Way back when the earth was flat, Monty Python had a skit where there was a joke so funny that you'd die laughing, literally. The military wanted to use it against they enemies, so they can to translate it into the enemies language (probably German in the skit,I don't recall) but if a single translator was given the whole joke, they woule die laughing before they would write down the translation. So they cut the printed copy of the joke into smaller (non-leathal) sections and had a group of translators translate sections of the joke which was later reassembled into final form. Same principle.
Possible Reasons for buying Opera
on
Google to Buy Opera?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh the possibilites:
Opera becomes a free, as in no-cost, browser (forget about buying your way out of displaying Google ads) which means you can't pay for it but you also can't disabled advertising.
Google aquires a browser that runs on platforms not supported by IE and Firefox, accellerating distro of Google products/services to small/alternate form factor devices.
They open source Opera so features in it (don't ask me what) can find their way into Firefox.
Google once again uses its wealth to fund threatened developers, in this case former Opera employees.
Google uses the closed source Opera code base to make a platform which can run emerging Google specific apps which are not supported via current browsers. Think Google Earth where the "app" is GOpera which understands how to connect to the Google Keyhole servers to download "application code" as well as map data. Integrated Chat, FTP, Mail, etc. where all of the "extras" are downloaded on demand. Imagine a "browser" which has a full text editing/ word processing engine (like say maybe Star Office) built-in but saves its documents transparently to Google Base servers. The Google/Opera application could be their end-all intregration suite. The Opera engine (HTTP transport, rendering, etc.) supplies a common client-side platform for their developments to come. And you thought MS-Office was scary as "the" application intregration platform for Micro$oft!!!
I know and work with Nucs (and other more normal but also bright people) and while Nucs are generally smart folks, that alone does not make them good at software and some of them don't understand beans about code or the software development process.
Physics is only one technical subject, computer science is a different subject area. In that Nucs are generally smart and smart people make better coders than dumb ones, I'd have to agree with you assertion, otherwise, all bets are off.
And then there's personality - which Nucs either don't have (mostly) or have too much of (even worse).
Yep, and that crack/flamebait about sending money to DARPA (used to be ARPA), DOD, etc. vice NSF...well NSF did not create the Intenet that everyone is reading this post via.
Hey, how about Tang? Without a space program who among us would have drunk that vaguely colored water back in the 60s? Actually it was better dry using a wetted popsicle stick - straight to your toungue. Boy that would light you up!
Seriously, look at the stuff that is produced offshore (Taiwan, China, etc.) but note that most of the engineering is done back in the U.S. - expect that to change tho. I'm not saying there are not good engineers overseas (there are and they do a a lot of hardware design (but the point is that the broad specs and standards are still mostly U.S. driven. Say what you will, but that is still largely the case today. No doubt that will change in the future as well, but because we are living in a more open standards driven global village, not because of a decline in education/engineering in the U.S.
I don't see the U.S. in decline in absolute terms, but rather other countries are producing better engineers than they have in the past. So, in relative terms, the U.S. has a declining lead (the third world gap is shrinking).
A movie DVD has maybe 4.7 GB (and often much more with dual layering and 2 discs in the package) of data, a CD has less than 700 MB. The movie soundtrack is on the DVD with the movie for maybe $17. The soundtrack (only) CD runs maybe $2 - $4 less and has a lower value (audio only) which is not in proportion to its price.
Its simple, CDs are not a good value for the money at current prices. If they cost $5 to $7, they would sell at LOT more CDs and make more profit on the greater volumne (heck the media is pennies per disc).
If they moan that the distribution costs of packing and shipping physical media does not support this price range (which is B.S. by the way), then all the more reason to have an Internet based delivery price model which is less than the physical CD from the store.
The RIAA's profits are down because they are greedy (and stupid) and are ignoring changing economics and technology shifts. But we know that...(and yes most of today's music is crap. The only CDs I buy are of 20 - 30 year old songs).
