There is a floating point of equilibrium between monetary cost and quality/support. A certain quality of software/support is available "for free". Higher quality software/support can be gotten for payment (even open source software is better if the developers can afford do it full-time).
Microsoft is complaining about where the equilibrium point may be drifting. Microsoft is effectively saying that there is no commercial value in (some of) what they produce because you can get the equivalent for free.
This leads into the interesting hall of mirrors where it is illegal to sell a molecular fabber that can build a less constrained molecular fabber or any part thereof!
I disagree about the amount of respect professors receive (having spent over a decade in a university environment) but that is just a matter of opinion.
What is certainly true is that professors are poorly paid considering their education. The poverty stricken professor is a stock character.
If high tech workers are going to organize, the objective should be to become professionals like doctors rather than union members like autoworkers. Professionals are paid more, get more respect from society, and are more independent.
You are right. However, the high prices of these journals, which leads to the illegal copies, is the result of a peculiar market.
As we know, in the research/academic community it is "publish or perish". However, it is insufficient to publish just anywhere, you have to publish in the most prestigious journal you can in order to get more research funding. I.e., putting your paper up on the web won't work.
As a result, the journals can reject all but the finest papers (I'll leave the definition of "finest" as an exercise for the reader). The papers they do accept are not allowed to be published elsewhere (like on the web).
So, if you want to know what is going on in a technical field, you have to pay the publishing gatekeepers their pound of flesh.
Competing journals cannot come into existence because they cannot attract the requisite papers. It's a chicken and egg problem.
To recap: because of research/academic politics, the most useful information is not available for a reasonable price. Instead, people who early on maneuvered their way into a unique position to control the flow of information have enjoyed an opportunity to engage in extortion.
I think so. A few days ago I said: I expect the XBox is the precursor of something that will become a SOHO terminal that is as hard to work as a light switch.
All of the non-technical users I know want a zero-maintenance computer: no software upgrades required, no hardware upgrades required, and no backups required.
I am not saying anything about what is the right solution. I am simply observing that I know a lot of people who would like a different solution. A solution more like a telephone than a PC.
The question for us (advocates of open source and/or free software) is what will our response to.NET be?
We are definitely off-topic now but I need to say to everyone that I didn't mean to be harsh in my response to the original poster and I apologize if I came across that way.
The phrase broadcasters who are not obliged to continually chase the bottom line are more likely to come up with something creative and interesting is an assertion, not an argument. My point is that there is nothing in the original post to support the assertion, no matter how it is phrased.
There is also the slippery slope of defining terms. What do "creative" and "interesting" mean? What is creative/interesting to one person is trite/boring to another. In any case, there is no proven connection with the method of funding the production.
Therefore, nationalization produces the best programs.
The best we might be able actually deduce from the statements is that the programs that have appealed to you the most so far happen to have been the product of nationalized institutions.
<humor>
Isn't a spell checker for making sure that your incantation to raise the dead is going to work and it's a spelling checker that makes sure that you don't have typos?
</humor>
Having been a Java/CORBA advocate for the last four or five years, I am aware of JINI. What I would like to know is which Java IDE is it that allows you to browse the network seeing service providers as being just another component to be referenced, no matter what language that service is written in?
As for the problem with the plugin, as I said, it is a known and documented problem with jinstall.exe. It is "Bug Id 4393067" and is known since 28 November 2000.
You apparently overlooked the name of my company OpenSourcerers -- I am not a Microsoft advocate! However, to ignore the biggest gorilla on the block doesn't make sense, many people will be willing to use.NET.
I have no trouble viewing the.NET page in any of the browsers I have here (Links, Lynx, Opera, Netscape, and IE), perhaps it is your system?
You seem to have missed the gist of what I have been saying: I think Microsoft has concluded that the Era of the Platform is over and that we are entering the Age of the Service.
That's true, but given that you can easily snoop the network connection and that a.NET service advertises in a standard way what it can do by describing the function name, parameters, and results; then it seems to me it will not be too hard to figure out what is going on.
