So while you opted in, that is true, there's no guarantee that you still won't received unsolicited commercial email.
The same could be said of thousands of mailing lists, news mailings, job lists, and other mass mailings that people want to receive. I see no real reason for your fatalistic attitude toward this, especially given the measures that VOA has to take each day to ensure that their emails continue to penetrate the Chinese firewall.
Is it acceptable to send unsolicited email in the name of "freedom"?
Just a minor nitpick, the article doesn't say that the emails are "unsolicited". It states that VOA sends out "mass mailings" which is a very different thing. If all mass mailings were spam, then Lockergnome would have been indicted years ago.
You might want to check your facts before posting this kind of FUD.
$#%@!!!! You post a WEB SURVEY and the have the gall to accuse me of spreading FUD?! Good God, you are either truly naive about all things statistical, or you're trying to spread quite a bit of FUD yourself.
JBoss has neither revenue nor major influence. Most uses of open source J2EE only require a servlet container, which JBoss doesn't provide!
Precisely! Although I will point out that JBoss does have some value in their name. The name was partly gained through jumping off another name (Rickard, one of the earliest EJB experts) and partly through a lot of theatrics performed by Fleury. That name has some value, but probably not 200 million worth.
It's too bad they lost Rickard or they might at least have technology on par with the Orion guys. Ever since he left, the server seems to require that you purchase support just to get it up and running. (I wonder if that's intentional?)
In terms of revenue, you're absolutely correct. But if you count usage, I would say that Apache Tomcat likely beats every commercial or OSS vendor by a wide margin.
Umm... I guess it depends on whether you count all usage or just deployments. If we're only talking deployments, I don't see Tomcat scoring that high. Up until recent versions (5.0?) the performance of the server was considered so poor that it was simply unable to compete. Most people used it for development and bundling, though. Resin made a nice niche market be replacing Tomcat for production performance.
That's a of qualifiers. The question is: Do they mean anything?
I can unequivolcally state that I am the leading Slashdot poster with Batman in my name. That statement doesn't generate revenue or otherwise help me in any useful way.
OSS Java app servers with low/null acquisition costs are a high growth market.
According to who? I have observed no real push by the market to move from their expensive servers to OSS servers. There is a push for cheaper servers like JRun and Caucho, but JBoss doesn't really enter into play. Many companies eschew a J2EE server altogether and use just a servlet container like Tomcat.
That big list you mentioned has how many OSS competitors for JBoss in it?
Two direct competitors. There's also noncertified servers such as Exolab, OpenEJB, Enhydra and non-EJB servers such as Tomcat, Jetty, OpenJSA, Gefion LiteWebServer, and many projects/companies that went defunct shortly after producing viable competitors. Why did competitors like Exoffice go MIA? Well, it seems the market isn't big enough to support that many competitors.
OSS apps with comparable feature sets tend to grow their userbases at the expense of commercial applications. It is hard to compete with free.
It is hard to compete with free. Which is why JBoss can't compete with SunOne, HP-AS, Orion, and SybaseAS, all of which are either outright free or provide free editions bundled with other services. Which would a large company rather go with: A free OSS product or a free commercial product? Most go for the latter as they feel that it guarantees stability, support, and upgrades.
Unless you've got some hard numbers to back up your assertions, I'm afraid that the massive, OSS, J2EE market simply doesn't exist.
Killing off the leading product in a high growth market is bad business. It doesn't appear logical.
1. JBoss is not the leading product in the J2EE market. It's a competitor, but nowhere near the top.
2. J2EE servers are not a high growth market. In fact, the market is oversaturated at this point, with servers from BEA, Sun, IBM, Novell, JBoss, Apache, Macromedia, ObjectWeb, Pramati, Borland, Orion, Oracle, Caucho, Apple (!), ATG, Compaq/HP, Fujitsu, Gemstone, Hitachi, IONA, Secant, Sybase, and quite a few others who aren't worth mentioning. Of those, Apache and ObjectWeb directly compete with JBoss to provide an open source J2EE server. Nearly the entire market competes with JBoss for support contracts.
Larry can't just write a check, get regulatory approval and be done. There is no way Marc will sell his baby...
