Woah, now if Microsoft did something like that, Mac users would be screaming bloody murder!
Microsoft has already done this several times in the past with both products it developed internally, and products it acquired by buying other companies.
That's silly. Sure you may have to use some constructs like Yadda y = new Yadda() once in a while, but the fact is that you can very much write code that nobody would consider OOP in Java. In fact I frequently see such code written by ex C programmers who are in the process of learning Java.
Key things to watch out for are classes with names starting with Process or ending with Utilities.
They have five employees entering the data onto PC's. One of the news articles stated that it is going to take 6 months to rebuild the tax database. 2.5 man years times, say $40K per man year (salary + benefits + office space etc) comes out to about $100,000, or just about ten times the cost of that maintenance contract. And that's jsut for the tax data. There are, of course, other municipal records on that computer.
No doubt the personal computers involved are ALSO ageing, probably 386's running MS-DOS 6.1.
in regards to AIDS drugs, to those of you defending companies not giving poor people in Africa drugs at the cost of protection, I hope that you people find yourself sick with some disease and too poor to pay some greedy corporation for the cure.
Current AIDS treatments do not cure the disease, they merely prolong the life of the infected person. Given the state of society in Africa, what is the likely result of expenditures on AIDS treatment? An increasing population of infected people capable of spreading the disease, dependent on an alreaady totally overburdened health care system? Wouldn't it be much more sensible to spend the money on prevention? Along with treatment and prevention of other diseases that also ravage the populations?
The situation really is a disaster, but until there really is a cure, it isn't going to get better.
Provide all of the drugs needed at zero cost and I absolutely garantee you that it will get to the people who need it.
Current experience shows that this is not the case. Many people in Africa die from common diseases because they are unable or unwilling to travel 20 miles to a free clinic. Given the chronic nature of AIDS it is highly questionable as to whether making a drug coctail available that requires a complex dosage regimin and regular trips to a clinic for treatment will make the slightest impact in the death rates from this disease. There is even a great deal of concern that partially administered treatment programs will lead to new mutations of the disease that are resistant to current drugs.
Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.500 poor AIDS victims."
There is a great deal of question as to whether the infrastructure exists to deliver and administer the anti-AIDS drugs even if they we made available at zero cost.
We are talking about countries where the per capita health care spending is less than $10/year.
These are also the same places where other diseases that could be cured at far less cost than AIDS go uncontrolled. Malaria kills far more people than AIDS, and is far less expensive to fight. How can you make a moral case about AIDS drugs when in fact spending the money on fighting other diseases would offer greater relief from suffering with the same resources?
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Mac Linux/Adobe applications. It's not 'just a recompile'. Adobe works hard to optimize their products for a specific architecture - Altivec and SIMD play large in the ability of Adobe products to manipulate images. In addition the effectiveness of Adobe applications depends quite a bit on the quality of the hardware support - and Mac Linux is definitely not very strong in this regard.
We are not talking about a port of some simple integer based application like grep here. Adobe spends a lot of time optimizing their code at a low level. And then there is the matter of after-market support. Photoshop users are not going to move to Linix if their 3rd party plug ins aren't available.
That may be true, but you're missing the point... that the ideal location for many Win2k workstationss is behind a corporate firewall..
I am not missing any point. What counts is what is actually happening, not some kind of ideal. The fact is that W2K is conducting a DDOS attack on key internet infrastructure components becasue of a bad default configuration.
This isn't a security hole. In fact, it's more of a feature.
Hmmmm... DDNS updates could be considered to be a feature. What is definately NOT a useful feature is that they are enabled by default.
Why on earth would/should it ship differently?
Isn't that the point of the article? The fact that this feature is on by default is causing the root name servers to be flooded with 1 MILLION DDNS updates per hour. That means very simply that Microsoft's latest misplaced attempt to be featureful is resulting in what is effectively a DDOS against the root nameservers. That is a very bad thing.
Perhaps there is no correlation between speed and accident rates that anyone can point to.
However I have a problem with claims that travelling at high speeds is just as safe or safer than travelling at low speeds. Basic physics tells me that E=1/2 M V ^2. This if you are travelling at 60 mph, you have to dissipate 4x the amount of energy that you would have at 30 mph. Part of that energy will generally be adsorbed by the human bodies involved in the accident. Regardless of other factors, this basic physics is inescapable.
Then there is the issue of reaction time. The fact is that reaction time is fixed - it does not depend on speed. At a higher speed you have less time to react to a road hazard until you hit it. Period. Basic physics again.
Corelations that measure accident or fatality rates and either show or fail to show a correlation are suspect. Correlations do not establish OR disprove cause and effect. Changes in vehicle safety, road design, traffic patterns, social behaviour and so on are very much confounding, and make such correlations weak evidence indeed.
