I'm surprised it's taken this long for people to catch on. I guess that the increasing level of eye candy in all desktop operating systems over the past decade has masked the fact that you don't actually need translucent windows, and if you drop back to a user interface with less overhead then you almost can't find a general purpose processor, no matter how cheap, that isn't more than powerful enough to do almost everything almost everyone actually wants from a computer.
Don't forget that the first popular computer with a GUI was running on hardware that made a Palm Pilot from 1998 look fast, and your typical "free" cellphone today has more horsepower than that.
I personally find that food and shelter costs money and as a writer of desktop applications that means I like to target a platform that has some users.
Even desktop Linux has "some users". Mac OS has *lots* of users. Not as many as Windows, but thanks to people like you there's less competition FOR those users. So you keep writing for the clumsy Windows APIs and fight it out with the other long-suffering Windows developers. That leaves more money on the table for the folks who actually care about their customers.
Their problem is that the world has changed, and what worked in 1998 simply doesn't work anymore in 2008.
Actually, Microsoft's changed a lot since 1998, though they were already setting down the road to where they are now... they introduced ActiveX in 1997, for example... they still had NT running on at least four platforms, they were still supporting more than the Win32 subsystem in NT, and while they'd moved GDI into the kernel both NT4 and the initial release of NT5 (Windows 2000) were still decent desktop operating systems. They didn't really start going round the twist until Windows XP came out.
If Microsoft in 1998 had been like Microsoft in 2008 there's no way I'd have picked the Citrix-based solution over one of the emulation schemes that were starting to show up back then.
And all that really crazy stuff came about after Ballmer became CEO in 2000.
the only potential misuse I could see is if people have a good reason to post anonymously, like whistleblowers - anyone know of any use like that?
Scientology critics?
If one of the party was not in good faith - well, they can be smacked down very hard quite easily.
Inconceivable!
It looks like CoreCodec just discovered they were not actually in good faith and are doing damage control.
I think that's what they said, yes. Their message is basically "we fucked up, sorry, we're making sure we can't fuck up that way again".
Voluntarily admitting they fucked up when they fuck up, let alone bothering to figure out how they can avoid fucking up again, is unfortunately rare enough for organizations that it's actually impressive to see one do it without having to be dragged through a lawsuit first. I don't think you're giving them enough credit.
The question as to whether a company should take part in a boycott on ethical or moral grounds is an interesting one, especially since one can argue that the board has a fiduciary duty to stockholders to act immorally or unethically in this kind of situation. How one responds to this kind of conflict of interests is definitely a test of character... and people who would stand firm in the face of such a test are unlikely to get onto a board, so I suspect that you are right: this scenario is completely unrealistic.
What browser would you recommend for people who aren't able to learn how not to be phished?
IE's right out: it's really not safe for anyone but a trained security professional, the way it asks people to make snap decisions about complex security matters all the time.
Opera, maybe. Firefox? I don't really trust it... the security model still has a path for objects inside the sandbox to request that they be installed outside the sandbox.
If I drive my car down the road like an asshole it doesn't make me a vehicular terrorist.
Are you the bleeding vehicular terrorist who tried to sideswipe me coming up to the tollbooth on the beltway last week?
OK, all joking aside... I agree that terms like "terrorist" are being abused, though really it's the word "war" that's the problem. The US government declares a "war on" something vague and undefiniable, and all of a sudden the constitution is tossed out of the window. Whether the opponents are labeled "terrorists" or "drug lords" the result is the same.
On the other hand, when a country engages in aggression within the borders of another country during peacetime. Didn't that used to be called an act of war? What do you do about it short of declaring war? Does it matter which of the two countries is more pro-USA?
The result is that we are in a "state of war" all the time, but the President doesn't have to go cap-in-hand to Congress for each piddling little not-really-an-invasion. I don't see that as a good thing, and it's a much bigger problem than one of the particular abuses of language that are being used to justify it.
I'm tempted to say they're raping the language but of course that's just more of the same kind of verbal warfare that... hmmm... there I go again...
On the gripping hand, I'm not the CiC of the US armed forces.
I've posted about this before, but if you buy Windows you don't know what support you're going to get. When we installed our first Windows domain servers we bought two servers and enough client licenses for our user base, and it was good. Then we upgraded from NT 3.1 to NT 3.51 and we started getting users kicked out because we didn't have enough licenses. So we called Microsoft, and they told us to make some changes to our license settings, and we did that, and EVERYONE started getting kicked out. Nobody could log in to the domain. So we called Microsoft back and they said, oh no, we'd used up the three free support calls, now we had to get a support contract, they were sorry that it was their fault they'd made things worse but they couldn't do anything about that... policy was policy, even if our whole domain was broken...
