New users find the selection of different toolkits for X confusing and inconsistent both in appearance and behaviour.
I was a Visual Basic developer for about 6 years before I tried Linux. Finding I had to pick a toolkit to start GUI development was unusual but not at all confusing. I looked at the differences in API, available widgets, supported platforms, etc, and dove in with one. I don't see the differences as inconsistent, but as a variety of preferences among different people. The variety of toolkits is a great asset to me as a developer. On Windows I barely had a choice!
As for end users there's no selection involved. They pick the apps they want to run and their distro installs the dependant toolkits. They may have different looks, but I've never heard of a person confused because buttons looked different.
I agree, but how was ESR out of line? If he were representing another company, maybe. But how is his non-corporate expression of opinion out of line? It may seem extreme, but from a nonprofit idealistic point of view what's the problem?
Out of line would be calling Scott McNealy Hitler. Or saying Sun is like Microsoft. Those kind of insults aren't called for.;)
Many people are asking who would want this number anyway? I think it would be really smart for a telemarketer to buy up the number in as many area codes as possible. All kinds of random people would be calling them, and maybe they can keep some talking long enough to sell something. Then at least one company wouldn't be calling people at home at dinner time. Their new customers would come to them.
What's a theater doing in an area inaccessible by road? If the populace can't afford to maintain roads why are they splurging on movies? I would assume the lack of roads is due to poverty. Roads are usually built leading to areas of even meager prosperity.
I hate MS as much as anyone. But I think that's a huge stretch. It would be a far bigger PR scandal if this was some sort of stunt and they got caught. They're not in a position yet where they need to take such risky and drastic measures to tarnish the competition. If they were near their demise I would agree it's possible, but they're nowhere near dead. In this case they really are a victim. Although they still don't get my sympathy...
This is very insightful. I've been writing a Windows 2000 service for work. It's in.Net and uses COM components. I can not count how many times I get COM failures with no system errors being raised ("Method '~' of object '~' failed" is the only message we sometimes get, how useful...). And.Net doesn't raise any errors at all on COM failures, so my application has no way to recover or even know something went wrong.
If they can't even trap and raise errors correctly I can't begin to imagine what a mess some of that code must be like inside.
Then why is Gentoo so much faster for me than Mandrake or Red Hat on the same computer? And I don't just mean launch times or graphics drivers or a pre-emptive patch. I mean everything is faster. I've checked the kernel compile flags and other things and can only attribute the huge gain to being native compiled to my Pentium III.
Why is Fedora/Red Hat still compiled for i386? Can there be many 386 or 486 users? I would think it better to make it for Pentium I or II to get a nice performance gain while not abandoning many users. I realize they probably do it because Linux's oldest supported Intel chip is the 386, but it seems much more practical to compile higher. This was the reason I switched to Mandrake years ago, to try a distro compiled for Pentium.
It appears this is the first time stem cells have been taken from a human clone, not the first time a human has been cloned. Wired magazine had a cover story recently of a human clone reaching the 16 cell stage, just no stem cells were taken.
Also, there's other layers of complexity in getting the cloned cells to survive long enough to grow into an ebryo and then into a full person. It doesn't appear anyone has tried this yet, or if they have they haven't published anything about it.
So as people are told never to download random little tool apps or IE plugins for stability and security reasons they're supposed to download one of 100 pop-up blockers? When people see lots of pop-up blockers many tend to worry how many will just bring up their own ads or catch them a virus. Since so many cost a few dollars people don't trust the free ones. Plus they know anything they download normally slows down their computer, so how many more are they going to try and never uninstall?
The average user sees IE as the internet, and pop-up blockers aren't trusted because they're plugins not from the one company giving them their internet. It's much easier to show them a complete alternative as it seems to instill more trust in the end.
As of September, 2003, there were 31 known unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Some of the most critical have not been fixed in well over a year. The original page listing them was removed at Microsoft's request, but I cached it.
Microsoft was notified of significant issues with their implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on September 2, 2002, and on April 9th, 2003, Microsoft issued an update to fix the problem. That took more than seven months.