An ecosystem isn't stable if one type of organism comprises 97% of the biomass. Such an ecosystem will collapse, with the dominant organism choking on it's own waste products.
It seems to me that software that is developed with public funds should not be licensed or copyrighted at all. No GPL. No BSD. It should be public domain.
I know that this is closer to what Gates is suggesting, but it seems to me that this sort of stuff should be made freely available to all to use regardless of their application.
While Gates' motives are highly suspect, the fact is that the GPL is a license that prevents many people from using code for a particular purpose. If that code were developed using funds from general revenues, I don't think that is right.
On the other hand, I would highly encourage people writing software with private funds to license code using GPL.
California could of spent zero by going with MySQL.
MySQL is a great small database, but it really isn't up to running a state with tens of millions of citizens. Clearly something on the order of Oracle is required.
This kind of troglodytic ignorance of the value of a good interface is all too typical. Why shouldn't this stuff be easy to use? Why should soneone need to know how to construct regular expressions in order to run a web server?
I am sorry, but a good user interface accomodates users with advanced skill levels just as well as it does novices. The ZDNet article is in fact doing people a disservice when it states that the Apache configuration is hard to use. Hard to use for whom? Some paper MSCE? Or somebody who is facile with a text editor with a regular expression tool set? It is a falacy of arrogance to assume that users do not appreciate the ability to interact with their software in powerful ways. It is even more idiotic to design a tool that ultimately limits the productivity of the user far below what is possible with the mistaken design goal of making the product 'easy to use' for a novice.
The problem with these simplistic GUI interfaces is that they exclude the use of powerful tools. It is not acceptable UI design to build a UI that is easier for a novice, but when that novice gains expertise he finds that the UI is a burden or cannot accomodate his level of expertise.
Anyone who has studied OOD knows the facade design pattern MUST be accompanied by access to the underlying flexibility of the entire application. Evisceration of functionality via GUI is an NOT acceptable design.
You'll be waiting a very long time, unfortunately. Moz isn't better for a consumer, maybe for a geek... but the important thing is that for the consumer it works with every site. They don't care about HTML standards, they just want to be able to order their books, and read their hotmail knowing it will work.
If the rumors are true about AOL moving to Moz(Gecko), we are going to see some interesting times. AOL is still the largest user population, and if they ship Moz, a lot of webmasters are going to be fixing up their pages.
The problem is that there really wasn't a recession last year, which is defined by two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. The overall US economy grew 2% last year, and consumer spending was up even more. The part of the US economy that was down was business spending, which was apparently due mostly to a work-off of overly large inventories. Businesses clearly are not the major consumers of music CD's.
The decline in CD sales last year is not attributable to macro economic factors.
It's nice that they give a passing mention to the fact that the economy is sluggish in general these days.
The economy may be sluggish, but it's business spending that is down, not consumer spending, which has continued to increase. Any kind of comparison to economic trends vs. CD sales quickly shows that there is some other reason for a decline in CD sales.
I do believe (please correct me if im dead wrong here) that the recording industry gets a percentage of CD-R sales.
You are mostly wrong. The music industry does not get a cut of ordinary CD-R sales. They do get a piece of the action from music CD sales, which are probably a tiny fraction of the overall CD-R sales.
mostly that it is a from-scratch rewrite, with a particular eye on security
It will be interesting to see how this "from scratch rewrite" holds up security-wise. History has taught us that it usually takes a long time for a new code base to get the security holes wrung out.
It's only unfriendly to a person that cannot grok the advantages of text file based configuration, such as being able to copy the file to a source repository, grep it for keywords, parse it using a regular expression, etc. etc.
In reality a text file configuration is worth a million GUI config tools.
I think that the place PostgreSQL clearly falls down is when you get into larger scale applications. Where is the large scale support, third party tools, etc?
Basically, if Microsoft hadn't spent the money on legal muscle that they did, Apple would have crushed anybody trying to come out with a modern graphical desktop for Linux.
While I agree that while Apple is no friend of free software, I think it would have been quite possible for the free software community to come up with a modern look and feel that would not have been challenged by Apple. Other companies did with their products. Who knows, it may have even been better if people had been forced to innovate rather than just copying what Apple developed.
Slashdot Mirror
Woah, now if Microsoft did something like that, Mac users would be screaming bloody murder!
Microsoft has already done this several times in the past with both products it developed internally, and products it acquired by buying other companies.
Java, like Smalltalk, is a purely OO language.
That's silly. Sure you may have to use some constructs like Yadda y = new Yadda() once in a while, but the fact is that you can very much write code that nobody would consider OOP in Java. In fact I frequently see such code written by ex C programmers who are in the process of learning Java.
