Re:So let me get this straight...
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 2
And you think that Dow's right here?
Yes, I do. The waste was not delivered to Dow as a corporation in some abstract sense - it wss delivered to a bunch of poor working stiffs trying to make a living. The fact that they work for Dow does NOT make them a free target for an assualt like this.
Re:Whither Globalization?
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
American politicians today who scream about Iraq gassing its own people should take a look at this.
A negligent American company releases poisonous gases in a third-world country and kills or injures tens of thousands of (dark-skinned) people. You would think the world would be outraged.
Your comparison between Carbide and Hussein is morally bankrupt.
There is a very large difference between the negligence (if there was actual negligence) of Carbide and murderous intent of Saddam Hussein to commit genocide. Carbide certainly did NOT go out and say 'let's kill off a bunch of folks using MIC to cut down on these local protests'.
There is also the fact that the UCarbide plant in West Va, had problems with MIC accidents as well. The concept that Carbide was doing anything in India because it felt that Indians were less worthy than Americans is speculative, to say the least.
UC does bear a great deal of responsibility for what happened in India. But it was not genocide, murder, chemical warefare or any other such act. It was an unintended industrial accident of unprecidented impact.
Maybe UC was negligent in it's operations of the Bhopal plant - but the fact is that best practice standards then and now are two very different things. And the fact is that ultimately that local management of a chemical plant is in the best position to address safety issues. That local management must share a great deal of the responsibility for what happened, including ultimately the leaky valve that was the immediate cause of the accident. That local management was Indian.
I don't see any reason why mass murderers should be allowed to hide behind something as trivial as copyright laws to protect them from having their actions brought to larger attention.
In what regard are these mass murderers? Certainly Dow had no involvement with or ability to alter the circumstances involving Bhopal befire the fact. And to be honest I really doubt that there are any people that were involved with the Bhopal incident still with UC at the time of its acquisition by Dow.
If you are talking about some form of corporate responsibility, well, yes. Certainly the UC of 1984 was responsible for this disaster. And they paid the price for it, both financial and in the courts of public opinion. Dow must continue to assume the liabilities associated with this as a corporation because of their acquisition of UC.
As for murder, I have my doubts that it applies in this case. Murder involves intent to kill somebody. Nobody has any evidence that anyone at UC said 'let's kill off a bunch of folks in India'. Calling this murder really shows that you have no interest in presenting the facts fairly.
Re:USA - the world's biggest polluter. So what's n
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Per capita, Americans use more energy, more oil, more gas than any other nation in the world.
That sort of automatically follows from the fact that America has the highest GDP and GDP/capita, doesn't it?
Personally I agree with you that the US should be doing a lot more to control it's greenhouse gas emissions. But tirades that ignore the fact that there are other sources of pullution in this world, and in fact the US is not doing that badly in terms of pullution per GDP do little to address the overall problem.
If you look at statistics like pollution / GDP, which is a much more indicitive measure of how a society is handling pollution issues, America is not the highest in the world, and isn't even close. For example if you look at lb. of sulfur dioxide emissions per $1000 USD GDP we have the following as the top polluters.
Poland Greece Australia Canada Turkey Czech China Russia
In fact the situation with pollution in China is so bad that 8 of the 10 most polluted cities in the world are in China.
China, with a GDP equal to about 10% of the US GDP releases 13% of the world's CO2 vs. the US's 23%. That is a factor of more than 5 per GDP dollar greater than the US. At this rate, and China's rate of economic growth it is estimated that China will be the #1 CO2 emitter by the end of the decade. By 2020 China is expected to be emitting more CO2 than the US, Japan and Canada combined.
Yes, the US is the largest consumer of economic resources, and the largest polluter in the world. Be even if the US were to freeze it's CO2 emissions at 1990 levels, it would little to impact world CO2 levels or growth of those levels. That growth is coming from places outside the US. And even worse is the efficiency of that growth in terms of pollution per GDP dollar.
Given that they intend for their whole OS to be based on.NET, this means the command line may offer access to more functionality than/bin/sh offers on a UNIX platform.
And how would that be? UNIX is a file/text based OS, and all of its functionality is controlled by running shell scripts. Exactly what UNIX functionality is not available from a shell script?
something I don't think there's any Unix equivalent of yet.
Hmmm, then what might AppleScript for OS X be?
Answer:
AppleScript is an object oriented scripting langauge that is capable of controlling applications, discovery of methods using reflection, etc. It supports a variety of languages through the Open Scripting Architecture. There are hooks into the MRJ (Macintosh Java Runtime). It even supports interacting with web services in the scripting environment.
