Not at all. First of all, they could use Macintoshes. Second, they could use the web based interface to Outlook which looks damn near identical to the "real" Outlook. At the place I used to work, Outlook was a "must" but people used it over the web from Linux and SGI boxes, plus from Mac's..
A market is a democracy and a market has "voted" Microsoft to the position they are in. It's not Microsoft that has "taken" the 90% market share they have - it's people who have bought their products, either directly ("I'd like a copy of Windows please.") or indirectly ("I'd like to buy a PC. Oh, it comes pre-loaded with Windows? Oh-kay. I will use it instead of getting Linux, even though it's free.").
I think you are severely over reacting when you suggest that Microsoft is evil and wants to take over the world. They are just a company and they just want to sell software and make money. As a publicly traded company, they HAVE to be aggressive and do anything in their power to make profit for the share owners. It's the law. Sometimes they have stepped over the line (to illegal methods) but Microsoft is still just a place to work and a bunch of people. It's not some evil entity from space, wanting to "take over the world".
Microsoft wants their products to be everywhere - yes, of course. So what? So does the Free Software Foundation! What company doesn't want to sell as much products as possible and make as big an impact on the world as they can?
Microsoft has used illegal (and "mean") tactics and they deserve to get slapped by the DOJ - yes! But they don't deserve to get "destroyed" like you say. Microsoft is not some evil entity from space, wanting to take over the world. They are just a company selling products and a place where people work. Relax a little..
Why does it seem that most people spend most of their time hoping for something bad to happen to Microsoft? If there's a security problem with a Microsoft product, it's not a *good* thing, much less is it "too good to be true"! If Linux scores better in a database test, it's a good thing because it means there have been advancements in software. It's not a good thing because Microsoft came 2nd.
The whole culture of hate here on Slashdot (and in the open source community in general) really bothers me.. Why do you have to hate something? Why isn't it enough for you that Linux or your favorite open source project is successful and works great? Why do you have to stomp everything else? No wonder people say "open source, closed minds".
If it was just 13 year olds writing the comments, I'd understand it. But it's the editors of Slashdot too! You guys really should set a better example than that. Even Linus Torvalds said in a recent CNET interview that he doesn't understand why everyone hates Bill Gates so much.
It's much more productive - and much better for the cause (which is to make better software, remember?) - to focus your energy in positive things. Write software, report bugs, test.. Sure, celebrate Linux being first in a database test, but don't celebrate it because it knocked away Windows 2000 & SQL Server 2000 from that spot.
Define yourself by what you are for - not by what you are against.
I'm also not sure when SP1 was released but SP2 *just* appeared today so the article intro is slightly incorrect. Also, remember that Microsoft do provide other updates than just service packs - that's what the whole "Windows Update" thing is for.
I'm curious.. What process is that exactly? I'm curious cause you can check every single process that is running, which DLL's it has loaded etc. and while I see a lot of other stuff like csrss, I sure as hell don't see anything related to IE.
I also don't understand why the hell anyone would like to remove the best web browser on earth from their installation. Maybe it's just me but it bothers me when people spend a large portion of their day hating Microsoft and Bill Gates. Define yourself by what you are FOR, not by what you are AGAINST.
Neither should they moderate the parent down. The parent post was a very good one. You may or may not disagree with the views of the writer but that's not a base for moderation. Moderation is about rating the quality of the post, not the content of the post.
Win2K may be 30 million lines of code but the Win2K *kernel* is tiny compared to that amount. The 30 million lines includes everything from the kernel, logging, user management, dialup tools, solitaire to the file manager. Don't compare apples to oranges.
Mundie talks about advantages and disadvantages of open source. The main advantage he mentions is that it gives more eyeballs and indeed makes development more efficient. The main disadvantage he talks about is that putting stuff under GPL is the "viral nature" of GPL in that any code that is used with GPL also has to be under GPL. He talks about how some companies may not have fully understood what it means to open source their software and that they run the risk of doing an un-reversible move simply because they are uninformed or have not understood the issues right.
Steve Ballmer bragging about MS partners having access to their source code is not contradicting what Mundie says, since sharing the source code ("read only") is exactly one of the strong points that Mundie mentioned about open source.
Bill Gates saying things about Linux and it's economical impact on Microsoft are completely unrelated from any statements by Ballmer and Mundie regarding the pro's and con's about open source. He could just as well be talking about Solaris or BeOS.
