they say somewhere in their document that no products but the simplest product cannot be split into two components. That seems like a valid claim.
I think that they have some good points about why it is not illegal to bundle two products. I also think many of the criticism MS received for bundling IE and windows is a direct result from the fact that some people for various reasons don't symphatize with MS and dislike most of their products (for varioous reasons).
The fact remains that bundling the two adds value. I.e. the resulted integrated product provides is more valuable than the two seperate products. Since building software like any business consists of adding value it makes perfect sense to integrate two products you have.
The claim that you could also achieve this with a third party product is also not correct. MS like it or not has several non standard features in IE and in the integrated OS there are several things that depend on those features and would be difficult to provide with a third party browser. The only thing you therefore can claim that MS is stimulating the use of their propietary technology. Since there is no law stating that you should comply with W3C standards that is perfectly legal.
From a business point of view it is also a smart thing to do (See latest profit figures for MS).
Those people thinking that MS stood trial for their browser integration are wrong. Sure it was part of the trial but the real issues MS misuse of their monopoly position. The way they forced customers to buy their products rather than those of competitors.
Being anti MS is easy that's probably why it's so popular these days. In my eyes they are a normal company that operate their business like all their big competitors do. In my eyes stuff like AOL and Time warner merging is much more scary than the way MS is doing business. I'm under the impression that the only reason this trial got this far is because other companies lobbied for it to happen. The DOJ is not trying to protect our interests he's just trying to score in a big case. The companies that lobbied for this case are not interested in serving our interests but are just trying to protect their market shares.
Many people blame MS for netscape's way downhill but lets face: it they were out competed by a a better product. Perhaps it wasn't such a healthy company. Especially the first generation of web users are smart enough to download and install software. They downloaded IE more often. The stuff about AOL forcing their users to use IE is bullshit because that only accounts for a few million users (on a much larger population).
Netscape had a technological edge over internet explorer until version 3. After that they've produced crap. The one thing that kept them alive is that they could run their crap on non MS operating systems while MS chose not to do so (talking about monopolies).
Mozilla isn't crap though. If it's as good as people promise it will have a chance, also on the windows platform. It will have to compete with IE on quality. If it can provide a better end user experience (end users don't know what w3c is and don't care about the standards that originate from that institute)it will gain popularity. quickly. If it doesn't it won't gain much popularity.
The latest builds of mozilla look promising and there's definately a coolness factor around the whole thing.
The whole point of this post: compete on quality not in court.
I agree with this. In fact in a way you could say they are one of the early adopters. Wordperfect was one of the first commercial products ported to linux. A lot has happened after it. To say that Corel is jumping the bandwagon now is very misleading.
Convert the demos you saw to ordinary HTML (without losing features) and you'll see the amount of communication increase since you can't do much at all on the clientside. With HTML you always have to transfer layout information since that's all you got. You can to some extent manipulate the client side DOM model but in practice you'll let the server handle more complex things like sorting data (resulting in a reload of the entire page rather than a small XSL file).
Anyway, I don't think that the bandwidth problem is caused by either HTML or XML. The real problem is the objects that are referenced like for instance gif or jpg images and that won't change I'm afraid.
I think something stable as linux is especially suitable for laptops. It's just that this stability is not used as much as it could be. There's a few things you need to be able to do on a laptop and that is suspend, reduce power consumption and dock/undock. Right now linux support for these things is less than ideal.
Rebooting is something that you shouldn't do anymore, at least not just because you are going to unplug the machine. At my work I have an NT machine. I reboot it for stability reasons every other week or so but I always feel a little guilty that it just sits there sucking energy all night. I don't shut it down though because rebooting takes too long. Why can't I just suspend it?
Now linux is stable enough to prevent a reboot. I have unix loving colleague who used to very proud of the uptime of his linux machine. he recently got a laptop and of course he's running linux. Every time he undocks the thing he has to reboot to keep the hardware working properly, that's so stupid.
It seems like a relatively simple problem to fix (I won't do any programming for it in case you are wondering).
XML will actually allow for less network trafic. The reason for this is that you will be able to manipulate an XML DOM tree on the clienside with for instance javascript. This means you won't need to contact the server for simple things like sorting a list.
A second reason you'll have less network trafic is that you don't have to put layout information in the XML files. Rather you download a separate XSL file (which can be cached). Subsequent communication consists of data only.
Microsoft has some nice demos on their site (yes I know it's propietary and all but it's there) and I think mozilla also has a few nice demos.
We don't need another data exchange format. XML is pretty adequate for more advanced stuff we have SGML.
What we do need are tools to manipulate XML. The tools for reading and writing XML are already there. What we need next is tools to transform XML documents (the standard to specify these transformation already exists: XSL).
I think there are several initiatives in this direction. (sorry I don't have any references).
Like many people I see a great future for XML but I think the coming few years will be characterized by a lot of redundant programming since everybody will individually attempt to implement more or less the same components. It would be nice to see some reusable components on the serverside.
As long as there is no standard we'll just have use our credit card. We have a standard for networking (TCP/IP), we have a few standards for mail (pop3, smtp, imap, etc.).
While I agree that not every standard is as good as it could be, having a standard means that you've got something to work with. If a standard for exchanging money is not good enough the credit card companies have to pay for it. If their losing a lot of money they'll have to fix the standard or accept their loss. It isn't their customers problem.
