The nearest stars to our sun, Alpha Centauri A and B, are by far the closest to our sun in terms of light output, size and heat in our interstellar neighbourhood. Both of those two stars could support earth type planets.
And it's 4 light years away. A very powerful, fusion powered craft, traveling at 10% the speed of light, could reach it in 40 years.
It just occured to me that the only way you can make anything, and I mean thing, not person, aware of you is by making a large signal in the form of "yoohoo, hallooo, hey!". In other words by making a very big bang visible over light years in most of the wavelengths of the EM spectrum.
There are so many basic assumptions in communicating with possible aliens, such as assuming they even use radio, that it seems patently wasteful to try and second guess what an alien civilisation would or would not understand. If one is going to use radio messages, wouldn't it simply be the easiest to beam a pattern that is obviously artificial, repeated endlessly. The actual content of the pattern should be as simple as possible, but needn't even contain anything meaningful, since anything meaningful is probably only going to be meaningful to us.
Any civilation spotting the repeated pattern and deducting that it is artificial would then hopefully respond. Sure, the actual modalities of how to communicate with them would then take centuries or decades, but why were you were hoping for ET to walk into your living room next week in the first place?
The universe is a big place and travel amongst the stars, even at light speed, is a multigenerational process.
You're right about me getting the date of the movie wrong, but the aspect of the movie I was thinking about was the fundamentalist government portrayed there at the time, where any form of profanity or "unmoral" behaviour was criminal.
I fully agree that military research is in no way impeded in the USA, but, to put it simply, you can't eat guns. While other areas of research, such as aeronautical and computer research, are still very advanced in the US, there is a lot more to it than that. For example, I would think that medical and food technology research could fall behind, and even controversial areas of computer science such as AI, which may offend fundamentalists.
Possibly, however, the most endangered field of study is not even these, but things such as sociology.
I'm not American, so I can't say how much of a real impact something like this has, but I wonder if this recent rise of very conservative religious fundamentalism in the USA and efforts to stop the presentation of things that contradict their view might not lead to the USA eventually falling beind in key sciences, and, as a consquence, losing its edge in the world of technology.
While the situation isn't as bad as that Escape from LA movie from the late 80's, there certainly are aspects of that in modern American politics it seems.
I'm pleased to hear that. While I can appreciate the fact that people are working on this in their own time for the sheer pleasure of it, I know that RMS constantly drones on about how the Hurd is ready for mainstream use as an alternative to Linux, which it obviously won't be until it can be used on current systems with curent devices.
Making a Linux driver layer will certainly help in that arena, even if it raises the obvious question of "why should I use it" with most mainstream users. Possibly I just see this as a waste of time, since most experimental systems never make it past the experimental stage.
I would understand more people working on the Darwin kernel, for example, since it is the basis of an actively used system, and also uses the Mach kernel at its core. Why not for instance, try to replace Darwin's Mach kernel with the L4 kernel for example?
*The Hurd will go the way of other exotic and unused operating systems if these people continue to sit in their little dream castles and plan for world domination. It's like trying to row a Viking longboat without oars, trying to grill meat without a fork, or more to the taste of our slashdot crowd, trying to masturbate with one's hands tied behind one's back.
In 1991 an ultra high energetic particle was observed in Utah. It had so much energy in fact (travelling extremely close to the speed of light) that the particle, a single proton, had as much energy as a brick falling on your toe or a fastball travelling at 55mph.
The called the particle the Oh-My-God particle. Read a fun account on it here
Have become part of the American Empire with the help of two very bad poieces of shit in the names of Tony "45 minutes" Blair, and Johnny boy "Keep Autralia white" Howard. I've visited both countries, and while both ARE doing well economically, it's not as if they managed to do it on their own. Their corporations look and smell like American corporations. Their media looks like it was all made in the land of the corrupt and most of their products that aren't made in china seem to come from the Empire.
This is why I like feisty little countries like New Zealand with that weird PM of theirs who doesn't hesitate to make the Emperor know what she thinks, or places like Venezuela, with a luny President who basically spends all his time insulting the US and, because he has loads of SUV food, can get away scott free.
