This might be easier to understand than CORBA, and lead to more people "getting" it and using it. That is its only real strength...but that, along with industry backing, might be enough.
Isn't that the point of interoperability standards. Critical mass is the important thing. Everything previously was too complicated to get critical mass. Maybe SOAP is too complex and XML-RPC will be the winner. But at least we get to stop trying to make IIOP and DCOM and RMI (and other FAT ASS protocols) try to get critical mass
Why do you think it would threaten Linux? It's not like Linux costs money. People will get used to XF86 and lots of other things that make it easy to transition to Linux later. Mac has always been for people who don't like to tinker, and when they DO tinker alot, it will be easy for them to move on to Linux.
Use your brain for more than spewing. How long does it take to say "move a-star to foo"? Hella lot faster than typing it. Can your puny brain consider that it would be possible for a computer to support both "move a-star to foo" and "move all files starting with a to foo"? WOW! What a novel idea!! More than one way to do the same operation!!! Or I suppose you are the kind of mentality that thinks Java is the only language you can sue to write programs..
Slowlaris is supplied by Sun. Sun makes its money by selling very expensive hardware. Why is anyone surprised that slowlaris doesn't use hardware as efficiently?!?
Are you implying the "experiment" is just a public relations stunt?!?! Well, I never! Seriously, though, what's the supporting documentation? Have they already proven that this test will succeed in 10 minute interval as planned?? Thanks!
haha! that paper is so famous, ac should not matter. Anyway, the paper describes how free software is the best way for hardware and consulting companies to make money. For example, if you give free oil changes, you make lots of money off of radiator fixes when you "accidentally" stick a screwdriver through the guy's radiator while changing the oil. Obviously free software doesn't give you an incentive to make the software run efficiently on hardware. If you are a consulting/services company, then there is no incentive to make the software easy to use, otherwise nobody would hire you to teach them... It is a very good paper...
Sorry to take issue, but this mythology that Apache as it is today was somehow a community free source victory is silly. IBM and Sun get 99% of their revenue from hardware and services. Almost none of it comes from software. Both have donated code to Apache to prop up its viability. Apache most certainly would not be a viable tool without the assistance of paid programmers from Sun or IBM. It is also common knowledge that the interest hardware vendors have put into propping up free software is simply a strategic move to bleed Microsoft's revenues.
I personally would prefer a company that was confident enough in its software to close the source and charge for it. If the coder is so desperate for customers that he has to give it away and ride the coattails of open source fever, I would be suspicious. And I would be doubly suspicious if this guy's only way to make money is to provide support. There is a financial incentive to sell complicated software, and no financial incentive at all to make the software stand on its own...
Good idea. I recommend that you make the software look as compelling as possible, but leave many hidden "land mines" where they will have to come back to you for modifications. I mean, if you do too good of a job on the software, nobody will ever ask you for modifications, and you won't make any money, right?
...to each according to his needs. I believe Karl Marx sumemd it up best. If people need your software, and you have the ability to provide, just do it. Things will balance out in the end. If you insist on playing in the Capatalist scheme of things, then you can make money off of support consulting services (as in the redhat model) or by selling hardware. If you sell hardware, of course your best bet is to make your free software use lots of CPU cycles so that you can sell more hardware. If you make money from support services, you will need to become clever at making your free software difficult to use. That way they will have to keep coming back to you for services. -David
Can you say "reflexivity"? Mister Bovine learned at Berkley that you can be kewl and impress chicks by branding yourself a revolutionary. If you make like you are standing up to some big bad establishment, thousands of groupies will flock to you and cheer you on. Apple simply says "think different," and scores of monkeys salivate, secure that they cannot be accused of failing to think independently. In today's world of sound bites and knee-jerk reflexivity, Mister Bovine will soon be forgotten for the next yound skywalker.
