Ten billion for an operating system... am I the only one thinking that the money we spend on military adventures and bailing out Wall Street would be better spent funding the creation and development of open source software?
Let's see: public schools (which are paid for by the government) are installing lots of cameras to monitor people (an increasingly popular trend among governments) and then linking up their video feeds with government agents who might or might not need access to those video feeds.
This seems perfectly logical to me... what part of it strikes you as odd?
Of course there isn't much demand yet: it's still a beta technology! Moreover, the technical evangelists don't seem to be in agreement if Silverlight is toolkit for building media applications to compete with Flash/YouTube or if this is a toolset for building line-of-business applications (ala Java Applets, only without the hideous UI and slow performance). I personally believe that Silverlight will only be a big thing if it is positioned as something for building line-of-business apps and marketed as the perfect hybrid between the power of a desktop app with the convenience of install/update of a web app.
Speaking of which: are there any "distros" out there ship a combination of FreeBSD and the latest Gnome desktop? I think that would be a better combination than Ubuntu's Debian+Gnome combo, personally.
This sounds *really* cool actually, but I wonder if anything will ever come of it on the desktop? Perhaps in Windows 7. Like I replied on another sub-thread of this discussion, Singularity isn't intended to ever go to market. Rather it's a breeding and proving ground for advanced concepts that might find their way into the main Windows code base at some time in the future. I think it's something like the advanced technology/racing teams inside of the major car makers who create interesting ways of solving difficult problems: some of these advanced concepts (like ABS, traction control, etc) from the racing and research teams find their way into the cars we actually drive on a day to day basis.
MSFT never intends to turn Singularity into a marketable product. It's simply a RESEARCH project, a breeding and proving ground for advanced O/S concepts. If they learn valuable things from the project -- like SIP, for example -- those ideas might find their way into the Windows code base in the future.
Singularity, if you'll recall, has gained wide interest from researchers and users alike, by claiming to be a fully managed code kernel (with managed code drivers and applications as well), something that would finally revolutionize the operating system research arena. The impression I got by looking at what was known about the project a year ago is that it was of lesser interest that the OS was written in managed code and it was far more interesting that they had solved some problems of inter-process communication in a micro-kernel OS. As you can read at Wikipedia:
Singularity is a microkernel operating system; however, unlike most historical microkernels, the different components do not run in separate address spaces (processes). Instead, there is only a single address space in which "Software-Isolated Processes" (SIP) reside. Each SIP has its own data and code layout, and is independent from other SIPs. These SIPs behave like normal processes, but do not require the overhead penalty of task-switches. Protection in this system is provided by a set of invariants, such as the memory-invariant which states there will be no cross-references (or memory pointers) between two SIPs. Communication between SIPs occur via higher order communication channels managed by the operating system. These rules are checked during the installation phase of the application, and must be fulfilled in order for Singularity to allow the installation (note: in Singularity, installation is managed by the operating system). The promise of Singularity, as I understood it, was the possibility of constructing an O/S kernel with all of the modularity advantages of a microkernel without all of the process communication issues typical to this kernel type.
I just don't see the benefit of running PHP on Windows...what does [Microsoft say] the Windows platform offers for PHP that running it on freely available platforms doesn't? On the IIS 7.0 platform, Microsoft offers LOTS to PHP (and Perl, Python, et al), chiefly though the integrated pipeline, which will allow you to do some very interesting things like build PHP pages and apps that make use of ASP.NET's Membership and Role APIs (or the Session or Application objects, for that matter). I don't know how many people will actually be writing "extensions" to PHP in C#, but it will be possible with IIS 7.
I had something similar happen the other day and then the telemarketing person came on the line and started in which his pitch. Perhaps someone here on/. can correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was federal law that if I request it, the telemarketer has to provide me with their name, the name of their employer, and the street address of the company so that I can have the first clue who is calling me (and so I know who the complaint with the FTC will be about). But what if the person hangs up when you start asking questions and the number from which they are calling appears to be overseas -- even after the marketing person confirmed they were in the US to begin with. What recourse is there in such a case?