I mean, debian is the only distro that supports all the exotic architectures. If debian only supports the main architectures in futre, what then will the difference be between them and SuSE, Mandrake, Ubuntu and Gentoo for that matter?
I suppose that there is the usual chaos at Microsoft in the marketing department where a makreting person says something that is meant as the usual Microsoft vapourware in order to gather customer interest but where it is so obviously out of sync with actual developments that someone else has to clarify things a few days later.
I presume that marketing also realised that too much talk about Longhorn features being backported to XP could significantly harm sales of Longhorn when it eventually does come out as people will obviously then simply use those features in XP instead of upgrading, thereby making the usual Windows version chaos (some 15% of all Windows users are still using Win98) even worse and pulling down MS' revenues.
On the other hand, MS knows that it needs to have some way to get the new stuff (XAML,.Net by default, Avalon, Indigo, WinFS) to be used by a critical mass of developers and users or else it could very possibly fail as badly as MS Passport did.
Damned if they do and damned if they don't. Strangely, I feel no pity with them whatsoever, as it was their own predatory monopoly practices, where they would kill their foes with beneath the belt tactics in order to get that very last 3% of users that they didn't already have, i.e. they were never prepared to sacrifice anything in order to have a cleaner and more unified user base.
Those specs are very, very impressive. It's quite a bit more powerful than anything Apple has out now. Given that the 3 core PPC will be more like the IBM Power5 (dual core) than the PPC970, I wonder how hot this thing will run?
I suppose though that Apple will have by then released G5 Macs with similar speeds, since there hasn't been any update to the tower line in a while now.
What is interesting is that Microsoft is doing its level best to capture the game market, and not only the game market. I see where Microsoft is going with the built in media player and camera, obligatory online experience for all games and minimum HDTV resolution. They are trying to do to the market what Apple has done with stuff like iTunes, iChat and iSight. I would be very surprised if Microsoft is not going to try and use the XBox2 as their way of capturing the integrated experience that Apple has had a lock on with its own hardware and software, except that Microsoft will be able to lock out the competition even more thoroughly with the console.
I fully expect Microsoft to offer video chats, instant messaging, its own music store etc through a monthly subscription service such as Xbox live. Your average user doesn't care as long as it's easy to use and works. If the device includes a browser then you know that it is indeed aimed at Apple's iMac and Mac mini as well.
I think this is aimed squarely at both Sony and Apple, not because it uses a PPC but because of the feature integration and the sheer speed it will offer. I think Sony might just suffer heavy loss of marketshare unless the PS3, with its Cell processor really is so much faster that there's no competition and if Sony manages to get its online integration and feature set at the same level, which I doubt they will do.
The only real problem might be price. I can't see Microsoft selling this at a very low price (under $300) unless they're willing to take even heavier losses than they do with the XBox.
Why, for the love of all that's holy, should anyone care what computer Linus uses to do his work? If he uses a Sun, Mac, PC or even a PDA, does it matter as long as what he produces works?
I think the simple matter is that Macs are generally appealing, and that those who like them tend to evangelise a lot and those who don't have some fear that x86 is not good enough, or somethiing to that extent.
I think that while he most definitely does have a point, especially as regards RPM vs apt-get vs ports and the KDE vs GNOME fiasco I think he most totally absolutely misses or missed the boat when it comes to the adoption and future direction of Linux.
As others have noted here, Linux, in its most basic form, can neither win nor lose. It's not in any competition at that level. The people who work on it do it for pleasure, not money (some do it for money but I'll get to that in a minute).
On the commercial level, while he might have a point if debian, mandrake, gentoo and Ubuntu were in serious consideration for adoption by large software vendors, the fact of the matter is, that for all intents and purposes, enterprise Linux consists of Red Hat and Novell/SuSE. Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SAP and the numerous Java application server vendors all certify their products on one or both of those distros.
And that brings me to IBM. IBM is a serious, a very serious business software and services company. IBM would not have invested the enormous sums it has in the last few years into Linux if it didn't feel that Linux was worth it.