Hiring a company to dig up dirt on a competitor and attempt to smear their reputation publicly is really pathetic. What idiot said "Bill Gates investigates a company before he invests in it?" Where is the comparison. Anyway, this whole Gates vs. Ellison thing is something the press made up to sell papers. I have never heard Gates say the word "Ellison" and I doubt he ever has -- Ellison may be obsessed with Gates, but that sure as hell doesn't make a "rivalry". Anyway, Microsoft has no reputation left after this whole antitrust thing. Do Oracle shareholders really get value for their money by Ellison playing silly political games like this?
The ISP obviously did not prevent such bandwidth from being redirected, which might have foiled the hacker's attacks on Nike. So Nike should sue the ISP. Isn't it nice that Sun Microsystems has taught us to compete through litigation? Use competitive litigation while you can, before sun gets a patent on this innovative new business practice!
At fatbrain.com there is a site called eMatter or MightyWords that allows you to post your book in PDF format (thus cross-platform). Then people pay to download it, and you get 50% royalties automatically. Although the normal fatbrain site is only technical books, the eMatter site covers any type of book. You can generate PDF documents for free no problem, check out Adobe site. Also, if you buy a PocketPC, get the PocketPC SDK and you can publish your own books in the much nicer ClearType format for eBook, etc. (that is how stephen King and the others have published). eMatter would definitely carry your book. Then I dunno if bn.com or others would carry...
Great topics here -- I thought I was going to have to use the specs on wapforum.org to write my own; nice to know there are so many options already available..
Well, you may be wrong about M$ not suffering. While the actions that M$ took are fairly common in the software industry, their approach to slashdot attempting to squash commentary and acting like the Borg were unquestionably misguided. From a technical standpoint, M$ is no different than Sun, Oracle, or IBM in their approaches to standards. But when the company that everybody loves to hate responds in such an arrogant way on a community like slashdot, I think the damage is severe. I mean, M$ actually supported most of Kerberos while Apple had nothing -- so one could argue that M$ had better support of standards. But instead of getting Kudos for making an honest start at bringing Kerbie to people's PCs, they end up looking like the Antichrist. IMHO, the fact that they went with Kerbie at all is good, and they will be influenced to eventually make their stuff fully interoperable with UNIX (I know, I sound like the pundits claiming that constructive engagement is good for China's human rights). Now, they did not get Kerberos perfect on their first try and that may have something to do with greed, but the real damage to them is the "I hate Microsoft" dialogoue flying around groups like this everywhere. Do you think it is ever possible for them to win back the trust of the developer community when they do silly things like this??
Contrary to many of the memes that we slashdot-ers seem to cling to so jealously, maybe it is time we admit that this whole "movement" is more about how we want to be seen rather than what is right or realistic. For me, this realization struck particularly hard reading a recent local newspaper interview of Miguel de Icaza. In this interview, Miguel complains that Micro$oft failed to hire him, then went on to brag about how Gnome was finally a complete replica of M$ Office. After that he talked about how his company would soon be worth billions and he would be able to hire even more of his friends. Now, does it make me feel good to go to sleep at night knowing that the best of our open source rebels are content to copy what others have done and then want to get paid for it? At least Bertrand Meyer gets points for acknowledging that big blue never saw software as a threat, because they make money from hardware. This is something that most of us would do well to heed. Apache would be crap today if IBM had not dedicated full-time programming staff to improving it. The Apache XML parser is much improved by the fact that Sun Micro donated "Crimson" high-perf code. Now, when Sun and IBM get 99% of their revenues from hardware and services, but they are paying top-notch people to write free software, this whole new economy idea of free software rebels kind of breaks down. The people writing the good software are getting paid! Just because companies give it away in order to bleed competitors whose revenue streams are dependent on software does not mean that anyone is changing the world. When we are young and hot-blooded and don't get paid too much due to inexperience, it feels good and hip to feel like we are part of this rebel movement that is changing the world. I write software that is always sold as part of the hardware (chip design is really just software programming). Luckily, most people don't believe in free software so much that they give away chip designs for free. That means I can feed myself. I enjoy sharing new Linux source with friends and showing off my skills as much as the next guy, but as long as we all believe that this is the only way for programmers to work, we're going to have charismatic folks like Miguel taking our skills for free just long enough to get himself a fat IPO..