If IBM or Sun or someone else who has deep enough pockets would just buy the stock of those SCO cry-babies they could make this problem go away. Who knows, the SCO stock might cost less than legal expense of this worthless lawsuit. Have you read some of the "facts" in SCO suit? The only issue of any legal interest is if they can PROVE that IBM gave away or otherwise re-distributed SCO/UNIX source code or other propriety technologies. SCO makes noise that amounts to "since AIX is an licensed copy of UNIX, then anything IBM calls AIX is automatically the property of SCO". Which is nonsense as all of the IBM value added stuff does not belong to SCO and AIX is IBM's trademark, not SCO's. SCO is on their last legs and is trying to squeeze blood out of any rock it can find. And how about their asertion that their code is so special because it can run on the formerly underpowered Intel x86 chips? I guess they forgot about XENIX and Solaris 86 and QNX etc. I guess they forgot the fact that UNIX has been portable since it was rewritten in 'C' back in the dark ages and ever since the 80386 Intel chips have had what it takes to run a full fledged version of UNIX. With their revisionist view of history, SCO ought to relocate from Utah to one of the few communist countries left.
If Linux is so good and stable and free, why do Slashdot Editors want to run it on overpriced of hardware like a Mac when you can run it on an equivalent featured/powered PC for hundreds (or thousands) less? Don't confuse distain of MS-Windows with a lack of appreciation for cost effective hardware. Remember, once Windows is gone, its just hardware waiting to run an O/S.
I have a NX70 with the VGA res camera and the pictures it takes are crap. Even allowing for the 640x480 size. The noise and color fidelity suck. I had an old Sony Mavica (floppy disk storage) which had better image quality and the same res. For very quick and dirty photos, the built in camera on the Clie is ok, but it not a "REAL" camera like my Olympus E-10. I suspect the small lense and too much JPEG compression are to blame, so how will this improve with a 2 megapixel model? The only good thing about the Clie camera is that you can take photos in places were a real camera is not pratical or not allowed in the door. Since my Clie is always with me, I can always take a quick crappy photo. Big deal.
GCCS runs primarily on Solaris (although some variants like GCCS-M have, or still do, run under HP-UX). Applixware on the Unix boxes is what they are talking about replacing with StarOffice. Nothing wrong with that but don't get you Linux hopes up just yet.
And as others have pointed out, this does not represent a shift away from Microsoft Windows or Office, just an upgrade to existing Unix boxes (of which the DoD has plenty).
Also, as others have pointed out, DISA is far from being the entire DoD. The component services often do not follow DISA's lead except on systems under DISA's control.
Reading this thread I can't tell if you children think Bush and Americans are Isolationists or Imperialists. Or could it be both? The first Empire of Isolation!
Also I seem to have missed when Bush complained about the Ketchup on his french fries. Can you provide the exact date and place of this epic comment? I thought not.
By the way, being President, or the leader of most countries for that matter, is not rocket science. Some of our smartest Presidents were also our least effective Presidents.
Also, any country that does not have a least a modicum of self-interest is prey for the rest of the world (which obviously does pander to its self-interest).
In closing, I appear to part of the minority of posters who sign in and comment using their real name. Stand up and be counted, or are you afraid your parents will find out what your doing?
Netscape, being an AOL product includes AOL Instant Messanger (AIM) but does not have an IRC client. Conversely, the Mozilla release does not have AIM but does have an IRC client (Chatzilla).
The other item is that Mozilla is updated and debugged more frequently than Netscape 6.x
If Microsoft only sells new versions of their software via time limited subscriptions they will be forcing a large segment of the computing world to keep their last unlimited copies in use forever. So Windows 95/98/ME and NT/W2K will be around for a very long time.
The real question is what happens when someone buys a new computer. Does their PC stop working after 3 years if they don't pay Microsoft? Business may or may not put up with this, but I predict that consumers simply won't have it.
I hope Microsoft indeed puts this bad idea into effect, it will give other OS's a big boost. No doubt Linux, StarOffice and WordPerfect will be the winners here.
Platform abstracting layers/thunks/libraries do add chunk of code to your application but the amount is rather fixed. So, it is death for that 1000 line ditty application. But for a real application it is a manageable (and static) size increase. As you app grows from 1 to 3 megs the toolkit libraries remain fixed in size.
The poster's off the cuff remark, "I choose to write in a portable subset of C and C++" is right and wrong. The way we did our cross-platform app (500+ files, about a half million lines of code) was to stick to a "portable subset of C" but that doesn't do anything for database and GUI issues, nor does it solve the platform specific issues like file path separaters and clipboards.
