Your friend lied to you. It appears blueish because it scatters blue light - the same reason our atmosphere appears blueish even though air is "clear".
Assume you sign the NDA and can see the code - you can't tell Linus or anyone developing for the kernel about it because that would violate the NDA. Therefore the "offending code" (humor them for a minute) cannot ever be removed. Therefore, Linux is permanently tainted!
Even if you submit a patch to remove the code and don't tell anyone what it was specifically, I am quite sure that SCO will claim you are simply making an end-run around the NDA since anyone can deduce the actual code from what your patch removes.
Granted, this is all a bunch of lies, but SCO sure has a stock market racket going here. In the post-Enron world, their heads should roll but I have no doubt the SEC will be happy to ignore their behavior.
It appears that they are gearing up to start providing far more than two updates per day. This could mean that sometime in the future you could register a new domain name and have it up and running within 15-30 minutes.
Windows XP is based on the NT kernel and is a direct descendant of Windows 2000, itself a descendant of NT 4/3.
All of the above mentioned operating systems are true securable multiuser systems.
Microsoft hides and softens the details in Windows XP Home edition, but that changes nothing. On an XP pro workstation, create users and assign them permissions and group membership as you desire, including full DACL support on both the registry and filesystem.
Pardon me, but the article seems like a bunch of half-assed opinions with no facts to back them up, mixed in with a little bit of good old fashoned flaming/ranting.
Licensing 6.0 is a disaster, and so is Product Activation. At least we know that much.
I don't know about you folks, but this appears to redirect your request to their cgi script, which ostensibly will allow or deny it based on whether or not it is vulnerable.
This looks like a horrible way to "fix" the problem.
That's a lot of data folks. For comparison, Microsoft's Terraserver, which in cooperation with the USGS (geological survey), maps the entire surface of the united states with photographs from the air, satellites, and so on.
That database of pictures is around 6 TB.
Some of the databases listed on the survey are even larger - approaching tens of terrabytes!
I wonder what Skyserver will be (new successor to terraserver, designed to collect and stitch together a map of the entire sky in 3d from all known and future telescope pictures)
If China wants to make DVD players, TVs, and so on that don't try to strip my fair use rights away from me in some vain and nebulous "fight the pirates" scheme, I'm all for it.
Hollywood and their bullshit can go jump in a lake.
A note: This presentation (linked to in the parent) does NOT INCLUDE the matrix spoof video stuff. The presentation just blanks out with a generic "we can't show you this" message for several minutes.
That's funny, seeing as how I remember a recent story about how Americans are generally the most overworked and definitely the most productive in the western world.
There is a reason that Ford is bringing Focus production back into the USA from Mexico, unions and all. And there is also a reason that many companies find that once they have outsourced everything to India they really don't save that much money compared to hiring US workers.
The difference is that those middle-class US workers bought the company's HDTVs, SUVs, computers, furniture, games, etc. Those workers also bought products from 3rd parties that use their employer's products.
So I ask you - in the end - how much did they really save and what exactly will they do when there are no more Americans able to buy their products?
And when that strategy bankrupts and destroys the american middle class, who exactly will be left to buy the company's products? How will businesses that depend on those consumers continue to be successful, thus requiring software/hardware/other services?
You fail to understand that when the American middle class takes a hit, America takes a hit, period. Indian programmers making 1/3 of an American worker does not buy Xboxes, SUVs, or HDTVs.
Perhaps some companies should take a long-term view of the situation.
Surround sound is a necessary compromise; yes, you can get perfect surround sound with just good headphones (and a sub for that added feel on the low end.)
So who's gonna wear the headphones - you or your gf? Oh... the problem comes into focus now doesn't it! If you want to have more than one person listening to surround sound, you need a system.
Furthermore, tracks, movies, games, etc these days aren't mixed for good surround on headphones - they are usually mixed for 2 ch being stereo speakers and surround being a huge system. This is especially true of music. So if you want to experience the track the way it was intended to be experienced in terms of surround sound, you must use a system (or expensive headphones that can decode DD/DTS properly.)
This device will suffer the same problems as stereo speakers, namely that not all rooms are the same and the sound will not be deflected/reflected in the same way, and the effect is probably lost if you aren't in the special "sweet spot" too.
Audio technology is complex, but at least it differs from just looking at things: If it sounds good, it is good. The same axiom isn't necessarily applicable to visual inspections.
