Its only a matter of time before this 'leaked' memo, the associated press release, etc, will have the average person thinking that Microsoft is now secure.
Go around your office and start asking people, "Have any security holes been fixed on YOUR computer since Microsoft made those annoucements?" Educate people that the average Windows installation has something like 10 KNOWN security problems, and countless unknown (except to your worst nightmare).
Security holes do not get fixed by press releases. Unfortunately, people's perceptions do. Don't let that happen.
About 7 years ago, I was involved in a research project, trying to use video teleconferencing and doctors for remote diagnosis of patients.
We found that jpeg compression of images made medical diagnosis unreliable. Hairline fractures in x-rays are exactly the kind of small details that tend to get washed away in 'lossy' compression, and the banding caused can lead to false assumptions as well.
The article suggests that this is still a lossy compression with small amounts of data loss. I know Doctors that would take that admission as a condemnation of the technique.
Are Television shows created with public funds available for my use as source material in my own movies?
Are works of art (like the infamous Mapelthorpe photos) considered in the 'public domain'?
I honestly don't know the answer, but I'm sure someone has thought about this in another domain. I wish people would stop thinking that code/cyberspace is really as new and challenging as it seems.
Say whatever you have to to get elected... Say you are pro-life, pro-choice, or whatever your constituency wants... I'd just be happy to see someone who is smart enough to use linux and read slashdot in government.
I'm late joining this thread, so my comment will probably be lost in the noise... I hope that someone who cares sees this and mods it up.
A better question would be 'what is Object-Oriented Programming for". It is *not* for the computer... a computer will happily execute any machine code, no matter what its source.
Object oriented programming techniques, and in fact ALL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES are abstractions that help HUMANS.
The human mind can only keep track of 'so much' at any one time. That is why we tend to 'package' information up into simpler representations, like analogies and stereotypes. These 'wrappers' around the complexity allow us to manage more at a time.
This is what OOP is for... helping the developer manage the details of the implementation.
Now, we as humans are better at representing some problems and 'procedural' and others as 'objects'. The writers question 'Can OO Solve Engineering Problems?' is bizarre in this context... of COURSE it can... it is just a matter of the human thinking of it that way... the question might better be put 'is there a good way for us to think of these as OO problems?" That is a defferent question... Some problems will be better handled procedurally, some will be better handled as OO. And it has as much to do with the person decomosing the problem and their skill set as it does with the problem domain.
So far people's comments are griping about what a bad idea this is... I actually think it is *more* like a unix philosphy than the 'C drive' is.
Here's what I mean:
On windoze (and on the mac), each hard drive (or partition) is represented as an icon. The user has to keep track of what things are on which hard drive.
Under unix, all the hard drives are joined together under a logical file system under/. Which partition is your usr/local/bin/ on? You don't really need to know in order to use the system.
This sounds like they are suggesting making the desktop ==/, and get rid of the user worrying about volumes and partitions.
I am surprised that noone in this thread has yet mentioned the book 'After the Gold Rush'. I suggest every serious software engineer read it. Whether you love or hate the idea of licensing people as 'engineers', the book gives you a lot of food for thought on the subject.
My company bought about 15 of the inspiron 7000's several years ago, and had some problems with the hinges. We gradually replaced them with 7500, of which ALL of them have had hinge problems. We have since tried the 8000's, which still seem very flimsy, but we are now evaluating machines from HP and Gateway. We are also buying machines from some small Linux vendor, since Dell is no longer supporting linux.
Imagine a day when you buy a computer, plug it in, and it can dual boot windows-linux out of the box...
Boot into linux, and you have a usable system.
Boot into Windows, and it asks you for your credit card number so it can charge you $99 for a license to use it.
You can keep the system dual-booting, or tell one OS that it can delete and take over the other partition.
If users *really* have a CHOICE, and could SEE the cost associated with windows (instead of paying a 'tax' on every computer), linux will gain desktop space.
Lets write to the justice department... THIS should be the 'settlement' imposed on Microsoft.
Does this include phone calls? I mean, 'where' exactly AM I meeting with someone when I am on the phone with them?
Is placing an order online REALLY that much different than placing an order from the Sears catalog?
