michael Tiemann in yet another Linux in 2002 article at CNN. "There's no doubt that high-end graphics are going to be Linux-driven, as is high-end computing"
I think the 0.24% number arrived at by WebSideStory may be a bit low, but they're probably right about Linux's desktop market share not increasing over the last few years, though the number of desktop Linux users certainly has increased (for every geek-like entitity I know that has migrated to Linux, dozens of people became first-time computer users, running Windows almost invariably).
For desktop share to increase, three things need to happen:
I'm excited about several potentially significant projects that may have their first "stable" releases next year. Everyone knows about OpenOffice, Apache 2 and Mozilla (I'm surprised that neither article mentioned the last two). Here are a few others:
- Subversion version control rethought, could replace CVS as free software tool of choice
- E capability secure programming
- Reptile reputation-based content aggregator
I want real money idea futures for all predictions!Adobe still needs to be punished for instigating the arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov. He's now free, but Adobe never paid his legal costs and still supports the vile DMCA. Is there any way to support Gimp development financially? Are there other free software applications looking for financial support that offer viable alternatives to Adobe's core revenue-generating applications?
Hai! I get a strong sense of deja vu reading this non-news headline. Anyone remember Ambra? I remember trying to run Windoze NT 3.5 on one with a IBM 386SLC cpu. Very slow, and could only be booted from a floppy due to lack of NT drivers for the then-highly integrated on-board controller, or something like that.
Where does it say anything about VOD in San Francisco? The article's byline says San Francisco, that's all. Also, you don't have to fit around the broadcast schedule. That's Pay Per View. The article makes the difference between PPV and VOD pretty clear.