Shameless plug: more examples are available at my site.
Microsoft was notified 6 months ago. Either they didn't know about it before that or they didn't disclose that they did. The bug may have existed for 10 years, but they supposedly sat on it for 6 months. Actually, since it affects all versions of NT and 2000 before service pack 3 it could have existed since about 1985.
So your 1.0 apps that run on a very buggy platform must continue to run on that platform until you're willing to re-write it in a newer version. That's not acceptable.
It is also not acceptible to have 5 apps on one computer, each written with a different version of.Net, to each have the runtime in memory concurrently if the apps are to be running at the same time. Why should I have to use an extra gig of ram to run a few programs because each runtime isn't backwards compatible?
It's true your code today will execute tomorrow. But it's like saying it's OK to write new 16-bit Windows apps today. Yeah, it'll run, but you won't get any support, platform bug fixes, security checks, or anything else. Robert Scoble will tell you to use XAML today (not when Longhorn's released) because WinForms are the old way. So keep using WinForms, but soon don't expect any support or bug fixes.
You're a fool for relying on a platform that's never fixed or backwards compatible. Fundamental things like closing an open file still don't work 100% after the platform was released 2 years ago. If there's a fix in 1.3 you're telling me it's correct that I should have to rewrite my apps to use it. In attempts to fix DLL Hell, which doesn't exist to the same extent on any other platform, they produce a whole new set of even more complicated problems.
Yes, I know that we're locked in to MS OS and server, but given the incredible productivity increase, this is a small price to pay.
Vendor lock-in is never a small price to pay. From now on your project will be dependant on one and only one vendor, unless you're willing to completely re-write it from scratch one day. As IDEs evolve much quicker from every vendor except Microsoft, you'll be disappointed when you can't use the future version of Eclipse or JBuilder or whatever when it far surpasses Visual Studio. When a new useful free library pops up for Java, which happens all the time, you can't use it. You're stuck on a new platform with less features, less free tools, and less support for the foreseable future.
I agree. That doesn't stop a lot of zealous managers and developers from jumping in. It's quite ironic that they won't use the initial release of Office or Windows until many patches are tested, but they put.Net 1.0 on production servers almost immediately with complete trust it's secure and stable. Then 1.1 is released with a few bug fixes, but still more open issues than closed, and they upgrade the servers right away. I see it and hear of it happening all the time.
But Microsoft will not be able to break.Net in too many incompatible ways without alienating their customers.
But they are and they have, with many customers just going along. The.Net 1.1 runtime is not backwards compatible (it won't properly run all.Net 1.0 apps), even though it was only a minor version increment. They also changed many interfaces, so you couldn't always recompile on 1.1 without code changes.
Plus WinForms is already being dropped in the near future. Anything you develop today with a GUI in.Net will be considered legacy very soon. All new development is supposed to switch to a whole new API (Avalon?). Java did something similar with AWT and Swing, but they still support both. Microsoft's marking the WinForms API deprecated within a couple of years (by the time Longhorn's released).
In my view, and shared by many others, they alienated their biggest development customer base (Visual Basic) by not making any more fixes or enhancements to that line of software. They also didn't provide a seamless migration path. That's one reason why less than half of VB developers are switching to.Net so far. They lost many VB developers to Java. They've alienated many customers before, and they'll keep doing it. It already appears to be hurting their market share, but not their bottom line.
We were tasked with re-writing all of our internal client apps (VB) as web apps, so it would require no changes to the user's workstations. We had to buy all new servers and use a completely new platform from scratch, so what better time to switch to open source? Our lead developer "needed" a quad-processor server ($25,000) just to do.Net development, while I set up a linux server on an old Pentium II at zero cost and ran one of our web apps from there in Java.
The problem's not what Papa Johns will do, it's what others will do. It now takes very little effort for the federal government to obtain your records from Papa Johns. Let's say you occassionally order pizzas to your secret hang-out spot. The government thinks the place where you just drink and eat pizzas with friends is a terrorist hang-out. You're now implicated with terrorists just for ordering a pizza.