If my computer is able to use the phone line to enter this 'virtual place' protected by law, can I?
This could have HUGE implications for wire-tap laws... both good AND bad.
Bad example: a court could issue a 'wiretap' for 'any' location in Cyberspace... the tap could then follow from state to state to country... but then the question would be, what court has this jurisdiction? I'm not sure I want any court thinking it has that kind of global power.
Government contracting does not have to be boring. I work for a small company in Dulles, VA. We do work for Department of Defense, the Department of State, and commercial work as well. (about 40%, 40%, 30%)
I manage a project for the Department of State. My office does not have a desk in it. I have a leather couch, a 30 gallon fish tank with a breeding pair of angelfish, and a tech library of hundreds of books. I use a laptop exclusively, and manage a team of 20 people that includes 3 telecommuters.
We hold our team meetings in a lounge that includes bean bag chairs, a TV with a dish, a drum set, an amplifier where people can plug in their guitars, and some keyboards. Every friday at 4:00 work stops for happy hour, and the company supplies the beer. Everybody works flex time, and as long as you meet your deadlines and meetings, there are no problems.
Everyone gets a 401k, 7+ weeks of vacation time, and a ton of other great benefits, including the work place. We do not have any cubicles... Our The real-estate agent told us we were crazy when we built our building... they were suggesting that we use 'open office furniture' (a euphamism for cubicle hell). We designed the space with 10'x10' and 10'x15' offices, with real closing doors (most have windows - some are interior)... 15 amp circuits for people's computers, large monitors, halogen lamps, and small refrigerators. Tons of lab space, tons of conference room space, 4 kitchens, and a lounge.
Our company is stronger than ever, despite the tough econimic times. How do we do it? Well, the company is now 14 years old, and has less than 200 employees. We have grown SLOW... selectively hiring the best, and only the best (or the young, and mentoring them). People stay a LONG time (I've worked there 6 years, and of the first 50 people hired, about 45 are still here), so we develop skills and team cohesion that other tech companies can't match. We have a low overhead... about 90% of the staff are actually engineers, so we don't have a lot of people in 'upper management' or 'human resources' that increase the rates we have to charge our customers. The current economic downturn has only helped us... we have a larger selection of potential candidates to hire, and people looking to hire a tech company like our track record and reputation. The company has been managed like a real COMPANY, and we have been profitable nearly every quarter, every year. The sum of (happy employees, talent, profitability) is a strong company that will probably be here 100 years from now. We are privately owned by the employees. We have no reliance on 'venture capital'.
We have had clients that have hired 200+ people in less than a year, and act like throwing money around can solve any problem. This is why tech companies fail: money is NOT a substitute for time, talent, or experience. If you have to hire 200 people in a year, you are going to have a lot of dead weight, and you are going to have a small percentage of talented, overworked people who don't know how to work well together. They burn out, leave the company, and the company collapses from all the dead weight that are hiding in offices, hoping their stock options are worth something when they cash out.
As long as I'm bragging about the great place I work, I might as well tell you where I work. Check out www.fgm.com. If you are a talented engineer and looking for work, drop me your resume: dbock@fgm.com. I'll review it, and if I like what I see, I'll strike up a conversation with you. If you impress me, I'll give your resume to the appropriate people. If you are not talented, don't bother. We are looking for talented Engineers and Architects who know Java and/or C++. I'd expect you to know all the things a good programmer should know, such as maintaining make files (or Ant), using CVS, know a text editor well, etc. If you've read the Pragmatic Programmer, you know what I'm talking about. We are also looking for System Adminitrators with Solaris and Linux skills, who are willing to travel to Europe several times a year for a week at a time. If you know other stuff like PHP, Python, Ruby, Apache/Tomcat/JBoss administration, all the better. I you have skills working with an Object Database like Versant, talk to me RIGHT NOW.
If you are a windows-only guy, don't bother me... you are a dime a dozen. Do yourself a favor and go invest in your knowledge portfolio.
The company I work for is about to open source several very useful java packages. (Licence TBD). Why? We are a consulting company, NOT a product company. We have tried before, and it is nearly impossible for us to make money selling products. We don't have the support staff for all the packaging, shipping, phone calls, etc.