Our cross-platform app (which we started in 1993) used the XVT GUI toolkit but the issues are the same now as then, you need a portable GUI layer to write to. Everyone assumes they can roll their own toolkit. Bullshit - these are complex animals. Spend the money and buy someone else's mature, debugged, documented toolkit. Back when we started our development ODBC was embryonic as was IDAPI (Borland's database layer). Lacking an industry standard (at that time) we chose to build our own database layer which gave us access to Btrieve on the PCs only and Oracle on both PCs and HP workstations. Let me tell anyone interested in doing a cross-technology layer: don't do it if you really don't have to. Use ODBC, JDBC, etc. for your databse and settle on a tool for the GUI as well. The only caveat is be leery of a toolkit specific API unless you feel good about using the toolkit/IDE for a long time. Industry standards are best but at some point you pick a tool and make a go of it for few years.
Port early, port often (the battle cry of cross-platform coders). It's not portable unless you have tested it on all target platforms. Assumed, but untested "portable" apps aren't.
History note - Borland, like Microsoft, often has 3 levels for the compilers, Personal/Student/Standard ($99), Professional ($499-$999) and Enterprise ($999-$2499) so don't get undone that they announced the high-end Enterprise tool first.
A hundred bucks is not too much for a good tool for personal use. $500 is not too much for a tool you will use to write commercial apps and any price is ok if your employer thinks it is cost effective and picks up the tab.
You are welcome to your opinions but to present what is mostly hogwash without supporting studies or other objective data is just bullshit being passed off as journalism.
The opportunity for Java to flourish on Linux is on Linux web servers. Aren't web servers one of Linux's best penetrations to date?
Your choice is to create dynamic websites using Active Server Pages (ASP) on Windows servers (IIS/PWS) or Java Server Pages (JSP) on Linux (or Windows, Solaris, etc.)
I have programmed both ASP and JSP for a few years now and they are roughly equivilent. ASPs are easier to write and debug but JSP have many strengths (same language cross-platform middle-tier development via Java Beans) and a richer environment due to your access to the entire non-GUI Java API (class libraries).
Java Server Page Application servers are available both commercially (Allaire JRun, IBM WebSphere, iPlanet, etc.) and Open Source (Tomcat/Jakarta from the Apache folks) and JSPs/Servlets run on LOTS of platforms (I hate O/S lock-in like I hate vendor lock-in).
I have not used PHP or Python but I'm guessing they do not support same language cross-platform middle-tier development. That is, can you program a persistent, multi-user business logic layer in PHP or Python like you can with Java Beans or EJBs?
I have no love for Microsoft's answer to a middle tier (COM) as it is not cross platform, does not even try to look open or free, and is best developed using a different language ('C') from the webpage scripting language (typically VB Script but could be JavaScript).
Java lets me program webpages and middle tier in the same language so I have one set of tools (and yes, they are getting better every day). I often prototype functions in JSP and then move the same code to the middle tier when I find I need logic reuse.
You want to hurt Microsoft and promote Linux? Then get your Internet Hosting companies to offer JSP/Servlet support on their Linux offerings like the do with ASP support on their NT server offerings. Otherwise people will code ASPs on NT servers as the path of least resistance.
Put religion aside and think seriously about multi-vendor, cross-platform coding. That's where you offer your customer a value proposition. Commercial solutions are not "bad" just because they are commercial. They are "bad" when they limit your development and deployment options.
According to current poll results, if Slashdot was the Electoral College then our next president would be "I'm not a U.S. Citizen".
Obviously, Slashdot readers are not representative of the general voting public (consider Bush/Gore ratios and check our Nader's showing). Is that good or bad?
Novell ought to be a killer Linux company
on
Is Novell Doomed?
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· Score: 2
Novell should create or enhance a Linux distribution ("Novell Linux"). They would then port NDS, ZEN Works etc to the platform. These might (ZEN) or not (NDS) be commercially purchased products. Novell used to make a lot of its money from support and they could certainly do that as a Linux shop. They should be developing something to port or provide runtime emulation for NLMs to run with Linux beneath them.
Microsoft is the only remaining company that can sell a proprietary OS to a large market (and its days doing that may be numbered). Look at Banyan VINES, SCO, OSF-1, OS/2, CP/M. All dead. OS's that come bundled with a vendors hardware is another matter as it is a captive OS sale (Mac OS, Solaris, HP/UX, MVS, OS/400) and it should noted that HP is emphasising NT over HP/UX and IBM is widening support for Linux.