Maybe it's not the government's right to know where I have my pizza delivered.
Actually, yes, I did. Right after the decision was made with no thought of alternatives I went to "the big boss." He works for the CTO of the large financial company I work for. He said there was some investigation going on for the CTO into open source. I volunteered to help but he just gave me lip service. After asking around I can't find anyone looking into it, so I think he was just trying to get me to let it go. It's not worth fighting any longer if upper and lower management would rather ignore me and lie than simply spend a few minutes opening their mind.
For upper management I went straight to the idea that open source could save them millions of dollars in licensing and less administrative staff. I can't explain how the management of a publicly traded company could not at least think about it.
It's actually the opposite which should happen. In the US many more lawsuits were filed after the decision by the courts that Microsoft is indeed a monopoly and abused their power. Once that became official it was much easier to sue Microsoft on those grounds. There was no more need to prove in court they're an abusive monopoly as it's already decided. All that's left to prove is you're a victim of that abuse. The same may go in Europe, although of course I'm just speculating based on what's happened in the US.
I showed a six inch stack of papers explaining the virtues of open source and Linux to my boss and our lead developer. I held a meeting with my entire team when they started thinking of switching to.Net. I brought together all the facts management should hear when making a platform choice and made a professional presentation. I rewrote one of our smaller apps on Linux in my personal time as an example.
They wouldn't even look at it. Our lead developer thinks Microsoft is the best producer of software and that.Net is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Our boss agreed and we were forced to switch to.Net without even looking at an alternative. Rarely have I seen such blatent ignorance. So I keep an eye open for other jobs and read the articles on starting your own software company. Seems the only option when dealing with such ignorance is to stay away from it.
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New users find the selection of different toolkits for X confusing and inconsistent both in appearance and behaviour.
I was a Visual Basic developer for about 6 years before I tried Linux. Finding I had to pick a toolkit to start GUI development was unusual but not at all confusing. I looked at the differences in API, available widgets, supported platforms, etc, and dove in with one. I don't see the differences as inconsistent, but as a variety of preferences among different people. The variety of toolkits is a great asset to me as a developer. On Windows I barely had a choice!
As for end users there's no selection involved. They pick the apps they want to run and their distro installs the dependant toolkits. They may have different looks, but I've never heard of a person confused because buttons looked different.
I agree, but how was ESR out of line? If he were representing another company, maybe. But how is his non-corporate expression of opinion out of line? It may seem extreme, but from a nonprofit idealistic point of view what's the problem?
;)
Out of line would be calling Scott McNealy Hitler. Or saying Sun is like Microsoft. Those kind of insults aren't called for.
Many people are asking who would want this number anyway? I think it would be really smart for a telemarketer to buy up the number in as many area codes as possible. All kinds of random people would be calling them, and maybe they can keep some talking long enough to sell something. Then at least one company wouldn't be calling people at home at dinner time. Their new customers would come to them.
What's a theater doing in an area inaccessible by road? If the populace can't afford to maintain roads why are they splurging on movies? I would assume the lack of roads is due to poverty. Roads are usually built leading to areas of even meager prosperity.
I hate MS as much as anyone. But I think that's a huge stretch. It would be a far bigger PR scandal if this was some sort of stunt and they got caught. They're not in a position yet where they need to take such risky and drastic measures to tarnish the competition. If they were near their demise I would agree it's possible, but they're nowhere near dead. In this case they really are a victim. Although they still don't get my sympathy...
This is very insightful. I've been writing a Windows 2000 service for work. It's in .Net and uses COM components. I can not count how many times I get COM failures with no system errors being raised ("Method '~' of object '~' failed" is the only message we sometimes get, how useful...). And .Net doesn't raise any errors at all on COM failures, so my application has no way to recover or even know something went wrong.
If they can't even trap and raise errors correctly I can't begin to imagine what a mess some of that code must be like inside.