BUT, by open-sourcing our code, we look like 'experts' in that area, which can lead to more consulting work. People will see our stuff and say, "These guys have written exactgly what we need! Lets hire them to show us how to use it." As a result, our consulting work goes up.
Doctors don't make money by charging you for the tongue depressers they use at your visit... They make money by charging for their time. Same for lawyers, architects, etc. Intelligence is the currency of this kingdom... not shrink-wrapped widgets.
Is this company having an IPO anytime soon? I think they are trying to cash in on the megahetz myth with unwary investors. They push the story now, have 2 or three follow up stories repeated by news organizations who don't know any better, and voila!, they have a ready-made blip for their first few days of trading.
Notice, the article is quietly misleading people who read it into thinking this chip is somehow compariable/compatible with x86 instruction sets... like they have somehow trumped Intel to the 2.2 gig mark, the same way AMD trumped them to the 1 gig mark about a year ago.
Is it too late to begin marketing solutions to the 'S1B' problem? There must be some dilbert-style manager out there who'd pay me a few grand to stay up till about 2:00 am and make sure all his machines survive the 'rollover'...
In 1982, I used to download files on my Apple II+ using a bulletin board program called Ascii Express. Is this prior art, or does a bogus definition of 'network' help them? What about ftp, Bitnet, fidonet, etc?
Excuse me, but how can this article jive with the creation of Ruby, a really cool object-oriented language from Japan? www.ruby-lang.org. I just don't buy it. This is someone's propaganda. For what end, I know not.
1) This license is for some kind of mail toolkit, right? Well, if this means it's not legal for their stuff to talk to sendmail, then I guess they pretty much just killed their own product.
2) They have found an infectious meme in the word 'viral' to describe open source software. I encourage you to resist using it. It will hurt the open source movement. I will resist using it, and if people around me start using it, I will pretend like I have no clue what they are talking about until they use the appropriate term. "Viral Software? Whats that? You mean like Microsoft Outlook?"
3) The term 'Viral Software' is a term to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt... almost suggesting to people 'don't use this software unless you want to be exposed to viruses...' I think that the Free Software Foundation should sue Microsoft for Slander (or whatever the appropriate legal term is) for insinuating that they are virus-writers.
4) I think we should redefine the term 'viral software' on them. In my mind, Viral Software means 'software on which the majority of virii spread.' In this case,Windows and Outlook are the most virulent software of all.
At first I was all excited, I thought you meant the suburbs of Washington, DC.
Can you believe I live in the shadow of Dulles Airport, not more than 10 miles from America Online's "Campus", but we can't get DSL? All the politicians around here love to talk about the 'Dulles Technology Corridor', etc... the need for more roads and so on; If we could just get decent residential access, at least 75 people at my company could telecommute more than half the time.
We need a game of our own... on linux... that is a
killer app' of games. I want everyone to go 'WOW!' And want to run it. I want THEM to have to debate 'should we rewrite, or should we emulate?'. Many people will be enthralled enough to switch platforms.
The whole point of emulation is to help people ease their transition from one platform to another... As long as the end result is more people using Linux, I would be behind either, or both solutions.
1) Every three years now, I will have a damn good excuse to talk to management about the virtues of open-source.
2) The drawback - many management types will LIKE this... They can amortize the costs over many years, and if my COMPANY buys a subscription, it won't be part of my ORGANIZATIONS budget within the company, so to my immediate boss, it will appear free. (The same things happen with Oracle licenses - if a company has an oracle site license, the organizations within the company perceive Oracle as being 'free' to use because they don't have to think of it in their budget.)
This is a little piece I wrote recently as an internal memo. We use Versant on an internal project, and wanted to justify the use of OODBMS. We want to begin supporting an open-source one, which is where this came in...
---
Premise:
When Java first started appearing in enterprise-wide systems, there were large existing systems containing the enterprise's data. Early on, for Java to have acceptance as a solution to problems in this domain, there had to be a way to access this data... data was not going to be 'recreated' for a new, unproven language.
By far, this data was stored in relational databases, like Oracle and Microsoft's Sql Server. The shortest path to accessing this data in a way that made sense to Java's cross-platform nature was to take an existing specification, ODBC, and create a java-specification based on it. Thus, JDBC was born.