For that reason I'm not so afraid for bad standards. I can't stress this point enough: standardization is what made the industrial revolution happen. We'll need standardization on the internet too. Hell, the internet is all about standards. Bad standards are outcompeted (gopher) by other standards or fixed (IP).
Right now there isn't any standard for something very obvious: exchanging money. The only thing you can do is exchange credit card numbers. It's not a technical problem it's standardization problem.
Your post sounds very anarchistic. You're afraid of losing your freedom and you assume a central authority. I can't take away the first but the lack of the second thing is the whole problem. In a way the software community is way beyond the banking world in that they've recognized that it is more profitable to agree with your competitors than to compete with an incompatible 'standard' (recent example: internet messaging).
evidently you don't read very well. That executable indeed is not IE, DUHH!
I was just making the point that you only download the objects you are actually going to use.
However deranged MS' architecture may be, downloading one huge chunk of software called netscape communicator doesn't seem very smart either. It comes with all sorts of stuff you don't need or want to update straight away and there's no way you can avoid having to download it (except for getting it on cd of course).
But we weren't discussing architectures here we were discussing downloadsize. I made a point you missed it, sorry.
I don't agree with you on this. Sure absolute security is difficult but it should at least be possible to get more or less the same level of security we had before the internet (which was adequate most of the time).
For that to happen we need two things: 1 - a global standard on how to exchange money. Such a standard would need to include encryption + a protocol to establish a secure connection + a protocol to exchange the money over the connection + a secure way to allow both sides to identify each other
2 - Adequate laws to warrant the rights of both parties involved in a transaction similar to what applies to conventional ways of exchanging money and a more relaxed encryption policy of for instance the US government.
The technology to do all this has been around for a couple of years and things like this newsitem will make it more likely that banks and credit card companies will actually make this happen.
You are right as far as wintel machines are considered. It's unlikely that a newby user running windows 98 will want to go to the traumatic experience of installing new software that will basically provide them with the same functionality they already have.
However there's a whole lot of other devices outthere that are also in need of browsers, Unix workstations are only a small part of that group. PDA's & mobile phones are going to be a big thing the coming years and it already looks like they won't be running CE&IE. So guess what browser those things will run. The fact that you can run essentially the same browser as on your desktop will be great for marketing these devices
Then there's also the good old settop box that will run linux or a similar cheap OS and will also need a browser. Many ISP's are considering to provide these devices to their new customers.
I think some people have estimated that the market for non wintel browsers will explode the coming few years and mozilla will have a huge headstart there.
That's only the non wintel side. On the wintel side ISPs are going to fall in love the way they can customize the browser they ship to their customers. With mozilla they will be able to integrate their specific services into the browser. You can probably do this to some extent with IE but you don't get the source code with that.
Some statistics, Dec 1999: Internet Explorer: 78 % Netscape: 18%
There's lies, big lies and statistics. What makes me suspicious is that: A you don't provide a reference B you don't tell how these statistics were gathered C which versions these statistics apply too (ns 4.7 vs ie 5.0?)
About your comments on W2K. I might someday use it but certainly not on this machine (only 64 Mb). I once used Linux on a 486 with 8 Mb (it ran X windows too!).
I haven't heard about any features in W2K (except it's improved stability) that would make it worthwhile for me to upgrade to W2K (I only use the browser and some plugins, play quake, framemaker and Java). And since w98 is stable enough on my PC (at home) I don't really care to give it a try.
"But the *download* is about 50MB, and Microsoft doesn't provide a simple way to install a bare-bones browser."
That's bullshit too. They provide a small executable (500K or so) that allows you to select what you want installed. After that it downloads what you need. You can also choose to download everything and install it later.
"The code is already there. Some on-line science publisher could easily set this up. Question is, would the science community really like being "moderated" in this way, even if it is by their own selves?"
First, I think it would be very useful. Yet I see some problems with the existing culture around science. The current science community is dominated and led by elderly, earlier successful people. In fact the Nobel prize is usually awarded to people who did their boundary breaking work decades ago.
A democatically (a la slashdot) moderated journal would not favor those leading figures but their boundary breaking disciples (most great scientist publish their greatest work before they're 35). Yet, it is the elderly scientist who create and edit the journals. Why would they choose a formula that does not favor their own work?
Since I'm not yet 30 I like the idea of online, slashdot style moderated journals. I really hate the pace at which journals are published (it takes half a year or more to get an article published). I also dislike the general conservatism in the scientific community about things like publishing. (a few months back I actually had to send in a paper copy of an article! I'm a software engineer! I know about DTP, internet and stuff like that, why do I have to waste dead trees and stamps on somthing simple like this!).
As a counter argument to my own writing I have to admit that the baked in slowness in scientific publishing allows for better and more thorough selecting which leads to higher quality publishing. Somehow this should be compensated by better moderation.
It's the quantity over quality question we're dealing with here. Is it better to have many low quality published articles in which we have to search for meaningfull individual publiations or should we have a system where only few articles get published that are actually worthwhile reading?
I'm inclined to think that the latter option would render the same or a higher level of quality accompanied with a lot of static in the form of low quality bullshit troll/articles like we se on slashdot.
MS further demonstrated this point by porting IE to other, non MS OSes showing that the browser->OS dependence is bullshit (i.e. the OS is not an integral part of a browser).