It is certainly true that it would be typical for Microsoft to not port.NET to other platforms but I think the game has changed and that the underlying platform is no longer relevant. The main competitor to.NET is J2EE and in both cases it is in the best interests of the advocates to hide as much of the underlying platform (Windows, Solaris, Linux, OS/390,...) as possible and to focus on universal acceptance.
When you consider that.NET uses SOAP when accessing remote services, it seems pretty clear that how to implement the interface to.NET will be hard to keep secret. Also, the Common Language Infrastructure has been submitted to ECMA as a proposed standard so a lot of what's on the server will be known as well. The only place left for significant value is in what the service provides. Here the deep pockets of Microsoft et alia give them a serious competitive advantage over a talented developer in his "garage".
It also solves those pesky licensing and reverse-engineering problems too.:-)
The problem for most people is this: they buy a system then install whatever they need for the next 18 months.
Then they find they want/need some new application which requires a newer version of the operating system or a more powerful CPU. At this point they are out of luck. They don't know how to upgrade, they've never done a back up, and quite possibly they need more powerful hardware anyway.
These are the people who would much rather pay an extra $10 or $20 a month to the cable company to get access to all the latest software with never a worry about anything else.
X doesn't do the same job as.NET..NET allows a developer to create an application that contains different components that are supplied as services.
It is true that you can accomplish much of.NET with server-side Java but there aren't the development tools to allow things like dynamically discovering self-documenting services on the network. Also, Microsoft is working with ECMA and can claim to PHBs to be more "open" than Java.
Add to that the fact that you can trivially create projects with components made in different languages that are full peers to each other (a COBOL object can extend a C# object and the result can be invoked from Visual Basic all from inside the same IDE).
Applets are dead. Microsoft has seen to that. I recently revisited applets to see if any improvement has been made and the Java plugin fails to even install on my system. This problem is a known bug which has been known for several months. If I had to download the plugin over a dialup connection I would have been really annoyed!
I am pretty certain Microsoft will port.NET to Linux and other OSs (probably as a version a shade less than whatever is available on Microsoft platforms) because the the real battlefield has moved past that and into services.
For most users there will be no service packs or client licenses and that's the point. The only people who will have to worry about those issues will be the service providers. All the end user (individual or business) needs to worry about is "Did we pay our IT services bill?".
Go talk to any non-nerd individual or small business and ask them which they would rather have: systems and software they own but have to take care of themselves OR a service they don't have to maintain and that is accessible from anywhere, for a modest monthly fee.
I think.NET will be a resounding success and the pricing is on purpose to encourage the growth of Application Service Providers by making owning your own servers unattractive. As we know, it seems Microsoft is headed towards renting access to applications and this pricing will limit the producers of services to those who can afford the development costs, not like in the days of VB3.
Microsoft's problem is that there is no real reason to upgrade Microsoft Office or even Windows 98. The current versions do what 95%+ of people need. In order to ensure an on-going revenue stream they need to change their business model to a subscription service model where they charge you for the same application every month.
They will port.NET to other platforms because it will be the services that will be important, not the platforms. Microsoft is betting on having the best services. They have already won the office suite wars and they have been steadily accumulating the raw materials for services such as the electronic rights to images.
Without exception, all the non-technical people I know would love to have a simple on/off device that gave them access to a range of applications for a monthly fee. They hate upgrades, backups, and everything else that is not directly related to getting their work done.
Even more in favor of this are small businesses of fewer than 50 employees (to pick a number at random) because they cannot really justify the cost of a full-time IT person.
People will trust Microsoft with their personal data. People already trust their bank, their accountant, their doctor, their dentist, their lawyer, their realtor, etc. With careful marketing of image, an ASP can be a trusted entity.
As to whether or not businesses will do this, they already do. I know of an insurance company who outsources their IT to a consulting company who actually does the work on a leased IBM mainframe owned and maintained by a third company.
This will happen because it will sneak into corporations like PCs did. At first no real business would run on anything but a mainframe. Then, as PCs became accepted at home because of hobbiests and early adopters, small businesses began to use PCs because they couldn't afford "real" computers (I remember accounting packages that loaded from cassette and ran in 64K being used by small businesses). Pretty soon all companies had PCs because they couldn't afford not to, competively speaking.
