I think they were hinting that whatever MS Research had produced was mauled by MS product development. Still MS's fault, but like any large organization, it's not a monolith.
I understand that, at the time Clippy emerged, he was the only development that had its origins in Microsoft Research, something which they were mighty embarrassed by (and which was not really their fault).
Platform-specificity is ultimately good, both for Windows and for Linux programmers
I see.
So the reason for cloning Dotnet is so you can be sure that Windows programs won't run on Linux.
Have I got that right?
Re:VS sucks
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hmmm... a few pages above there's a post consisting of the two phrases "You are an idiot" and "There is no IDE that comes even close to Visual Studio.NET" that's now Insightful.
And now here I'm obliged to repeat someone's useful response (that wasn't modded up) to an ignorant assertion (that was).
The practice of refactoring is well-established and reflects changes to the naming or structuring of the code that have occurred since it was created, so your comments about the initial organization of code are irrelevant. Apparently your beloved VS.Net is likely to offer some refactoring capability in a future release, which acknowleges the importance of this feature but puts it approximately 2.5 years behind Eclipse and IDEA.
A workflow system consists of process definitions with process steps that involve conventional programming, therefore if I'm developing a workflow system, I'm also doing conventional programming. An IDE allows me to deal with these aspects in one environment (hence "Integrated"), just as VS.NET allows me to develop GUI layouts and conventional programming in one environment. (Or are you suggesting that the GUI designer in VS should be a separate system?)
I fail to see the relevance of standalone diagramming tools in this context since their purpose is to produce diagrams (for people) rather than code (for computers) - something you are free to do regardless of your IDE. However, since you bring up the subject, I should point out that in Workshop the workflow diagrams ARE integrated and correspond exactly (via 2-way update) with the visible program code. Again, such features are light-years ahead of anything in VS.
Re:Java's not exactly pining for the fields just n
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 1
But Java isn't a product, as you know.
A more reasonable comparison might be VS.NET with something like WebLogic Workshop. There's only one download involved with that - IDE, JVM, libraries, app server etc. in one.
Right. A very mainstream business OS - Stratus VOS - had memory-mapped files that worked over the network (i.e. mapping to a remote file). This was in keeping with the remotable-everything philosophy (files, terminals, tape drives, queues etc.) that I believe was shared by the Apollo Domain system, also of mid 80s vintage.
Yep, this is what the Autonomy stuff does - looks over your shoulder in effect and records the links in what you do including exactly the email scenario you describe.
Actually, the most impressive demo I saw was of a CNN broadcast being fed in via a voice recognition system, and the displayed TV picture being annotated live with links to relevant sources of info.
I'm sure there are competing systems out there but theirs is the only one I know.
Re:Lies, statistics, and analysts
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 1
Well, there are two levels of control here:
1) Ownership of the Java trademark. Sun has this, but has not stopped (and may have no grounds to stop) unlicensed developments such as Kaffe.
2) Control of Java's development via the JCP. Sun has a representative on each committee, but it can be (and apparently has been) outvoted.
There are sound reasons to continue using Java, security and portability being the most obvious. Your opinion is probably representative of a significant body of Linux users, which whether justified or not places us in a very awkward situation when looking for an alternative to Dotnet for Linux.
Re:Lies, statistics, and analysts
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Because it's not championed by one megacorp, but by a whole array of commercial and non-commercial interests, including IBM, BEA, Nokia among a cast of thousands?
If you feel this represents the same kind of vendor lock-in as Dotnet then your commercial antennae are in need of adjustment.
Why would MS want to shut down a project that is actively evangelising Dotnet for them?
The time to act would be when it presents a commercial threat.
The "Dotnet standard" bait-and-switch
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You've got your runtimes mixed up.
The Dotnet runtime consists of approximately 1200 classes, including Windows Forms, ASP.NET etc.
The CLR/CLI standard only covers core language-related classes - approx 120 in all.