While "real" capital is necessary for capitalism to function - that is you need clear property ownership rights - I doubt anyone who has never been in space could lay such a claim. If the property cannot be visited, traded, or borrowed against then it isn't really property or capital at all is it?
(FYI: this is why many 3rd world countries who try capitalism don't do that well, or at least part of the reason. In the western world it is so ingrained that we don't even think about it, but I can buy a house and be reasonably sure that I own the property and will continue to do so. I can take out a small business loan against it. I can sell it and make money. Imagine living somewhere where you can't necessarily get a clean title to anything. Imagine it takes years, thousands of dollars, and visiting hundreds of government offices to setup a legitimate business due to all the red tape. We are fortunate enough to have clear property rights established. Our capital is legitimately moveable and that's what makes it work.)
Au contraire! You forget that those were the days of the API wars, before DirectX on windows and before cards could really do a full OpenGL implementation (hurrah for game engine specific ICDs, heh)
These days, everyone writes to DirectX, period. Whether they use Direct3D or OpenGL is irrelevant, they all use DirectInput, Directsound, so on and so forth.
This of course means that a graphics card maker need only supply DirectX and OpenGL support and users can run their games on the card. Granted - card specific paths are often optimized for speed, but the games will run.
Not surprised
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Delphi, with its ability to write Windows programs, was having trouble enough. Once Visual Basic came along, it really stole a lot of their thunder in terms of making it easy to write windows programs.
So now you look at a platform like Linux, with a minority marketshare, and look at Delphi with its already small marketshare.... that adds up for..... yup, small marketshare.
Oh, don't forget dotnet and java, both of which have a lot of muscle behind them.
The kernel does indeed treat everything as a file, you just don't know it because Win32 hides the abstraction. The registry, devices, ports, network shares/pipes, mailslots, they are all files under the root.\ namespace.
Don't blame us if you aren't using Active directory with Win2k/XP clients w/Group Policy and SUS.
Microsoft has provided the tools to make software installation, management of desktop settings, and automatic pushing of patches and service packs completely automatic and easy to do.
If you refuse to use the technology, you deserve what you get.
Well when you rewrite your entire suite of apps & the shell in managed code, write a completely new window manager that uses the DirectX pipeline as its compositing engine, uses vector graphics to scale to various resolutions and DPI, and so on it can take some time.
There is other new tech going in as well.
This really is a big step, and Microsoft is making it public right now so developers can get on board early in the game and make suggestions or comments on it. Microsoft wants to make developers happy, so they are showing them the way windows development will work in the future to see how the developers react - what parts they like and don't like. It also means we won't have to wait a year after launch for Longhorn apps to appear.
1. WinFS was always running on top of NTFS. It will change things, because the new storage API in Longhorn makes WinFS a first-class entity and the preferred method of working with the filesystem.
2. Nearly all the bits, like Explorer, applets, property pages, etc are being rewritten to run on the CLR. This also means Microsoft has greatly expanded the capabilities of the class library, but much of the windows-specific functionality looks like it will go under the Microsoft.* namespace, making it easy to keep cross-platform if you wish.
3. Aero is the new window manager, which does away with 2D/3D for an integrated, vector graphics & 3D, all-new windowing system. The new Aero classes do not wrap Win32. It talks directly to the window manager. How many of the other classes no longer talk to Win32 and do their work directly remains to be seen.
4. The Longhorn kernel will be the base of the next version of Windows Server, including the focus on managed code as being THE new API. This is a huge shift - Microsoft is basically telling everyone "get ready to move away from Win32/Win64 - it is in legacy mode now."
Linux may be many things, but innovative it usually is not. The vast majority of what we consider "free" software is nothing more than an imitation of likeminded commercial software.
The bulk of innovation continues to come from Academic and commerical circles. There are some very bright people involved with Free Software to be sure, and some innovation, just not that much.
Furthermore, I am willing to wager $100 that many people involved with the Free Software movement do so only because they can get something for free, not because they share any of its ideals or wish to contribute anything to the movement.
1) Managed directX has, at worst, a 10% performance penalty against the exact same C++ code. People are always complaining about how we have an excess of performance in todays' CPUs. This seems like a good use of it to me, thanks to #2:
2) Managed code does not have buffer overflows. How many bugs in Windows and Linux, especially rootable bugs, are a result of a buffer overflow? 50%? 75% 90%? I don't know, but it is a lot. Dotnet code has zero buffer overflows.