And what about the numerous big name governments, cities and corporations that are publicly switching to Linux? The sheer uptake of the OS and above all the growth in that uptake indicates that Linux is doing just fine, thank you, despite all his worries and pessimism. Three years ago, after the dotcom bubble went balls up, you could not find Linux job adds easily, especially in a country like the one I live in, Switzerland, which is arch conservative. These days you can.
And I think that the desktop and package issues are slowly being solved by natural evolution in that there are now tools that intergrate RPM's on non RPM systems and vice versa and even KDE and GNOME are slowly but surely trying to come to a point where they are interoperable. I fully expect that in five years, it will not matter whether you prefer one or the other as they will finally be compatible to a large extent. The market and common sense demands it and that's the way it will go.
As for open source developers being squabbling children, I think I should point out that projects such as Apache, Tomcat, Mozilla etc are in no way squabbling rabbles, and their uptake by the general public and market prove that.
And talking about squabbling children, what would you say to Steve Balmers lunacy and Microsoft's cliched FUD campaigns which generally backfire on them as the public generally doesn't react well to negative marketing? Would you call that grow up?
I was wondering, apart from his comments themselves on the state and future of.Net, what the real consequence of some of Richard Grimes' stature is when he decides to publicly drop his.Net column.
It occurred to me that this is the first public person who is both a respected author in the Microsoft developer world and, possibly more importantly, a columnist at DrDobb's, who is publicly washing his hands with.Net. And that is why, I think, why Microsoft's bloggers are doing overtime on the defensive damage containment sector.
Dr Dobbs is possibly the most respected software development journal in the English speaking world. Certainly it has dropped somewhat over the years with the advent of the internet and the ease of accessibility to good quality development articles that the internet brings, but it is still probably the most important journal, especially relating to Microsoft products. The fact that a noted author in this journal has decided to wash his hands of.Net due to his frustration with the framework is what got the bloggers up in arms. Fear, simple fear, I think.
is it really that important? I don't know. I have no idea if this is the beginning trickle of a torrent of developers who will decide to drop.Net and move to some other framework or platform, or if it is just one frustrated man who will have no influence on future events.
While I would suspect the latter, I think that Microsoft's bloggers reactions means that Microsoft fears the former. And they right to be. A general dissatisfaction with.Net could very really cripple Microsoft's uptake in the enterprise, and the loss of enterprise development interest would leave Microsoft with an Desktop OS, a Server OS and an Office package.
My reasons for thinking of.Net and above all C# as a marketing exercise is due to the fiasco that Microsoft and Sun went through in the late 90's when Sun successfully stopped Microsoft from co-opting Java into becoming a "Microsoft language" as Basic (VB) and C++ (VC++) had become, i.e. a language in which the current implementation on Windows was wildly incompatible with implementations on other platforms.
That, I think, is the impetus that got Microsoft to start work on a Java-like language. I don't disagree that C# has some technological innovations, but they aren't that spectacular so that they make C# syntactically fundamentally different from Java. C# was, IMO, designed to entice Java developers to move over to the Windows platform (since.Net was obviously never ported and Mono will certainly not replace enterprise Java on Linux).
Moreover, the fiasco that Microsoft went through in 2000 to around 2002, naming every thing they possibly could.Net in some manner or another until they discovered that they were confusing their own customers definitely does suggest that it indeed a marketing exercise primarily.
While I can sympathise with Richard Grimes and certaqinly agree with him that.Net is more of a marketing exercise than technological breakthrough (even C# is Microsoft's response to Sun's lawsuit over MS' mangling of Java), I don't think Microsoft can now afford to give it up.
While they may very well be desperate since almost none of the initial investments have paid out, i.e. the lack of notable.Net applications on the client side of things reminds me very much of Java's client side predicament, they are in the now unenviable position of having spent so many years (6+) in development and (5+) in marketing and obviously having spent astronomical sums on both that they can not afford to switch to something else.
