"t's somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to as much as 15% according to an article I read in the Washington Post."
If they are only paying 5 to 15% they will get screwed if banking gets established instead. The going credit card rate is around 18% and some loans are even higher. 5% sounds like a great deal.
Go ahead and make a case for how killing afghanis which had nothing to do with the WTC is self defense. None of the people we have killed so far could be considered responsible for what happened. They are just some poor 15 year olds drafted into some godforsaken army. How is killing them self defense? If you want to talk self defense we should be bombing saudi arabia or germany or spain or even canada. That's where the terrorists came from.
" I'm sorry, but the last time I checked, no United States citizen has killed one of these alleged "thousands of Iraqi children." Which one have I killed? "
All US citizens helped kill over a million iraquis including over 500,000 children. Sure you did not go out there and pulled the trigger but your govt did it and you are responsible for your govt. By your insane and utterly stupid reasoning we should not be bombing Afghanistan because "No afghani citizen killed americans" All those terrorists were from saudi arabia or pakistan. Jeez no wonder you posted anonymously that was the stupidest post I have ever seen here.
BTW try and justify nagasaki in your mind sometime. There was no reason to drop THAT bomb. We did it because we enjoy killing so much. We can't seem to go for more then a few years without killing some dark skinned people someplace.
nevertheless the question remains. Why would the states settle in terms that massively favor MS? What was promised to whom? How much you want to bet lawyers and politicians were bribed immensely in order for MS to get this gift.
I would disagree a bit. Sure the power of the monarchy was reduced but the monarcy was not disolved. Maybe it's more accurate to say the idea of democracy was born in england but the actualy implementation took place here.
It depends on the size and the competency of the people using the product. Sure there is always a core dev team or a single person in charge but that does not negate anything. How many people knew about the CVS project? I didn't that's for sure. Maybe if more people were using it and it was valuable enough to at least one of them then somebody would have stepped up. Maybe winCVS is better for people or maybe it's good enough either way it's easier to switch then to maintain something you have no love of.
There was once a time when most people lived in some fiefdom or another. They were taxed by the king, his barons and dukes and such. There were a few rich people who owned everything and everybody else plowed the fields for them, killed for them, and died for them.
In America a group of well educated and well off people decided to try an experiment. As it turned this experiment in representive government was the most important event in the world. It literally changed the lives of billions of people over the next few decades and centuries. What we are seeing now is nothing less then the end of this experiment. It took a couple of hundred years but we are almost back where we started. Democracy is on it's deathbed and I don't think that's an overstatement.
I find it facinating that as the bright light of democracy dies in America there is a group of well educated and well off people are starting another kind of an experiment. This experiment is in many ways just as profound as democracy. It's an experiment to see if people of all different races, languages, religions, creeds, political idiologies etc can get together and do one thing. As an added measure of difficulty this experiment dictates that the reward can not be money. I am of course talking about open source.
Go to sourceforge and look at any large project. You will see people from all over the world working on something. Some of these people are communists, some are republican, some are democrats, some are black, some are arabs, and some are jews. Somehow they find a way to work together. To put aside their deep seated beliefs, religions or ethnic loyalties and work for the greater good.
The fact that what they produce is an operating system or a desktop environment or anything is beside the point. It would not matter if they were building paper airplanes. The fact that they can produce a high quality operating system is simply nothing less then astonishing. All for no money, just to to build something you can be proud of.
So as democracy dies, as the darkness of terrorism and strife spread across this planet the second most important experiment in human history is going on right now. Jump in, be selfless, work for no reward (other then knowing you make the world a better place). Stake out your corner in this experiment. The spirit of open source as well the actual implementation is the only thing that can fight the coming darkness.
Open source unites people and there is nothing more scary to the ruling class then people united.
Personally I feel like there are too many distros in the first place. If you want a easy to install system then you have your choice of red hat, suse, mandrake and maybe tubolinux. For the geekier crowd there is debian and slackware. For people choosing debian or slackware I don't think installers are a big deal.
If I had developers and wanted a debian based distro I would try and find a way to speed up debian development. Or perhaps make some improvements to apt so that you can run a stable distro with the latest apache and php or something. If I was really bold and bright I would ditch apt (the best thing in linux) and build an even better binary mechanism that isolates apps even better.
Yes go ahead and issue a call to arms. It won't work. This is just one of a series of devestating blows to the so called "geek community". I don't need to go into the litany of awful decisions made by the govt on technical issues from the MS settlement to the anti terrorist bill. Why do you think they win all the time? Why is it that we are batting 0%. Here are few possible reasons.
1) There is no such thing as a geek community. Sure a bunch of people hang out on slashdot but most don't really care. In fact most can't even agree on anything and here to perpetuate some flame war or another.
2) Even though geeks make more money then your average teacher or auto worker they are not willing to part with their money to bribe congresspeople. Without those bribes you get shit.
3) Geeks are notoriously anti union. Not only are they anti union but they hate the idea of joining any kind of organization which smacks of resembling a union. As a result teachers and autoworkers get heard and you get shit.
4) Geeks tend to worship businesses and business. They are afraid or unwilling to critizise businesses for bribing politicians or unwilling or afraid to critize their own companies for bribing politicians. Imagine if the programmers at disney got together and told their bosses to lay off pushing stupid laws.
I am sure you can think of more but in essense you have to organize and raise money. All your emails and faxes and mails do nothing. A politicians only cares about where the money is coming from. Right now Disney, AOL, Microsoft etc are spreading around millions of dollars while the geeks are playing everquest. What do you expect?
"what if I leave the company?"
You should exhibit loyalty and compassion towards your company exactly as much loyalty and compassion they have towards you (and maybe less).