So I asked on Usenet, got the right answer, and everything was working fine the next week when someone more senior from Microsoft called VERY apologetically and saying they'd reset our calls. For all I know they're still waiting for me to make 'em... because since then I've gone for the free "you don't know what you're going to get" support FIRST and it's always come through.
That might have been a clever enough scheme that you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel, but it had this little problem... it didn't work. The only organization that really had a stake in making it work was Sun, and they abdicated that role, so it fell apart.
It's just taking longer to fall apart with Apple than it did with Microsoft.
Apple vs Adobe is kind of like the Battle of Koom Valley. Whether Apple ambushed Adobe or Adobe ambushed Apple it's been going on and on all the way back to 1997 at least.
Anti-phishing? Give me a break. Apple's managed to only take three point something years to turn off the default "allow browser to do stupid things if it asks first" flag. Which sounds pretty bad, and I've been ragging on them about it since 2004, but I've been waiting for Microsoft to do something about the "allow browser to do REALLY stupid things if it asks first" function in IE for over 10 years now... and THAT doesn't even have an option to turn it off...
So on a scale of 1-10 in stupidity, Apple's lack of anti-phishing in Safari is about a 1, and Microsoft's ActiveX is about, oh, thirty thousand or so...
And if people were worried about bad behavior from companies, there's Microsoft's habit of ripping off developers, disabling people's computers by mistake, and the latest being Microsoft staking MSN music in the heart after telling people that "Plays for Sure" wasn't just a slogan...
Not to mention Vista.
Don't depend on good behavior from any company, and always ask "what have you done for us lately". Doesn't matter if it's Apple, Microsoft, or Ben & Jerry's.
OK, why does Sun think they can leave it to Apple?
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Java SE 6 For Mac OS X
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· Score: 1
Apple is responsible for providing java on OS X, not Sun, and it is so by Apple's choice
That's a little self-referential. All you're saying is that this isn't Sun's job because this isn't Sun's job. We know that, friend, we've known that for years. The problem is that Apple's support for Java has been lukewarm at best for years now, with Apple's Java generally coming late and only for the latest version of OS X... and the scope of their "OS X integration" has been scaled back as well.
My point is this: Apple really has no stake in providing Java for the Mac. They do it because there's demand for it, but it's not important to them, and while depending on them for Java on the Mac is not quite as daft as depending on Microsoft for Java on Windows proved to be, it's probably not a good idea for Sun to depend on Apple for the long term.
Which is why my message was titled "Why isn't this Sun's job?" and not "This is Sun's job".
An X11 based port from Sun would work for the interim, and possibly even shame Apple into committing the resources to completing their Cocoa port. It would also produce a port that works for earlier versions of OS X.
If they were simple to implement, Apple wouldn't be 2 years late.
If Apple doesn't even have 1.5 working properly on Leopard, I suspect that they have other issues.
As for Apple's possible issues with competitors... it's getting to the point where the question isn't going to be Java on OSX vs Java on Red Hat, it's going to be.NET on Windows vs Mono on Red Hat. I wouldn't have believed it a few years ago, but Microsoft has managed to actually convince a critical mass of open source folks that Mono isn't the camel's nose under the tent.
Which is interesting from a historical perspective, by that I mean it tells us why Apple decided to take on the job several years ago. But it really doesn't answer the question of why the Java community isn't coming back to Sun with "look, Apple doesn't really have anything at stake here, they don't see the success of Java as important, the bastards, but whether they're bastards or not you're the ones who've got a dog in the hunt and you're the ones who've got to cover this trail."
Alternatively, the FreeBSD port of Java seems to run on Leopard:
February 14, 2008: Greg Lewis has released the fourth patchset (patchlevel 4, "Mach 1") for the JDK(TM) 1.6.0 software. This release now supports MacOS X Leopard and NetBSD/amd64. Information on downloading the patchset can be found at http://www.eyesbeyond.com/freebsddom/java/jdk16.html.
What's the current license situation with Java, anyway? I thought they had gone to a real open source license, but the interstitial license page for the "Mach 1" download implies otherwise. Is this something else that Sun could be doing a better job of clearing up?
Microsoft's support for Java on Windows theoretically ended in 2007, and if you want to run Java apps on Windows you go to http://www.java.com/en/index.jsp and download Java.
If you're on Linux and you want to run Java apps, you go to the same place and download an RPM.
On Solaris, of course, you go... guess where... and download Java.
Last time I installed it on FreeBSD, I used the Linux binaries in Linus emulation mode. There's a FreeBSD Java project now.