They seem more likely, as is shown by their decisions to port Avalon and Indigo to XP, to try and hack it to work on all platforms so that at least the development effort will not have been wasted. The end effect will probably be that.Net will be ubiquitous on the various Windows platforms and will be the end user development plaform of choice, much as VB is today, but that it will be the same total sludge of low level hacks that give MFC and VB their well deserved reputation for irritation.
I also serioiusly doubt that.Net, will ever really kill off server side Java, not unless Sun makes some really stupid moves, although that, I suppose, is well within the realm of possibility.
I aslo agree totally, that MS is very quick to jump and get all defensive whenever somebody of note crticises them or their products. Admitting failure or misdeeds is not one of MS' strengths.
I look at the state of the German economy - 5,2 million unemployed as of last week, 12,6% of the workforce - and the state of the Swiss economy - 230 000 or 4,1% of the workforce - and I wonder when Germany will have to start asking for aid donations from countries that don't have anachronistic and dreamland laws about when you can work, how long you can work, how much you have to earn and why the unions have so much control to the workforce detriment.
I live in Switzerland, which is not part of the EU, thank God, and given the EC blatant disregard for the EU parlimentary request to restart the process of software patents, I will make very sure, by the democratic means of public initiative, aka privately initiated referendums, which we have in Switzerland, that Switzerland will never join that bastion of corruption.
I do not want my country ruled by a cabal of easily bought unelected scum in Brussels, and, given the way things are going, I think there are many current EU members, such as the UK and Denmark that are wondering how they can get out of it as fast as possible.
The EU Commision is appointed by the heads of state of the various EU countries, while the EU parliment is an elected but somewhat powerless organisation. The EU's coming constitution is a joke as it only cements this bad state of affairs. The commision should be elected, but you can well expect that the old dinosaur demagogues of European politics, among them Berlusconi of Italy and Chirac of France will fight tooth and nail to keep their influence on the Commision.
Slashdot Mirror
The nearest stars to our sun, Alpha Centauri A and B, are by far the closest to our sun in terms of light output, size and heat in our interstellar neighbourhood. Both of those two stars could support earth type planets.
And it's 4 light years away. A very powerful, fusion powered craft, traveling at 10% the speed of light, could reach it in 40 years.
It just occured to me that the only way you can make anything, and I mean thing, not person, aware of you is by making a large signal in the form of "yoohoo, hallooo, hey!". In other words by making a very big bang visible over light years in most of the wavelengths of the EM spectrum.
:D
Maybe blow up Jupiter
There are so many basic assumptions in communicating with possible aliens, such as assuming they even use radio, that it seems patently wasteful to try and second guess what an alien civilisation would or would not understand. If one is going to use radio messages, wouldn't it simply be the easiest to beam a pattern that is obviously artificial, repeated endlessly. The actual content of the pattern should be as simple as possible, but needn't even contain anything meaningful, since anything meaningful is probably only going to be meaningful to us.
Any civilation spotting the repeated pattern and deducting that it is artificial would then hopefully respond. Sure, the actual modalities of how to communicate with them would then take centuries or decades, but why were you were hoping for ET to walk into your living room next week in the first place?
The universe is a big place and travel amongst the stars, even at light speed, is a multigenerational process.
You're right about me getting the date of the movie wrong, but the aspect of the movie I was thinking about was the fundamentalist government portrayed there at the time, where any form of profanity or "unmoral" behaviour was criminal.
I fully agree that military research is in no way impeded in the USA, but, to put it simply, you can't eat guns. While other areas of research, such as aeronautical and computer research, are still very advanced in the US, there is a lot more to it than that. For example, I would think that medical and food technology research could fall behind, and even controversial areas of computer science such as AI, which may offend fundamentalists.
Possibly, however, the most endangered field of study is not even these, but things such as sociology.
I'm not American, so I can't say how much of a real impact something like this has, but I wonder if this recent rise of very conservative religious fundamentalism in the USA and efforts to stop the presentation of things that contradict their view might not lead to the USA eventually falling beind in key sciences, and, as a consquence, losing its edge in the world of technology.
While the situation isn't as bad as that Escape from LA movie from the late 80's, there certainly are aspects of that in modern American politics it seems.