And it is here today. On OS X, clearly a flavor of UNIX.
Here is a brief blurb from Apple's developer site on one of it's capabilities:
Java Methods as AppleScript Commands
Most method calls on a Java object are available as AppleScript commands. In the dictionary displayed by the Script Editor, each Java class is listed in its own suite with an AppleScript class representing the Java class and a list of commands in that suite that correspond to the methods.
even less of a reason to switch to something else in the first place.
Microsoft shops have already adapted to Microsoft's admin tools and don't see them as a disadvantage.
What this may offer is the reverse - Microsoft wants to make it easier to switch from UNIX/Linux to Windows.
I think that those who are switching from Windows are doing so because of license costs, the new provisions of the license program, the costs associated with making sure that you are in compliance, objectionable EULA terms, security issues, issues regarding scalability and having to run many Windows servers where fewer Linux/UNIX servers would do, rebellion at the costs associated with.Net migration, and so on.
For good reason! Never plot long term stock market results on a linear scale! Always plot on a log scale to get a more realistic view of the growth rate vs. time.
This plot clearly shows the other recessions that have occurrred over the course of the century, the malaise of the 70's, the NASDAQ bubble, the crash, etc. in persepective.
Last year the company I work for got a big project around Thanksgiving. We hired several contractors to work with us on the project, and got really top people, from whom we learned a lot and improved the level of quality on all our projects. This was of course about 2 months after 9/11.
This year the same thing happened - and we found that the quality of people that were available was much lower. However they were also asking for less money. Now we are teaching our contractors.
None of my techie friends are currently out of work - I really don't know anyone who is 'entry level'. This summer I did know two people who were unemployed, a sysadmin and a Java programmer. Both found jobs within a few months. In the past I would have expected that these people would have found jobs within weeks.
I do know a fellow who says some of his friends are having a very hard time finding a job, but these are younger people with little or no experience.
According to the world bank the average per capita GDP world wide is about $7000/year. The US is near the top, true; but it's more like 32%, not 47%.
The problem that people are feeling here is that if you are unemployed and your benefits have run out (typically 6 months) your income is zero. That is not good on a very personal level, regardless of what the country is doing.
Two years ago I worked for free for two months as a web developer for a then-struggling firm - but I was rank amateur,
Sounds to me like you were essentially an intern. To me that is a reasonable way to get a start in any profession. However once you get that start, and make some financial commitments working for free is a pretty dire circumstance.
I think the delegates/events are a definite ARCHITECTURAL advantage as well as the Common Type System. The CLR is another advantage because it provides generic support for many other languages.
Well, Delegates and Events have been severely criticized by some language purists, so I don't think that you can point to them as being a clear cut advantage.
I am not sure that the CLR is an architectural advantage, either. Sure, it lets you write in a variety of languages, but does it give you the abilitiy to express something different in each language? Not really, because you are limited by the underlying model as to what you can implement. The same applies to the CTS. In fact, there is a major criticism out there that the CTS/CLR has forced every language ported to.Net to lose some major features that make that language distinctive from other languages. It's sort of a Procrustean bed. Everybody can lie down on it, but watch out! Anything that doesn't fit has to get cut off.
To be honest, I've found the CLR multi-language support to be quite annoying from another perspective. I want to write in C#, but the fact of the matter is that I've found a large percentage of code examples to be in VB.NET. This is a real PITA. To me this multilanguage thing is more like a marketing bullet point than something that is going to help me as a programmer.
Here is a prediction: In the long run software program managers are going to grow to HATE the multilanguage support in.Net. It's promulgating a raft of standards of expression where unification is important.
There are also some things in.Net that I have real problems with - the first being lack of checked exceptions. To me this is a BIG issue and will cause a lot of software reliability problems. Uncaught exceptions are the main reason that Sun is adding generics to Java 1.5 - and here we have Microsoft with.Net with a hole in it wide enough to drive a fleet through.
Sure, I think that.Net is an interesting effort. It has some innovations that may turn out to be good ideas. But architectural superior? I haven't seen any evidence that it is.
Maybe in 3-4 years when we have had a chance to digest it, and there is real experience with implementation of the standard body of design patterns on it we might have some evidence that.Net actually does have architectural advantages over Java. But I haven't seen any such evidence yet.
some features I particularly liked: delegates (and resulting event support), properties and indexers, and collection management.