Since this new approach is what Microsoft wants (remember the constant revenue stream is desired) and Microsoft controls the vast majority of the bottom end of computers (i.e., the same place that PCs snuck in to begin with) this will happen.
From Microsoft's perspective this has the additional benefit of defanging the accusation of leveraging their operating system to the detriment of others. They will now be able to claim that they operate on an ECMA standard platform and anyone can implement it.
The new consulting (services) company between Microsoft and Anderson is a sign of this as well. Those consultants will advocate spreading IT costs across time periods in nice predictable amounts rather than the current spikey model where the spikes are caused by an unwanted upgrade cycle. This will be irresistably attractive to accountants and CEOs who hate surprises in the quarter's bottom line.
I expect the XBox is the precursor of something that will become a SOHO terminal that is as hard to work as a light switch.
The big question is not "Will.NET succeed?" it's "What can advocates of free software and open source offer that is as attractive?".
People who haven't looked at.NET or who write it off as a lame alternative to Java/J2EE should look into it more and watch The Show at MSDN.
To whet your appetite: one feature is the ability to browse the web from your IDE, locate a server offering a.NET service, see all the functions and parameters that are available for accessing that service, and then include that service (complete with IntelliSense prompting in the editor) as just another component.
I agree completely that laundry lists of requirements are red flag! My response here is not meant to be argumentative. I hope to provide some insight.
My perception of ads that contain long lists of requirements is that any of the following may be true:
the ad writer doesn't know what he is talking about and is afraid he is leaving something out
the company can't even figure out what they want in a developer (How can they figure out a business?)
the ad is not for a real job, they are just collecting resumes
The other major problem with ads is failing to mention the salary. As I have moved up during my career I have observed that salaries are mentioned more often in the ad. See for yourself, you won't find nearly as many executive positions advertised as "DOE" or "competitive".
Finally, as someone in the southeast who is currently job hunting (sales engineer, 11 years of open source experience, obligatory resume), I have to say that the cost of living in Silicon Valley makes moving there nearly impossible to consider.
A developer in Atlanta can easily make $75K and a nice enough house only costs about $150K. A sales engineer typically makes a base of $90K with incentives to $150K or more. From my research, I would have to be paid something like $375K to move to Silicon Valley and maintain my life style.
I am curious, who is paying $150-250/hour for those developers? That pay rate is easily 4 times anything I have seen advertised, even for Silicon Valley.
I really liked the movie but you are absolutely right about the plot.
What would have made more sense to me would be that the humans comprise a massive bank of parallel wetware processors for achieving an objective that only the machines understand.
A genetic algorithm would be used which explains why the humans live in alternate realities: each person/society/reality is evolving towards the answer.
Given the fact that this explanation makes so much more sense (IMHO), I have to wonder if the electricity explanation is a red herring and that as the series progresses we will find out that electricity was not the reason.
Perhaps the machines are trying to determine the existence of God and will discover that the answer was right in front of them the entire time: as human beings, God in each of us and not "out there" to be discovered by machines.
This approach to firing/laying off people is pretty typical. ICL of the UK did it to all 500+ employees in North America this past October.
It wasn't quite as abrupt but it boiled down to showing up at work, being told you don't have a job; and then being told to clean out your office and leave the building.
I think the approach in the article is expected as the consensus among the ex-ICL employees was that the shutdown wasn't being done in a "professional" manner because (1) employees had been allowed into the building to be told of the lay-offs, and (2) they had been allowed back into their offices (and the network) after hearing the news.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a floating point of equilibrium between monetary cost and quality/support. A certain quality of software/support is available "for free". Higher quality software/support can be gotten for payment (even open source software is better if the developers can afford do it full-time).
Microsoft is complaining about where the equilibrium point may be drifting. Microsoft is effectively saying that there is no commercial value in (some of) what they produce because you can get the equivalent for free.