The other dependency (the browser is an integral part of the OS) was disproved during the trial.
I hope the two will end up in different parts of the post-trial-microsofts. With the fake dependencies eliminated the two will be able to evolve seperately opening the way for making the browser dependencies standards compliant thus enabling to use any standards compliant browser rather than just internet explorer.
The integration of browser and OS on itself is quite a good idea. It's only the fact that MS decided to rely on their own standards rather than the W3C standards that bothers me.
I read an interesting article on software methodology on Martin Fowler's site (www.martinfowler.com). In this article he discusses light weight development methods and compares a few existing methods.
Basically his arguments boil down to this:
Traditional, so called heavy weight methods, are bad for creativity because they drown developers in a sea of bureaucratic documents.
No method is not good either, because in larger development teams anarchy leads nowhere.
Any method should be based on good assumptions. One of these assumptions should be that development and creativity of developers is inherently unpredictable. Therefore there is no point in building a requirement specification because by the time you have implemented, the requirements will have changed. The so called lightweight methods fowler suggests, are all iterative methods. They involve a lot of testing and frequent milestones.
The methods he discusses all follow this pattern. He even mentions open source and mozilla as examples of light weight development methods.
We already are capable of brainwashing people. It comes in many forms but basically brainwashing has taken the place of good old violence. It's much easier to make people do something by brainwashing (i.e. convincing them that they want to do it) then forcing them to do something.
Brainwashing has many names and comes in many forms: marketing, commercials, ideology, religion. Some forms are successful, some are very intrusive but mostly you don't even notice.
Religious brainwashing is commonly practiced in many cultures, Most religious people believe because they were raised by religious parents. Only a tiny percentage picks up another religion than the one taught to him/her by the parents.
Probably we all are the victim of brainwashing to some extent. Commercials work even though they are annoying. In fact some commercials work because they are annoying. Also we were all raised in a certain way. It's called culture and it never really leaves you.
During the cold war more violent and destructive ways of brainwashing were commonly practiced by both east and west. Scary methods were used to do this but those methods were just a sight effect of greater insight in how the brain works. This knowledge is also used to do good things: curing mentally ill people for instance.
I like the android example because at this point it seems the ultimate unethical thing to do. But if you think about it and drop the ethics, there are usefull applications for such technology.
I just read the story about 20% of the americans being nuts (hehe, I think this is a bit low estimation). Anyway, if I would live in a repressive society like the US, there would be a large difference between what I think and what I practice.
Some people are more courageous like the guy who said that the earth wasn't flat some 500 years ago. Was he less right just because he was the only one that came to that conclusion? I don't think so.
If people only believed what everybody else believes there would be no progress. That's why religion is essentially conservative and blocks progress.
BTW. I'm dutch and have been living in sweden for a year and must say that your post perfectly represents how the average swede thinks. I have been frequently amazed by the lack of imagination and initiative of the average swede. You all go to the dagis, grow up in a very safe and secure social system. Pancakes on thursday, falukorv on monday. It's all very predictable and boring.
Not that I hate sweden (I think its a great country), but it just struck me as ironic that the swedish word 'lagom' perfectly characterizes your post.
Ok, as long as you don't claim that these are scientific proofs it's ok with me. Just don't mix up science and religion.
The best science can do is proof that there is no proof for GOD.
To me religion is a tool that the elite in a society uses to steer the less fortunate. In any society religion is practiced by intellectuals. The sole exception is the western civilization (bad name I know) which is becoming more global. In this particular society, religion is being replaced by science. In earlier days churches housed the intellectual elite, nowadays they host a bunch of confused priests. In my home country (Holland), Catholic churches are populated by a rapidly aging staff -> they are becoming obsolete.
What you believe is irrelevant. What I write and believe is irrelevant (just opinions). I can't prove that there is no GOD but then why would I want to prove that there is one? I don't believe there is one or more specific I think the idea of a GOD like creature ruling everything is a bit strange. I can prove that pigs can't fly in a scientific way but proving that there is (no) God is different since: A - we have no defintion of God. Pardox here because the moment we define it it becomes science. B - There is no observable entity that we can relate to God. All information we have about it is secondary information.
From a scientific point of view religion is a moving target. Science merely convinces people that certain things are possible or true and religion usually accepts those facts and adapts to it. Religion says you cannot produce life. Science clones sheep. Religion counters: well, cloning is not the same as creating life.
Next century we'll engineer a bacteria, possibly even more complex organisms. Will it have a soul? Who cares, religion will probably end up making a distinction between life an what was created by man.
You can't really beat religion because it is irrational. Logics don't apply here. A religious person will counter any logic you present to him. There's no point in doing so. Intelligent people shouldn't waste their intellect on the God issue. It's unprovable and any useful argument has probably already been made.
If you live in a conservative society: pretend you're a believer, it makes life easy if you don't have to fight irrational things. If you are a believer, dream on if that's what keeps you happy. If you are a non believer, don't waste time on convincing others of your belief.
Oops, time for some self reflection. I'm wasting precious time here (time = limited resource, I only have 80 years or so). But then, I do enjoy this type of thing:)
'life' is a religious concept in the first place. When does something in a laboratory come alife? Is it when you have somehow managed to create a string of DNA? Is it when you put his string of DNA in some host cell? Is it when you get make the cell capable of replicating itself? Sure that's a complex thing to do but not impossible or improbable.