I don't particularly see these as ARCHITECTURAL advantages, rather I see these as arguable syntactical advantages. And I don't agree that these are necessarily advantages. For example, let's take Properties.
Properties give you the ability to access mutators and accessors as if they were fields. Now that might seem to be an improvement, I would say that it actully muddies the syntactic distinction between fields and methods, making the code less readable. This is a bad thing IMHO.
To me an architectural advantage is a lot more fundamental; for example a something in the design that makes implementation of a certain design pattern easy. And to be honest this is something I am having difficulty with in ASP.NET. For example, ASP.NET and its framework make it very difficult to implement MVC in ASP.Net cleanly.
People authoritively claim that Microsoft will use patents to kill these efforts if they become competitive, but there is no evidence to support this paranoia, and in-fact Microsoft does not have a histroy of abusing patents in this manner
Incorrect in every regard.
Microsoft has already used patents to attack open source projects, and has also used patent licenses to attack the GPL. Microsoft's highest executives have also stated publically that they intend to use patents against certain open source projects.
Examples
- no translation of ASF, WMA and WMV files to any other format. - patent licenses granted only to non-GPL software CIFS implementations - royalty fees on file sharing extensions to SMB in Win2K and WinXP - Nasty letters to certain Linux kernel developers working on NTFS support.
The Halloween documents also mention the possibility that Microsoft may use Patents to attack OS endeavors.
We also have comments from Mr. Ballmer regarding.Net:
Responding to questions about the opening-up of the.NET framework, Ballmer announced that there would certainly be a "Common Language Runtime Implementation" for Unix, but then explained that this development would be limited to a subset, which was "intended only for academic use". Ballmer rejected speculations about support for free.NET implementationens such as Mono: "We have invested so many millions in.NET, we have so many patents on.NET, which we want to cultivate."
And we also have this:
Asked by CollabNet CTO Brian Behlendorf whether Microsoft will enforce its patents against open source projects, Mundie replied, "Yes, absolutely." An audience member pointed out that many open source projects aren't funded and so can't afford legal representation to rival Microsoft's. "Oh well," said Mundie. "Get your money, and let's go to court."
Any statement that Microsoft has not and is not likely to enforce patents in these areas is just not backed up by the history, or by public statements by MS senior executives.
There are still people who make very good money making furniture the same way it was made 200 years ago. The quality, design and aethetics of 18th century furniture has never been surpassed. Pieces from this era have sold for millions.
The issue for software professionals is that their tools are still evolving quickly. So long as computer hardware continues to increase in power rapidly (and no one knows when that will end) the potential applications for software will continue to grow. The greater the range of applicability, the harder it will be to build prepackaged components that address the need at hand.
Someday software construction will be drag and drop. But I don't see that happening for quite a while yet.
All that is happening now is a business cycle where all capital spending (including software) is way off. This happens all the time. What I've noticed is that each cycle since the wide adoption of the computer seems to come back with a stronger need for software.
If someone patented the recording and playback of a signal that can be displayed as a visual image before the VCR was invented, is the VCR really innovative?
Obviously you don't have any practical experience in this area.
If you build something innovative and patentable as an extension to somebody else's work, you own the rights to that innovation. What you still don't get is the right to commercialize that innovation if it infringes on the base technology. In the real world of IP, there are any number of practical solutions to this issue including various types of mutually beneficial cross licensing.
Bad IP laws prevent you from building on other people's work and that inhibits innovation.
Current IP laws do NOT prevent you from doing this.
Slashdot Mirror
And you think that Dow's right here?
Yes, I do. The waste was not delivered to Dow as a corporation in some abstract sense - it wss delivered to a bunch of poor working stiffs trying to make a living. The fact that they work for Dow does NOT make them a free target for an assualt like this.
American politicians today who scream about Iraq gassing its own people should take a look at this.
A negligent American company releases poisonous gases in a third-world country and kills or injures tens of thousands of (dark-skinned) people. You would think the world would be outraged.
Your comparison between Carbide and Hussein is morally bankrupt.
There is a very large difference between the negligence (if there was actual negligence) of Carbide and murderous intent of Saddam Hussein to commit genocide. Carbide certainly did NOT go out and say 'let's kill off a bunch of folks using MIC to cut down on these local protests'.
There is also the fact that the UCarbide plant in West Va, had problems with MIC accidents as well. The concept that Carbide was doing anything in India because it felt that Indians were less worthy than Americans is speculative, to say the least.