His Royal highness, King Timothy has decided to grace us with his uncanny ability to post duplicate stories.
I'm pleased to hear that. While I can appreciate the fact that people are working on this in their own time for the sheer pleasure of it, I know that RMS constantly drones on about how the Hurd is ready for mainstream use as an alternative to Linux, which it obviously won't be until it can be used on current systems with curent devices.
Making a Linux driver layer will certainly help in that arena, even if it raises the obvious question of "why should I use it" with most mainstream users. Possibly I just see this as a waste of time, since most experimental systems never make it past the experimental stage.
I would understand more people working on the Darwin kernel, for example, since it is the basis of an actively used system, and also uses the Mach kernel at its core. Why not for instance, try to replace Darwin's Mach kernel with the L4 kernel for example?
It's the device drivers, stupid!*
*The Hurd will go the way of other exotic and unused operating systems if these people continue to sit in their little dream castles and plan for world domination. It's like trying to row a Viking longboat without oars, trying to grill meat without a fork, or more to the taste of our slashdot crowd, trying to masturbate with one's hands tied behind one's back.
In 1991 an ultra high energetic particle was observed in Utah. It had so much energy in fact (travelling extremely close to the speed of light) that the particle, a single proton, had as much energy as a brick falling on your toe or a fastball travelling at 55mph.
The called the particle the Oh-My-God particle. Read a fun account on it here
Have become part of the American Empire with the help of two very bad poieces of shit in the names of Tony "45 minutes" Blair, and Johnny boy "Keep Autralia white" Howard. I've visited both countries, and while both ARE doing well economically, it's not as if they managed to do it on their own. Their corporations look and smell like American corporations. Their media looks like it was all made in the land of the corrupt and most of their products that aren't made in china seem to come from the Empire.
This is why I like feisty little countries like New Zealand with that weird PM of theirs who doesn't hesitate to make the Emperor know what she thinks, or places like Venezuela, with a luny President who basically spends all his time insulting the US and, because he has loads of SUV food, can get away scott free.
I mean, debian is the only distro that supports all the exotic architectures. If debian only supports the main architectures in futre, what then will the difference be between them and SuSE, Mandrake, Ubuntu and Gentoo for that matter?
The mother, the mother! Why wont someone think of the mother?!
It was his mother who wanted him out of the house.
I suppose that there is the usual chaos at Microsoft in the marketing department where a makreting person says something that is meant as the usual Microsoft vapourware in order to gather customer interest but where it is so obviously out of sync with actual developments that someone else has to clarify things a few days later.
.Net by default, Avalon, Indigo, WinFS) to be used by a critical mass of developers and users or else it could very possibly fail as badly as MS Passport did.
I presume that marketing also realised that too much talk about Longhorn features being backported to XP could significantly harm sales of Longhorn when it eventually does come out as people will obviously then simply use those features in XP instead of upgrading, thereby making the usual Windows version chaos (some 15% of all Windows users are still using Win98) even worse and pulling down MS' revenues.
On the other hand, MS knows that it needs to have some way to get the new stuff (XAML,
Damned if they do and damned if they don't. Strangely, I feel no pity with them whatsoever, as it was their own predatory monopoly practices, where they would kill their foes with beneath the belt tactics in order to get that very last 3% of users that they didn't already have, i.e. they were never prepared to sacrifice anything in order to have a cleaner and more unified user base.
Those specs are very, very impressive. It's quite a bit more powerful than anything Apple has out now. Given that the 3 core PPC will be more like the IBM Power5 (dual core) than the PPC970, I wonder how hot this thing will run?
I suppose though that Apple will have by then released G5 Macs with similar speeds, since there hasn't been any update to the tower line in a while now.
What is interesting is that Microsoft is doing its level best to capture the game market, and not only the game market. I see where Microsoft is going with the built in media player and camera, obligatory online experience for all games and minimum HDTV resolution. They are trying to do to the market what Apple has done with stuff like iTunes, iChat and iSight. I would be very surprised if Microsoft is not going to try and use the XBox2 as their way of capturing the integrated experience that Apple has had a lock on with its own hardware and software, except that Microsoft will be able to lock out the competition even more thoroughly with the console.