3) Managed code avoids DLL hell: the GAC and side-by-side execution ensure that programs will continue to run on versions of libraries that they are designed to support, since minor/major version upgraded files will not be fed to these applications (although revisions still can for bug fixing reasons.) Neither the user nor developer need to even THINK about these issues - the runtime simply takes care of them.
4) Managed code upgrades to 64-bit in a neutral and architecture-independent way. Apps that are "bit neutral" will run on a 32-bit system JIT'd for 32-bit mode, and those same EXACT EXE files will run in 64-bit mode on a 64-bit system, including making use of new registers and other such things. No recompiles - the JIT takes care of it. This also means that much of the code Microsoft writes - mountains of it - to handle all kinds of things from Office to [insert favorite feature here] can be transported across 32/64 bits and architectures. No more Mac version of Office if they want - Abstract any platform-specific calls into one or two classes and have everything else be managed bit-neutral code. Notice that no one is being silly enough to suggest write-once-run-anywhere for useful apps; that is and always was a pipe dream.
I would not doubt that the dotnet runtime on Longhorn is not going to call the Win32 API much; They might just be doing it internally and only using the Executive (NT/2K/XP's kernel native API) when necessary. That would explain part of the time length. Not only do you have to upgrade your existing code to C#/VB.NET/Managed C++/whatever other dotnet language, but you need to rewrite the new runtime to completely rid it of any dependance on the Win32 API. In this way, you also make the runtime a little bit more platform neutral, vs having to convert it from Win32 to Win64 for other platforms. But this is just a guess.
First off, Whidbey is the next version of Visual Studio, which is designed to use the dotnet framework v2. The SDK will be released publicly around the same time, so those who prefer Notepad need not pay one cent to write dotnet apps.
Secondly, generics, partial types, and such are being added to the CLR, as well as Microsoft's "first-class" languages, meaning that yes VB.NET will include them. VB.NET also gets operator overloading, native support for unsigned types, and in-line XML commenting.
You can read it all at the roadmap here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productin fo/road map.aspx
It tells about some of the changes to the IDE, the CLR, and the languages. One interesting new "feature" is a sort of grammatical analyzer for writing code that will suggest improvements or corrections, similar to the way word underlines misspellings or grammar errors.
Whether it will be a great tool or a bloody nuisance remains to be seen.
" This happens all the time, MS can choose to make a change and not rely on the standard. If some idiot thinks.net is anything but a stab at Java they probably thought that MS would continue to evolve IE when Netscape was finished;)"
Could the knee-jerk morons stop posting this please?
There are two reasons dotnet will NEVER EVER break backwards compatibility: Side-by-Side and the Standards.
Side-by-Side versioning means that on any given machine with the dotnet runtime, all major/minor versions of the runtime still exist.
If I want to write a dotnet app against 1.0 instead of 1.1, I can do so. And I can install the 1.0 runtime anytime I wish. In fact I can install 1.1 first then 1.0
That is the whole POINT. When v2.0 of the runtime comes out, it won't break any previous versions or introduce incompatibilities (ala changing the Win32 API or extending it, resulting in the horrid mess we have now.)
The second reason is the standards. They are approved and out there for anyone to view. The 1.0 and 1.1 runtimes will continue to exist, VS.NET 2002/2003 will continue to run, and Mono will keep plugging along. Even if Microsoft never wrote another line of code.... or worse, made V2 completely incompatible, it wouldn't matter. None of that existing technology suddenly goes away. People installing V2 of the runtime don't lose the ability to run 1.0/1.1 products.
Microsoft isn't stupid. Their bread is buttered by developers and they know it. The only way to yank the rug out from under Mono is to yank it from under themselves and their own developers, throw away Side-by-Side versioning, and violate the standards.
Last but not least: take a lession in Object Oriented Programming. So long as Microsoft makes the object interfaces available to their developers, Mono (or any other project) can implement that interface using their own back-end solution. As long as the inputs, outputs, and expected behavior are the same there is no problem.
If you think Microsoft would implement a bunch of new features into the runtime and not tell any of their developers or make any of it public, you understand nothing about the company. One thing it has focused on - the one thing that has helped it crush all competitors - is courting developers. Microsoft still has the best development tools and spends millions (billions?) on providing things like msdn.microsoft.com, visual studio, and so on.
So please - spare us all of your stupidity - and stop posting this crap about how Microsoft is going to hurt Mono.