You might be amazed at how much power is contained within a single zero. Throw enough of them on the check, and even Marc would have a hard time resisting.
Don't believe for a minute that Oracle would purchase JBoss to "help it shift customers to a subscriber-based model". Oracle already has a superior J2EE server based on Orion technology. Far more likely is that Oracle wants to pull another PeopleSoft aquisition. They'll buy up JBoss, kill the company, then let the product die on the vine. All while pushing how "Open Source Friendly" they've become.
...or does that list sound suspiciously close to the list of first-release Bluray discs? How many times does Sony expect customers to buy these movies? Especially the Fifth Element. I mean, it was an 'okay' movie the first time. It's still an 'okay' movie, but now it looks dated. So why do I want to rush out to buy it on VHS/DVD/DVD-UMD/Bluray? Just so I can reach five copies so that I can call them my "five elements"?
And yet, he is correct. In Korea and Vietnam, the enemy often targetted the medics as a direct way of ensuring the reductions of our fighting forces. As a former medic who made it out of Korea said in an interview, "that red cross on your back is nothin' more than a target for the enemy."
That was an emotional interview, too. This big old guy was in tears as he recounted how the men in his care were cut off from their evac choppers, critically wounded time and time again, and spent the nights calling out for their mamas as they lay dying. He got as many of them out of there as he could, but you could see that it really hurt him that he didn't save them all.
Army Field Medics and Navy Corpsmen will throw themselves in front of any danger, put themselves on top a gernade, take direct fire from the enemy, refuse their own medical treatment, and drown in a sinking ship all to save one more life. That is their duty, and I have never heard of even one who has done anything less than go above and beyond it. They're fucking heros. Each and every one of them.
If any of you guys are reading this, I salute you. Your job is harder than anyone has any right to ask of you. There's nothing I can say that will truly show how much appreciation I have for your jobs. So I'll just say, "Thank you." I'm glad you guys are out there watching the backs of our brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters.
Look at Google. They have very few offices, but instead many small rooms with 4-6 people in each.
I will point out, however, that they are rooms. I imagine that background noise is minimal, and people are allowed to focus on their tasks. In comparison, I've worked in environments with tons of open cubicles. The background noise really interferes with trying to focus on what you're doing. You don't even notice it at first, but the moment you find a quiet space you suddenly notice the difference.
So in short, you need a conductive workspace, of which offices are only one type.:-)
Another alternative for Linux is Moneydance, a java app that apparently spoofs Windows quicken online banking on Macs (or Linux).
What do you mean by "Spoofs?" I know the author put considerable effort into making it familiar for quicken users, but everything you see is pure Java code written by the author himself. I spoke with him on several occasions, and even managed to finagle a special version with plugin support out of him. Unfortunately, I never completed the project I wanted it for. (Creating a WAP interface to add transactions to Moneydance from my phone.) Sadly, I wasn't able to get ahold of a WAP enabled phone at the time, and lost interest by the time I did.:-(
P.S. GMail users: You MUST try out the new IM in the GMail interface. It has this cool spinning smiley feature.:-)
He's joking at how far behind the curve this company is. All the topics he's pointing to are what you would have expected to hear about in a company back in the 70's and 80's.
Sort of a, "Welcome to the new millenium, enjoy your stay" type of thing.
That's almost as bad as the Entertainment Tonight preview of Star Trek: Enterprise done shortly before it went on the air. It was a short clip (30 seconds or so?), but in that time they managed to:
Refer to Bakula as "Scott Bracula"
Place text on the screen identifying Bakula as T'Pol
Mispronounce "Subcommander T'Pol" as "TEE-POLE" (Sounds kind of kinky.)
The clip was worth its weight in comedic gold. Wish I'd kept a copy.
The bad news is that time does not change. In other words, no time travel to the past or the future, no motion in space-time, no wormholes and no hanky-panky with your great, great grandmother. There is only the changing present, aka the NOW. The good news is that distance is an illusion and we'll be able to travel instantly from anywhere to anywhere."
Those are contradictory statements. If you can travel from anywhere to anywhere instantly, then you can also travel from any point to any point in time instantly. Why? Because it's just another dimension of space-time.