And what was Jim Allchin talking about when he says free software hurts innovation? He was not talking just about software but also other forms of intellectual property business, such as music. He talks about how the community mentality is that *all* software should be free. So how does it hurt innovation? He thinks that hurts innovation because he believes that without companies being able to charge for software, they won't be able to spend $$ on R&D and thus innovation. You may argue that he doesn't get it or that he is wrong but that's not the point. The point is that his statements are not contradicting any other MS statements about open source. If you think they contradict Bill Gates' statements that Linux is no threat, then that's a different thing - he is talking about Red Hat selling lots of Linux distros for servers. Allchin was talking the mentality about all software, music, movies etc. being free: "I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat."
Arthur C Clarke's Space Odyssey 3001 - printed in 1997 - have space elevators and in the end of the book he explains that they could very well be possible to manufacture using tubular buckminsterfullerene. In the back of the book he says:
"Meanwhile, the discovery of the third form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene (C60) has made the concept of the Space Elevator much more plausible. In 1990 a group of chemists at Rice University, Houston, produced a tubular form of C60 - which has far greater tensile strength than diamond. The group's leader, Dr. Smalley, even went so far as to claim it was the strongest material that could ever exist - and added that it would make possible the construction of the Space Elevator."
You are using quotation marks but I'm pretty sure nobody said exactly that. I read what Craig Mundie said and he actually admitted that there are good points with open source software - namely that it helps debugging and development. That's why he said they would follow a model where they share the source code with partners to get the benefit of "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" but without putting the source under a license that would allow it to be forked.
You and I may or may not agree with his points (if people can't contribute, will they really look for bugs either?) but don't misquote / fake-quote and then act all flabbergasted about it. If you didn't understand what his points where or if you thought they were contradicting, i suggest you re-read it.
"What is to stop them from sitting on their backsides and doing nothing?"
Competition? It may not exist now, but if they just sit on their asses, you can be sure that it will exist. Right now, they just more or less compete with theirself (their old versions of their own software). It's harder for them to sell a new version by saying that it's more stable than the old one - that's why they create more features, which is why Word has a toolbar the size of Texas.
With subscription, they suddenly don't have to compete against their own old versions but only the competition. In my view, this means that feature work is no longer as high a priority as it was before. I could be wrong.:)
I don't agree. I think that companies of all sizes actually will LIKE subscription since it means they don't have to pay a huge sum up front but that the cost gets distributed over a longer time period. Remember that if Office costs $X now, it doesn't mean it will cost $X every year if the subscription plans happen but rather $X/5 or whatever, per year. Also, when there's a new version, upgrading is a non-issue cost-wise.
A side effect could be that Microsoft actually starts putting more weight on improving quality rather than adding new features, since there's no need to "lure" old customers to buy the new version - they will still pay for the subscription regardless of what version they are using.
For home users that would rather just pay once and then be done with it, I think subscription will be a bad thing. Someone might have money today and buy MS Office, but in three years, if they are unemployed, they won't be able to continue the subscription. That's a very bad thing.
I think a one-time "unlimited" license should definitely still be an option, but as far as companies not liking subscriptions, I think you're wrong.
Yes, people were foolish. But just like everyone was all hyped up about dot-coms and e-commerce and new economy, people are also now all hyped up about the failure of these. It's *all* out of proportion.
Do you have any idea how many car makers have existed? Over 15000! How many exist now? 20? 30? Does that mean that cars aren't one of the most revolutionary inventions ever or that it's a bad business idea? Should we laugh at Ford, Honda and Audi?
What's idiotic is getting into extremes, using terms like "e-revolution", "new economy", "cyberspace" etc. Just because something is revolutionary doesn't mean we have to use it in every single aspect of our lives. After all, we still drive on "roads" - as opposed to "automobile space".
It's easy to make fun of it all now, when we know how it all turned out. But just because boo.com went bankrupt and just because Nasdaq was/is about 10x overvalued doesn't mean that we're not talking about a revolution - it is a revolution for sure. I consider it revolutionary enough that I can read my email on the subway, that I can buy movie tickets with a cell phone from a café using a web / wap browser etc. There's no need to hype it, but there's also no need to ridicule it.
I kinda saw this coming.. It's weird in a sense, but it also makes sense. Why do people rent apartments? Most (if not all) people would prefer to own their apartment but they rent them because it means they have to pay less up front. For many companies, it would be great to be able to subscribe (think "rent") software, as it would make their up front cost much lower. For startups, software license costs can be a big problem - I know this first hand..
So why do people and thus companies feel so uncomfortable with subscriptions when it comes to software? I think the reason is that we fear that the company we are subscribing from would go bankrupt and that it would mean that all the software we are using would expire and we would be in a lot of trouble. In the current economical situation where companies are firing people left and right and where many tech companies are facing serious survival issues, the fears are absolutely called for.
You may think what you like about Microsoft but they aren't stupid. They have user groups that they try their ideas on and they listen carefully to feedback. Nothing is random. If they decide to name something "XP", it's because their studies told them that people like the name. If they decide to drop subscriptions, it's because their studies told them that people were uncomfortable with them.