It's all chemistry to me. The only scientific definition of 'life' I can think of is large scale chemistry.
All the other is religious fluff. I'm not really worried about the religious impact of this since my only religion is science. If it can be done, it will be done and it should be done properly. In my opinion its only a matter of time before they clone/create a human like creature, and why shouldn't we allow it? I have no objections against a creature that is perfectly happy being my slave (which somehow seems the greatest fear of 'ethical' people). The word slave only has a sour taste because of the way human slaves were treated in the past. You have to pull it out of its context of the past and think of life as large scale chemistry. An android is just another tool. Sure there's no need to treat them in a cruel way but then we can built in a friendly attitude can't we?
The story of Frankenstein is not one about how horrible human creations can be but about how humans deal with something new: scared, afraid and hostile. Frankensteins monster only became a monster after he denied access to human civilization (mainly because of his appearance).
Religion for me represent the scared part of our society. Religion always question scientific achievements out of fear what it could do to society - this started when somebody claimed the earth was not flat. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making a plea for carelessly doing anything that's scientifically feasible but I don't think ethics and religion provide any real clues here.
The real, scientific questions should not be how this will potentially harm our society but how we can use this to our advantage. 'Life' (no pun intended) would be so much simpler if we could do without ethical and religious complications. Of course real life doesn't work that way and I don't think the process of putting scientific findings through a process of evaluating their impact (on society and technology) is bad. The only thing I plead for is that it is an open minded process. I don't oppose the ability to create a humanoid and use it to do labour. I may oppose specific realizations of this concept that look to much like what happened to africans in the later part of this millenium but then they are not androids in the first place.
Arguments such as "it's unnatural" or "it says here in that we shouldn't do this" are not very compelling arguments to me because I'm unaware of the difference between natural and unnatural (please don't insert your cheesy definition in a potential reply) and I only have one religion: science. I'm aware that that's a religion since it makes the minimal assumption that what we see exists as we see it. I.e. I cannot prove I don't live in a world like the Matrix but have no reason to assume that we do so I make the assumption that we don't and that what we see is what we see.
But even if you falsify this assumption (i.e. there is something out there!, BTW how could you do this without using scientific notions?) it doesn't make science less true for the world we 'live' in. Maybe it doesn't apply outside the world if there is such a thing but who cares? If we ever manage to get there the first thing we'll do is adapt our science to cover the new situation. Falsification is not a disaster for science.
"We all know that software isn't really a product, but a service - and I think the economy is waking up to that fact."
I only half agree with you on this. The way any company works is that it uses something cheap as input, adds some value to it and puts the result of that out making money over the added value. With software there's the interesting thing that part of the input (existing software) does not have any production cost. That means that when you add value to it and are competing with other companies who deliver a similar product, you can compete with those companies by not charging for the input software. That's where the GPL comes in. If you look what is GPLed these days it is mostly software that has been around in some form for years. Who pays money for just a C compiler or a yet another mouse driver or an editor? Right nobody, people are paying for IDE's, not for just a compiler (and even IDEs have to offer more than just edit/compile/debug functionality). This last example also shows that there is one short term tactic of making money over the input software: bundle it with valuable software and keep those things dependent.
MS is the classical example. DOS became a commodity, so they added windows. Word became a commodity, so they bundled it with other apps. Compilers became a commodity, so they created devstudio. All the previous became a commodity so they webenabled it.....
What happened with HP puzzles me a bit, I spend half an hour staring at the code examples they provided in the tutorial and had to conlude that there was nothing special to be found. Rather it struck me that this was probably the longest version of Hello world I've seen so far.
All the concepts used in e-speak already exists in some form. Worse, as far as I can see they are all available on top of Java (Jini, CORBA, RMI, HTTP). And what they provided also runs on top of Java!?!? Possibly the innovation is in the protocol they use for the communication but unfortunately that is only documented in the form of source code. I think this is an area where we could use a simple but elegant protocol. Setting up CORBA stuff is a bit overkill for most remote stuff and RMI only works with Java programs and DCOM is to lowlevel.
The fact that they GPLed it only confirms that they did not actually provide much new stuff here. They don't expect to make much money on licensing this software.
Interestingly I see that the new word for 'component' has become 'service'. I think this started when SUN put out Jini, suddenly anything that had an interface and was approachable over the network became a 'service' rather than a reusable component. HP is cleverly using this word now to market their stuff.
As far as I can see they reinvented reusable components and the ORB in a simplified form. I don't expect that this will go anywhere unless they make its use completely transparent. I.e. make it possible to use COM/CORBA/JavaBean components as a e-speak service. With JavaBeans I really don't want to write IDL specs, thats what we have the reflection APIs for (Voyager is an ORB that uses this to automatically hook up any java class to an ORB).
I'm highly sceptical about this, the only interesting part I was able to discover under all the marketing drool was the protocol and there's not much specific about this to be found anywhere but the gpl'd demo code.
release candidate is newspeak for beta release. MS had 3 of them with windows 2000. It is not a finished product. As I understand it, the plugin is not yet ready for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
actually they did, sort of. There's a patch/upgrade on the MS site that allows you to use CAB files as if it were normal folders.
they say somewhere in their document that no products but the simplest product cannot be split into two components. That seems like a valid claim.