As I understand it, the various pipelines of the Cell chip tend to be more specialized than the Coolthreads technology Sun is using on their new T1 processor. However, even with 32 full-blown pipelines, Sun is also concerned about whether their chips will be put to good use or not.
I'm not quite sure what IBM is planning to do, but Sun has started a contest to see who can build the coolest program that takes advantage of their new Coolthreads technology. The prize is a cool $50,000, so Sun seems to be serious about this. The results of the contest may very well prove whether the new parallel technologies have a future or not.
Mickey D's is a nickname for "McDonald's". It comes from the "Mc D's" shortening that was eventually "cutsified" (hey, I invented a word!) into "Mickey D's".
This is the first time I've debugged a large asynchronous application that isn't a GUI, and I'm curious to know what advice the Slashdot crowd has to share
An event driven system is an event driven system is an event driven system. The only difference you're likely to find is that you can often see the results of a GUI application, but you can't "see" the results of a telephony application. Otherwise, debugging isn't really that different. If you need to get a feel for it, configure a logging system and place debugging logging events at various points in the code. The resulting log file can help give you a feel for when events happen, in what order, with what values, and several other important points.
Also, if the original author(s) are available, never be afraid to ask questions. If you find anything in the code that wasn't obvious to you, add a comment. It will save you from trying to re-figure it out later. Have fun!
Ultimately, where there is ice, there is water. And with water, life is sustainable.
Ah, reminds me of one of the greatest quotes of our age:
"The Moon is essentially in the same orbit... The Moon is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
Sorry, I couldn't resist. Your post so much reminded me of our poor former Vice-President. An intelligent man, to be sure, but couldn't speak in public to save his life.:-P
Government agencies are not allowed to hold copyrights. If the images belonged to a third party that NASA contracted out to, then you might have an issue. Fortuanetly, it's usually NASA's mission to get those photos, so they belong to NASA even if NASA contract for the space vehicle to be built by someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
So while you opted in, that is true, there's no guarantee that you still won't received unsolicited commercial email.
The same could be said of thousands of mailing lists, news mailings, job lists, and other mass mailings that people want to receive. I see no real reason for your fatalistic attitude toward this, especially given the measures that VOA has to take each day to ensure that their emails continue to penetrate the Chinese firewall.
Is it acceptable to send unsolicited email in the name of "freedom"?
Just a minor nitpick, the article doesn't say that the emails are "unsolicited". It states that VOA sends out "mass mailings" which is a very different thing. If all mass mailings were spam, then Lockergnome would have been indicted years ago.
You might want to check your facts before posting this kind of FUD.
:-P
$#%@!!!! You post a WEB SURVEY and the have the gall to accuse me of spreading FUD?! Good God, you are either truly naive about all things statistical, or you're trying to spread quite a bit of FUD yourself.
IDC: IBM takes lead from BEA
Gartner: IBM trumps BEA
You don't by any chance work for JBoss's Astroturfing department, do you? Hmmm... very suspicious...
JBoss has neither revenue nor major influence. Most uses of open source J2EE only require a servlet container, which JBoss doesn't provide!
Precisely! Although I will point out that JBoss does have some value in their name. The name was partly gained through jumping off another name (Rickard, one of the earliest EJB experts) and partly through a lot of theatrics performed by Fleury. That name has some value, but probably not 200 million worth.
It's too bad they lost Rickard or they might at least have technology on par with the Orion guys. Ever since he left, the server seems to require that you purchase support just to get it up and running. (I wonder if that's intentional?)
In terms of revenue, you're absolutely correct. But if you count usage, I would say that Apache Tomcat likely beats every commercial or OSS vendor by a wide margin.
Umm... I guess it depends on whether you count all usage or just deployments. If we're only talking deployments, I don't see Tomcat scoring that high. Up until recent versions (5.0?) the performance of the server was considered so poor that it was simply unable to compete. Most people used it for development and bundling, though. Resin made a nice niche market be replacing Tomcat for production performance.
JBoss is the leading open source java app server
That's a of qualifiers. The question is: Do they mean anything?
I can unequivolcally state that I am the leading Slashdot poster with Batman in my name. That statement doesn't generate revenue or otherwise help me in any useful way.