And then there's the flipside to the coin. For the exact same reason that companies don't want to subscribe software (fear of the software company going belly up), Microsoft doesn't want to have to trust that companies have money to pay for subscriptions. They would rather get all the money up front. There's less risk that way...
Hey hey.. wait a minute!! I didn't diss Perl, nor did I mock it or any of the uses for it. I was just questioning the original authors statement about how Perl is/has been an example for other languages (a model for them). Personally, I can't think of any language that would have been influenced heavily by Perl.
In a completely separate point, I was asking if my feelings about Perl actually being used less now than it was used 3 years ago are correct. What I mean is, rather than being a great example that everyone is following, Perl is actually slowly fading away from the position it once had.. I could be wrong, but that's the feeling I get..
There's a reason why there are so many Java books in the bookstores. The reason is that Java is extremely popular right now for server side programming and there is a demand for those books. The people on Slashdot that say that Java sucks have mostly little or no real experience with JDBC, EJB, JSP, RMI etc. and are just basing their view on Java applets coded by some "programmer" at a web concultancy, holding "Teach Yourself Java In 21 Days" in his left hand. Yes, those suck. Yes, those are slow. The fact of the matter is that Java is clearly fast enough for what it's being used for - that's why it's so popular. Java is in the same ballpark with Perl when it comes to speed (there are lots of benchmarks proving the superriority of either of these, and most of these benchmarks are ridiculously flawed and one-sided) and obviously, Perl is also "fast enough"; case in point, Slashdot.
As far as "easy" vs. "hard" goes, I don't think that Java being hard is a point against Java - quit the opposite, Java is usually perceived as being a relatively easy language, mostly thanks to garbage collection and all objects being passed by reference (contrary to what you often hear on Slashdot about Java not having pointers - it has nothing BUT pointers, except for primitives). Too much like C++? C++ with an option for garbage collection and a strong and balanced standard library would be - to me - an ideal language so I'm not sure I understand your point there..
Java and Perl will be the basis of most programming languages? Java maybe - C# proved that, but Perl? I may be wrong but the only place that Perl has really ever been REALLY strong (yes, it's used for scripting stuff by system admins but I'm talking *REALLY* widespread and serious mission critial use) is for CGI on web servers. There, Perl has traditionally been extremely strong but it seems to me that lately, ASP, PHP and especially Java servlets and JSP is eating up that advantage. If anything, it seems that Perl is losing "market share". Does anyone have any stats to show if my feelings are right/wrong?
Re:But Microsoft will decide to invent their own..
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This story had absolutely nothing at all to do with Microsoft but wouldn't you know it - there's still a post with a negative tone about Microsoft.
Can't we just wait until they do something bad and THEN talk about it rather than pessimistically assume the worst and write about it in advance? You know, email has existed for a pretty long time now and people using Outlook can still communicate with the rest of the world just fine. Sure, Microsoft has a reputation of embrance and extend, but in this area, they are no worse than any other company. Just think about how many proprietary discussion group and email systems exist.. (Netscape Collabra, Lotus Notes, Exchange)
Maybe we can calm down a little and forget about Microsoft for once?
Sounds cool.. How does Python stand up to Java speed and stability wise (especially on various platforms - not just one particular)? I've been thinking about learning some Python but so far, I haven't really run into any situation where I would have really needed it.. I also haven't really found Java to be a problem - not execution speed nor development speed wise.
When I read about PHP vs. Perl vs. Java or in this case, about Java servlet & JSP engines, it really bothers me that so many people totally miss the point.
How you embed a couple of variables into the HTML is a complete non-issue. PHP, Perl, JSP, servlets, ASP, they are all fast ENOUGH and in all of those, it's easy enough for anyone to do. It's completely irrelevant anyway if the response time is 0.1 or 0.3 seconds, even if that's a 3x difference. Even if one technology would mean you have to get 3 servers instead of just one, hardware is so much cheaper than developer time that it's still worth it. There are *major* sites running all of those technologies I mentioned above, which is proof enough that they all scale and the fact that there are supporters for each also proves that for different people, different technologies are differently suitable.
The real "problem" is how to separate logic well into "something else" and have that "something else" communicate to the front end layer (the ASP, JSP, PHP, Perl etc.) the results so that you don't end up with a back filled with HTML where you should only have logic. Also, how does that back end scale *conceptually* as the application grows more complex? Is it a pile of spaghetti code or does the technology / language promote good design? How does it integrate with existing systems and databases?
100 line "benchmarks" don't answer those questions and the myriad of clueless Slashdot posts from people who have never actually done anything more than a "hello world" will also not answer the questions.