The world will always have niche OSs but there will be only 2 widespead OSs in the near future (Windows and Linux). That does not leave much room for Netware. Novell talks about becoming a network services company. Well, they can have a "reference" platform for their goods and it should be Linux.
If Compact and Phoenix (among others) never clean-room reverse engineered the BIOS calls of the original IBM PC we would all be buying our PCs only from Big Blue to this day. Look what cloning/reverse engineering has done:
Helped create open standards out of otherwise proprietary works. Fewer open standards (from which many competitive products arise) better serve the marketplace than thousands of proprietarty products from single vendors.
Created competition which broadened the market such that even the "original owner" of a technology benefits (a smaller piece of a much much larger pie).
If the challenge from IBM against cloning their BIOS had survived, we would now have hundreds of wacky computer hardware manfactuers and virtually no usefull software as every program could only target a small number of hardware suites. On second thought, it may have have just accelerated a Java like virtual machine approach to software abstraction that much sooner.
Slashdot Mirror
Way back when the earth was flat, Monty Python had a skit where there was a joke so funny that you'd die laughing, literally. The military wanted to use it against they enemies, so they can to translate it into the enemies language (probably German in the skit,I don't recall) but if a single translator was given the whole joke, they woule die laughing before they would write down the translation. So they cut the printed copy of the joke into smaller (non-leathal) sections and had a group of translators translate sections of the joke which was later reassembled into final form. Same principle.
Physics is only one technical subject, computer science is a different subject area. In that Nucs are generally smart and smart people make better coders than dumb ones, I'd have to agree with you assertion, otherwise, all bets are off.
And then there's personality - which Nucs either don't have (mostly) or have too much of (even worse).
Hey, how about Tang? Without a space program who among us would have drunk that vaguely colored water back in the 60s? Actually it was better dry using a wetted popsicle stick - straight to your toungue. Boy that would light you up!
Seriously, look at the stuff that is produced offshore (Taiwan, China, etc.) but note that most of the engineering is done back in the U.S. - expect that to change tho. I'm not saying there are not good engineers overseas (there are and they do a a lot of hardware design (but the point is that the broad specs and standards are still mostly U.S. driven. Say what you will, but that is still largely the case today. No doubt that will change in the future as well, but because we are living in a more open standards driven global village, not because of a decline in education/engineering in the U.S.
I don't see the U.S. in decline in absolute terms, but rather other countries are producing better engineers than they have in the past. So, in relative terms, the U.S. has a declining lead (the third world gap is shrinking).
A movie DVD has maybe 4.7 GB (and often much more with dual layering and 2 discs in the package) of data, a CD has less than 700 MB. The movie soundtrack is on the DVD with the movie for maybe $17. The soundtrack (only) CD runs maybe $2 - $4 less and has a lower value (audio only) which is not in proportion to its price.
Its simple, CDs are not a good value for the money at current prices. If they cost $5 to $7, they would sell at LOT more CDs and make more profit on the greater volumne (heck the media is pennies per disc).
If they moan that the distribution costs of packing and shipping physical media does not support this price range (which is B.S. by the way), then all the more reason to have an Internet based delivery price model which is less than the physical CD from the store.
The RIAA's profits are down because they are greedy (and stupid) and are ignoring changing economics and technology shifts. But we know that...(and yes most of today's music is crap. The only CDs I buy are of 20 - 30 year old songs).
If IBM or Sun or someone else who has deep enough pockets would just buy the stock of those SCO cry-babies they could make this problem go away. Who knows, the SCO stock might cost less than legal expense of this worthless lawsuit. Have you read some of the "facts" in SCO suit? The only issue of any legal interest is if they can PROVE that IBM gave away or otherwise re-distributed SCO/UNIX source code or other propriety technologies. SCO makes noise that amounts to "since AIX is an licensed copy of UNIX, then anything IBM calls AIX is automatically the property of SCO". Which is nonsense as all of the IBM value added stuff does not belong to SCO and AIX is IBM's trademark, not SCO's. SCO is on their last legs and is trying to squeeze blood out of any rock it can find. And how about their asertion that their code is so special because it can run on the formerly underpowered Intel x86 chips? I guess they forgot about XENIX and Solaris 86 and QNX etc. I guess they forgot the fact that UNIX has been portable since it was rewritten in 'C' back in the dark ages and ever since the 80386 Intel chips have had what it takes to run a full fledged version of UNIX. With their revisionist view of history, SCO ought to relocate from Utah to one of the few communist countries left.
