(BTW, C# is a shoot-yourself language now - ever since they added var types, extension methods (omg yuk!) and similar stuff to support scripting languages built on the CLR. You can be spectacularly stupid without even realising it. They started well, but then.. kept adding stuff they liked. It'll end up like COM did).
No, Microsoft licenced the patents to Novell. Novell then grants anyone using Mono these patent licences so they won;t be sued. That's it. If you get Mono from anywhere else, (eg Debian) then you are not covered.
Microsoft can sue your ass and still get to claim the moral high ground of giving it away for free yet still trying to control it from chaotic implementations and forks and whatnot. We may agree that'd be a stupid argument, but they'd probably win a court case using it.
So, is it a trap? Well, nobody in their right mind ever though writing Java apps would get them sued or have to suddenly pay up, yet here we are today. Stick to the truly open languages and stay away from the company-controlled ones, its about time we told them where to go.
However, the existence of alternate compilers, alternate VMs, and extensions to the language not officially sanctioned by Sun (or Oracle)
sure, that makes sense. It worked fine for Microsoft when they wanted to add extensions to the language after all.
No, Java is on the way out, if there's one thing business doesn't like one bit, its uncertainty. Look at why Silverlight is now on the way out ('cos Muglia didn't support it nearly enough in his speech) and you'll see companies dropping it. Whilst a business is fine with paying a licence fee to use software, they cannot stand the thought of spending a lot of money on developing something that will be obsolete.
Java is now in the 'what the hell's going on' camp, and businesses are worried about it. You can guarantee they'll be looking at their future strategies right now, thinking 'what if' scenarios and (more importantly) looking at alternatives.
James Gosling:...I'm sure they were looking at the license fees they were getting from Microsoft. Microsoft.NET just smears over a huge pile of Sun patents. When they did the.NET design, they basically cut and pasted from the Java spec. The way that they did CLR, you know they swizzled the way the instruction set went but the way this thing really operated, they exercised essentially no creativity when coming up with.NET. They've done some things since then that have been kind of good but as part of the various court cases we ended up with this rather odd patent deal with them that involved them paying us fairly tasty amounts of money. And I'm sure that the lawyers looked at the Microsoft numbers and said, yeah I want that from Google
Your ISO standard is C# 2.0, not the current version - or did you expect better from Microsoft? I guess you did, more fool you.
Oh I dunno, but think for a moment why half the web servers in the world run apps written in a scripting language. Answer that question, you answer your own - there must be something in it, or they'd all be running Java/C#/ASP. Wouldn't they?
once Java didn't cut it in the same way lower-level compiled languages did. But then memory became cheaper and processors faster, and Java started to become fast enough. (I recall my PC having 32Mb Ram when Java first came out)
Today memory is even cheaper (I have 4Gb) and processors are even faster (4 cores!) which means that those scripting languages can cut it where VM-based languages used to be needed. Slashdot runs fine, and its in perl after all. At work, I'm considering performance issues on a 24 core server with 48Gb RAM. (.net issues this time - not really down to.net, but the design of the code more than anything. It could have been written in script and the result would be exactly the same)
So, the problem isn't that scripting languages are crap, too slow, they are - but the hardware has caught up to the point where everything you need to do for the usual LoB app can be written in them without anyone noticing that they are. We have Mercurial SCM written in python, and rich GUIs written in javascript. Unless you have some HPC requirements, script is fast enough.
Considering that C# is Java with a fair few mods. I'm ambivalent whether that makes it substantially better than Java or just another Java, but the point is that once Oracle starts succeeding here, Microsoft and the new board might decide to take note.
Whilst Microsoft has never traditionally done this kind of thing, they used to be run by engineers (sort of, you get where I'm coming from) where they wanted to try and achieve technical excellence, they are now run by businessmen who are only interested in the share price (and their bonuses). Note that Microsoft heavily licences java to use in C# (Gosling said they pay Sun, now Oracle 'tasty' fees very year).