I fully expect Microsoft to offer video chats, instant messaging, its own music store etc through a monthly subscription service such as Xbox live. Your average user doesn't care as long as it's easy to use and works. If the device includes a browser then you know that it is indeed aimed at Apple's iMac and Mac mini as well.
I think this is aimed squarely at both Sony and Apple, not because it uses a PPC but because of the feature integration and the sheer speed it will offer. I think Sony might just suffer heavy loss of marketshare unless the PS3, with its Cell processor really is so much faster that there's no competition and if Sony manages to get its online integration and feature set at the same level, which I doubt they will do.
The only real problem might be price. I can't see Microsoft selling this at a very low price (under $300) unless they're willing to take even heavier losses than they do with the XBox.
Why, for the love of all that's holy, should anyone care what computer Linus uses to do his work? If he uses a Sun, Mac, PC or even a PDA, does it matter as long as what he produces works?
I think the simple matter is that Macs are generally appealing, and that those who like them tend to evangelise a lot and those who don't have some fear that x86 is not good enough, or somethiing to that extent.
I think that while he most definitely does have a point, especially as regards RPM vs apt-get vs ports and the KDE vs GNOME fiasco I think he most totally absolutely misses or missed the boat when it comes to the adoption and future direction of Linux.
As others have noted here, Linux, in its most basic form, can neither win nor lose. It's not in any competition at that level. The people who work on it do it for pleasure, not money (some do it for money but I'll get to that in a minute).
On the commercial level, while he might have a point if debian, mandrake, gentoo and Ubuntu were in serious consideration for adoption by large software vendors, the fact of the matter is, that for all intents and purposes, enterprise Linux consists of Red Hat and Novell/SuSE. Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SAP and the numerous Java application server vendors all certify their products on one or both of those distros.
And that brings me to IBM. IBM is a serious, a very serious business software and services company. IBM would not have invested the enormous sums it has in the last few years into Linux if it didn't feel that Linux was worth it.
And what about the numerous big name governments, cities and corporations that are publicly switching to Linux? The sheer uptake of the OS and above all the growth in that uptake indicates that Linux is doing just fine, thank you, despite all his worries and pessimism. Three years ago, after the dotcom bubble went balls up, you could not find Linux job adds easily, especially in a country like the one I live in, Switzerland, which is arch conservative. These days you can.
And I think that the desktop and package issues are slowly being solved by natural evolution in that there are now tools that intergrate RPM's on non RPM systems and vice versa and even KDE and GNOME are slowly but surely trying to come to a point where they are interoperable. I fully expect that in five years, it will not matter whether you prefer one or the other as they will finally be compatible to a large extent. The market and common sense demands it and that's the way it will go.
As for open source developers being squabbling children, I think I should point out that projects such as Apache, Tomcat, Mozilla etc are in no way squabbling rabbles, and their uptake by the general public and market prove that.
And talking about squabbling children, what would you say to Steve Balmers lunacy and Microsoft's cliched FUD campaigns which generally backfire on them as the public generally doesn't react well to negative marketing? Would you call that grow up?
I was wondering, apart from his comments themselves on the state and future of .Net, what the real consequence of some of Richard Grimes' stature is when he decides to publicly drop his .Net column.
.Net. And that is why, I think, why Microsoft's bloggers are doing overtime on the defensive damage containment sector.
.Net due to his frustration with the framework is what got the bloggers up in arms. Fear, simple fear, I think.
.Net and move to some other framework or platform, or if it is just one frustrated man who will have no influence on future events.
.Net could very really cripple Microsoft's uptake in the enterprise, and the loss of enterprise development interest would leave Microsoft with an Desktop OS, a Server OS and an Office package.