OpenSourcerers
The current Pulpit has an interesting related analysis.
OpenSourcerers
This leads into the interesting hall of mirrors where it is illegal to sell a molecular fabber that can build a less constrained molecular fabber or any part thereof!
OpenSourcerers
I disagree about the amount of respect professors receive (having spent over a decade in a university environment) but that is just a matter of opinion.
What is certainly true is that professors are poorly paid considering their education. The poverty stricken professor is a stock character.
OpenSourcerers
I would start by examining the logs to see which pages are requested the most and fix them first.
OpenSourcerers
If high tech workers are going to organize, the objective should be to become professionals like doctors rather than union members like autoworkers. Professionals are paid more, get more respect from society, and are more independent.
OpenSourcerers
I am glad to hear that the user isn't going to be paying this money... btw: where does the government get their money?
People have got to learn that the government cannot give, it can only return!
OpenSourcerers
You are right. However, the high prices of these journals, which leads to the illegal copies, is the result of a peculiar market.
As we know, in the research/academic community it is "publish or perish". However, it is insufficient to publish just anywhere, you have to publish in the most prestigious journal you can in order to get more research funding. I.e., putting your paper up on the web won't work.
As a result, the journals can reject all but the finest papers (I'll leave the definition of "finest" as an exercise for the reader). The papers they do accept are not allowed to be published elsewhere (like on the web).
So, if you want to know what is going on in a technical field, you have to pay the publishing gatekeepers their pound of flesh.
Competing journals cannot come into existence because they cannot attract the requisite papers. It's a chicken and egg problem.
To recap: because of research/academic politics, the most useful information is not available for a reasonable price. Instead, people who early on maneuvered their way into a unique position to control the flow of information have enjoyed an opportunity to engage in extortion.
They are now reaping what they have sown.
OpenSourcerers
I think so. A few days ago I said: I expect the XBox is the precursor of something that will become a SOHO terminal that is as hard to work as a light switch.
All of the non-technical users I know want a zero-maintenance computer: no software upgrades required, no hardware upgrades required, and no backups required.
I am not saying anything about what is the right solution. I am simply observing that I know a lot of people who would like a different solution. A solution more like a telephone than a PC.
The question for us (advocates of open source and/or free software) is what will our response to .NET be?
OpenSourcerers
We are definitely off-topic now but I need to say to everyone that I didn't mean to be harsh in my response to the original poster and I apologize if I came across that way.
OpenSourcerers
Now you're trolling.
OpenSourcerers
The phrase broadcasters who are not obliged to continually chase the bottom line are more likely to come up with something creative and interesting is an assertion, not an argument. My point is that there is nothing in the original post to support the assertion, no matter how it is phrased.
There is also the slippery slope of defining terms. What do "creative" and "interesting" mean? What is creative/interesting to one person is trite/boring to another. In any case, there is no proven connection with the method of funding the production.
OpenSourcerers
This point is illogical.
The best we might be able actually deduce from the statements is that the programs that have appealed to you the most so far happen to have been the product of nationalized institutions.
OpenSourcerers
<humor>
Isn't a spell checker for making sure that your incantation to raise the dead is going to work and it's a spelling checker that makes sure that you don't have typos?
</humor>
OpenSourcerers
Having been a Java/CORBA advocate for the last four or five years, I am aware of JINI. What I would like to know is which Java IDE is it that allows you to browse the network seeing service providers as being just another component to be referenced, no matter what language that service is written in?
As for the problem with the plugin, as I said, it is a known and documented problem with jinstall.exe. It is "Bug Id 4393067" and is known since 28 November 2000.
You apparently overlooked the name of my company OpenSourcerers -- I am not a Microsoft advocate! However, to ignore the biggest gorilla on the block doesn't make sense, many people will be willing to use .NET.
I have no trouble viewing the .NET page in any of the browsers I have here (Links, Lynx, Opera, Netscape, and IE), perhaps it is your system?
You seem to have missed the gist of what I have been saying: I think Microsoft has concluded that the Era of the Platform is over and that we are entering the Age of the Service.