The only thing that might stop them from tier-ing.net is that they use it to sell other Microsoft software - you don't write C# code in notepad for example (try it! its hurts) or run it on anything other than Windows. Whilst you can do this today doesn't mean they won't crack down on it in the future - and you can so easily imagine them doing so.
At the moment, only the truly open languages are safe to invest your time in. All the company-owned ones are poised to be monetised at the drop of a hat.
absolutely - MSE (otherwise known as Forefront, their 'enterprise' AV system, otherwise known as Antigen since 2005 until Microsoft purchased the company and rebranded it, pretending to be 'innovative')
So, its yet another one of 'those' products that are actually quite good - mainly because someone else made it:)
fair enough if it wasn't designed for rotation, but there's no reason a ring couldn't be tacked on at a later date - probably when there's enough incentive to pay for the construction of one (it'd be quite expensive, not just for the rotating coupling with the rest of the station, but for the cost of 2 struts to connect the pods at the end of the arms to the hub, and the living quarter pods themselves. (I assume counter-rotating pods at the end of 2 arms would be a lot cheaper than a full ring)
Also you don't need to worry about docking - you dock at the centre that doesn't rotate.
damn! Next you'll be telling us that all scientific, pilot, research, weapons, and EVA roles would be perfectly suited to 16 year old sons of medical staff.
I'm British, I just like the word. Sheeple. I don't who or what Ayn Rand is, and I don't care about the 2nd amendment. Sheeple. Just one of those weird words, I don't get to use it often enough so let me be, old chap.
we relegare ourselves to a pack of dumb animals if we make the point that watching something or reading something or playing violent video games means we're going to freak out and imitate or otherwise follow the directions of anything contained within.
trouble is, some people do freak out and imitate or otherwise follow this nonsense. In fact, many people do - from TV evangelists and their millions of followers, through ponzi and 'nigerian' scammers, and massmedia-incited mobs, to fanatical nutjobs. That's what I find scary about all this. Its not the nutjbs trying to cash in in some way, it the sheeple who so easily follow the most obviously ludicrous idiocy.
Theonly answer is education, so we improve the quality of all the people's intellectual capacity. Hopefully the number of fools who fall for all of the above will drop then. (though too many of these people will *still* buy iPads:) )
good point, and I've been racking my brains trying to think of something they don't describe what it does (even Vista - meaning 'look out of window until disk stops thrashing' is a good naming system).
I could only come up with Excel - which is anything but.
its not so bads - sure, things get forked all the time... but that's nearly always because of issues with the original organisation. Once forked, one thrives and the other withers away (usually the original, but then, you could say that was going to happen anyway - or the inpetus for the fork would never have ben there in the first place).
Sometimes, the fork occurs for more political reasons than anything, but the forkers fail. Often that's becuase they had grand ideas that the original knew better than to implement, those overblown ideas being the reason the fork fails.
So, really.. this is all a good thing,. The openness that allows forks simply offers a means for 'ownership' to continue with a group that will nurture the product.
although MS have made some useless design decisions with each version (the 'dom' for interacting with it programmatically keeps changing, so you have to keep rewriting wizard code for example, and the compiler gen/parser is a bit broken - ie you can use it for any language as long as that's c#, and the plugin model changed a bit, again probably a.net 'progres' thing again) its really quite good.
Don't take my word for it, try it. I think it is the reason lots of devs love C# - they don;t really, they just love the little automated bits that VS gives you. (like snippets, intellisense and fancy auto-compete stuff).
MS has a policy of providing devs with as much love and cool stuff as they can, so you can understand that the dev tools are the best that MS can make. I'm not going to knock the open source equivalents, as they're great too (though I understand eclipse uses a little memory) but of all the stuff MS makes, the dev tools are the bits they get right.
Not breaking Microsoft up into pieces was the worst thing that ever happened. We could be buying Visual Studio for Linux and Android right about now if they had been.