Now here comes the controvercial part; in my experience, Java is miles ahead of the rest (ASP + COM is about on par if you are working on something that just has to run on an NT server) when it comes to real world application development. The main reason is that the front end and back end communication is so great. JSP is clearly a better model than servlets as the front end should be as purely HTML as possible. The fact that JSP allows you to make up your own tags and map them to Java code also makes it really easy to do more complex stuff - all tag based (this is why Cold Fusion is so popular among non-techies).
Still, JSP compiles into Java servlets, which is a great model from a programmer point of view (one instance, one thread per request etc.) so you get the best of both worlds - clean HTML and a great programming model. Also, since a Java servlet is a normal Java class, your can build an application out of it really easily and use all the stuff you would normally use - EJB, Corba, RMI, JDBC, etc.
The object oriented (sorry, object based) nature of Java also promotes good application design so that you don't end up with a huge "MyPortal.cgi" Perl script with 50000 lines of code and HTML, all mixed up into one big mess.
That Java is "running" and that only new threads are created for the requests also gives you the benefit that you can do things like caching in-memory between requests etc. really easily. This again makes it possible to employ all kinds of techniques for speeding up sites, bypassing database queries for often-requested stuff etc.
This is just my point of view though. I'm sure others consider Perl a better alternative and have a lot of reasons to back it up. I'm sure they can list a lot of technologies that I didn't know of (Perl related I mean) that lets them do basically the same things that I just described above. This doesn't bother me at all - quit the opposite. What bothers me is that Slashdot (and IBM) posts idiot stories about "comparisons" that don't mean anything since the real problem is not in the front end.
That may or may not be true (Have you been to China? I have.. It's not as bad as you seem to think.) but the fact remains that there are two stories by two involved parties and the truth could be anything between these two stories and there's no way of knowing. For all we know, the American CAN have lost temper and crashed on purpose. It's highly unlikely but it's possible. It's more possible that the plane was on autopilot and then made a correction in course and took the Chinese by surprise - maybe he was reading a map or something and not paying attention. It's even more possible that the Chinese pilot messed up. But you can't declare anything as the truth like people are doing here ("the US plane was flying on auto pilot in a straight line") because *WE DON'T KNOW FOR SURE*. It's not like the US side hasn't messed up before anyway:
- shooting down an Iranian passenger jet
- bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade
- running nuclar subs into Japanese fishing boats
etc.
Having said that, I think both the US and the Chinese side are acting like a bunch of 5 year olds. If world peace and 24 lives wasn't at stake, I would be very amused by it.
I'm curious as to where this "was flying in a straight line on autopilot" thing came from. I mean, how would they know that? They must have asked the US pilot.. The Chinese pilot in the other plane (remember, there was TWO Chinese jets) say the US plane suddenly banked to the left. It's their word against the word of the US pilot. For all we know, any one could be lying or it could be that both are telling the truth and that a sudden wind change caused the autopilot to do a correction and banked into the Chinese plane, which was obviously too close. From an onlooking Chinese fighter (the 2nd one), it might have very well appeared as the US collided into the Chinese fighter on purpose. Hell, they may even have it on film if the other plane had a "gun-camera", like many fighters do.
And by the way, when a North Korean MIG-15 defected into American hands to South Korea, and was demanded back "immediately", just like the US now demands the plane back, the US took more than two months until they finally returned it - in 76 boxes.
The truth is probably not as black and white as CNN tells it - nor is it as black and white as the Chinese media tells it.
Heh, yeah, that IS a good example. I wasn't actually thinking about that but yeah.. Just *7* lines.. And completely unreadable.:) And btw, I'm no Perl coder and I would be the last to do Perl advocacy but for string handling, it really rocks as far as speed and code compactness goes. Personally I prefer to do string handling object oriented but that's just me and I wasn't always like that.
That's what I guessed.. I downloaded the source code and the Java is horrible. It uses all the built-in slow string stuff like StreamTokenizer that is the first thing you learn to NOT use when you use Java and want performance. It uses the Vector class but doesn't initialize it to any special size so the default is used, which is way too small in this case. Since java.util.Vector is implemented with arrays and copies the old array to a newly allocated one if it runs out of space, it's horribly slow if it needs to resize itself. I could go on forever.. STILL.. I ran both the Java and the Perl samples and it was 5 secs for Java, 3 for Perl. So so much for a 9 time speed difference.. I thought it was full of shit anyway. Feel free to test the stuff yourself if you want.. I could optimize the Java code a little bit if anyone wants to challenge this for a speed contest. I'm pretty sure I could half the Java execution time with an hour of work..