Dotnet is therefore mostly proprietary and there is no spec. to implement. Mono is having to reverse-engineer, with dubious consequences.
Re:VS sucks
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
As someone has mysteriously marked the parent as "interesting" it might be worthwhile to provoke a genuinely interesting debate below it so that readers are not too disappointed.
The parent insists that no Java IDE "can touch" VS for "any single thing you could possibly want to do", but a moment later admits that "VS.NET doesn't have as robust a feature set as some Java IDEs".
Features like refactoring, perhaps, as found on the free Eclipse IDE, or the modestly priced IDEA?
Or, looking a bit further afield, we could ask how one might develop a complete workflow system in VS, as you can in WebLogic Workshop?
My clients do these things all the time, but VS has a long way to go to offer a competitive alternative to the Java tools available now.
A definition simply saying that meta-data is "data about data" would mean that any fact or statement qualifies as meta-data. "The sky is blue" is meta-data about skies and blueness at this level. Such a definition is meaningless.
The definition you offer is therefore partially "right" (i.e. useful) in that "data about data elements" could reasonably mean "describing how this to interpret this object as a set of specific data elements", e.g. a database schema.
However, the definition is quite wrong (i.e. inconsistent, not useful) in describing any inferred or derived information as meta-data.
Categorization is not an activity unique to IT, and it is absurd to adopt and debase mathematical terms when established alternatives exist.
I'll pass quickly over your dubious terminology and get straight to repudiating your conclusion:
There are a number of successful products that automatically infer ("extract") categorization information ("meta-data") from unstructured data and are certainly more than "marginally useful".
A structured information storage system for Linux is something to be welcomed rather than sneered at. It will immediately improve the accessibility and coherence of information now haphazardly stored in dozens of different semi-structured forms, and, later, in conjunction with the kind of automated tools referred to above, has the prospect of growing into a valuable information processing system.
It's logically incorrect (and perhaps rather pretentious) to refer to categorization information in general as "meta-data".
Only information essential to the interpretation of an object, such as its Latin-1 text encoding or a.C vs..java file extension, could conceivably be classed as meta-data in an IT system.
The author and title of a song are simply categorization information of the kind that librarians have dealt with for a long time, and should be accorded no more special treatment by the storage system than any other explicit or implicit characteristic.
I see several posts here point out the difficulty of maintaining category information (erroneously referred to as metadata) manually so it seems clear that progress in automatic classification is needed to complement more sophisticated storage structures.
Nope, you're wrong, see section 3.4 of the VAT Ins and Outs guide. You could only delay paying VAT if you were operating the Cash Accounting Scheme, but this is only for small companies (turnover less than GBP600k).
Similar rules apply in the rest of Europe, I believe.
trying to glue their UI abortion on top of a rewrite of IBM's AS400 concept of a database
Sounds fine to me. Flat files had their day a long time ago, if they ever belonged in a consumer OS to start with. Of course, nothing will change in the Linux world until years after Longhorn arrives because it will take that long to convert developers from the belief that Linux should be a bunch of device drivers to the idea of building an information processing and presentation system.
Thanks. Then again, I have heard that one or two German speakers are just about able get by in English, so if we're very very lucky something resembling a translation may appear. 10/10 for effort though!
A most interesting contribution to the debate, and one which I find myself quite unable to respond to adequately. My only hope is that there are others here more qualified than I that can rise to the challenge that you have set.
Slashdot Mirror
Highly recommend the BBC treatment with Denholm Elliott as Jarndyce and Diana Rigg as Lady Deadlock - not as widely known as Xmas Carol etc.
Very interesting. I thought I was up to date, but missed:
a) the latest postponement
b) the interesting contrast between stated vs. actual position of UK Liberals (a relatively significant presence in EuroParl of course)
c) the (surprisingly didactic) UK Labour press release
So I really didn't know what was going on at all!
For further debunking of the McCarthy line, I can certainly recommend the FFII page (probably already referenced).