I think that they have some good points about why it is not illegal to bundle two products.
I also think many of the criticism MS received for bundling IE and windows is a direct result from the fact that some people for various reasons don't symphatize with MS and dislike most of their products (for varioous reasons).
The fact remains that bundling the two adds value. I.e. the resulted integrated product provides is more valuable than the two seperate products. Since building software like any business consists of adding value it makes perfect sense to integrate two products you have.
The claim that you could also achieve this with a third party product is also not correct. MS like it or not has several non standard features in IE and in the integrated OS there are several things that depend on those features and would be difficult to provide with a third party browser. The only thing you therefore can claim that MS is stimulating the use of their propietary technology. Since there is no law stating that you should comply with W3C standards that is perfectly legal.
From a business point of view it is also a smart thing to do (See latest profit figures for MS).
Those people thinking that MS stood trial for their browser integration are wrong. Sure it was part of the trial but the real issues MS misuse of their monopoly position. The way they forced customers to buy their products rather than those of competitors.
Being anti MS is easy that's probably why it's so popular these days. In my eyes they are a normal company that operate their business like all their big competitors do. In my eyes stuff like AOL and Time warner merging is much more scary than the way MS is doing business. I'm under the impression that the only reason this trial got this far is because other companies lobbied for it to happen. The DOJ is not trying to protect our interests he's just trying to score in a big case. The companies that lobbied for this case are not interested in serving our interests but are just trying to protect their market shares.
Many people blame MS for netscape's way downhill but lets face: it they were out competed by a a better product. Perhaps it wasn't such a healthy company. Especially the first generation of web users are smart enough to download and install software. They downloaded IE more often. The stuff about AOL forcing their users to use IE is bullshit because that only accounts for a few million users (on a much larger population).
Netscape had a technological edge over internet explorer until version 3. After that they've produced crap. The one thing that kept them alive is that they could run their crap on non MS operating systems while MS chose not to do so (talking about monopolies).
Mozilla isn't crap though. If it's as good as people promise it will have a chance, also on the windows platform. It will have to compete with IE on quality. If it can provide a better end user experience (end users don't know what w3c is and don't care about the standards that originate from that institute)it will gain popularity. quickly. If it doesn't it won't gain much popularity.
The latest builds of mozilla look promising and there's definately a coolness factor around the whole thing.
The whole point of this post: compete on quality not in court.
I think one of the microsoft millionaires retired to search for stuff like this. Might be something for him.
Or you can give your dog something to chew on.
I agree with this. In fact in a way you could say they are one of the early adopters. Wordperfect was one of the first commercial products ported to linux. A lot has happened after it. To say that Corel is jumping the bandwagon now is very misleading.
Convert the demos you saw to ordinary HTML (without losing features) and you'll see the amount of communication increase since you can't do much at all on the clientside. With HTML you always have to transfer layout information since that's all you got. You can to some extent manipulate the client side DOM model but in practice you'll let the server handle more complex things like sorting data (resulting in a reload of the entire page rather than a small XSL file).
Anyway, I don't think that the bandwidth problem is caused by either HTML or XML. The real problem is the objects that are referenced like for instance gif or jpg images and that won't change I'm afraid.
I think something stable as linux is especially suitable for laptops. It's just that this stability is not used as much as it could be. There's a few things you need to be able to do on a laptop and that is suspend, reduce power consumption and dock/undock. Right now linux support for these things is less than ideal.
Rebooting is something that you shouldn't do anymore, at least not just because you are going to unplug the machine. At my work I have an NT machine. I reboot it for stability reasons every other week or so but I always feel a little guilty that it just sits there sucking energy all night. I don't shut it down though because rebooting takes too long. Why can't I just suspend it?
Now linux is stable enough to prevent a reboot. I have unix loving colleague who used to very proud of the uptime of his linux machine. he recently got a laptop and of course he's running linux. Every time he undocks the thing he has to reboot to keep the hardware working properly, that's so stupid.
It seems like a relatively simple problem to fix (I won't do any programming for it in case you are wondering).
XML will actually allow for less network trafic. The reason for this is that you will be able to manipulate an XML DOM tree on the clienside with for instance javascript. This means you won't need to contact the server for simple things like sorting a list.
A second reason you'll have less network trafic is that you don't have to put layout information in the XML files. Rather you download a separate XSL file (which can be cached). Subsequent communication consists of data only.
Microsoft has some nice demos on their site (yes I know it's propietary and all but it's there) and I think mozilla also has a few nice demos.
We don't need another data exchange format. XML is pretty adequate for more advanced stuff we have SGML.
What we do need are tools to manipulate XML. The tools for reading and writing XML are already there. What we need next is tools to transform XML documents (the standard to specify these transformation already exists: XSL).
I think there are several initiatives in this direction. (sorry I don't have any references).
Like many people I see a great future for XML but I think the coming few years will be characterized by a lot of redundant programming since everybody will individually attempt to implement more or less the same components. It would be nice to see some reusable components on the serverside.
As long as there is no standard we'll just have use our credit card. We have a standard for networking (TCP/IP), we have a few standards for mail (pop3, smtp, imap, etc.).
While I agree that not every standard is as good as it could be, having a standard means that you've got something to work with. If a standard for exchanging money is not good enough the credit card companies have to pay for it. If their losing a lot of money they'll have to fix the standard or accept their loss. It isn't their customers problem.