I think you all miss the point by thinking the translator is the hard part. You can convert just about any EDI format (flat file, XML, or other) just using a well-constructed XSLT transform. Yes, virginia, XSLT will transform flatfiles, too! The part that is hardest, IMO, is getting the standards cartels to tell you what their particular format is. You should start a "free standards" movement to get these people to describe their formats in a machine-readable format and make it freely available instead of charging thousands like they do now. If the standards are available, any idiot can write a translator, and many will. Starting a free-standards movement might be a waste of time, though. Look at http://www.biztalk.org if you want to see one attempt. oasis is another. The problem is, you need to get EDIFACT, X12, and all of the other cartels to provide the standards they use for free if you want this to work. IMO, you should be applying your pressure within your company to use only EDI formats that are freely and publicly available. After that, it is trivial to write your own translator or buy one off the shelf..
Contrasting EDI and XML as if there is a difference shows a lack of understanding. EDI can be done using XML (many companies do) *or* using flatfile formats like X12 or EDIFACT. Of course XML is nicer than flatfiles for input, but that is fairly irrelevant. GM, Walmart, and others will still require flat files for awhile, people coming on board today all use XML formats now. Even with flat files though, it was common to need to translate between flat file formats (for example, P&G would send a version x PO to WalMart, who needed a version y.) As far as the business is concerned, the EDI package should be able to handle whatever EDI format they want
I have embarked on this attempt to many years ago. EDI historically has used flat file fixed-width formats that were easy to process with COBOL. Any fool could write an EDI parser in those days (and this fool did). Now all EDI packages are moving to be XML based. This makes sense because XML is even easier to parse than fixed-width flat files and XML parsers are available universally. Now the problem is exactly what one other reader pointed out -- you need to tell the EDI package what the fields mean. So any person can pull out the field named "PO number" or whatever, but how do you know that the other guy didn't call it "Prchs. Nbr." The answer is that standards bodies such as ANSI X12 and EDIFACT define this. The specs are huge, and they change periodically. When I tried to get a subscription to the specs, they wanted to shaft me for big money. They also change the specs every 4-6 months, so you have to buy a subscription, and electronic format costs more (at least when I tried). I wanted to release a freeware EDI processor, but realized that those guys who charge $10,000 are probably just breaking even because of the fees they pay the standards mafia. The whole idea if oasis and biztalk.org is that they are hoping standards bodies will publish their specifications (schemas) in machine readable format for free download. Unfortunately, it looks like there is still alot of resistence and the standards mafias are attempting to control access to schemas. If products like mikula's, commerceone, biztalk, etc. all agree to work with each others schema formats, then they will be able to put pressure on the standards groups. Otherwise, if they stay fragmented then EDIFACT and all of the other industry groups will be able to play the vendors against one another and fragment the market..
Whoever said that databases can do this with standby servers what right on point. I would encourage that you think of this in terms of generic state-management. When you have non-disjoint partitions (replicas), standard state-management theory says you have two possible types of consistency; eager and lazy consistency. The fact is, most DB standby solutions are lazily consistent. Things like wolfpack clusters or shared EMC volumes on fibre could almost be considered eager consistency. DB techniques that do two-phase-commit across all volumes are also eager replication. The main issue, though, is that eager consistency is really unnecessary in most cases and defeats scalability. For your data consistency to be just a tiny bit lazy, you gain huge scalability -- purely eager consistency will always be EXPENSIVE. This is what IBM figured out at least 40 years ago, and no researcher denies it. Vendors will take advantage of you by telling you that you NEED their particular eager consistency scheme, but in reality mainframes and all other systems do fine with designs that use queued operations and other asynch. techniques. Spend $50 on a book that teaches you how to design for lazy consistency and you will save thousands or millions on hardware and customized proprietary solutions.
Yeah, I have the Mitsubishi phone -- it does quite a bit considering the service is free for unlimited access and is just part of the standard one rate plan. I am looking now for info about hacking the phone (a T250).