In the years since then, JDBC has matured into a very usable API for accessing relational databases, and a lot of Java developers have had to learn how to use it. Many developers don't even realize it, but there is a mismatch between storing data as an object graph and storing it in a relational database. As a developer, you have to write a lot of code to map between the object world and the relational world. There is a better way.
JDBC is great for accessing existing relational data... It is and should be considered a bridge to legacy systems. If you are starting a new project using Java, there should be a better way. There should be a way to store your data without thinking about it. You should be able to hand your objects to a service that will store them. You should be able to maintain complex relationships between those objects, and you should be able to query that service for objects that match certain criteria. You should not have to muddy up your domain objects with code for storing themselves, and you shouldn't have to extend any objects that a framework provides. You shouldn't have to complicate your build process with 'enhancement' steps, and your objects should not be bytecode modified, so they are still usable in debugging environments.
Does such an object-oriented database exist? In some respects, yes. There are object-oriented databases such as Object Store and Versant. They operate very closely to the ideals listed above. But for most developers, especially those that already know JDBC, their price tags are a large barrier to entry. Until you know the technology, you won't recommend it. You won't recommend the technology until you use it. You are not going to spend $10,000 of your own money to get to know and use a product like this... there are too many other things happening in the Java community anyway.
Conclusion:
These are the reasons object databases have not become popular: There is a high barrier to entry for their use. The databases themselves are expensive. And Java Developers doing database access know JDBC, which is a 'good enough' solution.
In order to overcome this and make object databases take their position in the java community as a preferred way to store data, we need a good, Free, Open Source implementation with all the benefits of transparency of use. Once the database is Free, it must be evangelized by developers. Other developers need to know of it and learn it.
Slashdot Mirror
Much like the way OS9 apps run in a 'sandbox' in OSX, This hypothetical WindowsRG could run a sandbox for legacy apps.
So, following Apple's lead, Microsoft should make a new gui environment running on top of a unix, that runs older apps in a sandbox...
Wait a minute... Sounds like Linux, KDE/Gnome, and Wine! Problem solved!
Its only a matter of time before this 'leaked' memo, the associated press release, etc, will have the average person thinking that Microsoft is now secure.
Go around your office and start asking people, "Have any security holes been fixed on YOUR computer since Microsoft made those annoucements?" Educate people that the average Windows installation has something like 10 KNOWN security problems, and countless unknown (except to your worst nightmare).
Security holes do not get fixed by press releases. Unfortunately, people's perceptions do. Don't let that happen.
About 7 years ago, I was involved in a research project, trying to use video teleconferencing and doctors for remote diagnosis of patients.
We found that jpeg compression of images made medical diagnosis unreliable. Hairline fractures in x-rays are exactly the kind of small details that tend to get washed away in 'lossy' compression, and the banding caused can lead to false assumptions as well.
The article suggests that this is still a lossy compression with small amounts of data loss. I know Doctors that would take that admission as a condemnation of the technique.
After all, I've never known sales people OR barflys to exaggerate at all.
Code is no different than any other property...
Are Television shows created with public funds available for my use as source material in my own movies?
Are works of art (like the infamous Mapelthorpe photos) considered in the 'public domain'?
I honestly don't know the answer, but I'm sure someone has thought about this in another domain. I wish people would stop thinking that code/cyberspace is really as new and challenging as it seems.
-db
Say whatever you have to to get elected... Say you are pro-life, pro-choice, or whatever your constituency wants... I'd just be happy to see someone who is smart enough to use linux and read slashdot in government.
I'm late joining this thread, so my comment will probably be lost in the noise... I hope that someone who cares sees this and mods it up.
A better question would be 'what is Object-Oriented Programming for". It is *not* for the computer... a computer will happily execute any machine code, no matter what its source.
Object oriented programming techniques, and in fact ALL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES are abstractions that help HUMANS.
The human mind can only keep track of 'so much' at any one time. That is why we tend to 'package' information up into simpler representations, like analogies and stereotypes. These 'wrappers' around the complexity allow us to manage more at a time.
This is what OOP is for... helping the developer manage the details of the implementation.