For that reason I'm not so afraid for bad standards. I can't stress this point enough: standardization is what made the industrial revolution happen. We'll need standardization on the internet too. Hell, the internet is all about standards. Bad standards are outcompeted (gopher) by other standards or fixed (IP).
Right now there isn't any standard for something very obvious: exchanging money. The only thing you can do is exchange credit card numbers. It's not a technical problem it's standardization problem.
Your post sounds very anarchistic. You're afraid of losing your freedom and you assume a central authority. I can't take away the first but the lack of the second thing is the whole problem. In a way the software community is way beyond the banking world in that they've recognized that it is more profitable to agree with your competitors than to compete with an incompatible 'standard' (recent example: internet messaging).
evidently you don't read very well. That executable indeed is not IE, DUHH!
I was just making the point that you only download the objects you are actually going to use.
However deranged MS' architecture may be, downloading one huge chunk of software called netscape communicator doesn't seem very smart either. It comes with all sorts of stuff you don't need or want to update straight away and there's no way you can avoid having to download it (except for getting it on cd of course).
But we weren't discussing architectures here we were discussing downloadsize. I made a point you missed it, sorry.
I don't agree with you on this. Sure absolute security is difficult but it should at least be possible to get more or less the same level of security we had before the internet (which was adequate most of the time).
For that to happen we need two things:
1 - a global standard on how to exchange money. Such a standard would need to include encryption + a protocol to establish a secure connection + a protocol to exchange the money over the connection + a secure way to allow both sides to identify each other
2 - Adequate laws to warrant the rights of both parties involved in a transaction similar to what applies to conventional ways of exchanging money and a more relaxed encryption policy of for instance the US government.
The technology to do all this has been around for a couple of years and things like this newsitem will make it more likely that banks and credit card companies will actually make this happen.
You are right as far as wintel machines are considered. It's unlikely that a newby user running windows 98 will want to go to the traumatic experience of installing new software that will basically provide them with the same functionality they already have.
However there's a whole lot of other devices outthere that are also in need of browsers, Unix workstations are only a small part of that group. PDA's & mobile phones are going to be a big thing the coming years and it already looks like they won't be running CE&IE. So guess what browser those things will run. The fact that you can run essentially the same browser as on your desktop will be great for marketing these devices
Then there's also the good old settop box that will run linux or a similar cheap OS and will also need a browser. Many ISP's are considering to provide these devices to their new customers.
I think some people have estimated that the market for non wintel browsers will explode the coming few years and mozilla will have a huge headstart there.
That's only the non wintel side. On the wintel side ISPs are going to fall in love the way they can customize the browser they ship to their customers. With mozilla they will be able to integrate their specific services into the browser. You can probably do this to some extent with IE but you don't get the source code with that.
Some statistics, Dec 1999:
Internet Explorer: 78 %
Netscape: 18%
There's lies, big lies and statistics. What makes me suspicious is that:
A you don't provide a reference
B you don't tell how these statistics were gathered
C which versions these statistics apply too (ns 4.7 vs ie 5.0?)
About your comments on W2K. I might someday use it but certainly not on this machine (only 64 Mb). I once used Linux on a 486 with 8 Mb (it ran X windows too!).
I haven't heard about any features in W2K (except it's improved stability) that would make it worthwhile for me to upgrade to W2K (I only use the browser and some plugins, play quake, framemaker and Java). And since w98 is stable enough on my PC (at home) I don't really care to give it a try.
"But the *download* is about 50MB, and Microsoft doesn't provide a simple way to install a bare-bones browser."
That's bullshit too. They provide a small executable (500K or so) that allows you to select what you want installed. After that it downloads what you need. You can also choose to download everything and install it later.
"The code is already there. Some on-line science publisher could easily set this up. Question is, would the science community really like being "moderated" in this way, even if it is by their own selves?"
First, I think it would be very useful. Yet I see some problems with the existing culture around science. The current science community is dominated and led by elderly, earlier successful people. In fact the Nobel prize is usually awarded to people who did their boundary breaking work decades ago.
A democatically (a la slashdot) moderated journal would not favor those leading figures but their boundary breaking disciples (most great scientist publish their greatest work before they're 35). Yet, it is the elderly scientist who create and edit the journals. Why would they choose a formula that does not favor their own work?
Since I'm not yet 30 I like the idea of online, slashdot style moderated journals. I really hate the pace at which journals are published (it takes half a year or more to get an article published). I also dislike the general conservatism in the scientific community about things like publishing. (a few months back I actually had to send in a paper copy of an article! I'm a software engineer! I know about DTP, internet and stuff like that, why do I have to waste dead trees and stamps on somthing simple like this!).
As a counter argument to my own writing I have to admit that the baked in slowness in scientific publishing allows for better and more thorough selecting which leads to higher quality publishing. Somehow this should be compensated by better moderation.
It's the quantity over quality question we're dealing with here. Is it better to have many low quality published articles in which we have to search for meaningfull individual publiations or should we have a system where only few articles get published that are actually worthwhile reading?
I'm inclined to think that the latter option would render the same or a higher level of quality accompanied with a lot of static in the form of low quality bullshit troll/articles like we se on slashdot.
MS further demonstrated this point by porting IE to other, non MS OSes showing that the browser->OS dependence is bullshit (i.e. the OS is not an integral part of a browser).