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that the point of interoperability standards. Critical mass is the important thing. Everything previously was too complicated to get critical mass. Maybe SOAP is too complex and XML-RPC will be the winner. But at least we get to stop trying to make IIOP and DCOM and RMI (and other FAT ASS protocols) try to get critical mass
Such a suit would definitely be elusive. How do you serve a warrant against "open source"?
So you are saying that her nasty libel was a punishment for him not talking? That sounds like blackmail.
Why do you think it would threaten Linux? It's not like Linux costs money. People will get used to XF86 and lots of other things that make it easy to transition to Linux later. Mac has always been for people who don't like to tinker, and when they DO tinker alot, it will be easy for them to move on to Linux.
Use your brain for more than spewing. How long does it take to say "move a-star to foo"? Hella lot faster than typing it. Can your puny brain consider that it would be possible for a computer to support both "move a-star to foo" and "move all files starting with a to foo"? WOW! What a novel idea!! More than one way to do the same operation!!! Or I suppose you are the kind of mentality that thinks Java is the only language you can sue to write programs..
Slowlaris is supplied by Sun. Sun makes its money by selling very expensive hardware. Why is anyone surprised that slowlaris doesn't use hardware as efficiently?!?
Are you implying the "experiment" is just a public relations stunt?!?! Well, I never! Seriously, though, what's the supporting documentation? Have they already proven that this test will succeed in 10 minute interval as planned?? Thanks!
haha! that paper is so famous, ac should not matter. Anyway, the paper describes how free software is the best way for hardware and consulting companies to make money. For example, if you give free oil changes, you make lots of money off of radiator fixes when you "accidentally" stick a screwdriver through the guy's radiator while changing the oil. Obviously free software doesn't give you an incentive to make the software run efficiently on hardware. If you are a consulting/services company, then there is no incentive to make the software easy to use, otherwise nobody would hire you to teach them... It is a very good paper...
Sorry to take issue, but this mythology that Apache as it is today was somehow a community free source victory is silly. IBM and Sun get 99% of their revenue from hardware and services. Almost none of it comes from software. Both have donated code to Apache to prop up its viability. Apache most certainly would not be a viable tool without the assistance of paid programmers from Sun or IBM. It is also common knowledge that the interest hardware vendors have put into propping up free software is simply a strategic move to bleed Microsoft's revenues.
I personally would prefer a company that was confident enough in its software to close the source and charge for it. If the coder is so desperate for customers that he has to give it away and ride the coattails of open source fever, I would be suspicious. And I would be doubly suspicious if this guy's only way to make money is to provide support. There is a financial incentive to sell complicated software, and no financial incentive at all to make the software stand on its own...
Good idea. I recommend that you make the software look as compelling as possible, but leave many hidden "land mines" where they will have to come back to you for modifications. I mean, if you do too good of a job on the software, nobody will ever ask you for modifications, and you won't make any money, right?
...to each according to his needs. I believe Karl Marx sumemd it up best. If people need your software, and you have the ability to provide, just do it. Things will balance out in the end. If you insist on playing in the Capatalist scheme of things, then you can make money off of support consulting services (as in the redhat model) or by selling hardware. If you sell hardware, of course your best bet is to make your free software use lots of CPU cycles so that you can sell more hardware. If you make money from support services, you will need to become clever at making your free software difficult to use. That way they will have to keep coming back to you for services. -David
Can you say "reflexivity"? Mister Bovine learned at Berkley that you can be kewl and impress chicks by branding yourself a revolutionary. If you make like you are standing up to some big bad establishment, thousands of groupies will flock to you and cheer you on. Apple simply says "think different," and scores of monkeys salivate, secure that they cannot be accused of failing to think independently. In today's world of sound bites and knee-jerk reflexivity, Mister Bovine will soon be forgotten for the next yound skywalker.