If Linux is so good and stable and free, why do Slashdot Editors want to run it on overpriced of hardware like a Mac when you can run it on an equivalent featured/powered PC for hundreds (or thousands) less? Don't confuse distain of MS-Windows with a lack of appreciation for cost effective hardware. Remember, once Windows is gone, its just hardware waiting to run an O/S.
I have a NX70 with the VGA res camera and the pictures it takes are crap. Even allowing for the 640x480 size. The noise and color fidelity suck. I had an old Sony Mavica (floppy disk storage) which had better image quality and the same res. For very quick and dirty photos, the built in camera on the Clie is ok, but it not a "REAL" camera like my Olympus E-10. I suspect the small lense and too much JPEG compression are to blame, so how will this improve with a 2 megapixel model? The only good thing about the Clie camera is that you can take photos in places were a real camera is not pratical or not allowed in the door. Since my Clie is always with me, I can always take a quick crappy photo. Big deal.
And as others have pointed out, this does not represent a shift away from Microsoft Windows or Office, just an upgrade to existing Unix boxes (of which the DoD has plenty).
Also, as others have pointed out, DISA is far from being the entire DoD. The component services often do not follow DISA's lead except on systems under DISA's control.
Also I seem to have missed when Bush complained about the Ketchup on his french fries. Can you provide the exact date and place of this epic comment? I thought not.
By the way, being President, or the leader of most countries for that matter, is not rocket science. Some of our smartest Presidents were also our least effective Presidents.
Also, any country that does not have a least a modicum of self-interest is prey for the rest of the world (which obviously does pander to its self-interest).
In closing, I appear to part of the minority of posters who sign in and comment using their real name. Stand up and be counted, or are you afraid your parents will find out what your doing?
Netscape, being an AOL product includes AOL Instant Messanger (AIM) but does not have an IRC client. Conversely, the Mozilla release does not have AIM but does have an IRC client (Chatzilla).
The other item is that Mozilla is updated and debugged more frequently than Netscape 6.x
If Microsoft only sells new versions of their software via time limited subscriptions they will be forcing a large segment of the computing world to keep their last unlimited copies in use forever. So Windows 95/98/ME and NT/W2K will be around for a very long time. The real question is what happens when someone buys a new computer. Does their PC stop working after 3 years if they don't pay Microsoft? Business may or may not put up with this, but I predict that consumers simply won't have it. I hope Microsoft indeed puts this bad idea into effect, it will give other OS's a big boost. No doubt Linux, StarOffice and WordPerfect will be the winners here.
Platform abstracting layers/thunks/libraries do add chunk of code to your application but the amount is rather fixed. So, it is death for that 1000 line ditty application. But for a real application it is a manageable (and static) size increase. As you app grows from 1 to 3 megs the toolkit libraries remain fixed in size.
The poster's off the cuff remark, "I choose to write in a portable subset of C and C++" is right and wrong. The way we did our cross-platform app (500+ files, about a half million lines of code) was to stick to a "portable subset of C" but that doesn't do anything for database and GUI issues, nor does it solve the platform specific issues like file path separaters and clipboards.
Our cross-platform app (which we started in 1993) used the XVT GUI toolkit but the issues are the same now as then, you need a portable GUI layer to write to. Everyone assumes they can roll their own toolkit. Bullshit - these are complex animals. Spend the money and buy someone else's mature, debugged, documented toolkit. Back when we started our development ODBC was embryonic as was IDAPI (Borland's database layer). Lacking an industry standard (at that time) we chose to build our own database layer which gave us access to Btrieve on the PCs only and Oracle on both PCs and HP workstations. Let me tell anyone interested in doing a cross-technology layer: don't do it if you really don't have to. Use ODBC, JDBC, etc. for your databse and settle on a tool for the GUI as well. The only caveat is be leery of a toolkit specific API unless you feel good about using the toolkit/IDE for a long time. Industry standards are best but at some point you pick a tool and make a go of it for few years.