Key things to watch out for are classes with names starting with Process or ending with Utilities.
How much do you think it's worth?
They have five employees entering the data onto PC's. One of the news articles stated that it is going to take 6 months to rebuild the tax database. 2.5 man years times, say $40K per man year (salary + benefits + office space etc) comes out to about $100,000, or just about ten times the cost of that maintenance contract. And that's jsut for the tax data. There are, of course, other municipal records on that computer.
No doubt the personal computers involved are ALSO ageing, probably 386's running MS-DOS 6.1.
Those responsible should be sacked.
in regards to AIDS drugs, to those of you defending companies not giving poor people in Africa drugs at the cost of protection, I hope that you people find yourself sick with some disease and too poor to pay some greedy corporation for the cure.
Current AIDS treatments do not cure the disease, they merely prolong the life of the infected person. Given the state of society in Africa, what is the likely result of expenditures on AIDS treatment? An increasing population of infected people capable of spreading the disease, dependent on an alreaady totally overburdened health care system? Wouldn't it be much more sensible to spend the money on prevention? Along with treatment and prevention of other diseases that also ravage the populations?
The situation really is a disaster, but until there really is a cure, it isn't going to get better.
Provide all of the drugs needed at zero cost and I absolutely garantee you that it will get to the people who need it.
Current experience shows that this is not the case. Many people in Africa die from common diseases because they are unable or unwilling to travel 20 miles to a free clinic. Given the chronic nature of AIDS it is highly questionable as to whether making a drug coctail available that requires a complex dosage regimin and regular trips to a clinic for treatment will make the slightest impact in the death rates from this disease. There is even a great deal of concern that partially administered treatment programs will lead to new mutations of the disease that are resistant to current drugs.
I think he means that Adobe for Linux on the Mac would be a simple recompile of Adobe for Linux on Intel (or visa-versa)
It wouldn't be just a recompile because of the SIMD/Alitvec optimizations.
Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.500 poor AIDS victims."
There is a great deal of question as to whether the infrastructure exists to deliver and administer the anti-AIDS drugs even if they we made available at zero cost.
We are talking about countries where the per capita health care spending is less than $10/year.
These are also the same places where other diseases that could be cured at far less cost than AIDS go uncontrolled. Malaria kills far more people than AIDS, and is far less expensive to fight. How can you make a moral case about AIDS drugs when in fact spending the money on fighting other diseases would offer greater relief from suffering with the same resources?
Isn't it basically just a recompile for them?
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Mac Linux/Adobe applications. It's not 'just a recompile'. Adobe works hard to optimize their products for a specific architecture - Altivec and SIMD play large in the ability of Adobe products to manipulate images. In addition the effectiveness of Adobe applications depends quite a bit on the quality of the hardware support - and Mac Linux is definitely not very strong in this regard.
We are not talking about a port of some simple integer based application like grep here. Adobe spends a lot of time optimizing their code at a low level. And then there is the matter of after-market support. Photoshop users are not going to move to Linix if their 3rd party plug ins aren't available.
Given a choice between styrofoam or mercury and cadium, I'd take styrofoam
Yeah, Minimata disease (mercury) and "itai-itai (cadmium) are horrible diseases.
Don't forget the lead either - the glass in monitors is up to 40% lead.
Spent computers really are bad news environmentally.
That may be true, but you're missing the point... that the ideal location for many Win2k workstationss is behind a corporate firewall..
I am not missing any point. What counts is what is actually happening, not some kind of ideal. The fact is that W2K is conducting a DDOS attack on key internet infrastructure components becasue of a bad default configuration.
This isn't a security hole. In fact, it's more of a feature.
Hmmmm... DDNS updates could be considered to be a feature. What is definately NOT a useful feature is that they are enabled by default.
Why on earth would/should it ship differently?
Isn't that the point of the article? The fact that this feature is on by default is causing the root name servers to be flooded with 1 MILLION DDNS updates per hour. That means very simply that Microsoft's latest misplaced attempt to be featureful is resulting in what is effectively a DDOS against the root nameservers. That is a very bad thing.
Perhaps there is no correlation between speed and accident rates that anyone can point to.
However I have a problem with claims that travelling at high speeds is just as safe or safer than travelling at low speeds. Basic physics tells me that E=1/2 M V ^2. This if you are travelling at 60 mph, you have to dissipate 4x the amount of energy that you would have at 30 mph. Part of that energy will generally be adsorbed by the human bodies involved in the accident. Regardless of other factors, this basic physics is inescapable.
Then there is the issue of reaction time. The fact is that reaction time is fixed - it does not depend on speed. At a higher speed you have less time to react to a road hazard until you hit it. Period. Basic physics again.