Summary: Microsoft will make improvements to the runtime, but old versions will continue to run side-by-side preserving compatibility. Those improvements will be made available to Microsoft's own developers, thus will be known and can be implemented by the maintainers of Mono, even if the improvements are not submitted as part of the updated standard.
*Patents are another issue entirely, and a legitimate one. Depsite the fact that several members of the dotnet, language, and VS.NET teams are cheering Mono privately, who knows what the PHBs will do. So in that respect, Patents are always a vulnerability, but that is the same situation nearly all open source software is in. The patent system is broken, and we can't let fear of it paralyze us.
"Learning is fun!" - Bender, Futurama. If you know this quote, you know that these people just learned an important lesson.
"Code Escrow"
If I am going to purchase components or make a decision to commit, I make sure that there is some sort of safety-net just in case the company fails. Often this comes in the form of a code escrow service. Every X days, the company ships off a copy of all their code to the service. If the company fails or there is a serious event, the escrow company releases the code.
As a small developer that is a large expense, so for my customers, they already have the contact info for my off-site backup person. If anything happens to me, that person is instructed to freely distribute all source code. It is someone I trust.
Or you could use your attorney.
Off-site backups are a Good Thing(TM), and it only takes one extra small step to ensure that, should you perish, your work isn't left inaccessible. Whether that means a closed-source app or just your notes on an open source project.
If you think nuclear waste will need to be kept around for hundreds of thousands of years, check into actinide burners.
It looks like we may be able to break down the seriously radioactive stuff from nuclear fuel and turn it into the stuff that is only slightly radioactive (think dangerous for about 100 years.)
So we reprocess the spent fuel, which we aren't doing now. That's 90% of your mass right there that you extract and put back into the reaction.
Now take that 10% and extract the 2% plutonium that is in it and use that in one of the nuclear plant designs that can run on plutonium/uranium mix.
Now with the 8% that is left, process it in an actinide burner and you have a small amount of material that needs only to be kept for 100 years before it isn't really very radiactive. In practice, the closer you get to the 100 year mark the less dangerous it becomes.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha!
Your friend lied to you. It appears blueish because it scatters blue light - the same reason our atmosphere appears blueish even though air is "clear".
It gets even better than that man...
Assume you sign the NDA and can see the code - you can't tell Linus or anyone developing for the kernel about it because that would violate the NDA. Therefore the "offending code" (humor them for a minute) cannot ever be removed. Therefore, Linux is permanently tainted!
Even if you submit a patch to remove the code and don't tell anyone what it was specifically, I am quite sure that SCO will claim you are simply making an end-run around the NDA since anyone can deduce the actual code from what your patch removes.
Granted, this is all a bunch of lies, but SCO sure has a stock market racket going here. In the post-Enron world, their heads should roll but I have no doubt the SEC will be happy to ignore their behavior.
It appears that they are gearing up to start providing far more than two updates per day. This could mean that sometime in the future you could register a new domain name and have it up and running within 15-30 minutes.
Seems like a positive change to me.
Did you troll on purpose or what?
Windows XP is based on the NT kernel and is a direct descendant of Windows 2000, itself a descendant of NT 4/3.
All of the above mentioned operating systems are true securable multiuser systems.
Microsoft hides and softens the details in Windows XP Home edition, but that changes nothing. On an XP pro workstation, create users and assign them permissions and group membership as you desire, including full DACL support on both the registry and filesystem.
tl;dr: think & know before you open your mouth.
Pardon me, but the article seems like a bunch of half-assed opinions with no facts to back them up, mixed in with a little bit of good old fashoned flaming/ranting.
Licensing 6.0 is a disaster, and so is Product Activation. At least we know that much.
I don't know about you folks, but this appears to redirect your request to their cgi script, which ostensibly will allow or deny it based on whether or not it is vulnerable.
This looks like a horrible way to "fix" the problem.
That's a lot of data folks. For comparison, Microsoft's Terraserver, which in cooperation with the USGS (geological survey), maps the entire surface of the united states with photographs from the air, satellites, and so on.
That database of pictures is around 6 TB.
Some of the databases listed on the survey are even larger - approaching tens of terrabytes!
I wonder what Skyserver will be (new successor to terraserver, designed to collect and stitch together a map of the entire sky in 3d from all known and future telescope pictures)
If China wants to make DVD players, TVs, and so on that don't try to strip my fair use rights away from me in some vain and nebulous "fight the pirates" scheme, I'm all for it.
