I should have been more specific, I guess. I was talking about the CORBA Component Model. Here's the OMG's summary (bold added):
"Specification of: a Component Implementation Definition Language (CIDL); the semantics of the CORBA Components Model (CCM); a Component Implementation Framework (CIF), which defines the programming model for constructing component implementations; a container programming model describing how an Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) component can be used by CORBA clients, including CORBA components; an architecture of the component container as seen by the container provider; how Component implementations may be packaged and deployed; and definitions of the XML DTDs used by the CORBA Components"
"Note in my post that RMI is platform to platform (through Java) whereas CORBA is language to language"
Actually CORBA is both language to language and platform to platform. As long as you can invoke methods on components remotely, it's really irrelevent whether the client and the component are written in the same language.
JTRS is rather an interesting mandate. It seems to be an attempt to solve a social problem with technology. The social problem: Every branch of the military wants to do things their own way. Rather than mandate one or a limited number of military radios that all the branches must use, JTRS attempts to make it possible for them to pretty much do what they want but requires that they interoperate anyway.
There is also the desire to save money but given the fact the program has already been going on for many years, it's doubtful that it's going to happen. The idea of using CORBA inside an embedded system is rather mind-boggling. Given the lofty goals of the project, it may end up being more complex than Windows Vista.
You're right that the OMG is not Sun-directed. It is true, however, that the CORBA spec has compatibility with Sun's EJB as a major goal. This is a special status that only Sun enjoys. There is no attempt to be compatible with MS's COM+ for example.
"On a side note, has anyone noticed that there seems to be substantially less interpersonal drama in jobs dominated by men? Men just go to work, take care of business, and leave their personal bs at the door."
Actually, I haven't found this to be true at all. I think it's just a myth that some men would like to believe.
Looking for biological causes that draw women away from math and science is even more dubious than looking for biological causes for inferior ability would be. Should we start looking for biological reasons why some people prefer Star Wars to Star Trek?
Of course a biological cause would relieve educational institutions from any responsiblity, so I suspect that's the motive for making the comment.
"Although I think Sony would have done well to have picked some action films/cult classics that were shot in digital HD from the start."
So there's Star Wars II and III that were shot in digital HD. I suppose there might be a few others. If being shot in digital HD is a requirement for a movie to be great on HD DVDs then we are going to be waiting a long, long time before upgrading makes sense.
"On the subject of making Windows less complicated, I think one way to do it is to take many of the programs that have been integrated into the Windows operating system and make then completely separate programs."
This type of integration seems to me to be an internal detail that has little to do with the user experience. If you start an application from the start menu, you really don't know if it is integrated into the Windows OS or not.
"There are reasons why folks use Unix, TSO and DOS: most applications are textual in nature and benefit from that environment."
I'm not sure if I buy into the idea that "most applications are textual in nature" but even if I did, I don't see how the CLI interface has anything to do with how well an application can process text.
Gates commitment to education can't be measured simply by looking at what MS does. The Gates foundation has given a ton of money to education. I'm talking about real money, not free MS products.
Actually, "quick and dirty" is often a good strategy for a startup even if selling the company is not the goal. You have to get something out in the market before you run out of money. I don't mean that the code should have a lot of bugs, but it doesn't have to be pretty.
The benefits of doing things the "right way" are usually deferred. In a startup you usually can't afford to do anything with deferred benefits. Once your company is profitable, you can take advantage of the cost savings that sometimes goes along with a more sophisticated approach.
Gee, if you have 3 superstar developers at one company the bar for superstar must be set pretty low. In any case, it's easy to claim that the people who inherit the code are not very good, but that doesn't make it true. The truth is that probably 90% of the applications used today don't use reflection or metaprogramming. That doesn't mean these concepts aren't important, but they're hardly a genearl litmus test for programming knowledge and skill.
"Even if they aren't hired away, superstar developers mean that they can leverage huge salaries."
What superstar developers? Being a superstar in any field is more about image than substance. If there are any true superstars in software their most likely characteristic is that they no longer write software. They end up with jobs like Apple fellow.
"Looking at this statement in those terms, things become more clear. The free software project can be resurrected by somebody else, the non-free project cannot be resurrected"
Actually non-free projects are resurrected all the time. Look at WordPerfect. It's been resurrected at least twice.