Very soon these devices will wirelessly talk to keyboard, monitors, each other, the public internet,/i>
You want Nokias, they already talk to bluetooth keyboards and have HDMI cable connectors for your TV at 720p at least. That's for the consumer stuff, try the N900 for the 'smart computing device'
I'm not sure if you can get a docking station for them that has the cable and BT set up - worth asking.
its not a totaly bad summary though. The problem is twofold:
firstly, we have a stock market that (for all its ills) does collect the predictions of a great many people together and effectively calculates the true worth of a company. All those analysts who are paid to determine who's going to be a winner or a loser in the future really do their best, as they get paid a lot if they get it right. These guys all think Microsoft is going nowhere. I mean, their PE ratio is 12 (ie the share price compared to sales) - against over 40 for ARM for example.
secondly, things can change in an instant. Look at mobile phones, one day we all had landlines, overnight we were mobile. Smartphones - one day it was just a txt and voice device, next: full on internet and everything "i" you can think of. One day, something like this will happen to a core Microsoft product, and next thing you know, Microsoft is laying off thousands, closing divisions and reinventing itself.
This is why the smart money is out looking for something else and not totally relying on MS to deliver. I'm not sure the giant-killer is out there for businesses, unless its a Nokia 'smart computer', or (more likely) Google., but I think the consumer arena is lost to MS completely. If we see poor Xbox figures soon (and remember the PS Move is getting a lot of good coverage while the Kinect is not, and the Move is cheap whereas the Kinect is not), poor Live figures too (as usual), and slower-than-expected WinPho7 sales then the decline of MS could accelerate.
do you really want the guy who's writing your medical records system to know about optimal register allocation
no, but I want him to know more than 'I click the wizard and it says "what parameters do you want", and I fill it in, and then I have a running web service'.
unfortunately, Microsoft is desperate to get you chained on that upgrade bandwagon. I predict that soon, all MS apps will *require* W7 or later to work. Its already happening though MS are being forced to back down (eg IE9, Visual Studio 2010). Once they feel confident they won't piss off all the corporate customers currently runnng XP, they will, and you'll have to buy something else. Probably a newer version of Windows.
Is W7 better than XP - yeah, it is I guess. Is it really so much better that you *have* to run out and get a copy - not really. You could wait for W8 without any harm whatsoever.
I tell you what, that's the 3rd comment I've seen that's made the excuse that it must have been better hardware performing better, nothing to do with.NET v Linux at all. Are the Microsoft marketing department working overtime today? You'd think you guys would have a selection of excuses to use instead of just the 1.
Frankly, I'm surprised you havn't banged on about how it was written in.NET 1.1, and that.NET 4 is soo much better now. Still, the facts are that Linux is an established player in corporate, enterprise, mission critical systems.
I think you overestimate the number of J2ME devs compared to Symbian ones. There's a lot of those. And comparing anything to Apple is disingenuous as Apple wants the lock in of a little-used language, just like MS wants lock-in with.NET.
Still, I would not have made the UI components java-based at all, as I think Java is a lock-in language all of its own (I shudder at all that "100% pure" Java marketing), I think they should have made it more as open component, probably in C, with bindings for all languages the dev likes - so you can still code in Java if you liked, or C/C++, or python, all the time knowing you were getting a first-class support for interaction with the underlying system.
Is Java a better thing to code against? That depends on your skill set, and before anyone says 'but we need to make it as easy as possible', if that was the case, the language used would have been Basic:)
Don't forget the VM is the OS as far as Java is concerned. Google could easily have put that work into the Linux kernel (or the Android API layer) without needing to put a VM layer on top of it all. Its all swings and roundabouts ultimately, but I think the flexibility you lose by enforcing Dalvik is ultimately detrimental.
Slashdot Mirror
lol. Good job you don't use C!
(BTW, C# is a shoot-yourself language now - ever since they added var types, extension methods (omg yuk!) and similar stuff to support scripting languages built on the CLR. You can be spectacularly stupid without even realising it. They started well, but then.. kept adding stuff they liked. It'll end up like COM did).
they're rewriting Hudson in C? really? show me a link (I'm actually genuinely interested now :) )
No, Microsoft licenced the patents to Novell. Novell then grants anyone using Mono these patent licences so they won;t be sued. That's it. If you get Mono from anywhere else, (eg Debian) then you are not covered.