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. First of all, they could use Macintoshes. Second, they could use the web based interface to Outlook which looks damn near identical to the "real" Outlook. At the place I used to work, Outlook was a "must" but people used it over the web from Linux and SGI boxes, plus from Mac's..
A market is a democracy and a market has "voted" Microsoft to the position they are in. It's not Microsoft that has "taken" the 90% market share they have - it's people who have bought their products, either directly ("I'd like a copy of Windows please.") or indirectly ("I'd like to buy a PC. Oh, it comes pre-loaded with Windows? Oh-kay. I will use it instead of getting Linux, even though it's free.").
I think you are severely over reacting when you suggest that Microsoft is evil and wants to take over the world. They are just a company and they just want to sell software and make money. As a publicly traded company, they HAVE to be aggressive and do anything in their power to make profit for the share owners. It's the law. Sometimes they have stepped over the line (to illegal methods) but Microsoft is still just a place to work and a bunch of people. It's not some evil entity from space, wanting to "take over the world".
Microsoft wants their products to be everywhere - yes, of course. So what? So does the Free Software Foundation! What company doesn't want to sell as much products as possible and make as big an impact on the world as they can?
Microsoft has used illegal (and "mean") tactics and they deserve to get slapped by the DOJ - yes! But they don't deserve to get "destroyed" like you say. Microsoft is not some evil entity from space, wanting to take over the world. They are just a company selling products and a place where people work. Relax a little..
What's wrong with you?
Why does it seem that most people spend most of their time hoping for something bad to happen to Microsoft? If there's a security problem with a Microsoft product, it's not a *good* thing, much less is it "too good to be true"! If Linux scores better in a database test, it's a good thing because it means there have been advancements in software. It's not a good thing because Microsoft came 2nd.
The whole culture of hate here on Slashdot (and in the open source community in general) really bothers me.. Why do you have to hate something? Why isn't it enough for you that Linux or your favorite open source project is successful and works great? Why do you have to stomp everything else? No wonder people say "open source, closed minds".
If it was just 13 year olds writing the comments, I'd understand it. But it's the editors of Slashdot too! You guys really should set a better example than that. Even Linus Torvalds said in a recent CNET interview that he doesn't understand why everyone hates Bill Gates so much.
It's much more productive - and much better for the cause (which is to make better software, remember?) - to focus your energy in positive things. Write software, report bugs, test.. Sure, celebrate Linux being first in a database test, but don't celebrate it because it knocked away Windows 2000 & SQL Server 2000 from that spot.
Define yourself by what you are for - not by what you are against.
I'm also not sure when SP1 was released but SP2 *just* appeared today so the article intro is slightly incorrect. Also, remember that Microsoft do provide other updates than just service packs - that's what the whole "Windows Update" thing is for.
I'm curious.. What process is that exactly? I'm curious cause you can check every single process that is running, which DLL's it has loaded etc. and while I see a lot of other stuff like csrss, I sure as hell don't see anything related to IE.
I also don't understand why the hell anyone would like to remove the best web browser on earth from their installation. Maybe it's just me but it bothers me when people spend a large portion of their day hating Microsoft and Bill Gates. Define yourself by what you are FOR, not by what you are AGAINST.
Neither should they moderate the parent down. The parent post was a very good one. You may or may not disagree with the views of the writer but that's not a base for moderation. Moderation is about rating the quality of the post, not the content of the post.
Win2K may be 30 million lines of code but the Win2K *kernel* is tiny compared to that amount. The 30 million lines includes everything from the kernel, logging, user management, dialup tools, solitaire to the file manager. Don't compare apples to oranges.
I don't see what is so contradicting about that.
Mundie talks about advantages and disadvantages of open source. The main advantage he mentions is that it gives more eyeballs and indeed makes development more efficient. The main disadvantage he talks about is that putting stuff under GPL is the "viral nature" of GPL in that any code that is used with GPL also has to be under GPL. He talks about how some companies may not have fully understood what it means to open source their software and that they run the risk of doing an un-reversible move simply because they are uninformed or have not understood the issues right.
Steve Ballmer bragging about MS partners having access to their source code is not contradicting what Mundie says, since sharing the source code ("read only") is exactly one of the strong points that Mundie mentioned about open source.
Bill Gates saying things about Linux and it's economical impact on Microsoft are completely unrelated from any statements by Ballmer and Mundie regarding the pro's and con's about open source. He could just as well be talking about Solaris or BeOS.