MS Research did the "AI", that was their contribution.
I think they were hinting that whatever MS Research had produced was mauled by MS product development. Still MS's fault, but like any large organization, it's not a monolith.
Actually, there's some substance to that.
I understand that, at the time Clippy emerged, he was the only development that had its origins in Microsoft Research, something which they were mighty embarrassed by (and which was not really their fault).
Platform-specificity is ultimately good, both for Windows and for Linux programmers
I see.
So the reason for cloning Dotnet is so you can be sure that Windows programs won't run on Linux.
Have I got that right?
Hmmm... a few pages above there's a post consisting of the two phrases "You are an idiot" and "There is no IDE that comes even close to Visual Studio.NET" that's now Insightful.
And now here I'm obliged to repeat someone's useful response (that wasn't modded up) to an ignorant assertion (that was).
The practice of refactoring is well-established and reflects changes to the naming or structuring of the code that have occurred since it was created, so your comments about the initial organization of code are irrelevant. Apparently your beloved VS.Net is likely to offer some refactoring capability in a future release, which acknowleges the importance of this feature but puts it approximately 2.5 years behind Eclipse and IDEA.
A workflow system consists of process definitions with process steps that involve conventional programming, therefore if I'm developing a workflow system, I'm also doing conventional programming. An IDE allows me to deal with these aspects in one environment (hence "Integrated"), just as VS.NET allows me to develop GUI layouts and conventional programming in one environment. (Or are you suggesting that the GUI designer in VS should be a separate system?)
I fail to see the relevance of standalone diagramming tools in this context since their purpose is to produce diagrams (for people) rather than code (for computers) - something you are free to do regardless of your IDE. However, since you bring up the subject, I should point out that in Workshop the workflow diagrams ARE integrated and correspond exactly (via 2-way update) with the visible program code. Again, such features are light-years ahead of anything in VS.
But Java isn't a product, as you know.
A more reasonable comparison might be VS.NET with something like WebLogic Workshop. There's only one download involved with that - IDE, JVM, libraries, app server etc. in one.
Right. A very mainstream business OS - Stratus VOS - had memory-mapped files that worked over the network (i.e. mapping to a remote file). This was in keeping with the remotable-everything philosophy (files, terminals, tape drives, queues etc.) that I believe was shared by the Apollo Domain system, also of mid 80s vintage.
Yep, this is what the Autonomy stuff does - looks over your shoulder in effect and records the links in what you do including exactly the email scenario you describe.
Actually, the most impressive demo I saw was of a CNN broadcast being fed in via a voice recognition system, and the displayed TV picture being annotated live with links to relevant sources of info.
I'm sure there are competing systems out there but theirs is the only one I know.
Well, there are two levels of control here:
1) Ownership of the Java trademark. Sun has this, but has not stopped (and may have no grounds to stop) unlicensed developments such as Kaffe.
2) Control of Java's development via the JCP. Sun has a representative on each committee, but it can be (and apparently has been) outvoted.
There are sound reasons to continue using Java, security and portability being the most obvious. Your opinion is probably representative of a significant body of Linux users, which whether justified or not places us in a very awkward situation when looking for an alternative to Dotnet for Linux.
Because it's not championed by one megacorp, but by a whole array of commercial and non-commercial interests, including IBM, BEA, Nokia among a cast of thousands?
If you feel this represents the same kind of vendor lock-in as Dotnet then your commercial antennae are in need of adjustment.
Why would MS want to shut down a project that is actively evangelising Dotnet for them?
The time to act would be when it presents a commercial threat.
You've got your runtimes mixed up.
The Dotnet runtime consists of approximately 1200 classes, including Windows Forms, ASP.NET etc.
The CLR/CLI standard only covers core language-related classes - approx 120 in all.
Dotnet is therefore mostly proprietary and there is no spec. to implement. Mono is having to reverse-engineer, with dubious consequences.