Or perhaps the FBI pulled a rather legal two-step: commission a company like InfoUSA to do a more broad, demographically based data-mining, and then when probable cause is established (and it WILL be established, even if only as a "clerical error") you get a FISA warrant for more direct searching and data mining through the credit card companies.
Javascript, like HTML, has grown to handle tasks it was never envisioned or intended to do when it was first created, and that has tremendous implications in the security space (cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, etc). Why not just scrap the HTML and Javascript specs and start over with something designed with security in mind from the get-go? Swapping Javascript for Python or Ruby only means that we get to write/deal with exploits with more syntactical sugar. Let's fix the darned problem once and for all.
MS Silverlight is their planned attempt at killing off not only Adobe Flash but also all this AJAX stuff. Really? I thought this was their way of giving up on making Internet Explorer standards compliant by simply creating a whole new rendering engine as a cross-platform, multi-browser plugin...
In case you haven't noticed, the brain-trust at Microsoft doesn't sit still, and they have the financial and monopolistic resources to try and try again until they get it right. Moreover, as C# and.NET have shown, when you get the right people involved (Anders Hejlsberg) on making an in-house version of a very compelling technology (Java), Microsoft is more than capable at delivering a winner.
In the case of IIS 7, they have finally decided to create a Windows webserver in the modular blueprint of Apache. The betas of IIS 7 show that performance and security are better than anything that's come before it -- not just any IIS, but any webserver. Hell, the guys at Zend are saying that Zend on IIS 7 will be the most robust way to deploy PHP! And this is all built on the evolved form of Windows 2003 server, which has been the most secure O/S ever released by MS, something that a even a n00b with one weekend of training can lock down as tight as your favorite flavor or Linux.
Rather than stand around and argue about it, y'all need to get to work on Apache 3... and get ready to play catchup to MS again. The insecure days of IIS 5 are long gone; you've got your work cut out for you.
For typing up an inter-office memo in Word, most likely. But I'm a programmer, and I can barely read out loud some perfectly fine code, I can't imagine trying to enter it all with voice recognition, no matter how good it gets. Probably because computer languages aren't designed for dictation. It would be interesting, however, if a language were designed for spoken programming rather than typing. What would that look like -- errr, sound like? Code-reviews might get a little wacky though (I'm hearing voices in the computer!).
I used to work for a company that has the words "new directions" in their name. When I told people where I worked I would make a rather long pause between the "new" and "directions" so as not to sound like I was saying something else. I wonder how this software would render it...
I thought about doing the same thing when I bought a new laptop a few months ago, but then I realized Vista is actually a good operating system and there's no sense in taking a step back to XP. The security warnings get annoying quick, but a few minutes of searching on the Web took care of that. With Aero disabled, Vista looks almost identical to XP. And I'm certain few people have reformatted to XP given that they just paid for a copy of Vista. You're not developing software for Windows XP platforms and targeting shops that have already stated they won't even think about adopting Vista until SP2. Windows 2000 Pro still has over 2 1/2 years of support left. Windows XP Pro is good until 2012. Why the hell switch operating system right now just because there's something newer available -- especially when the newer O/S is so well documented to not work with lots of mission critical software?
Does that 40,000,000 figure count the license that was bundled with my Dell laptop? I bought my lapper in March and at the time Dell's website didn't have the option to have it pre-loaded with XP. The FIRST thing I did was wipe the hard drive and load XP, and I suspect thousands, if not millions of people have done that to the machines they've bought. Moreover, even if I wanted on my machine I would get an OEM copy of Vista Ultimate, in which case MS gets to show that they've sold two licenses to me. How many of the rest of you are in this boat?
MS is doing what they do best: marketing, marketing, marketing and not letting quality control or the facts get in the way.
So Polish copyright law forbids the translation of sub-titles. More power to them. And the Polish Police have caught people in Poland breaking Polish law. Why is this "news?" I suppose the angle here is that "gee, it sucks that what we Americans think is fine and dandy is illegal in Poland." If so, here are two choices for remedy: lobby for a change of law in Poland or convince Dub-ya to invade Poland and impose American law.