And Sun has recently announced that they'll be supporting Java on the iPhone.
But if you have a Mac, Sun tells you to bugger off and ask Apple.
I'm sure there's some good historical reason for this weird exception, but given that Sun's supporting Java on much smaller platforms than Mac OS X, wouldn't it be in Sun's interest to take on the Mac as well if whatever legacy business agreement with Apple isn't working out? If they did that, then possibly it'd even become possible to get up-to-date Java support for older versions of OS X.
How about it, Sun, are you willing to put your programmers where your mouth is?
That's a valid response to the original post. The analogy I was objecting to wasn't.
Though I do have one objection to Novell's reported announcement:
"We're not interested in suing people over Unix," Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry said. "We're not even in the Unix business anymore."
Since Linux is UNIX in every sense of the word that remains meaningful, that's hardly true.
It's kind of a real-life example of Russell's Paradox. If they do pursue UNIX copyrights but exclude Linux, they would be keeping a definition of UNIX (albeit one that has never been a particularly useful one) alive... but by abandoning that then only the functional definition of UNIX retains any meaning, and by that definition Linux quacks as loudly as anything else that implements and lives upon the traditional UNIX API...
They don't get the option of not being "in the UNIX business", they just get to pick what kind of business that is.:)
Uhm, Novell and SCO had an agreement where SCO would be the licensing agent for Unix.
What exactly they were to be the licensing agent for is one of the things that's under question.
If you go to a store and purchase the cash register, and the cashier puts the money in his pocket, that doesn't necessarily mean you get to keep the cash register.
Was "the right to sell transferrable source licenses" one of the things that SCO had the right to sell to Sun?
Well, if SCO has to pay Novell 2 million, then I guess Novell has accepted the money for the cash register. If SCO has to give it back to Sun, then Novell gets to go after Sun. If SCO gets to hang onto it, who knows?
Yeh, that was my first thought, this is a version of the exoskeleton forklift from Alien. Which is more useful, really, than the Iron Man suit, it'd be far more versatile than a forklift in a warehouse or machine shop.
Slashdot Mirror
3. You've taken a job away from an honest man and given it to a crook.
4. The other half million blokes in prison still get to rot.
Perhaps it might make more sense to attack the problems in the prison system at a lower level?
I'm surprised it's taken this long for people to catch on. I guess that the increasing level of eye candy in all desktop operating systems over the past decade has masked the fact that you don't actually need translucent windows, and if you drop back to a user interface with less overhead then you almost can't find a general purpose processor, no matter how cheap, that isn't more than powerful enough to do almost everything almost everyone actually wants from a computer.
Don't forget that the first popular computer with a GUI was running on hardware that made a Palm Pilot from 1998 look fast, and your typical "free" cellphone today has more horsepower than that.
I personally find that food and shelter costs money and as a writer of desktop applications that means I like to target a platform that has some users.
Even desktop Linux has "some users". Mac OS has *lots* of users. Not as many as Windows, but thanks to people like you there's less competition FOR those users. So you keep writing for the clumsy Windows APIs and fight it out with the other long-suffering Windows developers. That leaves more money on the table for the folks who actually care about their customers.
Their problem is that the world has changed, and what worked in 1998 simply doesn't work anymore in 2008.
Actually, Microsoft's changed a lot since 1998, though they were already setting down the road to where they are now... they introduced ActiveX in 1997, for example... they still had NT running on at least four platforms, they were still supporting more than the Win32 subsystem in NT, and while they'd moved GDI into the kernel both NT4 and the initial release of NT5 (Windows 2000) were still decent desktop operating systems. They didn't really start going round the twist until Windows XP came out.
If Microsoft in 1998 had been like Microsoft in 2008 there's no way I'd have picked the Citrix-based solution over one of the emulation schemes that were starting to show up back then.
And all that really crazy stuff came about after Ballmer became CEO in 2000.
Where do you suggest they host it? HavenCo? That's probably a bit pricey, yesno?
Perhaps he should have called it Schroeder?
Wow, a lucid post from an AC. I hope it's modded accordingly.
-1 Astroturfing?
the only potential misuse I could see is if people have a good reason to post anonymously, like whistleblowers - anyone know of any use like that?
Scientology critics?
If one of the party was not in good faith - well, they can be smacked down very hard quite easily.
Inconceivable!
It looks like CoreCodec just discovered they were not actually in good faith and are doing damage control.
I think that's what they said, yes. Their message is basically "we fucked up, sorry, we're making sure we can't fuck up that way again".
Voluntarily admitting they fucked up when they fuck up, let alone bothering to figure out how they can avoid fucking up again, is unfortunately rare enough for organizations that it's actually impressive to see one do it without having to be dragged through a lawsuit first. I don't think you're giving them enough credit.