It occurred to me that this is the first public person who is both a respected author in the Microsoft developer world and, possibly more importantly, a columnist at DrDobb's, who is publicly washing his hands with
Dr Dobbs is possibly the most respected software development journal in the English speaking world. Certainly it has dropped somewhat over the years with the advent of the internet and the ease of accessibility to good quality development articles that the internet brings, but it is still probably the most important journal, especially relating to Microsoft products. The fact that a noted author in this journal has decided to wash his hands of
is it really that important? I don't know. I have no idea if this is the beginning trickle of a torrent of developers who will decide to drop
While I would suspect the latter, I think that Microsoft's bloggers reactions means that Microsoft fears the former. And they right to be. A general dissatisfaction with
Think about that.
My reasons for thinking of .Net and above all C# as a marketing exercise is due to the fiasco that Microsoft and Sun went through in the late 90's when Sun successfully stopped Microsoft from co-opting Java into becoming a "Microsoft language" as Basic (VB) and C++ (VC++) had become, i.e. a language in which the current implementation on Windows was wildly incompatible with implementations on other platforms.
.Net was obviously never ported and Mono will certainly not replace enterprise Java on Linux).
.Net in some manner or another until they discovered that they were confusing their own customers definitely does suggest that it indeed a marketing exercise primarily.
That, I think, is the impetus that got Microsoft to start work on a Java-like language. I don't disagree that C# has some technological innovations, but they aren't that spectacular so that they make C# syntactically fundamentally different from Java. C# was, IMO, designed to entice Java developers to move over to the Windows platform (since
Moreover, the fiasco that Microsoft went through in 2000 to around 2002, naming every thing they possibly could
His Shigawire in the Dune series was something similar.
While I can sympathise with Richard Grimes and certaqinly agree with him that .Net is more of a marketing exercise than technological breakthrough (even C# is Microsoft's response to Sun's lawsuit over MS' mangling of Java), I don't think Microsoft can now afford to give it up.
.Net applications on the client side of things reminds me very much of Java's client side predicament, they are in the now unenviable position of having spent so many years (6+) in development and (5+) in marketing and obviously having spent astronomical sums on both that they can not afford to switch to something else.
.Net will be ubiquitous on the various Windows platforms and will be the end user development plaform of choice, much as VB is today, but that it will be the same total sludge of low level hacks that give MFC and VB their well deserved reputation for irritation.
.Net, will ever really kill off server side Java, not unless Sun makes some really stupid moves, although that, I suppose, is well within the realm of possibility.
While they may very well be desperate since almost none of the initial investments have paid out, i.e. the lack of notable
They seem more likely, as is shown by their decisions to port Avalon and Indigo to XP, to try and hack it to work on all platforms so that at least the development effort will not have been wasted. The end effect will probably be that
I also serioiusly doubt that
I aslo agree totally, that MS is very quick to jump and get all defensive whenever somebody of note crticises them or their products. Admitting failure or misdeeds is not one of MS' strengths.
I look at the state of the German economy - 5,2 million unemployed as of last week, 12,6% of the workforce - and the state of the Swiss economy - 230 000 or 4,1% of the workforce - and I wonder when Germany will have to start asking for aid donations from countries that don't have anachronistic and dreamland laws about when you can work, how long you can work, how much you have to earn and why the unions have so much control to the workforce detriment.
I live in Switzerland, which is not part of the EU, thank God, and given the EC blatant disregard for the EU parlimentary request to restart the process of software patents, I will make very sure, by the democratic means of public initiative, aka privately initiated referendums, which we have in Switzerland, that Switzerland will never join that bastion of corruption.
I do not want my country ruled by a cabal of easily bought unelected scum in Brussels, and, given the way things are going, I think there are many current EU members, such as the UK and Denmark that are wondering how they can get out of it as fast as possible.
The EU Commision is appointed by the heads of state of the various EU countries, while the EU parliment is an elected but somewhat powerless organisation. The EU's coming constitution is a joke as it only cements this bad state of affairs. The commision should be elected, but you can well expect that the old dinosaur demagogues of European politics, among them Berlusconi of Italy and Chirac of France will fight tooth and nail to keep their influence on the Commision.
Democracy in Europe!
I hope you'll be more satisfied up there than you were down here. So long and thanks.