Then why is Gentoo so much faster for me than Mandrake or Red Hat on the same computer? And I don't just mean launch times or graphics drivers or a pre-emptive patch. I mean everything is faster. I've checked the kernel compile flags and other things and can only attribute the huge gain to being native compiled to my Pentium III.
Why is Fedora/Red Hat still compiled for i386? Can there be many 386 or 486 users? I would think it better to make it for Pentium I or II to get a nice performance gain while not abandoning many users. I realize they probably do it because Linux's oldest supported Intel chip is the 386, but it seems much more practical to compile higher. This was the reason I switched to Mandrake years ago, to try a distro compiled for Pentium.
It appears this is the first time stem cells have been taken from a human clone, not the first time a human has been cloned. Wired magazine had a cover story recently of a human clone reaching the 16 cell stage, just no stem cells were taken.
Also, there's other layers of complexity in getting the cloned cells to survive long enough to grow into an ebryo and then into a full person. It doesn't appear anyone has tried this yet, or if they have they haven't published anything about it.
So as people are told never to download random little tool apps or IE plugins for stability and security reasons they're supposed to download one of 100 pop-up blockers? When people see lots of pop-up blockers many tend to worry how many will just bring up their own ads or catch them a virus. Since so many cost a few dollars people don't trust the free ones. Plus they know anything they download normally slows down their computer, so how many more are they going to try and never uninstall?
The average user sees IE as the internet, and pop-up blockers aren't trusted because they're plugins not from the one company giving them their internet. It's much easier to show them a complete alternative as it seems to instill more trust in the end.
My mistake. I thought I had seen it before coming back to /. and posting.
That contradicts the article from eEye. So who do we believe?
The PHPs already work as well on Linux as Windows. I think it's the PHBs which have the problem. ;)
But according to eEye it affects all versions of NT, 2000 prior to SP3, and 98. Is eEye wrong or is Microsoft lying?
The Windows help system was exploitable for about 7 years. From the time of Windows NT 4.0's release (1996?) until June, 2003, an attacker could exploit the help system to run their own code. And that's just the help system!
As of September, 2003, there were 31 known unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Some of the most critical have not been fixed in well over a year. The original page listing them was removed at Microsoft's request, but I cached it.
Microsoft was notified of significant issues with their implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on September 2, 2002, and on April 9th, 2003, Microsoft issued an update to fix the problem. That took more than seven months.
Shameless plug: more examples are available at my site.
Microsoft was notified 6 months ago. Either they didn't know about it before that or they didn't disclose that they did. The bug may have existed for 10 years, but they supposedly sat on it for 6 months. Actually, since it affects all versions of NT and 2000 before service pack 3 it could have existed since about 1985.
So your 1.0 apps that run on a very buggy platform must continue to run on that platform until you're willing to re-write it in a newer version. That's not acceptable.
.Net, to each have the runtime in memory concurrently if the apps are to be running at the same time. Why should I have to use an extra gig of ram to run a few programs because each runtime isn't backwards compatible?
It is also not acceptible to have 5 apps on one computer, each written with a different version of
It's true your code today will execute tomorrow. But it's like saying it's OK to write new 16-bit Windows apps today. Yeah, it'll run, but you won't get any support, platform bug fixes, security checks, or anything else. Robert Scoble will tell you to use XAML today (not when Longhorn's released) because WinForms are the old way. So keep using WinForms, but soon don't expect any support or bug fixes.
You're a fool for relying on a platform that's never fixed or backwards compatible. Fundamental things like closing an open file still don't work 100% after the platform was released 2 years ago. If there's a fix in 1.3 you're telling me it's correct that I should have to rewrite my apps to use it. In attempts to fix DLL Hell, which doesn't exist to the same extent on any other platform, they produce a whole new set of even more complicated problems.
Yes, I know that we're locked in to MS OS and server, but given the incredible productivity increase, this is a small price to pay.