And what was Jim Allchin talking about when he says free software hurts innovation? He was not talking just about software but also other forms of intellectual property business, such as music. He talks about how the community mentality is that *all* software should be free. So how does it hurt innovation? He thinks that hurts innovation because he believes that without companies being able to charge for software, they won't be able to spend $$ on R&D and thus innovation. You may argue that he doesn't get it or that he is wrong but that's not the point. The point is that his statements are not contradicting any other MS statements about open source. If you think they contradict Bill Gates' statements that Linux is no threat, then that's a different thing - he is talking about Red Hat selling lots of Linux distros for servers. Allchin was talking the mentality about all software, music, movies etc. being free: "I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat."
Arthur C Clarke's Space Odyssey 3001 - printed in 1997 - have space elevators and in the end of the book he explains that they could very well be possible to manufacture using tubular buckminsterfullerene. In the back of the book he says:
"Meanwhile, the discovery of the third form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene (C60) has made the concept of the Space Elevator much more plausible. In 1990 a group of chemists at Rice University, Houston, produced a tubular form of C60 - which has far greater tensile strength than diamond. The group's leader, Dr. Smalley, even went so far as to claim it was the strongest material that could ever exist - and added that it would make possible the construction of the Space Elevator."
You are using quotation marks but I'm pretty sure nobody said exactly that. I read what Craig Mundie said and he actually admitted that there are good points with open source software - namely that it helps debugging and development. That's why he said they would follow a model where they share the source code with partners to get the benefit of "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" but without putting the source under a license that would allow it to be forked.
You and I may or may not agree with his points (if people can't contribute, will they really look for bugs either?) but don't misquote / fake-quote and then act all flabbergasted about it. If you didn't understand what his points where or if you thought they were contradicting, i suggest you re-read it.
Competition? It may not exist now, but if they just sit on their asses, you can be sure that it will exist. Right now, they just more or less compete with theirself (their old versions of their own software). It's harder for them to sell a new version by saying that it's more stable than the old one - that's why they create more features, which is why Word has a toolbar the size of Texas.
With subscription, they suddenly don't have to compete against their own old versions but only the competition. In my view, this means that feature work is no longer as high a priority as it was before. I could be wrong.
I don't agree. I think that companies of all sizes actually will LIKE subscription since it means they don't have to pay a huge sum up front but that the cost gets distributed over a longer time period. Remember that if Office costs $X now, it doesn't mean it will cost $X every year if the subscription plans happen but rather $X/5 or whatever, per year. Also, when there's a new version, upgrading is a non-issue cost-wise.
A side effect could be that Microsoft actually starts putting more weight on improving quality rather than adding new features, since there's no need to "lure" old customers to buy the new version - they will still pay for the subscription regardless of what version they are using.
For home users that would rather just pay once and then be done with it, I think subscription will be a bad thing. Someone might have money today and buy MS Office, but in three years, if they are unemployed, they won't be able to continue the subscription. That's a very bad thing.
I think a one-time "unlimited" license should definitely still be an option, but as far as companies not liking subscriptions, I think you're wrong.
Yes, people were foolish. But just like everyone was all hyped up about dot-coms and e-commerce and new economy, people are also now all hyped up about the failure of these. It's *all* out of proportion.
Do you have any idea how many car makers have existed? Over 15000! How many exist now? 20? 30? Does that mean that cars aren't one of the most revolutionary inventions ever or that it's a bad business idea? Should we laugh at Ford, Honda and Audi?
What's idiotic is getting into extremes, using terms like "e-revolution", "new economy", "cyberspace" etc. Just because something is revolutionary doesn't mean we have to use it in every single aspect of our lives. After all, we still drive on "roads" - as opposed to "automobile space".
It's easy to make fun of it all now, when we know how it all turned out. But just because boo.com went bankrupt and just because Nasdaq was/is about 10x overvalued doesn't mean that we're not talking about a revolution - it is a revolution for sure. I consider it revolutionary enough that I can read my email on the subway, that I can buy movie tickets with a cell phone from a café using a web / wap browser etc. There's no need to hype it, but there's also no need to ridicule it.
I kinda saw this coming.. It's weird in a sense, but it also makes sense. Why do people rent apartments? Most (if not all) people would prefer to own their apartment but they rent them because it means they have to pay less up front. For many companies, it would be great to be able to subscribe (think "rent") software, as it would make their up front cost much lower. For startups, software license costs can be a big problem - I know this first hand..
So why do people and thus companies feel so uncomfortable with subscriptions when it comes to software? I think the reason is that we fear that the company we are subscribing from would go bankrupt and that it would mean that all the software we are using would expire and we would be in a lot of trouble. In the current economical situation where companies are firing people left and right and where many tech companies are facing serious survival issues, the fears are absolutely called for.
You may think what you like about Microsoft but they aren't stupid. They have user groups that they try their ideas on and they listen carefully to feedback. Nothing is random. If they decide to name something "XP", it's because their studies told them that people like the name. If they decide to drop subscriptions, it's because their studies told them that people were uncomfortable with them.