OpenSourcerers
That's true, but given that you can easily snoop the network connection and that a .NET service advertises in a standard way what it can do by describing the function name, parameters, and results; then it seems to me it will not be too hard to figure out what is going on.
OpenSourcerers
It is certainly true that it would be typical for Microsoft to not port .NET to other platforms but I think the game has changed and that the underlying platform is no longer relevant. The main competitor to .NET is J2EE and in both cases it is in the best interests of the advocates to hide as much of the underlying platform (Windows, Solaris, Linux, OS/390,...) as possible and to focus on universal acceptance.
When you consider that .NET uses SOAP when accessing remote services, it seems pretty clear that how to implement the interface to .NET will be hard to keep secret. Also, the Common Language Infrastructure has been submitted to ECMA as a proposed standard so a lot of what's on the server will be known as well. The only place left for significant value is in what the service provides. Here the deep pockets of Microsoft et alia give them a serious competitive advantage over a talented developer in his "garage".
It also solves those pesky licensing and reverse-engineering problems too. :-)
OpenSourcerers
The problem for most people is this: they buy a system then install whatever they need for the next 18 months.
Then they find they want/need some new application which requires a newer version of the operating system or a more powerful CPU. At this point they are out of luck. They don't know how to upgrade, they've never done a back up, and quite possibly they need more powerful hardware anyway.
These are the people who would much rather pay an extra $10 or $20 a month to the cable company to get access to all the latest software with never a worry about anything else.
OpenSourcerers
X doesn't do the same job as .NET. .NET allows a developer to create an application that contains different components that are supplied as services.
It is true that you can accomplish much of .NET with server-side Java but there aren't the development tools to allow things like dynamically discovering self-documenting services on the network. Also, Microsoft is working with ECMA and can claim to PHBs to be more "open" than Java.
Add to that the fact that you can trivially create projects with components made in different languages that are full peers to each other (a COBOL object can extend a C# object and the result can be invoked from Visual Basic all from inside the same IDE).
Applets are dead. Microsoft has seen to that. I recently revisited applets to see if any improvement has been made and the Java plugin fails to even install on my system. This problem is a known bug which has been known for several months. If I had to download the plugin over a dialup connection I would have been really annoyed!
I am pretty certain Microsoft will port .NET to Linux and other OSs (probably as a version a shade less than whatever is available on Microsoft platforms) because the the real battlefield has moved past that and into services.
For most users there will be no service packs or client licenses and that's the point. The only people who will have to worry about those issues will be the service providers. All the end user (individual or business) needs to worry about is "Did we pay our IT services bill?".
Go talk to any non-nerd individual or small business and ask them which they would rather have: systems and software they own but have to take care of themselves OR a service they don't have to maintain and that is accessible from anywhere, for a modest monthly fee.
OpenSourcerers
I think .NET will be a resounding success and the pricing is on purpose to encourage the growth of Application Service Providers by making owning your own servers unattractive. As we know, it seems Microsoft is headed towards renting access to applications and this pricing will limit the producers of services to those who can afford the development costs, not like in the days of VB3.
Microsoft's problem is that there is no real reason to upgrade Microsoft Office or even Windows 98. The current versions do what 95%+ of people need. In order to ensure an on-going revenue stream they need to change their business model to a subscription service model where they charge you for the same application every month.
They will port .NET to other platforms because it will be the services that will be important, not the platforms. Microsoft is betting on having the best services. They have already won the office suite wars and they have been steadily accumulating the raw materials for services such as the electronic rights to images.
Without exception, all the non-technical people I know would love to have a simple on/off device that gave them access to a range of applications for a monthly fee. They hate upgrades, backups, and everything else that is not directly related to getting their work done.
Even more in favor of this are small businesses of fewer than 50 employees (to pick a number at random) because they cannot really justify the cost of a full-time IT person.
People will trust Microsoft with their personal data. People already trust their bank, their accountant, their doctor, their dentist, their lawyer, their realtor, etc. With careful marketing of image, an ASP can be a trusted entity.