Vendor lock-in is never a small price to pay. From now on your project will be dependant on one and only one vendor, unless you're willing to completely re-write it from scratch one day. As IDEs evolve much quicker from every vendor except Microsoft, you'll be disappointed when you can't use the future version of Eclipse or JBuilder or whatever when it far surpasses Visual Studio. When a new useful free library pops up for Java, which happens all the time, you can't use it. You're stuck on a new platform with less features, less free tools, and less support for the foreseable future.
I agree. That doesn't stop a lot of zealous managers and developers from jumping in. It's quite ironic that they won't use the initial release of Office or Windows until many patches are tested, but they put .Net 1.0 on production servers almost immediately with complete trust it's secure and stable. Then 1.1 is released with a few bug fixes, but still more open issues than closed, and they upgrade the servers right away. I see it and hear of it happening all the time.
But Microsoft will not be able to break .Net in too many incompatible ways without alienating their customers.
.Net 1.1 runtime is not backwards compatible (it won't properly run all .Net 1.0 apps), even though it was only a minor version increment. They also changed many interfaces, so you couldn't always recompile on 1.1 without code changes.
.Net will be considered legacy very soon. All new development is supposed to switch to a whole new API (Avalon?). Java did something similar with AWT and Swing, but they still support both. Microsoft's marking the WinForms API deprecated within a couple of years (by the time Longhorn's released).
.Net so far. They lost many VB developers to Java. They've alienated many customers before, and they'll keep doing it. It already appears to be hurting their market share, but not their bottom line.
But they are and they have, with many customers just going along. The
Plus WinForms is already being dropped in the near future. Anything you develop today with a GUI in
In my view, and shared by many others, they alienated their biggest development customer base (Visual Basic) by not making any more fixes or enhancements to that line of software. They also didn't provide a seamless migration path. That's one reason why less than half of VB developers are switching to
We were tasked with re-writing all of our internal client apps (VB) as web apps, so it would require no changes to the user's workstations. We had to buy all new servers and use a completely new platform from scratch, so what better time to switch to open source? Our lead developer "needed" a quad-processor server ($25,000) just to do .Net development, while I set up a linux server on an old Pentium II at zero cost and ran one of our web apps from there in Java.
The problem's not what Papa Johns will do, it's what others will do. It now takes very little effort for the federal government to obtain your records from Papa Johns. Let's say you occassionally order pizzas to your secret hang-out spot. The government thinks the place where you just drink and eat pizzas with friends is a terrorist hang-out. You're now implicated with terrorists just for ordering a pizza.
Maybe it's not the government's right to know where I have my pizza delivered.
Actually, yes, I did. Right after the decision was made with no thought of alternatives I went to "the big boss." He works for the CTO of the large financial company I work for. He said there was some investigation going on for the CTO into open source. I volunteered to help but he just gave me lip service. After asking around I can't find anyone looking into it, so I think he was just trying to get me to let it go. It's not worth fighting any longer if upper and lower management would rather ignore me and lie than simply spend a few minutes opening their mind.
For upper management I went straight to the idea that open source could save them millions of dollars in licensing and less administrative staff. I can't explain how the management of a publicly traded company could not at least think about it.
It's actually the opposite which should happen. In the US many more lawsuits were filed after the decision by the courts that Microsoft is indeed a monopoly and abused their power. Once that became official it was much easier to sue Microsoft on those grounds. There was no more need to prove in court they're an abusive monopoly as it's already decided. All that's left to prove is you're a victim of that abuse. The same may go in Europe, although of course I'm just speculating based on what's happened in the US.
I showed a six inch stack of papers explaining the virtues of open source and Linux to my boss and our lead developer. I held a meeting with my entire team when they started thinking of switching to .Net. I brought together all the facts management should hear when making a platform choice and made a professional presentation. I rewrote one of our smaller apps on Linux in my personal time as an example.
.Net is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Our boss agreed and we were forced to switch to .Net without even looking at an alternative. Rarely have I seen such blatent ignorance. So I keep an eye open for other jobs and read the articles on starting your own software company. Seems the only option when dealing with such ignorance is to stay away from it.
They wouldn't even look at it. Our lead developer thinks Microsoft is the best producer of software and that