And then there's the flipside to the coin. For the exact same reason that companies don't want to subscribe software (fear of the software company going belly up), Microsoft doesn't want to have to trust that companies have money to pay for subscriptions. They would rather get all the money up front. There's less risk that way...
Hey hey.. wait a minute!! I didn't diss Perl, nor did I mock it or any of the uses for it. I was just questioning the original authors statement about how Perl is/has been an example for other languages (a model for them). Personally, I can't think of any language that would have been influenced heavily by Perl.
In a completely separate point, I was asking if my feelings about Perl actually being used less now than it was used 3 years ago are correct. What I mean is, rather than being a great example that everyone is following, Perl is actually slowly fading away from the position it once had.. I could be wrong, but that's the feeling I get..
There's a reason why there are so many Java books in the bookstores. The reason is that Java is extremely popular right now for server side programming and there is a demand for those books. The people on Slashdot that say that Java sucks have mostly little or no real experience with JDBC, EJB, JSP, RMI etc. and are just basing their view on Java applets coded by some "programmer" at a web concultancy, holding "Teach Yourself Java In 21 Days" in his left hand. Yes, those suck. Yes, those are slow. The fact of the matter is that Java is clearly fast enough for what it's being used for - that's why it's so popular. Java is in the same ballpark with Perl when it comes to speed (there are lots of benchmarks proving the superriority of either of these, and most of these benchmarks are ridiculously flawed and one-sided) and obviously, Perl is also "fast enough"; case in point, Slashdot.
As far as "easy" vs. "hard" goes, I don't think that Java being hard is a point against Java - quit the opposite, Java is usually perceived as being a relatively easy language, mostly thanks to garbage collection and all objects being passed by reference (contrary to what you often hear on Slashdot about Java not having pointers - it has nothing BUT pointers, except for primitives). Too much like C++? C++ with an option for garbage collection and a strong and balanced standard library would be - to me - an ideal language so I'm not sure I understand your point there..
Java and Perl will be the basis of most programming languages? Java maybe - C# proved that, but Perl? I may be wrong but the only place that Perl has really ever been REALLY strong (yes, it's used for scripting stuff by system admins but I'm talking *REALLY* widespread and serious mission critial use) is for CGI on web servers. There, Perl has traditionally been extremely strong but it seems to me that lately, ASP, PHP and especially Java servlets and JSP is eating up that advantage. If anything, it seems that Perl is losing "market share". Does anyone have any stats to show if my feelings are right/wrong?
This story had absolutely nothing at all to do with Microsoft but wouldn't you know it - there's still a post with a negative tone about Microsoft.
Can't we just wait until they do something bad and THEN talk about it rather than pessimistically assume the worst and write about it in advance? You know, email has existed for a pretty long time now and people using Outlook can still communicate with the rest of the world just fine. Sure, Microsoft has a reputation of embrance and extend, but in this area, they are no worse than any other company. Just think about how many proprietary discussion group and email systems exist.. (Netscape Collabra, Lotus Notes, Exchange)
Maybe we can calm down a little and forget about Microsoft for once?
Sounds cool.. How does Python stand up to Java speed and stability wise (especially on various platforms - not just one particular)? I've been thinking about learning some Python but so far, I haven't really run into any situation where I would have really needed it.. I also haven't really found Java to be a problem - not execution speed nor development speed wise.
When I read about PHP vs. Perl vs. Java or in this case, about Java servlet & JSP engines, it really bothers me that so many people totally miss the point.
:)
How you embed a couple of variables into the HTML is a complete non-issue. PHP, Perl, JSP, servlets, ASP, they are all fast ENOUGH and in all of those, it's easy enough for anyone to do. It's completely irrelevant anyway if the response time is 0.1 or 0.3 seconds, even if that's a 3x difference. Even if one technology would mean you have to get 3 servers instead of just one, hardware is so much cheaper than developer time that it's still worth it. There are *major* sites running all of those technologies I mentioned above, which is proof enough that they all scale and the fact that there are supporters for each also proves that for different people, different technologies are differently suitable.
The real "problem" is how to separate logic well into "something else" and have that "something else" communicate to the front end layer (the ASP, JSP, PHP, Perl etc.) the results so that you don't end up with a back filled with HTML where you should only have logic. Also, how does that back end scale *conceptually* as the application grows more complex? Is it a pile of spaghetti code or does the technology / language promote good design? How does it integrate with existing systems and databases?
100 line "benchmarks" don't answer those questions and the myriad of clueless Slashdot posts from people who have never actually done anything more than a "hello world" will also not answer the questions.