Now, we as humans are better at representing some problems and 'procedural' and others as 'objects'. The writers question 'Can OO Solve Engineering Problems?' is bizarre in this context... of COURSE it can... it is just a matter of the human thinking of it that way... the question might better be put 'is there a good way for us to think of these as OO problems?" That is a defferent question... Some problems will be better handled procedurally, some will be better handled as OO. And it has as much to do with the person decomosing the problem and their skill set as it does with the problem domain.
So far people's comments are griping about what a bad idea this is... I actually think it is *more* like a unix philosphy than the 'C drive' is.
/. Which partition is your usr/local/bin/ on? You don't really need to know in order to use the system.
/, and get rid of the user worrying about volumes and partitions.
Here's what I mean:
On windoze (and on the mac), each hard drive (or partition) is represented as an icon. The user has to keep track of what things are on which hard drive.
Under unix, all the hard drives are joined together under a logical file system under
This sounds like they are suggesting making the desktop ==
I am surprised that noone in this thread has yet mentioned the book 'After the Gold Rush'. I suggest every serious software engineer read it. Whether you love or hate the idea of licensing people as 'engineers', the book gives you a lot of food for thought on the subject.
My company bought about 15 of the inspiron 7000's several years ago, and had some problems with the hinges. We gradually replaced them with 7500, of which ALL of them have had hinge problems. We have since tried the 8000's, which still seem very flimsy, but we are now evaluating machines from HP and Gateway. We are also buying machines from some small Linux vendor, since Dell is no longer supporting linux.
Imagine a day when you buy a computer, plug it in, and it can dual boot windows-linux out of the box...
Boot into linux, and you have a usable system.
Boot into Windows, and it asks you for your credit card number so it can charge you $99 for a license to use it.
You can keep the system dual-booting, or tell one OS that it can delete and take over the other partition.
If users *really* have a CHOICE, and could SEE the cost associated with windows (instead of paying a 'tax' on every computer), linux will gain desktop space.
Lets write to the justice department... THIS should be the 'settlement' imposed on Microsoft.
Does this include phone calls? I mean, 'where' exactly AM I meeting with someone when I am on the phone with them?
Is placing an order online REALLY that much different than placing an order from the Sears catalog?
If my computer is able to use the phone line to enter this 'virtual place' protected by law, can I?
This could have HUGE implications for wire-tap laws... both good AND bad.
Bad example: a court could issue a 'wiretap' for 'any' location in Cyberspace... the tap could then follow from state to state to country... but then the question would be, what court has this jurisdiction? I'm not sure I want any court thinking it has that kind of global power.
-db
Government contracting does not have to be boring. I work for a small company in Dulles, VA. We do work for Department of Defense, the Department of State, and commercial work as well. (about 40%, 40%, 30%)
I manage a project for the Department of State. My office does not have a desk in it. I have a leather couch, a 30 gallon fish tank with a breeding pair of angelfish, and a tech library of hundreds of books. I use a laptop exclusively, and manage a team of 20 people that includes 3 telecommuters.
We hold our team meetings in a lounge that includes bean bag chairs, a TV with a dish, a drum set, an amplifier where people can plug in their guitars, and some keyboards. Every friday at 4:00 work stops for happy hour, and the company supplies the beer. Everybody works flex time, and as long as you meet your deadlines and meetings, there are no problems.
Everyone gets a 401k, 7+ weeks of vacation time, and a ton of other great benefits, including the work place. We do not have any cubicles... Our The real-estate agent told us we were crazy when we built our building... they were suggesting that we use 'open office furniture' (a euphamism for cubicle hell). We designed the space with 10'x10' and 10'x15' offices, with real closing doors (most have windows - some are interior)... 15 amp circuits for people's computers, large monitors, halogen lamps, and small refrigerators. Tons of lab space, tons of conference room space, 4 kitchens, and a lounge.
Our company is stronger than ever, despite the tough econimic times. How do we do it? Well, the company is now 14 years old, and has less than 200 employees. We have grown SLOW... selectively hiring the best, and only the best (or the young, and mentoring them). People stay a LONG time (I've worked there 6 years, and of the first 50 people hired, about 45 are still here), so we develop skills and team cohesion that other tech companies can't match. We have a low overhead... about 90% of the staff are actually engineers, so we don't have a lot of people in 'upper management' or 'human resources' that increase the rates we have to charge our customers. The current economic downturn has only helped us... we have a larger selection of potential candidates to hire, and people looking to hire a tech company like our track record and reputation. The company has been managed like a real COMPANY, and we have been profitable nearly every quarter, every year. The sum of (happy employees, talent, profitability) is a strong company that will probably be here 100 years from now. We are privately owned by the employees. We have no reliance on 'venture capital'.