The question as to whether a company should take part in a boycott on ethical or moral grounds is an interesting one, especially since one can argue that the board has a fiduciary duty to stockholders to act immorally or unethically in this kind of situation. How one responds to this kind of conflict of interests is definitely a test of character... and people who would stand firm in the face of such a test are unlikely to get onto a board, so I suspect that you are right: this scenario is completely unrealistic.
What browser would you recommend for people who aren't able to learn how not to be phished?
IE's right out: it's really not safe for anyone but a trained security professional, the way it asks people to make snap decisions about complex security matters all the time.
Opera, maybe. Firefox? I don't really trust it... the security model still has a path for objects inside the sandbox to request that they be installed outside the sandbox.
I suspect lynx is pretty secure.
In general, the tone of responses to this article seems to be that hotels should do as China asks, since their laws are sovereign in their country.
That wasn't my take on the tome of responses here, but of course that's subjective.
Of course not doing business there would mean effectively placing an embargo on them, which presents an alternate set of criticisms.
If it's imposed from above by the government, it's an embargo. This would be a boycott, not an embargo.
Cisco bends over for China to sell routers, and Slashdot criticizes China and Cisco and says "don't do business there".
Hotels bend over for China to rent rooms, and Slashdot criticizes China and the hotels and says "don't do business there".
What exactly is this difference that you're demanding an explanation for?
If I drive my car down the road like an asshole it doesn't make me a vehicular terrorist.
Are you the bleeding vehicular terrorist who tried to sideswipe me coming up to the tollbooth on the beltway last week?
OK, all joking aside... I agree that terms like "terrorist" are being abused, though really it's the word "war" that's the problem. The US government declares a "war on" something vague and undefiniable, and all of a sudden the constitution is tossed out of the window. Whether the opponents are labeled "terrorists" or "drug lords" the result is the same.
On the other hand, when a country engages in aggression within the borders of another country during peacetime. Didn't that used to be called an act of war? What do you do about it short of declaring war? Does it matter which of the two countries is more pro-USA?
The result is that we are in a "state of war" all the time, but the President doesn't have to go cap-in-hand to Congress for each piddling little not-really-an-invasion. I don't see that as a good thing, and it's a much bigger problem than one of the particular abuses of language that are being used to justify it.
I'm tempted to say they're raping the language but of course that's just more of the same kind of verbal warfare that... hmmm... there I go again...
On the gripping hand, I'm not the CiC of the US armed forces.
I've posted about this before, but if you buy Windows you don't know what support you're going to get. When we installed our first Windows domain servers we bought two servers and enough client licenses for our user base, and it was good. Then we upgraded from NT 3.1 to NT 3.51 and we started getting users kicked out because we didn't have enough licenses. So we called Microsoft, and they told us to make some changes to our license settings, and we did that, and EVERYONE started getting kicked out. Nobody could log in to the domain. So we called Microsoft back and they said, oh no, we'd used up the three free support calls, now we had to get a support contract, they were sorry that it was their fault they'd made things worse but they couldn't do anything about that... policy was policy, even if our whole domain was broken...
So I asked on Usenet, got the right answer, and everything was working fine the next week when someone more senior from Microsoft called VERY apologetically and saying they'd reset our calls. For all I know they're still waiting for me to make 'em... because since then I've gone for the free "you don't know what you're going to get" support FIRST and it's always come through.
That might have been a clever enough scheme that you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel, but it had this little problem... it didn't work. The only organization that really had a stake in making it work was Sun, and they abdicated that role, so it fell apart.
It's just taking longer to fall apart with Apple than it did with Microsoft.
One of the blokes from Mythbusters. And give them free rein over the gadgetry.
If you can't get them, then hell, how about Tom Hanks?
Apple vs Adobe is kind of like the Battle of Koom Valley. Whether Apple ambushed Adobe or Adobe ambushed Apple it's been going on and on all the way back to 1997 at least.
Anti-phishing? Give me a break. Apple's managed to only take three point something years to turn off the default "allow browser to do stupid things if it asks first" flag. Which sounds pretty bad, and I've been ragging on them about it since 2004, but I've been waiting for Microsoft to do something about the "allow browser to do REALLY stupid things if it asks first" function in IE for over 10 years now... and THAT doesn't even have an option to turn it off...
So on a scale of 1-10 in stupidity, Apple's lack of anti-phishing in Safari is about a 1, and Microsoft's ActiveX is about, oh, thirty thousand or so...