Hollywood and their bullshit can go jump in a lake.
A note: This presentation (linked to in the parent) does NOT INCLUDE the matrix spoof video stuff. The presentation just blanks out with a generic "we can't show you this" message for several minutes.
That's funny, seeing as how I remember a recent story about how Americans are generally the most overworked and definitely the most productive in the western world.
There is a reason that Ford is bringing Focus production back into the USA from Mexico, unions and all. And there is also a reason that many companies find that once they have outsourced everything to India they really don't save that much money compared to hiring US workers.
The difference is that those middle-class US workers bought the company's HDTVs, SUVs, computers, furniture, games, etc. Those workers also bought products from 3rd parties that use their employer's products.
So I ask you - in the end - how much did they really save and what exactly will they do when there are no more Americans able to buy their products?
And when that strategy bankrupts and destroys the american middle class, who exactly will be left to buy the company's products? How will businesses that depend on those consumers continue to be successful, thus requiring software/hardware/other services?
You fail to understand that when the American middle class takes a hit, America takes a hit, period. Indian programmers making 1/3 of an American worker does not buy Xboxes, SUVs, or HDTVs.
Perhaps some companies should take a long-term view of the situation.
Surround sound is a necessary compromise; yes, you can get perfect surround sound with just good headphones (and a sub for that added feel on the low end.)
So who's gonna wear the headphones - you or your gf? Oh... the problem comes into focus now doesn't it! If you want to have more than one person listening to surround sound, you need a system.
Furthermore, tracks, movies, games, etc these days aren't mixed for good surround on headphones - they are usually mixed for 2 ch being stereo speakers and surround being a huge system. This is especially true of music. So if you want to experience the track the way it was intended to be experienced in terms of surround sound, you must use a system (or expensive headphones that can decode DD/DTS properly.)
This device will suffer the same problems as stereo speakers, namely that not all rooms are the same and the sound will not be deflected/reflected in the same way, and the effect is probably lost if you aren't in the special "sweet spot" too.
Audio technology is complex, but at least it differs from just looking at things: If it sounds good, it is good. The same axiom isn't necessarily applicable to visual inspections.
While "real" capital is necessary for capitalism to function - that is you need clear property ownership rights - I doubt anyone who has never been in space could lay such a claim. If the property cannot be visited, traded, or borrowed against then it isn't really property or capital at all is it?
(FYI: this is why many 3rd world countries who try capitalism don't do that well, or at least part of the reason. In the western world it is so ingrained that we don't even think about it, but I can buy a house and be reasonably sure that I own the property and will continue to do so. I can take out a small business loan against it. I can sell it and make money. Imagine living somewhere where you can't necessarily get a clean title to anything. Imagine it takes years, thousands of dollars, and visiting hundreds of government offices to setup a legitimate business due to all the red tape. We are fortunate enough to have clear property rights established. Our capital is legitimately moveable and that's what makes it work.)
Au contraire! You forget that those were the days of the API wars, before DirectX on windows and before cards could really do a full OpenGL implementation (hurrah for game engine specific ICDs, heh)
These days, everyone writes to DirectX, period. Whether they use Direct3D or OpenGL is irrelevant, they all use DirectInput, Directsound, so on and so forth.
This of course means that a graphics card maker need only supply DirectX and OpenGL support and users can run their games on the card. Granted - card specific paths are often optimized for speed, but the games will run.
Delphi, with its ability to write Windows programs, was having trouble enough. Once Visual Basic came along, it really stole a lot of their thunder in terms of making it easy to write windows programs.
..... yup, small marketshare.
So now you look at a platform like Linux, with a minority marketshare, and look at Delphi with its already small marketshare.... that adds up for
Oh, don't forget dotnet and java, both of which have a lot of muscle behind them.
The kernel does indeed treat everything as a file, you just don't know it because Win32 hides the abstraction. The registry, devices, ports, network shares/pipes, mailslots, they are all files under the root .\ namespace.
Don't blame us if you aren't using Active directory with Win2k/XP clients w/Group Policy and SUS.
Microsoft has provided the tools to make software installation, management of desktop settings, and automatic pushing of patches and service packs completely automatic and easy to do.
If you refuse to use the technology, you deserve what you get.
If you use Win9x/ME, you deserve to be shot.