We have had clients that have hired 200+ people in less than a year, and act like throwing money around can solve any problem. This is why tech companies fail: money is NOT a substitute for time, talent, or experience. If you have to hire 200 people in a year, you are going to have a lot of dead weight, and you are going to have a small percentage of talented, overworked people who don't know how to work well together. They burn out, leave the company, and the company collapses from all the dead weight that are hiding in offices, hoping their stock options are worth something when they cash out.
As long as I'm bragging about the great place I work, I might as well tell you where I work. Check out www.fgm.com. If you are a talented engineer and looking for work, drop me your resume: dbock@fgm.com. I'll review it, and if I like what I see, I'll strike up a conversation with you. If you impress me, I'll give your resume to the appropriate people. If you are not talented, don't bother. We are looking for talented Engineers and Architects who know Java and/or C++. I'd expect you to know all the things a good programmer should know, such as maintaining make files (or Ant), using CVS, know a text editor well, etc. If you've read the Pragmatic Programmer, you know what I'm talking about. We are also looking for System Adminitrators with Solaris and Linux skills, who are willing to travel to Europe several times a year for a week at a time. If you know other stuff like PHP, Python, Ruby, Apache/Tomcat/JBoss administration, all the better. I you have skills working with an Object Database like Versant, talk to me RIGHT NOW.
If you are a windows-only guy, don't bother me... you are a dime a dozen. Do yourself a favor and go invest in your knowledge portfolio.
The company I work for is about to open source several very useful java packages. (Licence TBD). Why? We are a consulting company, NOT a product company. We have tried before, and it is nearly impossible for us to make money selling products. We don't have the support staff for all the packaging, shipping, phone calls, etc.
BUT, by open-sourcing our code, we look like 'experts' in that area, which can lead to more consulting work. People will see our stuff and say, "These guys have written exactgly what we need! Lets hire them to show us how to use it." As a result, our consulting work goes up.
Doctors don't make money by charging you for the tongue depressers they use at your visit... They make money by charging for their time. Same for lawyers, architects, etc. Intelligence is the currency of this kingdom... not shrink-wrapped widgets.
Whether we decide to classify it as a 'major planet', 'minor planet', 'planetoid', or 'planitessimal', is irrelevant.
Whatever Pluto is, it's been that since before life appeared on Earth, and it will continue to be that long after we are gone.
Great! SO now I can rip all my CDs and burn them to... smaller cds... seems kinda underwhelming.
Is this company having an IPO anytime soon? I think they are trying to cash in on the megahetz myth with unwary investors. They push the story now, have 2 or three follow up stories repeated by news organizations who don't know any better, and voila!, they have a ready-made blip for their first few days of trading.
Notice, the article is quietly misleading people who read it into thinking this chip is somehow compariable/compatible with x86 instruction sets... like they have somehow trumped Intel to the 2.2 gig mark, the same way AMD trumped them to the 1 gig mark about a year ago.
Watch the blip, then sell short.
Is it too late to begin marketing solutions to the 'S1B' problem? There must be some dilbert-style manager out there who'd pay me a few grand to stay up till about 2:00 am and make sure all his machines survive the 'rollover'...
-db
In 1982, I used to download files on my Apple II+ using a bulletin board program called Ascii Express. Is this prior art, or does a bogus definition of 'network' help them? What about ftp, Bitnet, fidonet, etc?
Excuse me, but how can this article jive with the creation of Ruby, a really cool object-oriented language from Japan? www.ruby-lang.org. I just don't buy it. This is someone's propaganda. For what end, I know not.
1) This license is for some kind of mail toolkit, right? Well, if this means it's not legal for their stuff to talk to sendmail, then I guess they pretty much just killed their own product.