As someone has mysteriously marked the parent as "interesting" it might be worthwhile to provoke a genuinely interesting debate below it so that readers are not too disappointed.
The parent insists that no Java IDE "can touch" VS for "any single thing you could possibly want to do", but a moment later admits that "VS.NET doesn't have as robust a feature set as some Java IDEs".
Features like refactoring, perhaps, as found on the free Eclipse IDE, or the modestly priced IDEA?
Or, looking a bit further afield, we could ask how one might develop a complete workflow system in VS, as you can in WebLogic Workshop?
My clients do these things all the time, but VS has a long way to go to offer a competitive alternative to the Java tools available now.
A definition simply saying that meta-data is "data about data" would mean that any fact or statement qualifies as meta-data. "The sky is blue" is meta-data about skies and blueness at this level. Such a definition is meaningless.
The definition you offer is therefore partially "right" (i.e. useful) in that "data about data elements" could reasonably mean "describing how this to interpret this object as a set of specific data elements", e.g. a database schema.
However, the definition is quite wrong (i.e. inconsistent, not useful) in describing any inferred or derived information as meta-data.
Categorization is not an activity unique to IT, and it is absurd to adopt and debase mathematical terms when established alternatives exist.
I'll pass quickly over your dubious terminology and get straight to repudiating your conclusion:
There are a number of successful products that automatically infer ("extract") categorization information ("meta-data") from unstructured data and are certainly more than "marginally useful".
A structured information storage system for Linux is something to be welcomed rather than sneered at. It will immediately improve the accessibility and coherence of information now haphazardly stored in dozens of different semi-structured forms, and, later, in conjunction with the kind of automated tools referred to above, has the prospect of growing into a valuable information processing system.
It's logically incorrect (and perhaps rather pretentious) to refer to categorization information in general as "meta-data".
.C vs. .java file extension, could conceivably be classed as meta-data in an IT system.
Only information essential to the interpretation of an object, such as its Latin-1 text encoding or a
The author and title of a song are simply categorization information of the kind that librarians have dealt with for a long time, and should be accorded no more special treatment by the storage system than any other explicit or implicit characteristic.
Single-level stores are an important angle here, but they were around long before GEOS.
The original implementation, along with Virtual Memory itself, was in the Manchester Atlas (1962).
This led to implementations on the IBM 360/85 and then Multics. I used an implementation in Stratus VOS (Multics cousin) in '86.
this is not information that the computer can necessarily gather for itself
Not necessarily, but system's like Autonomy's automatic categorization search can do a pretty good job.
I see several posts here point out the difficulty of maintaining category information (erroneously referred to as metadata) manually so it seems clear that progress in automatic classification is needed to complement more sophisticated storage structures.
Well, if I understand them to be saying that this license stream is to be their main source of revenue, paying 17.5% up front would be a huge hurdle.
Without a sugar daddy it seems that they could only grow it very slowly, and this only when more than, say, 50% of the "marks" (punters) are paying.
Nope, you're wrong, see section 3.4 of the VAT Ins and Outs guide. You could only delay paying VAT if you were operating the Cash Accounting Scheme, but this is only for small companies (turnover less than GBP600k).
Similar rules apply in the rest of Europe, I believe.
trying to glue their UI abortion on top of a rewrite of IBM's AS400 concept of a database
Sounds fine to me. Flat files had their day a long time ago, if they ever belonged in a consumer OS to start with. Of course, nothing will change in the Linux world until years after Longhorn arrives because it will take that long to convert developers from the belief that Linux should be a bunch of device drivers to the idea of building an information processing and presentation system.
Thanks. Then again, I have heard that one or two German speakers are just about able get by in English, so if we're very very lucky something resembling a translation may appear. 10/10 for effort though!
A most interesting contribution to the debate, and one which I find myself quite unable to respond to adequately. My only hope is that there are others here more qualified than I that can rise to the challenge that you have set.