Well when you rewrite your entire suite of apps & the shell in managed code, write a completely new window manager that uses the DirectX pipeline as its compositing engine, uses vector graphics to scale to various resolutions and DPI, and so on it can take some time.
There is other new tech going in as well.
This really is a big step, and Microsoft is making it public right now so developers can get on board early in the game and make suggestions or comments on it. Microsoft wants to make developers happy, so they are showing them the way windows development will work in the future to see how the developers react - what parts they like and don't like. It also means we won't have to wait a year after launch for Longhorn apps to appear.
1. WinFS was always running on top of NTFS. It will change things, because the new storage API in Longhorn makes WinFS a first-class entity and the preferred method of working with the filesystem.
2. Nearly all the bits, like Explorer, applets, property pages, etc are being rewritten to run on the CLR. This also means Microsoft has greatly expanded the capabilities of the class library, but much of the windows-specific functionality looks like it will go under the Microsoft.* namespace, making it easy to keep cross-platform if you wish.
3. Aero is the new window manager, which does away with 2D/3D for an integrated, vector graphics & 3D, all-new windowing system. The new Aero classes do not wrap Win32. It talks directly to the window manager. How many of the other classes no longer talk to Win32 and do their work directly remains to be seen.
4. The Longhorn kernel will be the base of the next version of Windows Server, including the focus on managed code as being THE new API. This is a huge shift - Microsoft is basically telling everyone "get ready to move away from Win32/Win64 - it is in legacy mode now."
Linux may be many things, but innovative it usually is not. The vast majority of what we consider "free" software is nothing more than an imitation of likeminded commercial software.
The bulk of innovation continues to come from Academic and commerical circles. There are some very bright people involved with Free Software to be sure, and some innovation, just not that much.
Furthermore, I am willing to wager $100 that many people involved with the Free Software movement do so only because they can get something for free, not because they share any of its ideals or wish to contribute anything to the movement.
1) Managed directX has, at worst, a 10% performance penalty against the exact same C++ code. People are always complaining about how we have an excess of performance in todays' CPUs. This seems like a good use of it to me, thanks to #2:
2) Managed code does not have buffer overflows. How many bugs in Windows and Linux, especially rootable bugs, are a result of a buffer overflow? 50%? 75% 90%? I don't know, but it is a lot. Dotnet code has zero buffer overflows.
3) Managed code avoids DLL hell: the GAC and side-by-side execution ensure that programs will continue to run on versions of libraries that they are designed to support, since minor/major version upgraded files will not be fed to these applications (although revisions still can for bug fixing reasons.) Neither the user nor developer need to even THINK about these issues - the runtime simply takes care of them.
4) Managed code upgrades to 64-bit in a neutral and architecture-independent way. Apps that are "bit neutral" will run on a 32-bit system JIT'd for 32-bit mode, and those same EXACT EXE files will run in 64-bit mode on a 64-bit system, including making use of new registers and other such things. No recompiles - the JIT takes care of it. This also means that much of the code Microsoft writes - mountains of it - to handle all kinds of things from Office to [insert favorite feature here] can be transported across 32/64 bits and architectures. No more Mac version of Office if they want - Abstract any platform-specific calls into one or two classes and have everything else be managed bit-neutral code. Notice that no one is being silly enough to suggest write-once-run-anywhere for useful apps; that is and always was a pipe dream.
I would not doubt that the dotnet runtime on Longhorn is not going to call the Win32 API much; They might just be doing it internally and only using the Executive (NT/2K/XP's kernel native API) when necessary. That would explain part of the time length. Not only do you have to upgrade your existing code to C#/VB.NET/Managed C++/whatever other dotnet language, but you need to rewrite the new runtime to completely rid it of any dependance on the Win32 API. In this way, you also make the runtime a little bit more platform neutral, vs having to convert it from Win32 to Win64 for other platforms. But this is just a guess.
First off, Whidbey is the next version of Visual Studio, which is designed to use the dotnet framework v2. The SDK will be released publicly around the same time, so those who prefer Notepad need not pay one cent to write dotnet apps.
n fo/road map.aspx
Secondly, generics, partial types, and such are being added to the CLR, as well as Microsoft's "first-class" languages, meaning that yes VB.NET will include them. VB.NET also gets operator overloading, native support for unsigned types, and in-line XML commenting.