How is this story "News for nerds" or "stuff that matters?" File it under the "Polish crime blotter" category and not "Your rights online" because clearly the Polish don't have these rights.
In practice, ideas set forth in the First Amendment of the Constitution aren't even guaranteed to Americans anymore. Read the USA PATRIOT act recently? All it's going to take to loose even the illusion of rights in this country is another 9/11 type attack. Whether you believe Muslims were behind 9/11 or not, the sequel is coming and after that any attempt to invoke the 1st amendment will be met with mindless new-speak like "The 1st amendment doesn't apply in a post-post-9/11 world!"
This is outstanding news for the F/OSS community! My hope is that the "there's got to be someone else I can blame this on" politicians file charges against Microsoft under provisions of the Patriot Act for leaking vital government secrets. The irony in such a case would be delicious: charges without real justification leveled against a monopolistic company who markets software that doesn't really work. With each side forced to disprove a negative proposition, this should give the F/OSS community a little more time to charge forward while MS pukes all over themselves.
I know that it's optional around here to RTFA, but the original poster is wrong to title this entry as a move to Linux: this is a primarily move from mainframe to AIX on pSeries, with a few other tasks (FTP) being tossed to Linux like you'd throw a dog a bone. Using this lack of logic, it would be plausible to suggest that the NYSE is "moving to Mac OS X" because a few people in the advertising and marketing department use Macs for their jobs. I realize this isn't Rolling Stone magazine, but the lack of journalistic quality control here at/. is pathetic.
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Ten billion for an operating system... am I the only one thinking that the money we spend on military adventures and bailing out Wall Street would be better spent funding the creation and development of open source software?
Let's see: public schools (which are paid for by the government) are installing lots of cameras to monitor people (an increasingly popular trend among governments) and then linking up their video feeds with government agents who might or might not need access to those video feeds.
This seems perfectly logical to me... what part of it strikes you as odd?
Of course there isn't much demand yet: it's still a beta technology! Moreover, the technical evangelists don't seem to be in agreement if Silverlight is toolkit for building media applications to compete with Flash/YouTube or if this is a toolset for building line-of-business applications (ala Java Applets, only without the hideous UI and slow performance). I personally believe that Silverlight will only be a big thing if it is positioned as something for building line-of-business apps and marketed as the perfect hybrid between the power of a desktop app with the convenience of install/update of a web app.
Sheesh, that was hard.
Speaking of which: are there any "distros" out there ship a combination of FreeBSD and the latest Gnome desktop? I think that would be a better combination than Ubuntu's Debian+Gnome combo, personally.
MSFT never intends to turn Singularity into a marketable product. It's simply a RESEARCH project, a breeding and proving ground for advanced O/S concepts. If they learn valuable things from the project -- like SIP, for example -- those ideas might find their way into the Windows code base in the future.
I had something similar happen the other day and then the telemarketing person came on the line and started in which his pitch. Perhaps someone here on /. can correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was federal law that if I request it, the telemarketer has to provide me with their name, the name of their employer, and the street address of the company so that I can have the first clue who is calling me (and so I know who the complaint with the FTC will be about). But what if the person hangs up when you start asking questions and the number from which they are calling appears to be overseas -- even after the marketing person confirmed they were in the US to begin with. What recourse is there in such a case?
Or perhaps the FBI pulled a rather legal two-step: commission a company like InfoUSA to do a more broad, demographically based data-mining, and then when probable cause is established (and it WILL be established, even if only as a "clerical error") you get a FISA warrant for more direct searching and data mining through the credit card companies.
Don't you all know that privacy is dead anyway? If not, you need to listen to Steve Rambam's talk on the subject.
Javascript, like HTML, has grown to handle tasks it was never envisioned or intended to do when it was first created, and that has tremendous implications in the security space (cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, etc). Why not just scrap the HTML and Javascript specs and start over with something designed with security in mind from the get-go? Swapping Javascript for Python or Ruby only means that we get to write/deal with exploits with more syntactical sugar. Let's fix the darned problem once and for all.