All Slashdot moderation does is supress posts that one or moderators don't like and boosts the ones they do. It stops the occasional GNAA and goatse and sometimes promotes a good submission, but most often it's just a limited form of group censorship.
"Then, Microsoft came to the party and knocked out the entire industry by illegally bundling competitors to all three of these pre-.com-era startups"
Acutally, the final judgement of the courts was the MS hadn't broken the law by bundling IE with Windows. It was for other reasons that they ultimately got in trouble.
AOL bought Netscape to inherit it's role as a MS victim so they could get a big settlement or a financial judgement against MS. It worked, but they overestimated how much the settlement would be so they lost money on the deal anyway.
I'm suggesting that those who like to call MS a marketing company really are trying to imply that MS is not a technology company. If you think MS is not a technology company, state your case. Don't hide behind this phony "MS is a marketing company" argument.
"Placing the word "desktop" before "monopoly" is to qualify it. They don't have an overall OS monopoly or server monopoly, only desktop"
You've actually exposed the problem with the whole MS as a monopoly theory. The scope of the market had to be artifically narrowed in order to make the charge stick (but that ship has already sailed). But in this discussion these three "potential" monopolies all have something in common: their not MS's business model.
In a sense all companies wish to have a monopoly or at least the greatest market share, but that doesn't make it their business model. I could certainly argue that Google's business plan is to have a monopoly on web advertisement that's just a bit less complete than what would inspire the Justice Department to investigate. Keep in mind that you don't need to be a monopoly to aspire to be one.
"Their entire corporate strategy revolves around their monopoly of the desktop OS."
It's like I said to the other guy: Adding the word monopoly doesn't prove anything. It's like saying the MS's business model is excellence because "Their entire corporate strategy revolves around the excellence of their desktop OS"
Slashdot Mirror
I should have been more specific, I guess. I was talking about the CORBA Component Model. Here's the OMG's summary (bold added):
"Specification of: a Component Implementation Definition Language (CIDL); the semantics of the CORBA Components Model (CCM); a Component Implementation Framework (CIF), which defines the programming model for constructing component implementations; a container programming model describing how an Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) component can be used by CORBA clients, including CORBA components; an architecture of the component container as seen by the container provider; how Component implementations may be packaged and deployed; and definitions of the XML DTDs used by the CORBA Components"
"Note in my post that RMI is platform to platform (through Java) whereas CORBA is language to language"
Actually CORBA is both language to language and platform to platform. As long as you can invoke methods on components remotely, it's really irrelevent whether the client and the component are written in the same language.
But not vendor neutral. In practice, code generated from one vendors tools won't be compatible with another's.
A few corrections:
Both COM+ and CORBA support multiple languages.
RMI isn't Java's answer to CORBA, EJB is.
JTRS is rather an interesting mandate. It seems to be an attempt to solve a social problem with technology. The social problem: Every branch of the military wants to do things their own way. Rather than mandate one or a limited number of military radios that all the branches must use, JTRS attempts to make it possible for them to pretty much do what they want but requires that they interoperate anyway.
There is also the desire to save money but given the fact the program has already been going on for many years, it's doubtful that it's going to happen. The idea of using CORBA inside an embedded system is rather mind-boggling. Given the lofty goals of the project, it may end up being more complex than Windows Vista.
You're right that the OMG is not Sun-directed. It is true, however, that the CORBA spec has compatibility with Sun's EJB as a major goal. This is a special status that only Sun enjoys. There is no attempt to be compatible with MS's COM+ for example.
"On a side note, has anyone noticed that there seems to be substantially less interpersonal drama in jobs dominated by men? Men just go to work, take care of business, and leave their personal bs at the door."
Actually, I haven't found this to be true at all. I think it's just a myth that some men would like to believe.
Looking for biological causes that draw women away from math and science is even more dubious than looking for biological causes for inferior ability would be. Should we start looking for biological reasons why some people prefer Star Wars to Star Trek?
Of course a biological cause would relieve educational institutions from any responsiblity, so I suspect that's the motive for making the comment.
If all you meant to say is that a CLI application typically uses less resources than an equivalent GUI application I agree.
"Although I think Sony would have done well to have picked some action films/cult classics that were shot in digital HD from the start."