Microsoft can sue your ass and still get to claim the moral high ground of giving it away for free yet still trying to control it from chaotic implementations and forks and whatnot. We may agree that'd be a stupid argument, but they'd probably win a court case using it.
So, is it a trap? Well, nobody in their right mind ever though writing Java apps would get them sued or have to suddenly pay up, yet here we are today. Stick to the truly open languages and stay away from the company-controlled ones, its about time we told them where to go.
However, the existence of alternate compilers, alternate VMs, and extensions to the language not officially sanctioned by Sun (or Oracle)
sure, that makes sense. It worked fine for Microsoft when they wanted to add extensions to the language after all.
No, Java is on the way out, if there's one thing business doesn't like one bit, its uncertainty. Look at why Silverlight is now on the way out ('cos Muglia didn't support it nearly enough in his speech) and you'll see companies dropping it. Whilst a business is fine with paying a licence fee to use software, they cannot stand the thought of spending a lot of money on developing something that will be obsolete.
Java is now in the 'what the hell's going on' camp, and businesses are worried about it. You can guarantee they'll be looking at their future strategies right now, thinking 'what if' scenarios and (more importantly) looking at alternatives.
see my reply to the other guy - from a /. story
nope. wrong. sorry. un-curl the corner of the C# carpet and you'll see Java.
from http://www.basementcoders.com/transcripts/James_Gosling_Transcript.html
Gosling's interview concerning Oracle's takeover of Sun.
James Gosling: ...I'm sure they were looking at the license fees they were getting from Microsoft. Microsoft .NET just smears over a huge pile of Sun patents. When they did the .NET design, they basically cut and pasted from the Java spec. The way that they did CLR, you know they swizzled the way the instruction set went but the way this thing really operated, they exercised essentially no creativity when coming up with .NET. They've done some things since then that have been kind of good but as part of the various court cases we ended up with this rather odd patent deal with them that involved them paying us fairly tasty amounts of money. And I'm sure that the lawyers looked at the Microsoft numbers and said, yeah I want that from Google
Your ISO standard is C# 2.0, not the current version - or did you expect better from Microsoft? I guess you did, more fool you.
Oh I dunno, but think for a moment why half the web servers in the world run apps written in a scripting language. Answer that question, you answer your own - there must be something in it, or they'd all be running Java/C#/ASP. Wouldn't they?
Except...
once Java didn't cut it in the same way lower-level compiled languages did. But then memory became cheaper and processors faster, and Java started to become fast enough. (I recall my PC having 32Mb Ram when Java first came out)
Today memory is even cheaper (I have 4Gb) and processors are even faster (4 cores!) which means that those scripting languages can cut it where VM-based languages used to be needed. Slashdot runs fine, and its in perl after all. At work, I'm considering performance issues on a 24 core server with 48Gb RAM. (.net issues this time - not really down to .net, but the design of the code more than anything. It could have been written in script and the result would be exactly the same)
So, the problem isn't that scripting languages are crap, too slow, they are - but the hardware has caught up to the point where everything you need to do for the usual LoB app can be written in them without anyone noticing that they are. We have Mercurial SCM written in python, and rich GUIs written in javascript. Unless you have some HPC requirements, script is fast enough.
Or to put it another way, Java is now obsolete.
Considering that C# is Java with a fair few mods. I'm ambivalent whether that makes it substantially better than Java or just another Java, but the point is that once Oracle starts succeeding here, Microsoft and the new board might decide to take note.
Whilst Microsoft has never traditionally done this kind of thing, they used to be run by engineers (sort of, you get where I'm coming from) where they wanted to try and achieve technical excellence, they are now run by businessmen who are only interested in the share price (and their bonuses). Note that Microsoft heavily licences java to use in C# (Gosling said they pay Sun, now Oracle 'tasty' fees very year).