Corelations that measure accident or fatality rates and either show or fail to show a correlation are suspect. Correlations do not establish OR disprove cause and effect. Changes in vehicle safety, road design, traffic patterns, social behaviour and so on are very much confounding, and make such correlations weak evidence indeed.
An ecosystem isn't stable if one type of organism comprises 97% of the biomass. Such an ecosystem will collapse, with the dominant organism choking on it's own waste products.
Be careful - this sort of article might lead to designers replacing text with .jpg images of the text.
DAMN! TOO LATE!
It seems to me that software that is developed with public funds should not be licensed or copyrighted at all. No GPL. No BSD. It should be public domain.
I know that this is closer to what Gates is suggesting, but it seems to me that this sort of stuff should be made freely available to all to use regardless of their application.
While Gates' motives are highly suspect, the fact is that the GPL is a license that prevents many people from using code for a particular purpose. If that code were developed using funds from general revenues, I don't think that is right.
On the other hand, I would highly encourage people writing software with private funds to license code using GPL.
California could of spent zero by going with MySQL.
MySQL is a great small database, but it really isn't up to running a state with tens of millions of citizens. Clearly something on the order of Oracle is required.
This kind of troglodytic ignorance of the value of a good interface is all too typical. Why shouldn't this stuff be easy to use? Why should soneone need to know how to construct regular expressions in order to run a web server?
I am sorry, but a good user interface accomodates users with advanced skill levels just as well as it does novices. The ZDNet article is in fact doing people a disservice when it states that the Apache configuration is hard to use. Hard to use for whom? Some paper MSCE? Or somebody who is facile with a text editor with a regular expression tool set? It is a falacy of arrogance to assume that users do not appreciate the ability to interact with their software in powerful ways. It is even more idiotic to design a tool that ultimately limits the productivity of the user far below what is possible with the mistaken design goal of making the product 'easy to use' for a novice.
The problem with these simplistic GUI interfaces is that they exclude the use of powerful tools. It is not acceptable UI design to build a UI that is easier for a novice, but when that novice gains expertise he finds that the UI is a burden or cannot accomodate his level of expertise.
Anyone who has studied OOD knows the facade design pattern MUST be accompanied by access to the underlying flexibility of the entire application. Evisceration of functionality via GUI is an NOT acceptable design.
You'll be waiting a very long time, unfortunately. Moz isn't better for a consumer, maybe for a geek... but the important thing is that for the consumer it works with every site. They don't care about HTML standards, they just want to be able to order their books, and read their hotmail knowing it will work.
If the rumors are true about AOL moving to Moz(Gecko), we are going to see some interesting times. AOL is still the largest user population, and if they ship Moz, a lot of webmasters are going to be fixing up their pages.
Me: "Miss Rosen, please repeat after me.
RECESSION! RECESSION! RECESSION! RECESSION!"
The problem is that there really wasn't a recession last year, which is defined by two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. The overall US economy grew 2% last year, and consumer spending was up even more. The part of the US economy that was down was business spending, which was apparently due mostly to a work-off of overly large inventories. Businesses clearly are not the major consumers of music CD's.
The decline in CD sales last year is not attributable to macro economic factors.
It's nice that they give a passing mention to the fact that the economy is sluggish in general these days.
The economy may be sluggish, but it's business spending that is down, not consumer spending, which has continued to increase. Any kind of comparison to economic trends vs. CD sales quickly shows that there is some other reason for a decline in CD sales.
I do believe (please correct me if im dead wrong here) that the recording industry gets a percentage of CD-R sales.
You are mostly wrong. The music industry does not get a cut of ordinary CD-R sales. They do get a piece of the action from music CD sales, which are probably a tiny fraction of the overall CD-R sales.
mostly that it is a from-scratch rewrite, with a particular eye on security
It will be interesting to see how this "from scratch rewrite" holds up security-wise. History has taught us that it usually takes a long time for a new code base to get the security holes wrung out.
It's only unfriendly to a person that cannot grok the advantages of text file based configuration, such as being able to copy the file to a source repository, grep it for keywords, parse it using a regular expression, etc. etc.
In reality a text file configuration is worth a million GUI config tools.
I think that the place PostgreSQL clearly falls down is when you get into larger scale applications. Where is the large scale support, third party tools, etc?
Basically, if Microsoft hadn't spent the money on legal muscle that they did, Apple would have crushed anybody trying to come out with a modern graphical desktop for Linux.
While I agree that while Apple is no friend of free software, I think it would have been quite possible for the free software community to come up with a modern look and feel that would not have been challenged by Apple. Other companies did with their products. Who knows, it may have even been better if people had been forced to innovate rather than just copying what Apple developed.