So there's Star Wars II and III that were shot in digital HD. I suppose there might be a few others. If being shot in digital HD is a requirement for a movie to be great on HD DVDs then we are going to be waiting a long, long time before upgrading makes sense.
"On the subject of making Windows less complicated, I think one way to do it is to take many of the programs that have been integrated into the Windows operating system and make then completely separate programs."
This type of integration seems to me to be an internal detail that has little to do with the user experience. If you start an application from the start menu, you really don't know if it is integrated into the Windows OS or not.
"There are reasons why folks use Unix, TSO and DOS: most applications are textual in nature and benefit from that environment."
I'm not sure if I buy into the idea that "most applications are textual in nature" but even if I did, I don't see how the CLI interface has anything to do with how well an application can process text.
Gates commitment to education can't be measured simply by looking at what MS does. The Gates foundation has given a ton of money to education. I'm talking about real money, not free MS products.
Actually, "quick and dirty" is often a good strategy for a startup even if selling the company is not the goal. You have to get something out in the market before you run out of money. I don't mean that the code should have a lot of bugs, but it doesn't have to be pretty.
The benefits of doing things the "right way" are usually deferred. In a startup you usually can't afford to do anything with deferred benefits. Once your company is profitable, you can take advantage of the cost savings that sometimes goes along with a more sophisticated approach.
Gee, if you have 3 superstar developers at one company the bar for superstar must be set pretty low. In any case, it's easy to claim that the people who inherit the code are not very good, but that doesn't make it true. The truth is that probably 90% of the applications used today don't use reflection or metaprogramming. That doesn't mean these concepts aren't important, but they're hardly a genearl litmus test for programming knowledge and skill.
"Even if they aren't hired away, superstar developers mean that they can leverage huge salaries."
What superstar developers? Being a superstar in any field is more about image than substance. If there are any true superstars in software their most likely characteristic is that they no longer write software. They end up with jobs like Apple fellow.
"Looking at this statement in those terms, things become more clear. The free software project can be resurrected by somebody else, the non-free project cannot be resurrected"
Actually non-free projects are resurrected all the time. Look at WordPerfect. It's been resurrected at least twice.
All Slashdot moderation does is supress posts that one or moderators don't like and boosts the ones they do. It stops the occasional GNAA and goatse and sometimes promotes a good submission, but most often it's just a limited form of group censorship.
"Then, Microsoft came to the party and knocked out the entire industry by illegally bundling competitors to all three of these pre-.com-era startups"
Acutally, the final judgement of the courts was the MS hadn't broken the law by bundling IE with Windows. It was for other reasons that they ultimately got in trouble.
AOL bought Netscape to inherit it's role as a MS victim so they could get a big settlement or a financial judgement against MS. It worked, but they overestimated how much the settlement would be so they lost money on the deal anyway.
I'm suggesting that those who like to call MS a marketing company really are trying to imply that MS is not a technology company. If you think MS is not a technology company, state your case. Don't hide behind this phony "MS is a marketing company" argument.
Sun: Convinced the press and the public that Java was a new language that for the first time would allow a program to run on any computer.
MS: What do you want to do today?
"Placing the word "desktop" before "monopoly" is to qualify it. They don't have an overall OS monopoly or server monopoly, only desktop"
You've actually exposed the problem with the whole MS as a monopoly theory. The scope of the market had to be artifically narrowed in order to make the charge stick (but that ship has already sailed). But in this discussion these three "potential" monopolies all have something in common: their not MS's business model.
In a sense all companies wish to have a monopoly or at least the greatest market share, but that doesn't make it their business model. I could certainly argue that Google's business plan is to have a monopoly on web advertisement that's just a bit less complete than what would inspire the Justice Department to investigate. Keep in mind that you don't need to be a monopoly to aspire to be one.
"100% of the people back in the 80's technically could have bought a DVD player"
Since the first DVD players were released in 1996, they would have "technically" needed time-travel to buy one in the 80's.
"Their entire corporate strategy revolves around their monopoly of the desktop OS."
It's like I said to the other guy: Adding the word monopoly doesn't prove anything. It's like saying the MS's business model is excellence because "Their entire corporate strategy revolves around the excellence of their desktop OS"