OSS Java app servers with low/null acquisition costs are a high growth market.
According to who? I have observed no real push by the market to move from their expensive servers to OSS servers. There is a push for cheaper servers like JRun and Caucho, but JBoss doesn't really enter into play. Many companies eschew a J2EE server altogether and use just a servlet container like Tomcat.
That big list you mentioned has how many OSS competitors for JBoss in it?
Two direct competitors. There's also noncertified servers such as Exolab, OpenEJB, Enhydra and non-EJB servers such as Tomcat, Jetty, OpenJSA, Gefion LiteWebServer, and many projects/companies that went defunct shortly after producing viable competitors. Why did competitors like Exoffice go MIA? Well, it seems the market isn't big enough to support that many competitors.
OSS apps with comparable feature sets tend to grow their userbases at the expense of commercial applications. It is hard to compete with free.
It is hard to compete with free. Which is why JBoss can't compete with SunOne, HP-AS, Orion, and SybaseAS, all of which are either outright free or provide free editions bundled with other services. Which would a large company rather go with: A free OSS product or a free commercial product? Most go for the latter as they feel that it guarantees stability, support, and upgrades.
Unless you've got some hard numbers to back up your assertions, I'm afraid that the massive, OSS, J2EE market simply doesn't exist.
Killing off the leading product in a high growth market is bad business. It doesn't appear logical.
1. JBoss is not the leading product in the J2EE market. It's a competitor, but nowhere near the top.
2. J2EE servers are not a high growth market. In fact, the market is oversaturated at this point, with servers from BEA, Sun, IBM, Novell, JBoss, Apache, Macromedia, ObjectWeb, Pramati, Borland, Orion, Oracle, Caucho, Apple (!), ATG, Compaq/HP, Fujitsu, Gemstone, Hitachi, IONA, Secant, Sybase, and quite a few others who aren't worth mentioning. Of those, Apache and ObjectWeb directly compete with JBoss to provide an open source J2EE server. Nearly the entire market competes with JBoss for support contracts.
Larry can't just write a check, get regulatory approval and be done. There is no way Marc will sell his baby...
You might be amazed at how much power is contained within a single zero. Throw enough of them on the check, and even Marc would have a hard time resisting.
Don't believe for a minute that Oracle would purchase JBoss to "help it shift customers to a subscriber-based model". Oracle already has a superior J2EE server based on Orion technology. Far more likely is that Oracle wants to pull another PeopleSoft aquisition. They'll buy up JBoss, kill the company, then let the product die on the vine. All while pushing how "Open Source Friendly" they've become.
...or does that list sound suspiciously close to the list of first-release Bluray discs? How many times does Sony expect customers to buy these movies? Especially the Fifth Element. I mean, it was an 'okay' movie the first time. It's still an 'okay' movie, but now it looks dated. So why do I want to rush out to buy it on VHS/DVD/DVD-UMD/Bluray? Just so I can reach five copies so that I can call them my "five elements"?
That works for me too. I just didn't know what you meant by "spoofs" is all. :-)
And yet, he is correct. In Korea and Vietnam, the enemy often targetted the medics as a direct way of ensuring the reductions of our fighting forces. As a former medic who made it out of Korea said in an interview, "that red cross on your back is nothin' more than a target for the enemy."
That was an emotional interview, too. This big old guy was in tears as he recounted how the men in his care were cut off from their evac choppers, critically wounded time and time again, and spent the nights calling out for their mamas as they lay dying. He got as many of them out of there as he could, but you could see that it really hurt him that he didn't save them all.
Army Field Medics and Navy Corpsmen will throw themselves in front of any danger, put themselves on top a gernade, take direct fire from the enemy, refuse their own medical treatment, and drown in a sinking ship all to save one more life. That is their duty, and I have never heard of even one who has done anything less than go above and beyond it. They're fucking heros. Each and every one of them.
If any of you guys are reading this, I salute you. Your job is harder than anyone has any right to ask of you. There's nothing I can say that will truly show how much appreciation I have for your jobs. So I'll just say, "Thank you." I'm glad you guys are out there watching the backs of our brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters.
Look at Google. They have very few offices, but instead many small rooms with 4-6 people in each.