How about an HTML editing control?
In case you haven't noticed, the brain-trust at Microsoft doesn't sit still, and they have the financial and monopolistic resources to try and try again until they get it right. Moreover, as C# and .NET have shown, when you get the right people involved (Anders Hejlsberg) on making an in-house version of a very compelling technology (Java), Microsoft is more than capable at delivering a winner.
In the case of IIS 7, they have finally decided to create a Windows webserver in the modular blueprint of Apache. The betas of IIS 7 show that performance and security are better than anything that's come before it -- not just any IIS, but any webserver. Hell, the guys at Zend are saying that Zend on IIS 7 will be the most robust way to deploy PHP! And this is all built on the evolved form of Windows 2003 server, which has been the most secure O/S ever released by MS, something that a even a n00b with one weekend of training can lock down as tight as your favorite flavor or Linux.
Rather than stand around and argue about it, y'all need to get to work on Apache 3... and get ready to play catchup to MS again. The insecure days of IIS 5 are long gone; you've got your work cut out for you.
I used to work for a company that has the words "new directions" in their name. When I told people where I worked I would make a rather long pause between the "new" and "directions" so as not to sound like I was saying something else. I wonder how this software would render it...
Does that 40,000,000 figure count the license that was bundled with my Dell laptop? I bought my lapper in March and at the time Dell's website didn't have the option to have it pre-loaded with XP. The FIRST thing I did was wipe the hard drive and load XP, and I suspect thousands, if not millions of people have done that to the machines they've bought. Moreover, even if I wanted on my machine I would get an OEM copy of Vista Ultimate, in which case MS gets to show that they've sold two licenses to me. How many of the rest of you are in this boat?
MS is doing what they do best: marketing, marketing, marketing and not letting quality control or the facts get in the way.
So Polish copyright law forbids the translation of sub-titles. More power to them. And the Polish Police have caught people in Poland breaking Polish law. Why is this "news?" I suppose the angle here is that "gee, it sucks that what we Americans think is fine and dandy is illegal in Poland." If so, here are two choices for remedy: lobby for a change of law in Poland or convince Dub-ya to invade Poland and impose American law.
How is this story "News for nerds" or "stuff that matters?" File it under the "Polish crime blotter" category and not "Your rights online" because clearly the Polish don't have these rights.
In practice, ideas set forth in the First Amendment of the Constitution aren't even guaranteed to Americans anymore. Read the USA PATRIOT act recently? All it's going to take to loose even the illusion of rights in this country is another 9/11 type attack. Whether you believe Muslims were behind 9/11 or not, the sequel is coming and after that any attempt to invoke the 1st amendment will be met with mindless new-speak like "The 1st amendment doesn't apply in a post-post-9/11 world!"
I emailed a Chinese colleague to get his comment on this story -- but the link is blocked. Oh well...
This is outstanding news for the F/OSS community! My hope is that the "there's got to be someone else I can blame this on" politicians file charges against Microsoft under provisions of the Patriot Act for leaking vital government secrets. The irony in such a case would be delicious: charges without real justification leveled against a monopolistic company who markets software that doesn't really work. With each side forced to disprove a negative proposition, this should give the F/OSS community a little more time to charge forward while MS pukes all over themselves.
I know that it's optional around here to RTFA, but the original poster is wrong to title this entry as a move to Linux: this is a primarily move from mainframe to AIX on pSeries, with a few other tasks (FTP) being tossed to Linux like you'd throw a dog a bone. Using this lack of logic, it would be plausible to suggest that the NYSE is "moving to Mac OS X" because a few people in the advertising and marketing department use Macs for their jobs. I realize this isn't Rolling Stone magazine, but the lack of journalistic quality control here at /. is pathetic.
Actually, NASDAQ switched to Microsoft and SqlServer 2005 roughly 18 months ago. Nasdaq bills themselves as "the stock market for the next hundred years" -- I wonder how long they will stick with MS SQL Server?