Hiring a company to dig up dirt on a competitor and attempt to smear their reputation publicly is really pathetic. What idiot said "Bill Gates investigates a company before he invests in it?" Where is the comparison. Anyway, this whole Gates vs. Ellison thing is something the press made up to sell papers. I have never heard Gates say the word "Ellison" and I doubt he ever has -- Ellison may be obsessed with Gates, but that sure as hell doesn't make a "rivalry". Anyway, Microsoft has no reputation left after this whole antitrust thing. Do Oracle shareholders really get value for their money by Ellison playing silly political games like this?
The ISP obviously did not prevent such bandwidth from being redirected, which might have foiled the hacker's attacks on Nike. So Nike should sue the ISP. Isn't it nice that Sun Microsystems has taught us to compete through litigation? Use competitive litigation while you can, before sun gets a patent on this innovative new business practice!
At fatbrain.com there is a site called eMatter or MightyWords that allows you to post your book in PDF format (thus cross-platform). Then people pay to download it, and you get 50% royalties automatically. Although the normal fatbrain site is only technical books, the eMatter site covers any type of book. You can generate PDF documents for free no problem, check out Adobe site. Also, if you buy a PocketPC, get the PocketPC SDK and you can publish your own books in the much nicer ClearType format for eBook, etc. (that is how stephen King and the others have published). eMatter would definitely carry your book. Then I dunno if bn.com or others would carry...
Great topics here -- I thought I was going to have to use the specs on wapforum.org to write my own; nice to know there are so many options already available..
Well, you may be wrong about M$ not suffering. While the actions that M$ took are fairly common in the software industry, their approach to slashdot attempting to squash commentary and acting like the Borg were unquestionably misguided. From a technical standpoint, M$ is no different than Sun, Oracle, or IBM in their approaches to standards. But when the company that everybody loves to hate responds in such an arrogant way on a community like slashdot, I think the damage is severe. I mean, M$ actually supported most of Kerberos while Apple had nothing -- so one could argue that M$ had better support of standards. But instead of getting Kudos for making an honest start at bringing Kerbie to people's PCs, they end up looking like the Antichrist. IMHO, the fact that they went with Kerbie at all is good, and they will be influenced to eventually make their stuff fully interoperable with UNIX (I know, I sound like the pundits claiming that constructive engagement is good for China's human rights). Now, they did not get Kerberos perfect on their first try and that may have something to do with greed, but the real damage to them is the "I hate Microsoft" dialogoue flying around groups like this everywhere. Do you think it is ever possible for them to win back the trust of the developer community when they do silly things like this??
Contrary to many of the memes that we slashdot-ers seem to cling to so jealously, maybe it is time we admit that this whole "movement" is more about how we want to be seen rather than what is right or realistic. For me, this realization struck particularly hard reading a recent local newspaper interview of Miguel de Icaza . In this interview, Miguel complains that Micro$oft failed to hire him, then went on to brag about how Gnome was finally a complete replica of M$ Office. After that he talked about how his company would soon be worth billions and he would be able to hire even more of his friends. Now, does it make me feel good to go to sleep at night knowing that the best of our open source rebels are content to copy what others have done and then want to get paid for it? At least Bertrand Meyer gets points for acknowledging that big blue never saw software as a threat, because they make money from hardware. This is something that most of us would do well to heed. Apache would be crap today if IBM had not dedicated full-time programming staff to improving it. The Apache XML parser is much improved by the fact that Sun Micro donated "Crimson" high-perf code. Now, when Sun and IBM get 99% of their revenues from hardware and services, but they are paying top-notch people to write free software, this whole new economy idea of free software rebels kind of breaks down. The people writing the good software are getting paid! Just because companies give it away in order to bleed competitors whose revenue streams are dependent on software does not mean that anyone is changing the world. When we are young and hot-blooded and don't get paid too much due to inexperience, it feels good and hip to feel like we are part of this rebel movement that is changing the world. I write software that is always sold as part of the hardware (chip design is really just software programming). Luckily, most people don't believe in free software so much that they give away chip designs for free. That means I can feed myself. I enjoy sharing new Linux source with friends and showing off my skills as much as the next guy, but as long as we all believe that this is the only way for programmers to work, we're going to have charismatic folks like Miguel taking our skills for free just long enough to get himself a fat IPO..