And if people were worried about bad behavior from companies, there's Microsoft's habit of ripping off developers, disabling people's computers by mistake, and the latest being Microsoft staking MSN music in the heart after telling people that "Plays for Sure" wasn't just a slogan...
Not to mention Vista.
Don't depend on good behavior from any company, and always ask "what have you done for us lately". Doesn't matter if it's Apple, Microsoft, or Ben & Jerry's.
Apple is responsible for providing java on OS X, not Sun, and it is so by Apple's choice
That's a little self-referential. All you're saying is that this isn't Sun's job because this isn't Sun's job. We know that, friend, we've known that for years. The problem is that Apple's support for Java has been lukewarm at best for years now, with Apple's Java generally coming late and only for the latest version of OS X... and the scope of their "OS X integration" has been scaled back as well.
My point is this: Apple really has no stake in providing Java for the Mac. They do it because there's demand for it, but it's not important to them, and while depending on them for Java on the Mac is not quite as daft as depending on Microsoft for Java on Windows proved to be, it's probably not a good idea for Sun to depend on Apple for the long term.
Which is why my message was titled "Why isn't this Sun's job?" and not "This is Sun's job".
An X11 based port from Sun would work for the interim, and possibly even shame Apple into committing the resources to completing their Cocoa port. It would also produce a port that works for earlier versions of OS X.
.NET on Windows vs Mono on Red Hat. I wouldn't have believed it a few years ago, but Microsoft has managed to actually convince a critical mass of open source folks that Mono isn't the camel's nose under the tent.
If they were simple to implement, Apple wouldn't be 2 years late.
If Apple doesn't even have 1.5 working properly on Leopard, I suspect that they have other issues.
As for Apple's possible issues with competitors... it's getting to the point where the question isn't going to be Java on OSX vs Java on Red Hat, it's going to be
Alternatively, the FreeBSD port of Java seems to run on Leopard:
What's the current license situation with Java, anyway? I thought they had gone to a real open source license, but the interstitial license page for the "Mach 1" download implies otherwise. Is this something else that Sun could be doing a better job of clearing up?
Microsoft's support for Java on Windows theoretically ended in 2007, and if you want to run Java apps on Windows you go to http://www.java.com/en/index.jsp and download Java.
If you're on Linux and you want to run Java apps, you go to the same place and download an RPM.
On Solaris, of course, you go... guess where... and download Java.
Last time I installed it on FreeBSD, I used the Linux binaries in Linus emulation mode. There's a FreeBSD Java project now.
And Sun has recently announced that they'll be supporting Java on the iPhone.
But if you have a Mac, Sun tells you to bugger off and ask Apple.
I'm sure there's some good historical reason for this weird exception, but given that Sun's supporting Java on much smaller platforms than Mac OS X, wouldn't it be in Sun's interest to take on the Mac as well if whatever legacy business agreement with Apple isn't working out? If they did that, then possibly it'd even become possible to get up-to-date Java support for older versions of OS X.
How about it, Sun, are you willing to put your programmers where your mouth is?
Got to echo many comments here... I thought slack had gone pink years ago.
Good to see them still there fighting the bloat. I'll have to see about getting some slack on a spare server somewhere...
(and y'all thought I was just a BSD pussy)
That's a valid response to the original post. The analogy I was objecting to wasn't.
:)
Though I do have one objection to Novell's reported announcement:
"We're not interested in suing people over Unix," Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry said. "We're not even in the Unix business anymore."
Since Linux is UNIX in every sense of the word that remains meaningful, that's hardly true.
It's kind of a real-life example of Russell's Paradox. If they do pursue UNIX copyrights but exclude Linux, they would be keeping a definition of UNIX (albeit one that has never been a particularly useful one) alive... but by abandoning that then only the functional definition of UNIX retains any meaning, and by that definition Linux quacks as loudly as anything else that implements and lives upon the traditional UNIX API...
They don't get the option of not being "in the UNIX business", they just get to pick what kind of business that is.
Uhm, Novell and SCO had an agreement where SCO would be the licensing agent for Unix.
What exactly they were to be the licensing agent for is one of the things that's under question.
If you go to a store and purchase the cash register, and the cashier puts the money in his pocket, that doesn't necessarily mean you get to keep the cash register.
Was "the right to sell transferrable source licenses" one of the things that SCO had the right to sell to Sun?
Well, if SCO has to pay Novell 2 million, then I guess Novell has accepted the money for the cash register. If SCO has to give it back to Sun, then Novell gets to go after Sun. If SCO gets to hang onto it, who knows?
Yeh, that was my first thought, this is a version of the exoskeleton forklift from Alien. Which is more useful, really, than the Iron Man suit, it'd be far more versatile than a forklift in a warehouse or machine shop.