2) They have found an infectious meme in the word 'viral' to describe open source software. I encourage you to resist using it. It will hurt the open source movement. I will resist using it, and if people around me start using it, I will pretend like I have no clue what they are talking about until they use the appropriate term. "Viral Software? Whats that? You mean like Microsoft Outlook?"
3) The term 'Viral Software' is a term to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt... almost suggesting to people 'don't use this software unless you want to be exposed to viruses...' I think that the Free Software Foundation should sue Microsoft for Slander (or whatever the appropriate legal term is) for insinuating that they are virus-writers.
4) I think we should redefine the term 'viral software' on them. In my mind, Viral Software means 'software on which the majority of virii spread.' In this case,Windows and Outlook are the most virulent software of all.
-db
At first I was all excited, I thought you meant the suburbs of Washington, DC.
Can you believe I live in the shadow of Dulles Airport, not more than 10 miles from America Online's "Campus", but we can't get DSL? All the politicians around here love to talk about the 'Dulles Technology Corridor', etc... the need for more roads and so on; If we could just get decent residential access, at least 75 people at my company could telecommute more than half the time.
We need a game of our own... on linux... that is a
killer app' of games. I want everyone to go 'WOW!' And want to run it. I want THEM to have to debate 'should we rewrite, or should we emulate?'. Many people will be enthralled enough to switch platforms.
The whole point of emulation is to help people ease their transition from one platform to another... As long as the end result is more people using Linux, I would be behind either, or both solutions.
1) Every three years now, I will have a damn good excuse to talk to management about the virtues of open-source.
2) The drawback - many management types will LIKE this... They can amortize the costs over many years, and if my COMPANY buys a subscription, it won't be part of my ORGANIZATIONS budget within the company, so to my immediate boss, it will appear free. (The same things happen with Oracle licenses - if a company has an oracle site license, the organizations within the company perceive Oracle as being 'free' to use because they don't have to think of it in their budget.)
This is a little piece I wrote recently as an internal memo. We use Versant on an internal project, and wanted to justify the use of OODBMS. We want to begin supporting an open-source one, which is where this came in...
---
Premise:
When Java first started appearing in enterprise-wide systems, there were large existing systems containing the enterprise's data. Early on, for Java to have acceptance as a solution to problems in this domain, there had to be a way to access this data... data was not going to be 'recreated' for a new, unproven language.
By far, this data was stored in relational databases, like Oracle and Microsoft's Sql Server. The shortest path to accessing this data in a way that made sense to Java's cross-platform nature was to take an existing specification, ODBC, and create a java-specification based on it. Thus, JDBC was born.
In the years since then, JDBC has matured into a very usable API for accessing relational databases, and a lot of Java developers have had to learn how to use it. Many developers don't even realize it, but there is a mismatch between storing data as an object graph and storing it in a relational database. As a developer, you have to write a lot of code to map between the object world and the relational world. There is a better way.
JDBC is great for accessing existing relational data... It is and should be considered a bridge to legacy systems. If you are starting a new project using Java, there should be a better way. There should be a way to store your data without thinking about it. You should be able to hand your objects to a service that will store them. You should be able to maintain complex relationships between those objects, and you should be able to query that service for objects that match certain criteria. You should not have to muddy up your domain objects with code for storing themselves, and you shouldn't have to extend any objects that a framework provides. You shouldn't have to complicate your build process with 'enhancement' steps, and your objects should not be bytecode modified, so they are still usable in debugging environments.
Does such an object-oriented database exist? In some respects, yes. There are object-oriented databases such as Object Store and Versant. They operate very closely to the ideals listed above. But for most developers, especially those that already know JDBC, their price tags are a large barrier to entry. Until you know the technology, you won't recommend it. You won't recommend the technology until you use it. You are not going to spend $10,000 of your own money to get to know and use a product like this... there are too many other things happening in the Java community anyway.
Conclusion:
These are the reasons object databases have not become popular: There is a high barrier to entry for their use. The databases themselves are expensive. And Java Developers doing database access know JDBC, which is a 'good enough' solution.
In order to overcome this and make object databases take their position in the java community as a preferred way to store data, we need a good, Free, Open Source implementation with all the benefits of transparency of use. Once the database is Free, it must be evangelized by developers. Other developers need to know of it and learn it.