I think you all miss the point by thinking the translator is the hard part. You can convert just about any EDI format (flat file, XML, or other) just using a well-constructed XSLT transform. Yes, virginia, XSLT will transform flatfiles, too! The part that is hardest, IMO, is getting the standards cartels to tell you what their particular format is. You should start a "free standards" movement to get these people to describe their formats in a machine-readable format and make it freely available instead of charging thousands like they do now. If the standards are available, any idiot can write a translator, and many will. Starting a free-standards movement might be a waste of time, though. Look at http://www.biztalk.org if you want to see one attempt. oasis is another. The problem is, you need to get EDIFACT, X12, and all of the other cartels to provide the standards they use for free if you want this to work. IMO, you should be applying your pressure within your company to use only EDI formats that are freely and publicly available. After that, it is trivial to write your own translator or buy one off the shelf..
Contrasting EDI and XML as if there is a difference shows a lack of understanding. EDI can be done using XML (many companies do) *or* using flatfile formats like X12 or EDIFACT. Of course XML is nicer than flatfiles for input, but that is fairly irrelevant. GM, Walmart, and others will still require flat files for awhile, people coming on board today all use XML formats now. Even with flat files though, it was common to need to translate between flat file formats (for example, P&G would send a version x PO to WalMart, who needed a version y.) As far as the business is concerned, the EDI package should be able to handle whatever EDI format they want
I have embarked on this attempt to many years ago. EDI historically has used flat file fixed-width formats that were easy to process with COBOL. Any fool could write an EDI parser in those days (and this fool did). Now all EDI packages are moving to be XML based. This makes sense because XML is even easier to parse than fixed-width flat files and XML parsers are available universally. Now the problem is exactly what one other reader pointed out -- you need to tell the EDI package what the fields mean. So any person can pull out the field named "PO number" or whatever, but how do you know that the other guy didn't call it "Prchs. Nbr." The answer is that standards bodies such as ANSI X12 and EDIFACT define this. The specs are huge, and they change periodically. When I tried to get a subscription to the specs, they wanted to shaft me for big money. They also change the specs every 4-6 months, so you have to buy a subscription, and electronic format costs more (at least when I tried). I wanted to release a freeware EDI processor, but realized that those guys who charge $10,000 are probably just breaking even because of the fees they pay the standards mafia. The whole idea if oasis and biztalk.org is that they are hoping standards bodies will publish their specifications (schemas) in machine readable format for free download. Unfortunately, it looks like there is still alot of resistence and the standards mafias are attempting to control access to schemas. If products like mikula's, commerceone, biztalk, etc. all agree to work with each others schema formats, then they will be able to put pressure on the standards groups. Otherwise, if they stay fragmented then EDIFACT and all of the other industry groups will be able to play the vendors against one another and fragment the market..
Whoever said that databases can do this with standby servers what right on point. I would encourage that you think of this in terms of generic state-management. When you have non-disjoint partitions (replicas), standard state-management theory says you have two possible types of consistency; eager and lazy consistency. The fact is, most DB standby solutions are lazily consistent. Things like wolfpack clusters or shared EMC volumes on fibre could almost be considered eager consistency. DB techniques that do two-phase-commit across all volumes are also eager replication. The main issue, though, is that eager consistency is really unnecessary in most cases and defeats scalability. For your data consistency to be just a tiny bit lazy, you gain huge scalability -- purely eager consistency will always be EXPENSIVE. This is what IBM figured out at least 40 years ago, and no researcher denies it. Vendors will take advantage of you by telling you that you NEED their particular eager consistency scheme, but in reality mainframes and all other systems do fine with designs that use queued operations and other asynch. techniques. Spend $50 on a book that teaches you how to design for lazy consistency and you will save thousands or millions on hardware and customized proprietary solutions.
Yeah, I have the Mitsubishi phone -- it does quite a bit considering the service is free for unlimited access and is just part of the standard one rate plan. I am looking now for info about hacking the phone (a T250).