Port early, port often (the battle cry of cross-platform coders). It's not portable unless you have tested it on all target platforms. Assumed, but untested "portable" apps aren't.
History note - Borland, like Microsoft, often has 3 levels for the compilers, Personal/Student/Standard ($99), Professional ($499-$999) and Enterprise ($999-$2499) so don't get undone that they announced the high-end Enterprise tool first.
A hundred bucks is not too much for a good tool for personal use. $500 is not too much for a tool you will use to write commercial apps and any price is ok if your employer thinks it is cost effective and picks up the tab.
-- The voice of experience
You are welcome to your opinions but to present what is mostly hogwash without supporting studies or other objective data is just bullshit being passed off as journalism.
The opportunity for Java to flourish on Linux is on Linux web servers. Aren't web servers one of Linux's best penetrations to date?
Your choice is to create dynamic websites using Active Server Pages (ASP) on Windows servers (IIS/PWS) or Java Server Pages (JSP) on Linux (or Windows, Solaris, etc.)
I have programmed both ASP and JSP for a few years now and they are roughly equivilent. ASPs are easier to write and debug but JSP have many strengths (same language cross-platform middle-tier development via Java Beans) and a richer environment due to your access to the entire non-GUI Java API (class libraries).
Java Server Page Application servers are available both commercially (Allaire JRun, IBM WebSphere, iPlanet, etc.) and Open Source (Tomcat/Jakarta from the Apache folks) and JSPs/Servlets run on LOTS of platforms (I hate O/S lock-in like I hate vendor lock-in).
I have not used PHP or Python but I'm guessing they do not support same language cross-platform middle-tier development. That is, can you program a persistent, multi-user business logic layer in PHP or Python like you can with Java Beans or EJBs?
I have no love for Microsoft's answer to a middle tier (COM) as it is not cross platform, does not even try to look open or free, and is best developed using a different language ('C') from the webpage scripting language (typically VB Script but could be JavaScript).
Java lets me program webpages and middle tier in the same language so I have one set of tools (and yes, they are getting better every day). I often prototype functions in JSP and then move the same code to the middle tier when I find I need logic reuse.
You want to hurt Microsoft and promote Linux? Then get your Internet Hosting companies to offer JSP/Servlet support on their Linux offerings like the do with ASP support on their NT server offerings. Otherwise people will code ASPs on NT servers as the path of least resistance.
Put religion aside and think seriously about multi-vendor, cross-platform coding. That's where you offer your customer a value proposition. Commercial solutions are not "bad" just because they are commercial. They are "bad" when they limit your development and deployment options.
According to current poll results, if Slashdot was the Electoral College then our next president would be "I'm not a U.S. Citizen". Obviously, Slashdot readers are not representative of the general voting public (consider Bush/Gore ratios and check our Nader's showing). Is that good or bad?
Novell should create or enhance a Linux distribution ("Novell Linux"). They would then port NDS, ZEN Works etc to the platform. These might (ZEN) or not (NDS) be commercially purchased products. Novell used to make a lot of its money from support and they could certainly do that as a Linux shop. They should be developing something to port or provide runtime emulation for NLMs to run with Linux beneath them. Microsoft is the only remaining company that can sell a proprietary OS to a large market (and its days doing that may be numbered). Look at Banyan VINES, SCO, OSF-1, OS/2, CP/M. All dead. OS's that come bundled with a vendors hardware is another matter as it is a captive OS sale (Mac OS, Solaris, HP/UX, MVS, OS/400) and it should noted that HP is emphasising NT over HP/UX and IBM is widening support for Linux. The world will always have niche OSs but there will be only 2 widespead OSs in the near future (Windows and Linux). That does not leave much room for Netware. Novell talks about becoming a network services company. Well, they can have a "reference" platform for their goods and it should be Linux.
If Compact and Phoenix (among others) never clean-room reverse engineered the BIOS calls of the original IBM PC we would all be buying our PCs only from Big Blue to this day. Look what cloning/reverse engineering has done:
If the challenge from IBM against cloning their BIOS had survived, we would now have hundreds of wacky computer hardware manfactuers and virtually no usefull software as every program could only target a small number of hardware suites. On second thought, it may have have just accelerated a Java like virtual machine approach to software abstraction that much sooner.