MS bundled IE with Windows and used their near monopoly in the desktop OS market to gain a dominant position in the browser market and push Netscape (and a few other browser makers) out of business.
Who says the OS should provide nothing useful and let app makers make their money on it? Definitely not OS/X by Apple, or Android by Goggle, or any Linux distros which bundle tens of thousands of free apps that kill all commercial alternatives ranged from AV to photoshop!
There was never business for Netscape in the first place. They should know when they were developing apps on Windows, a proprietary and closed system, even though it's nowhere as hostile as iOS today.
Well-defined by design not by functionality or goal. It's pointless when you can't be sure whether your design is seriously flawed.
Which happens to us all the time because we do new types of projects every 2 years or so. My current project built on World Wind Java ended up having the core parts of WWJ re-analyzed, abandoned/replaced and partially rewritten due to very terrible rendering performance on modern hardware, which cannot be seen in prototype with small amounts of objects, plus lots of time tracking and fixing bugs inside Eclipse RCP and JavaFX.
Can it be avoided? yes, by studying the source code of all libraries used in every new projects. That would probably cost us more than the entire project itself.
fact: Internet access is a Human Right. fact: Access to clean, safe, FREE drinking water is not a Human right.
Fucked up, yes. Sounds wrong, yes. But that does not diminish that both statements are 100% absolutely true.
You cannot just go to a failed country, building a dam and treatment plants for them and expect them to keep everything running. But you can give them Internet access and they'd discover and learn how to fix everything on their own.
Not happening since Windows 7. Although it remains unresolvable if your Windows is somewhat fucked up - there is no way for manual repair or diagnosis.
Ads inside Google Maps and Google Earth could be their next step to get $$$.
Not ad banners, but useful landmarks on maps and virtual ads on virtual buildings in Google Earth - for example, they could make the virtual buildings representing paid customers larger and brighter, and prettier as well. Imagine a regular coffee drinker visit a virtual city in the morning and all of Starbucks' shops instantly pop up like the Empire State Building! Or during lunch time restaurants near your location stand taller than others to tell you where to find them (or hospitals in case of emergency, etc). It'd look awesome and probably quite useful as well.
a senior developer should at least know some basic concepts of encryption
What for? 20 years ago there was no encryption widely used anywhere. He may have learned the implementation details in college but never grasp the idea behind it or the importance, and never used it during 20 years of work.
What has he done in the 20 years? anything impressive?
They may have a better chance of making now, with Oracle pissing everybody off with their stewardship of Java. Sun Micro was considered the good guys, at least as far as Java was concerned.
You're kidding right? Sun was the asshole who delayed Java development for many years, refused to fix fundamental problems and invited other vendors to cause fragmentation.
The leading application servers were NOT made by Sun
The leading IDEs were NOT made by Sun
The leading web frameworks were NOT made by Sun
The leading application frameworks were NOT made by Sun
The leading persistence frameworks were NOT made by Sun
The de-facto GUI framework Sun made was a joke compared to Qt. It never goes beyond a textbook example because Sun refused to extend and improve it!
Sun could have made something like Android 10 years ago. They never did.
JNA (Java Native Access) does the thing which Sun should have done 20 years ago with their retarded JNI
Java still lacks simple process control and interaction with OS in general to this day.
In fact, I couldn't think of anything Sun has done right, whether to itself or anyone involved.
Sun was the stewardship of Java in their last years. Oracle is at least doing things now.
It's not they're giving up Windows. The entire PC desktop market is slowly dying and many things it did are now being done on tablets and phones and elsewhere instead.
PC will become developers' and designers' workstation and nothing else, so Microsoft is probably trying to make its development toolset as popular as possible. It's the only area which won't be affected in foreseeable future.
Can someone explain to me how iPod was better than Walkman or Zune or anything else? The early ones before iPod Touch look just as dull, even blank-and-white screen!
People who wanted music everywhere and had too much money could spend on PDAs or early smartphones like those with Symbian instead.
More population and economical growth => more demand on limited resource. If global population starts shrinking, the economics of currently rich countries would simply collapse.
Imagine a world without China and India, and one where all of them are as wasteful as Americans.