The only thing that might stop them from tier-ing .net is that they use it to sell other Microsoft software - you don't write C# code in notepad for example (try it! its hurts) or run it on anything other than Windows. Whilst you can do this today doesn't mean they won't crack down on it in the future - and you can so easily imagine them doing so.
At the moment, only the truly open languages are safe to invest your time in. All the company-owned ones are poised to be monetised at the drop of a hat.
absolutely - MSE (otherwise known as Forefront, their 'enterprise' AV system, otherwise known as Antigen since 2005 until Microsoft purchased the company and rebranded it, pretending to be 'innovative')
So, its yet another one of 'those' products that are actually quite good - mainly because someone else made it :)
fair enough if it wasn't designed for rotation, but there's no reason a ring couldn't be tacked on at a later date - probably when there's enough incentive to pay for the construction of one (it'd be quite expensive, not just for the rotating coupling with the rest of the station, but for the cost of 2 struts to connect the pods at the end of the arms to the hub, and the living quarter pods themselves. (I assume counter-rotating pods at the end of 2 arms would be a lot cheaper than a full ring)
Also you don't need to worry about docking - you dock at the centre that doesn't rotate.
damn! Next you'll be telling us that all scientific, pilot, research, weapons, and EVA roles would be perfectly suited to 16 year old sons of medical staff.
I'm British, I just like the word. Sheeple. I don't who or what Ayn Rand is, and I don't care about the 2nd amendment. Sheeple. Just one of those weird words, I don't get to use it often enough so let me be, old chap.
we relegare ourselves to a pack of dumb animals if we make the point that watching something or reading something or playing violent video games means we're going to freak out and imitate or otherwise follow the directions of anything contained within.
trouble is, some people do freak out and imitate or otherwise follow this nonsense. In fact, many people do - from TV evangelists and their millions of followers, through ponzi and 'nigerian' scammers, and massmedia-incited mobs, to fanatical nutjobs. That's what I find scary about all this. Its not the nutjbs trying to cash in in some way, it the sheeple who so easily follow the most obviously ludicrous idiocy.
Theonly answer is education, so we improve the quality of all the people's intellectual capacity. Hopefully the number of fools who fall for all of the above will drop then. (though too many of these people will *still* buy iPads :) )
good point, and I've been racking my brains trying to think of something they don't describe what it does (even Vista - meaning 'look out of window until disk stops thrashing' is a good naming system).
I could only come up with Excel - which is anything but.
its not so bads - sure, things get forked all the time... but that's nearly always because of issues with the original organisation. Once forked, one thrives and the other withers away (usually the original, but then, you could say that was going to happen anyway - or the inpetus for the fork would never have ben there in the first place).
Sometimes, the fork occurs for more political reasons than anything, but the forkers fail. Often that's becuase they had grand ideas that the original knew better than to implement, those overblown ideas being the reason the fork fails.
So, really.. this is all a good thing,. The openness that allows forks simply offers a means for 'ownership' to continue with a group that will nurture the product.
one thing they have to deal with is the name, LibreOffice is, well, somewhat poor.
The Document Foundation website looks good though, simple and says the right things about community and values. Easy links to download it too.
although MS have made some useless design decisions with each version (the 'dom' for interacting with it programmatically keeps changing, so you have to keep rewriting wizard code for example, and the compiler gen/parser is a bit broken - ie you can use it for any language as long as that's c#, and the plugin model changed a bit, again probably a .net 'progres' thing again) its really quite good.
Don't take my word for it, try it. I think it is the reason lots of devs love C# - they don;t really, they just love the little automated bits that VS gives you. (like snippets, intellisense and fancy auto-compete stuff).
MS has a policy of providing devs with as much love and cool stuff as they can, so you can understand that the dev tools are the best that MS can make. I'm not going to knock the open source equivalents, as they're great too (though I understand eclipse uses a little memory) but of all the stuff MS makes, the dev tools are the bits they get right.