The other dependency (the browser is an integral part of the OS) was disproved during the trial.
I hope the two will end up in different parts of the post-trial-microsofts. With the fake dependencies eliminated the two will be able to evolve seperately opening the way for making the browser dependencies standards compliant thus enabling to use any standards compliant browser rather than just internet explorer.
The integration of browser and OS on itself is quite a good idea. It's only the fact that MS decided to rely on their own standards rather than the W3C standards that bothers me.
I read an interesting article on software methodology on Martin Fowler's site (www.martinfowler.com). In this article he discusses light weight development methods and compares a few existing methods.
Basically his arguments boil down to this:
Traditional, so called heavy weight methods, are bad for creativity because they drown developers in a sea of bureaucratic documents.
No method is not good either, because in larger development teams anarchy leads nowhere.
Any method should be based on good assumptions. One of these assumptions should be that development and creativity of developers is inherently unpredictable. Therefore there is no point in building a requirement specification because by the time you have implemented, the requirements will have changed. The so called lightweight methods fowler suggests, are all iterative methods. They involve a lot of testing and frequent milestones.
The methods he discusses all follow this pattern. He even mentions open source and mozilla as examples of light weight development methods.
We already are capable of brainwashing people. It comes in many forms but basically brainwashing has taken the place of good old violence. It's much easier to make people do something by brainwashing (i.e. convincing them that they want to do it) then forcing them to do something.
Brainwashing has many names and comes in many forms: marketing, commercials, ideology, religion. Some forms are successful, some are very intrusive but mostly you don't even notice.
Religious brainwashing is commonly practiced in many cultures, Most religious people believe because they were raised by religious parents. Only a tiny percentage picks up another religion than the one taught to him/her by the parents.
Probably we all are the victim of brainwashing to some extent. Commercials work even though they are annoying. In fact some commercials work because they are annoying. Also we were all raised in a certain way. It's called culture and it never really leaves you.
During the cold war more violent and destructive ways of brainwashing were commonly practiced by both east and west. Scary methods were used to do this but those methods were just a sight effect of greater insight in how the brain works. This knowledge is also used to do good things: curing mentally ill people for instance.
I like the android example because at this point it seems the ultimate unethical thing to do. But if you think about it and drop the ethics, there are usefull applications for such technology.
I just read the story about 20% of the americans being nuts (hehe, I think this is a bit low estimation). Anyway, if I would live in a repressive society like the US, there would be a large difference between what I think and what I practice.
Some people are more courageous like the guy who said that the earth wasn't flat some 500 years ago. Was he less right just because he was the only one that came to that conclusion? I don't think so.
If people only believed what everybody else believes there would be no progress. That's why religion is essentially conservative and blocks progress.
BTW. I'm dutch and have been living in sweden for a year and must say that your post perfectly represents how the average swede thinks. I have been frequently amazed by the lack of imagination and initiative of the average swede. You all go to the dagis, grow up in a very safe and secure social system. Pancakes on thursday, falukorv on monday. It's all very predictable and boring.
Not that I hate sweden (I think its a great country), but it just struck me as ironic that the swedish word 'lagom' perfectly characterizes your post.
"that to me, PROVE the existence of God"
:)
Ok, as long as you don't claim that these are scientific proofs it's ok with me. Just don't mix up science and religion.
The best science can do is proof that there is no proof for GOD.
To me religion is a tool that the elite in a society uses to steer the less fortunate. In any society religion is practiced by intellectuals. The sole exception is the western civilization (bad name I know) which is becoming more global. In this particular society, religion is being replaced by science. In earlier days churches housed the intellectual elite, nowadays they host a bunch of confused priests. In my home country (Holland), Catholic churches are populated by a rapidly aging staff -> they are becoming obsolete.
What you believe is irrelevant. What I write and believe is irrelevant (just opinions). I can't prove that there is no GOD but then why would I want to prove that there is one? I don't believe there is one or more specific I think the idea of a GOD like creature ruling everything is a bit strange. I can prove that pigs can't fly in a scientific way but proving that there is (no) God is different since:
A - we have no defintion of God. Pardox here because the moment we define it it becomes science.
B - There is no observable entity that we can relate to God. All information we have about it is secondary information.
From a scientific point of view religion is a moving target. Science merely convinces people that certain things are possible or true and religion usually accepts those facts and adapts to it. Religion says you cannot produce life. Science clones sheep. Religion counters: well, cloning is not the same as creating life.
Next century we'll engineer a bacteria, possibly even more complex organisms. Will it have a soul? Who cares, religion will probably end up making a distinction between life an what was created by man.
You can't really beat religion because it is irrational. Logics don't apply here. A religious person will counter any logic you present to him. There's no point in doing so. Intelligent people shouldn't waste their intellect on the God issue. It's unprovable and any useful argument has probably already been made.
If you live in a conservative society: pretend you're a believer, it makes life easy if you don't have to fight irrational things. If you are a believer, dream on if that's what keeps you happy. If you are a non believer, don't waste time on convincing others of your belief.
Oops, time for some self reflection. I'm wasting precious time here (time = limited resource, I only have 80 years or so). But then, I do enjoy this type of thing
'life' is a religious concept in the first place. When does something in a laboratory come alife? Is it when you have somehow managed to create a string of DNA? Is it when you put his string of DNA in some host cell? Is it when you get make the cell capable of replicating itself? Sure that's a complex thing to do but not impossible or improbable.