Why are they still using C to deal with network protocol? Is the performance so critical that it's worth all the troubles?
Any high school student could have written this library in Java or something higher-level, running on JVM with all the strict rules and redundant checks everywhere, and without any need of special care for nasty security issues like that (unless VM itself is faulty, but it wouldn't concern app makers).
It might end up 10x slower and consume 10x more memory - but who cares? you have 4GB RAM on phones now, and 4 cores x 2GHz CPUs!
That's bound to happen when you ask government for everything from education to health cost, retirement fund and even jobs and training.
People in 1700s didn't fight over a few jobs left - they created it. They didn't need the government to babysit them. We all do now and that's what we end up.
The result products are superior and they're done in lesser time. What else should I care about? If you want to talk about life span of the platform, all Microsoft related tech would have to be abandoned.
I'm aware of that. But SVG and Canvas only come into major browsers recently and they're not even properly hardware-accelerated yet (I wanted the level of performance you can see in Qt or WPF), let alone any UI frameworks built on top of them.
WebGL might be a better choice. Its performance even in infant stage is years ahead of anything 2D renderers have to offer. But that doesn't solve the incapability of JavaScript to handle binary data such as conversion between different text encodings or parsing office files at client side.
We used Silverlight to build enterprise apps because it's most resembling to fully-functional desktop app platform - like client-server except the server side is built on OData service with row-level access control (by SQL expression rewriting) and clients simply query everything by LINQ, maintaining maximum control over everything except authentication/authorization.
It boosts development time significantly for building apps of the same functionality and does a lot of things which HTML5/JS cannot even maturely do yet, like binary data processing and really fast graphics rendering. If you take a look at their theme resource files, you'd notice that every UI controls and cool effects in Silverlight are actually complex vector shapes to be rendered in real-time, not fake image/bitmap used in typical websites because they're too slow to do anything serious.
Slashdot Mirror
MS bundled IE with Windows and used their near monopoly in the desktop OS market to gain a dominant position in the browser market and push Netscape (and a few other browser makers) out of business.
Who says the OS should provide nothing useful and let app makers make their money on it? Definitely not OS/X by Apple, or Android by Goggle, or any Linux distros which bundle tens of thousands of free apps that kill all commercial alternatives ranged from AV to photoshop!
There was never business for Netscape in the first place. They should know when they were developing apps on Windows, a proprietary and closed system, even though it's nowhere as hostile as iOS today.
A well defined project can be estimated.
Well-defined by design not by functionality or goal. It's pointless when you can't be sure whether your design is seriously flawed.
Which happens to us all the time because we do new types of projects every 2 years or so. My current project built on World Wind Java ended up having the core parts of WWJ re-analyzed, abandoned/replaced and partially rewritten due to very terrible rendering performance on modern hardware, which cannot be seen in prototype with small amounts of objects, plus lots of time tracking and fixing bugs inside Eclipse RCP and JavaFX.
Can it be avoided? yes, by studying the source code of all libraries used in every new projects. That would probably cost us more than the entire project itself.
fact: Internet access is a Human Right.
fact: Access to clean, safe, FREE drinking water is not a Human right.
Fucked up, yes. Sounds wrong, yes. But that does not diminish that both statements are 100% absolutely true.
You cannot just go to a failed country, building a dam and treatment plants for them and expect them to keep everything running. But you can give them Internet access and they'd discover and learn how to fix everything on their own.
Not happening since Windows 7. Although it remains unresolvable if your Windows is somewhat fucked up - there is no way for manual repair or diagnosis.
Ads inside Google Maps and Google Earth could be their next step to get $$$.
Not ad banners, but useful landmarks on maps and virtual ads on virtual buildings in Google Earth - for example, they could make the virtual buildings representing paid customers larger and brighter, and prettier as well. Imagine a regular coffee drinker visit a virtual city in the morning and all of Starbucks' shops instantly pop up like the Empire State Building! Or during lunch time restaurants near your location stand taller than others to tell you where to find them (or hospitals in case of emergency, etc). It'd look awesome and probably quite useful as well.
a senior developer should at least know some basic concepts of encryption
What for? 20 years ago there was no encryption widely used anywhere. He may have learned the implementation details in college but never grasp the idea behind it or the importance, and never used it during 20 years of work.