UC does bear a great deal of responsibility for what happened in India. But it was not genocide, murder, chemical warefare or any other such act. It was an unintended industrial accident of unprecidented impact.
Maybe UC was negligent in it's operations of the Bhopal plant - but the fact is that best practice standards then and now are two very different things. And the fact is that ultimately that local management of a chemical plant is in the best position to address safety issues. That local management must share a great deal of the responsibility for what happened, including ultimately the leaky valve that was the immediate cause of the accident. That local management was Indian.
I don't see any reason why mass murderers should be allowed to hide behind something as trivial as copyright laws to protect them from having their actions brought to larger attention.
In what regard are these mass murderers? Certainly Dow had no involvement with or ability to alter the circumstances involving Bhopal befire the fact. And to be honest I really doubt that there are any people that were involved with the Bhopal incident still with UC at the time of its acquisition by Dow.
If you are talking about some form of corporate responsibility, well, yes. Certainly the UC of 1984 was responsible for this disaster. And they paid the price for it, both financial and in the courts of public opinion. Dow must continue to assume the liabilities associated with this as a corporation because of their acquisition of UC.
As for murder, I have my doubts that it applies in this case. Murder involves intent to kill somebody. Nobody has any evidence that anyone at UC said 'let's kill off a bunch of folks in India'. Calling this murder really shows that you have no interest in presenting the facts fairly.
Per capita, Americans use more energy, more oil, more gas than any other nation in the world.
h
That sort of automatically follows from the fact that America has the highest GDP and GDP/capita, doesn't it?
Personally I agree with you that the US should be doing a lot more to control it's greenhouse gas emissions. But tirades that ignore the fact that there are other sources of pullution in this world, and in fact the US is not doing that badly in terms of pullution per GDP do little to address the overall problem.
If you look at statistics like pollution / GDP, which is a much more indicitive measure of how a society is handling pollution issues, America is not the highest in the world, and isn't even close. For example if you look at lb. of sulfur dioxide emissions per $1000 USD GDP we have the following as the top polluters.
Poland
Greece
Australia
Canada
Turkey
Czec
China
Russia
In fact the situation with pollution in China is so bad that 8 of the 10 most polluted cities in the world are in China.
China, with a GDP equal to about 10% of the US GDP releases 13% of the world's CO2 vs. the US's 23%. That is a factor of more than 5 per GDP dollar greater than the US. At this rate, and China's rate of economic growth it is estimated that China will be the #1 CO2 emitter by the end of the decade. By 2020 China is expected to be emitting more CO2 than the US, Japan and Canada combined.
Yes, the US is the largest consumer of economic resources, and the largest polluter in the world. Be even if the US were to freeze it's CO2 emissions at 1990 levels, it would little to impact world CO2 levels or growth of those levels. That growth is coming from places outside the US. And even worse is the efficiency of that growth in terms of pollution per GDP dollar.
Well, in UNIX, if you haven't wrapped system calls in an excutable, you can't access them from the shell.
.NET run time...
I don't think that has any practical significance. UNIX has a very complete set of fine granularity binaries to support shell scripting.
where all code is written to the
UNIX solved this long ago by exposing methods from its binaries with command line options and connecting the binaries with pipes.
It would probably fizzle to become their version of AppleScript - killer application in theory, but rarely used in practice.
There will probably be some community develop around it, as in AppleScript. But the learning curve will discourage anyone else.
Most scripting languages also supply a shell. Here is one for AppleScript.
2 06 04102147364
http://www.macosxapps.com/article.php?story=200
Do you really think that BillG got to be worth $40 billion by making customers UNhappy?
Bill Gates got the opportunity to be worth $40 billion because he convinced Lotus to write 1-2-3 for MS-DOS rather than CP/M.
Given that they intend for their whole OS to be based on .NET, this means the command line may offer access to more functionality than /bin/sh offers on a UNIX platform.
And how would that be? UNIX is a file/text based OS, and all of its functionality is controlled by running shell scripts. Exactly what UNIX functionality is not available from a shell script?
something I don't think there's any Unix equivalent of yet.
Hmmm, then what might AppleScript for OS X be?
Answer:
AppleScript is an object oriented scripting langauge that is capable of controlling applications, discovery of methods using reflection, etc. It supports a variety of languages through the Open Scripting Architecture. There are hooks into the MRJ (Macintosh Java Runtime). It even supports interacting with web services in the scripting environment.
And it is here today. On OS X, clearly a flavor of UNIX.