It's all chemistry to me. The only scientific definition of 'life' I can think of is large scale chemistry.
All the other is religious fluff. I'm not really worried about the religious impact of this since my only religion is science.
If it can be done, it will be done and it should be done properly. In my opinion its only a matter of time before they clone/create a human like creature, and why shouldn't we allow it? I have no objections against a creature that is perfectly happy being my slave (which somehow seems the greatest fear of 'ethical' people). The word slave only has a sour taste because of the way human slaves were treated in the past. You have to pull it out of its context of the past and think of life as large scale chemistry. An android is just another tool. Sure there's no need to treat them in a cruel way but then we can built in a friendly attitude can't we?
The story of Frankenstein is not one about how horrible human creations can be but about how humans deal with something new: scared, afraid and hostile. Frankensteins monster only became a monster after he denied access to human civilization (mainly because of his appearance).
Religion for me represent the scared part of our society. Religion always question scientific achievements out of fear what it could do to society - this started when somebody claimed the earth was not flat. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making a plea for carelessly doing anything that's scientifically feasible but I don't think ethics and religion provide any real clues here.
The real, scientific questions should not be how this will potentially harm our society but how we can use this to our advantage. 'Life' (no pun intended) would be so much simpler if we could do without ethical and religious complications. Of course real life doesn't work that way and I don't think the process of putting scientific findings through a process of evaluating their impact (on society and technology) is bad. The only thing I plead for is that it is an open minded process. I don't oppose the ability to create a humanoid and use it to do labour. I may oppose specific realizations of this concept that look to much like what happened to africans in the later part of this millenium but then they are not androids in the first place.
Arguments such as "it's unnatural" or "it says here in that we shouldn't do this" are not very compelling arguments to me because I'm unaware of the difference between natural and unnatural (please don't insert your cheesy definition in a potential reply) and I only have one religion: science. I'm aware that that's a religion since it makes the minimal assumption that what we see exists as we see it. I.e. I cannot prove I don't live in a world like the Matrix but have no reason to assume that we do so I make the assumption that we don't and that what we see is what we see.
But even if you falsify this assumption (i.e. there is something out there!, BTW how could you do this without using scientific notions?) it doesn't make science less true for the world we 'live' in. Maybe it doesn't apply outside the world if there is such a thing but who cares? If we ever manage to get there the first thing we'll do is adapt our science to cover the new situation. Falsification is not a disaster for science.
"We all know that software isn't really a product, but a service - and I think the economy is waking up to that fact."
.....
I only half agree with you on this. The way any company works is that it uses something cheap as input, adds some value to it and puts the result of that out making money over the added value. With software there's the interesting thing that part of the input (existing software) does not have any production cost. That means that when you add value to it and are competing with other companies who deliver a similar product, you can compete with those companies by not charging for the input software.
That's where the GPL comes in. If you look what is GPLed these days it is mostly software that has been around in some form for years. Who pays money for just a C compiler or a yet another mouse driver or an editor? Right nobody, people are paying for IDE's, not for just a compiler (and even IDEs have to offer more than just edit/compile/debug functionality).
This last example also shows that there is one short term tactic of making money over the input software: bundle it with valuable software and keep those things dependent.
MS is the classical example. DOS became a commodity, so they added windows. Word became a commodity, so they bundled it with other apps. Compilers became a commodity, so they created devstudio. All the previous became a commodity so they webenabled it
What happened with HP puzzles me a bit, I spend half an hour staring at the code examples they provided in the tutorial and had to conlude that there was nothing special to be found. Rather it struck me that this was probably the longest version of Hello world I've seen so far.
All the concepts used in e-speak already exists in some form. Worse, as far as I can see they are all available on top of Java (Jini, CORBA, RMI, HTTP). And what they provided also runs on top of Java!?!?
Possibly the innovation is in the protocol they use for the communication but unfortunately that is only documented in the form of source code. I think this is an area where we could use a simple but elegant protocol. Setting up CORBA stuff is a bit overkill for most remote stuff and RMI only works with Java programs and DCOM is to lowlevel.
The fact that they GPLed it only confirms that they did not actually provide much new stuff here. They don't expect to make much money on licensing this software.
Interestingly I see that the new word for 'component' has become 'service'. I think this started when SUN put out Jini, suddenly anything that had an interface and was approachable over the network became a 'service' rather than a reusable component. HP is cleverly using this word now to market their stuff.
As far as I can see they reinvented reusable components and the ORB in a simplified form. I don't expect that this will go anywhere unless they make its use completely transparent. I.e. make it possible to use COM/CORBA/JavaBean components as a e-speak service. With JavaBeans I really don't want to write IDL specs, thats what we have the reflection APIs for (Voyager is an ORB that uses this to automatically hook up any java class to an ORB).
I'm highly sceptical about this, the only interesting part I was able to discover under all the marketing drool was the protocol and there's not much specific about this to be found anywhere but the gpl'd demo code.
After that the US army got less succesfull since nuking was no longer considered appropriate:
- Korea
- Vietnam
release candidate is newspeak for beta release. MS had 3 of them with windows 2000. It is not a finished product. As I understand it, the plugin is not yet ready for instance.
what do you need the extensions for? Sucking is its life!