:-)
I will point out, however, that they are rooms. I imagine that background noise is minimal, and people are allowed to focus on their tasks. In comparison, I've worked in environments with tons of open cubicles. The background noise really interferes with trying to focus on what you're doing. You don't even notice it at first, but the moment you find a quiet space you suddenly notice the difference.
So in short, you need a conductive workspace, of which offices are only one type.
Ah, you mean that it's compatible with Quicken. Yes, I do believe you're correct. :-)
Another alternative for Linux is Moneydance, a java app that apparently spoofs Windows quicken online banking on Macs (or Linux).
:-(
:-)
What do you mean by "Spoofs?" I know the author put considerable effort into making it familiar for quicken users, but everything you see is pure Java code written by the author himself. I spoke with him on several occasions, and even managed to finagle a special version with plugin support out of him. Unfortunately, I never completed the project I wanted it for. (Creating a WAP interface to add transactions to Moneydance from my phone.) Sadly, I wasn't able to get ahold of a WAP enabled phone at the time, and lost interest by the time I did.
P.S. GMail users: You MUST try out the new IM in the GMail interface. It has this cool spinning smiley feature.
He's joking at how far behind the curve this company is. All the topics he's pointing to are what you would have expected to hear about in a company back in the 70's and 80's.
Sort of a, "Welcome to the new millenium, enjoy your stay" type of thing.
Who the heck is "Subcommander T'Phol?
That's almost as bad as the Entertainment Tonight preview of Star Trek: Enterprise done shortly before it went on the air. It was a short clip (30 seconds or so?), but in that time they managed to:
The clip was worth its weight in comedic gold. Wish I'd kept a copy.
The bad news is that time does not change. In other words, no time travel to the past or the future, no motion in space-time, no wormholes and no hanky-panky with your great, great grandmother. There is only the changing present, aka the NOW. The good news is that distance is an illusion and we'll be able to travel instantly from anywhere to anywhere."
Those are contradictory statements. If you can travel from anywhere to anywhere instantly, then you can also travel from any point to any point in time instantly. Why? Because it's just another dimension of space-time.
Would it be possible to write some kind of virtualization that would present an easy-to-develop-on layer?
You know, that's a really good idea!
As I understand it, the various pipelines of the Cell chip tend to be more specialized than the Coolthreads technology Sun is using on their new T1 processor. However, even with 32 full-blown pipelines, Sun is also concerned about whether their chips will be put to good use or not.
I'm not quite sure what IBM is planning to do, but Sun has started a contest to see who can build the coolest program that takes advantage of their new Coolthreads technology. The prize is a cool $50,000, so Sun seems to be serious about this. The results of the contest may very well prove whether the new parallel technologies have a future or not.
Mickey D's is a nickname for "McDonald's". It comes from the "Mc D's" shortening that was eventually "cutsified" (hey, I invented a word!) into "Mickey D's".
That's definitely not your run of the mill Gamestop. Sounds interesting. If I were you I'd keep a close eye on that one. :-)
This is the first time I've debugged a large asynchronous application that isn't a GUI, and I'm curious to know what advice the Slashdot crowd has to share
An event driven system is an event driven system is an event driven system. The only difference you're likely to find is that you can often see the results of a GUI application, but you can't "see" the results of a telephony application. Otherwise, debugging isn't really that different. If you need to get a feel for it, configure a logging system and place debugging logging events at various points in the code. The resulting log file can help give you a feel for when events happen, in what order, with what values, and several other important points.
Also, if the original author(s) are available, never be afraid to ask questions. If you find anything in the code that wasn't obvious to you, add a comment. It will save you from trying to re-figure it out later. Have fun!
Ah, reminds me of one of the greatest quotes of our age:
Sorry, I couldn't resist. Your post so much reminded me of our poor former Vice-President. An intelligent man, to be sure, but couldn't speak in public to save his life.
Government agencies are not allowed to hold copyrights. If the images belonged to a third party that NASA contracted out to, then you might have an issue. Fortuanetly, it's usually NASA's mission to get those photos, so they belong to NASA even if NASA contract for the space vehicle to be built by someone else.
NASA's page on the subject.