As to whether or not businesses will do this, they already do. I know of an insurance company who outsources their IT to a consulting company who actually does the work on a leased IBM mainframe owned and maintained by a third company.
This will happen because it will sneak into corporations like PCs did. At first no real business would run on anything but a mainframe. Then, as PCs became accepted at home because of hobbiests and early adopters, small businesses began to use PCs because they couldn't afford "real" computers (I remember accounting packages that loaded from cassette and ran in 64K being used by small businesses). Pretty soon all companies had PCs because they couldn't afford not to, competively speaking.
Since this new approach is what Microsoft wants (remember the constant revenue stream is desired) and Microsoft controls the vast majority of the bottom end of computers (i.e., the same place that PCs snuck in to begin with) this will happen.
From Microsoft's perspective this has the additional benefit of defanging the accusation of leveraging their operating system to the detriment of others. They will now be able to claim that they operate on an ECMA standard platform and anyone can implement it.
The new consulting (services) company between Microsoft and Anderson is a sign of this as well. Those consultants will advocate spreading IT costs across time periods in nice predictable amounts rather than the current spikey model where the spikes are caused by an unwanted upgrade cycle. This will be irresistably attractive to accountants and CEOs who hate surprises in the quarter's bottom line.
I expect the XBox is the precursor of something that will become a SOHO terminal that is as hard to work as a light switch.
The big question is not "Will .NET succeed?" it's "What can advocates of free software and open source offer that is as attractive?".
People who haven't looked at .NET or who write it off as a lame alternative to Java/J2EE should look into it more and watch The Show at MSDN.
To whet your appetite: one feature is the ability to browse the web from your IDE, locate a server offering a .NET service, see all the functions and parameters that are available for accessing that service, and then include that service (complete with IntelliSense prompting in the editor) as just another component.
OpenSourcerers
I think they are counting roll, pitch, and yaw as three dimensions.
OpenSourcerers
I agree completely that laundry lists of requirements are red flag! My response here is not meant to be argumentative. I hope to provide some insight.
My perception of ads that contain long lists of requirements is that any of the following may be true:
The other major problem with ads is failing to mention the salary. As I have moved up during my career I have observed that salaries are mentioned more often in the ad. See for yourself, you won't find nearly as many executive positions advertised as "DOE" or "competitive".
Finally, as someone in the southeast who is currently job hunting (sales engineer, 11 years of open source experience, obligatory resume), I have to say that the cost of living in Silicon Valley makes moving there nearly impossible to consider.
A developer in Atlanta can easily make $75K and a nice enough house only costs about $150K. A sales engineer typically makes a base of $90K with incentives to $150K or more. From my research, I would have to be paid something like $375K to move to Silicon Valley and maintain my life style.
OpenSourcerers
I am curious, who is paying $150-250/hour for those developers? That pay rate is easily 4 times anything I have seen advertised, even for Silicon Valley.
OpenSourcerers
I really liked the movie but you are absolutely right about the plot.
What would have made more sense to me would be that the humans comprise a massive bank of parallel wetware processors for achieving an objective that only the machines understand.
A genetic algorithm would be used which explains why the humans live in alternate realities: each person/society/reality is evolving towards the answer.
Given the fact that this explanation makes so much more sense (IMHO), I have to wonder if the electricity explanation is a red herring and that as the series progresses we will find out that electricity was not the reason.
Perhaps the machines are trying to determine the existence of God and will discover that the answer was right in front of them the entire time: as human beings, God in each of us and not "out there" to be discovered by machines.
OpenSourcerers
This approach to firing/laying off people is pretty typical. ICL of the UK did it to all 500+ employees in North America this past October.
It wasn't quite as abrupt but it boiled down to showing up at work, being told you don't have a job; and then being told to clean out your office and leave the building.
I think the approach in the article is expected as the consensus among the ex-ICL employees was that the shutdown wasn't being done in a "professional" manner because (1) employees had been allowed into the building to be told of the lay-offs, and (2) they had been allowed back into their offices (and the network) after hearing the news.
OpenSourcerers