Visual Studio is pretty much liquid digital sex
Not breaking Microsoft up into pieces was the worst thing that ever happened. We could be buying Visual Studio for Linux and Android right about now if they had been.
Very soon these devices will wirelessly talk to keyboard, monitors, each other, the public internet,/i>
You want Nokias, they already talk to bluetooth keyboards and have HDMI cable connectors for your TV at 720p at least. That's for the consumer stuff, try the N900 for the 'smart computing device'
I'm not sure if you can get a docking station for them that has the cable and BT set up - worth asking.
its not a totaly bad summary though. The problem is twofold:
firstly, we have a stock market that (for all its ills) does collect the predictions of a great many people together and effectively calculates the true worth of a company. All those analysts who are paid to determine who's going to be a winner or a loser in the future really do their best, as they get paid a lot if they get it right. These guys all think Microsoft is going nowhere. I mean, their PE ratio is 12 (ie the share price compared to sales) - against over 40 for ARM for example.
secondly, things can change in an instant. Look at mobile phones, one day we all had landlines, overnight we were mobile. Smartphones - one day it was just a txt and voice device, next: full on internet and everything "i" you can think of. One day, something like this will happen to a core Microsoft product, and next thing you know, Microsoft is laying off thousands, closing divisions and reinventing itself.
This is why the smart money is out looking for something else and not totally relying on MS to deliver. I'm not sure the giant-killer is out there for businesses, unless its a Nokia 'smart computer', or (more likely) Google., but I think the consumer arena is lost to MS completely. If we see poor Xbox figures soon (and remember the PS Move is getting a lot of good coverage while the Kinect is not, and the Move is cheap whereas the Kinect is not), poor Live figures too (as usual), and slower-than-expected WinPho7 sales then the decline of MS could accelerate.
do you really want the guy who's writing your medical records system to know about optimal register allocation
no, but I want him to know more than 'I click the wizard and it says "what parameters do you want", and I fill it in, and then I have a running web service'.
unfortunately, Microsoft is desperate to get you chained on that upgrade bandwagon. I predict that soon, all MS apps will *require* W7 or later to work. Its already happening though MS are being forced to back down (eg IE9, Visual Studio 2010). Once they feel confident they won't piss off all the corporate customers currently runnng XP, they will, and you'll have to buy something else. Probably a newer version of Windows.
Is W7 better than XP - yeah, it is I guess. Is it really so much better that you *have* to run out and get a copy - not really. You could wait for W8 without any harm whatsoever.
I tell you what, that's the 3rd comment I've seen that's made the excuse that it must have been better hardware performing better, nothing to do with .NET v Linux at all. Are the Microsoft marketing department working overtime today? You'd think you guys would have a selection of excuses to use instead of just the 1.
Frankly, I'm surprised you havn't banged on about how it was written in .NET 1.1, and that .NET 4 is soo much better now. Still, the facts are that Linux is an established player in corporate, enterprise, mission critical systems.
I think you overestimate the number of J2ME devs compared to Symbian ones. There's a lot of those. And comparing anything to Apple is disingenuous as Apple wants the lock in of a little-used language, just like MS wants lock-in with .NET.
Still, I would not have made the UI components java-based at all, as I think Java is a lock-in language all of its own (I shudder at all that "100% pure" Java marketing), I think they should have made it more as open component, probably in C, with bindings for all languages the dev likes - so you can still code in Java if you liked, or C/C++, or python, all the time knowing you were getting a first-class support for interaction with the underlying system.
Is Java a better thing to code against? That depends on your skill set, and before anyone says 'but we need to make it as easy as possible', if that was the case, the language used would have been Basic :)
Don't forget the VM is the OS as far as Java is concerned. Google could easily have put that work into the Linux kernel (or the Android API layer) without needing to put a VM layer on top of it all. Its all swings and roundabouts ultimately, but I think the flexibility you lose by enforcing Dalvik is ultimately detrimental.