Here is a brief blurb from Apple's developer site on one of it's capabilities:
Java Methods as AppleScript Commands
Most method calls on a Java object are available as AppleScript commands. In the dictionary displayed by the Script Editor, each Java class is listed in its own suite with an AppleScript class representing the Java class and a list of commands in that suite that correspond to the methods.
even less of a reason to switch to something else in the first place.
.Net migration, and so on.
Microsoft shops have already adapted to Microsoft's admin tools and don't see them as a disadvantage.
What this may offer is the reverse - Microsoft wants to make it easier to switch from UNIX/Linux to Windows.
I think that those who are switching from Windows are doing so because of license costs, the new provisions of the license program, the costs associated with making sure that you are in compliance, objectionable EULA terms, security issues, issues regarding scalability and having to run many Windows servers where fewer Linux/UNIX servers would do, rebellion at the costs associated with
This was one of the last holes they had to fill.
Will it be free?
You won't see this graph on CNBC very often.
s pc ,^ixic,^dji&a=v&p=s&t=my&l=on&z=l& q=l
For good reason! Never plot long term stock market results on a linear scale! Always plot on a log scale to get a more realistic view of the growth rate vs. time.
This plot clearly shows the other recessions that have occurrred over the course of the century, the malaise of the 70's, the NASDAQ bubble, the crash, etc. in persepective.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=^DJI&d=c&k=c1&c=^g
What do other slashdotters think?
Last year the company I work for got a big project around Thanksgiving. We hired several contractors to work with us on the project, and got really top people, from whom we learned a lot and improved the level of quality on all our projects. This was of course about 2 months after 9/11.
This year the same thing happened - and we found that the quality of people that were available was much lower. However they were also asking for less money. Now we are teaching our contractors.
None of my techie friends are currently out of work - I really don't know anyone who is 'entry level'. This summer I did know two people who were unemployed, a sysadmin and a Java programmer. Both found jobs within a few months. In the past I would have expected that these people would have found jobs within weeks.
I do know a fellow who says some of his friends are having a very hard time finding a job, but these are younger people with little or no experience.
According to the world bank the average per capita GDP world wide is about $7000/year. The US is near the top, true; but it's more like 32%, not 47%.
The problem that people are feeling here is that if you are unemployed and your benefits have run out (typically 6 months) your income is zero. That is not good on a very personal level, regardless of what the country is doing.
Two years ago I worked for free for two months as a web developer for a then-struggling firm - but I was rank amateur,
Sounds to me like you were essentially an intern. To me that is a reasonable way to get a start in any profession. However once you get that start, and make some financial commitments working for free is a pretty dire circumstance.
Actually there is pretty reliable evidence that there is at least frozen water on Mars. Large quantites of it, too.
e m/ odyssey_update_020301.html
What is unclear is whether or not it ever turns liquid. I say that the best policy is to be prepared and buy those bridges.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsyst
So all that money Reagan sunk into the Strategic Defense Initiative is finally going to pay off!
I think the delegates/events are a definite ARCHITECTURAL advantage as well as the Common Type System. The CLR is another advantage because it provides generic support for many other languages.
.Net to lose some major features that make that language distinctive from other languages. It's sort of a Procrustean bed. Everybody can lie down on it, but watch out! Anything that doesn't fit has to get cut off.
.Net. It's promulgating a raft of standards of expression where unification is important.
.Net that I have real problems with - the first being lack of checked exceptions. To me this is a BIG issue and will cause a lot of software reliability problems. Uncaught exceptions are the main reason that Sun is adding generics to Java 1.5 - and here we have Microsoft with .Net with a hole in it wide enough to drive a fleet through.
.Net is an interesting effort. It has some innovations that may turn out to be good ideas. But architectural superior? I haven't seen any evidence that it is.
.Net actually does have architectural advantages over Java. But I haven't seen any such evidence yet.
Well, Delegates and Events have been severely criticized by some language purists, so I don't think that you can point to them as being a clear cut advantage.
I am not sure that the CLR is an architectural advantage, either. Sure, it lets you write in a variety of languages, but does it give you the abilitiy to express something different in each language? Not really, because you are limited by the underlying model as to what you can implement. The same applies to the CTS. In fact, there is a major criticism out there that the CTS/CLR has forced every language ported to
To be honest, I've found the CLR multi-language support to be quite annoying from another perspective. I want to write in C#, but the fact of the matter is that I've found a large percentage of code examples to be in VB.NET. This is a real PITA. To me this multilanguage thing is more like a marketing bullet point than something that is going to help me as a programmer.