Now here comes the controvercial part; in my experience, Java is miles ahead of the rest (ASP + COM is about on par if you are working on something that just has to run on an NT server) when it comes to real world application development. The main reason is that the front end and back end communication is so great. JSP is clearly a better model than servlets as the front end should be as purely HTML as possible. The fact that JSP allows you to make up your own tags and map them to Java code also makes it really easy to do more complex stuff - all tag based (this is why Cold Fusion is so popular among non-techies).
Still, JSP compiles into Java servlets, which is a great model from a programmer point of view (one instance, one thread per request etc.) so you get the best of both worlds - clean HTML and a great programming model. Also, since a Java servlet is a normal Java class, your can build an application out of it really easily and use all the stuff you would normally use - EJB, Corba, RMI, JDBC, etc.
The object oriented (sorry, object based) nature of Java also promotes good application design so that you don't end up with a huge "MyPortal.cgi" Perl script with 50000 lines of code and HTML, all mixed up into one big mess.
That Java is "running" and that only new threads are created for the requests also gives you the benefit that you can do things like caching in-memory between requests etc. really easily. This again makes it possible to employ all kinds of techniques for speeding up sites, bypassing database queries for often-requested stuff etc.
This is just my point of view though. I'm sure others consider Perl a better alternative and have a lot of reasons to back it up. I'm sure they can list a lot of technologies that I didn't know of (Perl related I mean) that lets them do basically the same things that I just described above. This doesn't bother me at all - quit the opposite. What bothers me is that Slashdot (and IBM) posts idiot stories about "comparisons" that don't mean anything since the real problem is not in the front end.
That's all.. My rant is over..
That may or may not be true (Have you been to China? I have.. It's not as bad as you seem to think.) but the fact remains that there are two stories by two involved parties and the truth could be anything between these two stories and there's no way of knowing. For all we know, the American CAN have lost temper and crashed on purpose. It's highly unlikely but it's possible. It's more possible that the plane was on autopilot and then made a correction in course and took the Chinese by surprise - maybe he was reading a map or something and not paying attention. It's even more possible that the Chinese pilot messed up. But you can't declare anything as the truth like people are doing here ("the US plane was flying on auto pilot in a straight line") because *WE DON'T KNOW FOR SURE*. It's not like the US side hasn't messed up before anyway:
- shooting down an Iranian passenger jet
- bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade
- running nuclar subs into Japanese fishing boats
etc.
Having said that, I think both the US and the Chinese side are acting like a bunch of 5 year olds. If world peace and 24 lives wasn't at stake, I would be very amused by it.
I'm curious as to where this "was flying in a straight line on autopilot" thing came from. I mean, how would they know that? They must have asked the US pilot.. The Chinese pilot in the other plane (remember, there was TWO Chinese jets) say the US plane suddenly banked to the left. It's their word against the word of the US pilot. For all we know, any one could be lying or it could be that both are telling the truth and that a sudden wind change caused the autopilot to do a correction and banked into the Chinese plane, which was obviously too close. From an onlooking Chinese fighter (the 2nd one), it might have very well appeared as the US collided into the Chinese fighter on purpose. Hell, they may even have it on film if the other plane had a "gun-camera", like many fighters do.
And by the way, when a North Korean MIG-15 defected into American hands to South Korea, and was demanded back "immediately", just like the US now demands the plane back, the US took more than two months until they finally returned it - in 76 boxes.
The truth is probably not as black and white as CNN tells it - nor is it as black and white as the Chinese media tells it.
"Yeah sure Bill, I will trust you with my data!" says the guy who has a Hotmail address. I'm cracking up!
Heh, yeah, that IS a good example. I wasn't actually thinking about that but yeah.. Just *7* lines.. And completely unreadable. :) And btw, I'm no Perl coder and I would be the last to do Perl advocacy but for string handling, it really rocks as far as speed and code compactness goes. Personally I prefer to do string handling object oriented but that's just me and I wasn't always like that.
That's what I guessed.. I downloaded the source code and the Java is horrible. It uses all the built-in slow string stuff like StreamTokenizer that is the first thing you learn to NOT use when you use Java and want performance. It uses the Vector class but doesn't initialize it to any special size so the default is used, which is way too small in this case. Since java.util.Vector is implemented with arrays and copies the old array to a newly allocated one if it runs out of space, it's horribly slow if it needs to resize itself. I could go on forever.. STILL.. I ran both the Java and the Perl samples and it was 5 secs for Java, 3 for Perl. So so much for a 9 time speed difference.. I thought it was full of shit anyway. Feel free to test the stuff yourself if you want.. I could optimize the Java code a little bit if anyone wants to challenge this for a speed contest. I'm pretty sure I could half the Java execution time with an hour of work..