What has he done in the 20 years? anything impressive?
What do you do with the system, seriously, other than learning Linux itself?
That's a lie. When someone says 75% less power, it's supposed to mean 75% less power for PEAK performance, running for days with zero degradation.
Underclocking to save power is cheating!
Why do you want to visit websites poping up ads in front?
They may have a better chance of making now, with Oracle pissing everybody off with their stewardship of Java. Sun Micro was considered the good guys, at least as far as Java was concerned.
You're kidding right? Sun was the asshole who delayed Java development for many years, refused to fix fundamental problems and invited other vendors to cause fragmentation.
Sun was the stewardship of Java in their last years. Oracle is at least doing things now.
> Or is this the old Microsoft with the Embrace, Extend, Eradicate mentality we're seeing here?
Isn't this standard strategy in industry? Either you're doing that or you're stupid beyond belief.
It's not they're giving up Windows. The entire PC desktop market is slowly dying and many things it did are now being done on tablets and phones and elsewhere instead.
PC will become developers' and designers' workstation and nothing else, so Microsoft is probably trying to make its development toolset as popular as possible. It's the only area which won't be affected in foreseeable future.
Worked fine if you don't mind its windows 95 look and don't use non-English input methods.
Can someone explain to me how iPod was better than Walkman or Zune or anything else? The early ones before iPod Touch look just as dull, even blank-and-white screen!
People who wanted music everywhere and had too much money could spend on PDAs or early smartphones like those with Symbian instead.
Sure. But you started polluting the earth long before Chinese could do it, like, 200 years? So now it won't be China's turn until next century.
BTW rich Chinese people are busy migrating elsewhere, soon there won't be any problem at all!
Yes? I'm willing to sacrifice all others to fix it.
We're screwed either way!
More population and economical growth => more demand on limited resource. If global population starts shrinking, the economics of currently rich countries would simply collapse.
Imagine a world without China and India, and one where all of them are as wasteful as Americans.
Why are they still using C to deal with network protocol? Is the performance so critical that it's worth all the troubles?
Any high school student could have written this library in Java or something higher-level, running on JVM with all the strict rules and redundant checks everywhere, and without any need of special care for nasty security issues like that (unless VM itself is faulty, but it wouldn't concern app makers).
It might end up 10x slower and consume 10x more memory - but who cares? you have 4GB RAM on phones now, and 4 cores x 2GHz CPUs!
That's bound to happen when you ask government for everything from education to health cost, retirement fund and even jobs and training.
People in 1700s didn't fight over a few jobs left - they created it. They didn't need the government to babysit them. We all do now and that's what we end up.
It will get worse and worse.
Jesus or Muhammad isn't your mother. You don't even know them.
They're more like Pikachu or Gandalf in LOTR movies. People who defend them should be judged insane!
Do they have better things to do?
That's sad. They just started to be a better company.
The result products are superior and they're done in lesser time. What else should I care about? If you want to talk about life span of the platform, all Microsoft related tech would have to be abandoned.
I'm aware of that. But SVG and Canvas only come into major browsers recently and they're not even properly hardware-accelerated yet (I wanted the level of performance you can see in Qt or WPF), let alone any UI frameworks built on top of them.
WebGL might be a better choice. Its performance even in infant stage is years ahead of anything 2D renderers have to offer. But that doesn't solve the incapability of JavaScript to handle binary data such as conversion between different text encodings or parsing office files at client side.
We used Silverlight to build enterprise apps because it's most resembling to fully-functional desktop app platform - like client-server except the server side is built on OData service with row-level access control (by SQL expression rewriting) and clients simply query everything by LINQ, maintaining maximum control over everything except authentication/authorization.
It boosts development time significantly for building apps of the same functionality and does a lot of things which HTML5/JS cannot even maturely do yet, like binary data processing and really fast graphics rendering. If you take a look at their theme resource files, you'd notice that every UI controls and cool effects in Silverlight are actually complex vector shapes to be rendered in real-time, not fake image/bitmap used in typical websites because they're too slow to do anything serious.
But now it's dead.....