Here is a prediction: In the long run software program managers are going to grow to HATE the multilanguage support in
There are also some things in
Sure, I think that
Maybe in 3-4 years when we have had a chance to digest it, and there is real experience with implementation of the standard body of design patterns on it we might have some evidence that
it usually says 'judge on past projects.'
There is the clue to your answer. Hire someone who has done this sort of thing to give you an estimate.
Or you might try to go to a contractor and see if they will give you an estimate.
some features I particularly liked: delegates (and resulting event support), properties and indexers, and collection management.
I don't particularly see these as ARCHITECTURAL advantages, rather I see these as arguable syntactical advantages. And I don't agree that these are necessarily advantages. For example, let's take Properties.
Properties give you the ability to access mutators and accessors as if they were fields. Now that might seem to be an improvement, I would say that it actully muddies the syntactic distinction between fields and methods, making the code less readable. This is a bad thing IMHO.
To me an architectural advantage is a lot more fundamental; for example a something in the design that makes implementation of a certain design pattern easy. And to be honest this is something I am having difficulty with in ASP.NET. For example, ASP.NET and its framework make it very difficult to implement MVC in ASP.Net cleanly.
The only solution is for US workers to reduce their demands
Won't happen. Americans will find something else to do that pays better money.
People authoritively claim that Microsoft will use patents to kill these efforts if they become competitive, but there is no evidence to support this paranoia, and in-fact Microsoft does not have a histroy of abusing patents in this manner
.Net:
.NET framework, Ballmer announced that there would certainly be a "Common Language Runtime Implementation" for Unix, but then explained that this development would be limited to a subset, which was "intended only for academic use". Ballmer rejected speculations about support for free .NET implementationens such as Mono: "We have invested so many millions in .NET, we have so many patents on .NET, which we want to cultivate."
Incorrect in every regard.
Microsoft has already used patents to attack open source projects, and has also used patent licenses to attack the GPL. Microsoft's highest executives have also stated publically that they intend to use patents against certain open source projects.
Examples
- no translation of ASF, WMA and WMV files to any other format.
- patent licenses granted only to non-GPL software
CIFS implementations
- royalty fees on file sharing extensions to SMB in Win2K and WinXP
- Nasty letters to certain Linux kernel developers working on NTFS support.
The Halloween documents also mention the possibility that Microsoft may use Patents to attack OS endeavors.
We also have comments from Mr. Ballmer regarding
Responding to questions about the opening-up of the
And we also have this:
Asked by CollabNet CTO Brian Behlendorf whether Microsoft will enforce its patents against open source projects, Mundie replied, "Yes, absolutely." An audience member pointed out that many open source projects aren't funded and so can't afford legal representation to rival Microsoft's. "Oh well," said Mundie. "Get your money, and let's go to court."
Any statement that Microsoft has not and is not likely to enforce patents in these areas is just not backed up by the history, or by public statements by MS senior executives.
200 years ago, making furniture....
There are still people who make very good money making furniture the same way it was made 200 years ago. The quality, design and aethetics of 18th century furniture has never been surpassed. Pieces from this era have sold for millions.
The issue for software professionals is that their tools are still evolving quickly. So long as computer hardware continues to increase in power rapidly (and no one knows when that will end) the potential applications for software will continue to grow. The greater the range of applicability, the harder it will be to build prepackaged components that address the need at hand.
Someday software construction will be drag and drop. But I don't see that happening for quite a while yet.
All that is happening now is a business cycle where all capital spending (including software) is way off. This happens all the time. What I've noticed is that each cycle since the wide adoption of the computer seems to come back with a stronger need for software.
If so the next one will be a doozy.
If someone patented the recording and playback of a signal that can be displayed as a visual image before the VCR was invented, is the VCR really innovative?
Obviously you don't have any practical experience in this area.
If you build something innovative and patentable as an extension to somebody else's work, you own the rights to that innovation. What you still don't get is the right to commercialize that innovation if it infringes on the base technology. In the real world of IP, there are any number of practical solutions to this issue including various types of mutually beneficial cross licensing.
Bad IP laws prevent you from building on other people's work and that inhibits innovation.
Current IP laws do NOT prevent you from doing this.
ASP is MS proprietary and ChiliSoft never got sued, right?
Chilisoft (Now Sun One) ASP has some limitations, including lack of support for ASP 3.0 and VB objects.
Since Sun has announced that they are not going to advance Sun One ASP to ASP.NET, I think that this is a dead product.