You can read it all at the roadmap here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/producti
It tells about some of the changes to the IDE, the CLR, and the languages. One interesting new "feature" is a sort of grammatical analyzer for writing code that will suggest improvements or corrections, similar to the way word underlines misspellings or grammar errors.
Whether it will be a great tool or a bloody nuisance remains to be seen.
" This happens all the time, MS can choose to make a change and not rely on the standard. If some idiot thinks .net is anything but a stab at Java they probably thought that MS would continue to evolve IE when Netscape was finished ;)"
Could the knee-jerk morons stop posting this please?
There are two reasons dotnet will NEVER EVER break backwards compatibility: Side-by-Side and the Standards.
Side-by-Side versioning means that on any given machine with the dotnet runtime, all major/minor versions of the runtime still exist.
If I want to write a dotnet app against 1.0 instead of 1.1, I can do so. And I can install the 1.0 runtime anytime I wish. In fact I can install 1.1 first then 1.0
That is the whole POINT. When v2.0 of the runtime comes out, it won't break any previous versions or introduce incompatibilities (ala changing the Win32 API or extending it, resulting in the horrid mess we have now.)
The second reason is the standards. They are approved and out there for anyone to view. The 1.0 and 1.1 runtimes will continue to exist, VS.NET 2002/2003 will continue to run, and Mono will keep plugging along. Even if Microsoft never wrote another line of code.... or worse, made V2 completely incompatible, it wouldn't matter. None of that existing technology suddenly goes away. People installing V2 of the runtime don't lose the ability to run 1.0/1.1 products.
Microsoft isn't stupid. Their bread is buttered by developers and they know it. The only way to yank the rug out from under Mono is to yank it from under themselves and their own developers, throw away Side-by-Side versioning, and violate the standards.
Last but not least: take a lession in Object Oriented Programming. So long as Microsoft makes the object interfaces available to their developers, Mono (or any other project) can implement that interface using their own back-end solution. As long as the inputs, outputs, and expected behavior are the same there is no problem.
If you think Microsoft would implement a bunch of new features into the runtime and not tell any of their developers or make any of it public, you understand nothing about the company. One thing it has focused on - the one thing that has helped it crush all competitors - is courting developers. Microsoft still has the best development tools and spends millions (billions?) on providing things like msdn.microsoft.com, visual studio, and so on.
So please - spare us all of your stupidity - and stop posting this crap about how Microsoft is going to hurt Mono.
Summary: Microsoft will make improvements to the runtime, but old versions will continue to run side-by-side preserving compatibility. Those improvements will be made available to Microsoft's own developers, thus will be known and can be implemented by the maintainers of Mono, even if the improvements are not submitted as part of the updated standard.
*Patents are another issue entirely, and a legitimate one. Depsite the fact that several members of the dotnet, language, and VS.NET teams are cheering Mono privately, who knows what the PHBs will do. So in that respect, Patents are always a vulnerability, but that is the same situation nearly all open source software is in. The patent system is broken, and we can't let fear of it paralyze us.
"Learning is fun!" - Bender, Futurama. If you know this quote, you know that these people just learned an important lesson.
"Code Escrow"
If I am going to purchase components or make a decision to commit, I make sure that there is some sort of safety-net just in case the company fails. Often this comes in the form of a code escrow service. Every X days, the company ships off a copy of all their code to the service. If the company fails or there is a serious event, the escrow company releases the code.
As a small developer that is a large expense, so for my customers, they already have the contact info for my off-site backup person. If anything happens to me, that person is instructed to freely distribute all source code. It is someone I trust.
Or you could use your attorney.
Off-site backups are a Good Thing(TM), and it only takes one extra small step to ensure that, should you perish, your work isn't left inaccessible. Whether that means a closed-source app or just your notes on an open source project.
If you think nuclear waste will need to be kept around for hundreds of thousands of years, check into actinide burners.
It looks like we may be able to break down the seriously radioactive stuff from nuclear fuel and turn it into the stuff that is only slightly radioactive (think dangerous for about 100 years.)
So we reprocess the spent fuel, which we aren't doing now. That's 90% of your mass right there that you extract and put back into the reaction.
Now take that 10% and extract the 2% plutonium that is in it and use that in one of the nuclear plant designs that can run on plutonium/uranium mix.
Now with the 8% that is left, process it in an actinide burner and you have a small amount of material that needs only to be kept for 100 years before it isn't really very radiactive. In practice, the closer you get to the 100 year mark the less dangerous it becomes.