"You can't expect all of your clients to install Python because GUIs in Java are grotty"
This is rather irrelevent. I can't count the number of times MS made me install IE or patch IE or install the latest version of MDAC or the MSI installer to install some other program. If MS can make you install 60 megabytes of stuff just to run it's XML parser then why should you care if someone has to install a tiny perl interpreter.
Bill Clinton was publicly humiliated. His personal life was exposed to entire world. His friends were tried in court (sometimes frivolously). He was impeached and a public hearing was held in both chanbers of congress. He lost millions of dollars of money in legal fees. republicans and republican controlled media had daily clinton bashings. Blond republican women talked about his sex life and the shape of his penis on TV.
I think Bill gates should get at least that much punishment. It's only fair.
What a bunch of crock. Stop lying to defend your employer. People are already convinced that MS is full of liars and you don't help the situation. People don't choose MS products it gets chosen for them. Most people can't even afford MS products if it did not come bundled in with the PC.
Also don't forget that each copy of windows will be upgraded in a year or so when MS will more then make back what they lost in CDs. This is not a punishment it's a reward.
I don't know how big of a field computer science human computer interaction is but it sounds like a small community of acedemic researchers. Yes I have seen some nifty apps and even applets coming out of acedemia and the govt but I don't think you will be able to convince anybody that it represents a significant percentage of the applications written in java.
"Also, if Java is not being used to write GUI apps, I'm wondering why Sun would go to all the trouble of making Swing, their extensible GUI toolkit?"
Sun developed swing in order to encourage user apps written in java. it was a failure by and large. Not because swing is bad (it's quite good) but because it's slow and acts oddly and looks weird. Maybe these are acceptable trade offs to get a cross platform gui library but not many people bought into it. maybe the new IBM classes will kick java developers in the butt to develop user apps but I am not holding my breath. As it stands java is mainly used for non gui apps for which it's an excellant product.
Actually I used php to test to make sure the URL was correct and whatnot. Windows development is a drain in productivity unless you use python, perl or php.
Yesterday I was trying to write an app using VB. I was using the Microsoft.XMLHTTP control but kept getting an error message that said "bad variable type". This was very perplexing to me because I had copied the code from the MSDN web site and was testing it. I spent hours on MSDN, google, and support.microsoft.com trying to find out what this error meant (try typing it into groups.google.com one day) but there was no explation anywhere. After a while I gave up and dug up the winet.dll documentation and wrapped my own VB class on top of that just to duplicate one method of XMLHTTP object. What should have taken a few minutes took about 8 hours.
This is not the first time this has happened to me. I have spent many hours on google looking to find out what they cryptic error message means and not finding a solution. Alas I am being forced to use this crap but I figure if they don't mind lost productivity then I don't either.
Perhaps this is what the author means when he says it's not "enterprise ready".
As long as it only runs on windows then it's just another VB or Delphi. All the VB developers will have to switch (they have choice VB is dead) and maybe some of the VC++ people will switch but that's it. Nobody uses Java to write GUI apps and for them there is no motivation to switch to another language.
Slashdot Mirror
"t's somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to as much as 15% according to an article I read in the Washington Post."
If they are only paying 5 to 15% they will get screwed if banking gets established instead. The going credit card rate is around 18% and some loans are even higher. 5% sounds like a great deal.
"Because they're a bunch of envious, disempowered people who cannot do whatever they want to the rest of the world."
Well that and the fact that we keep killing them like cockroaches.
Go ahead and make a case for how killing afghanis which had nothing to do with the WTC is self defense. None of the people we have killed so far could be considered responsible for what happened. They are just some poor 15 year olds drafted into some godforsaken army. How is killing them self defense? If you want to talk self defense we should be bombing saudi arabia or germany or spain or even canada. That's where the terrorists came from.
" I'm sorry, but the last time I checked, no United States citizen has killed one of these alleged "thousands of Iraqi children." Which one have I killed? "
All US citizens helped kill over a million iraquis including over 500,000 children. Sure you did not go out there and pulled the trigger but your govt did it and you are responsible for your govt. By your insane and utterly stupid reasoning we should not be bombing Afghanistan because "No afghani citizen killed americans" All those terrorists were from saudi arabia or pakistan. Jeez no wonder you posted anonymously that was the stupidest post I have ever seen here.
BTW try and justify nagasaki in your mind sometime. There was no reason to drop THAT bomb. We did it because we enjoy killing so much. We can't seem to go for more then a few years without killing some dark skinned people someplace.
I think there is profound difference if some joe blow spins a story and CNN spins a story. Apparently for you it's the same thing.
nevertheless the question remains. Why would the states settle in terms that massively favor MS? What was promised to whom? How much you want to bet lawyers and politicians were bribed immensely in order for MS to get this gift.
I would disagree a bit. Sure the power of the monarchy was reduced but the monarcy was not disolved. Maybe it's more accurate to say the idea of democracy was born in england but the actualy implementation took place here.
It depends on the size and the competency of the people using the product. Sure there is always a core dev team or a single person in charge but that does not negate anything. How many people knew about the CVS project? I didn't that's for sure. Maybe if more people were using it and it was valuable enough to at least one of them then somebody would have stepped up. Maybe winCVS is better for people or maybe it's good enough either way it's easier to switch then to maintain something you have no love of.
There was once a time when most people lived in some fiefdom or another. They were taxed by the king, his barons and dukes and such. There were a few rich people who owned everything and everybody else plowed the fields for them, killed for them, and died for them.
In America a group of well educated and well off people decided to try an experiment. As it turned this experiment in representive government was the most important event in the world. It literally changed the lives of billions of people over the next few decades and centuries. What we are seeing now is nothing less then the end of this experiment. It took a couple of hundred years but we are almost back where we started. Democracy is on it's deathbed and I don't think that's an overstatement.
I find it facinating that as the bright light of democracy dies in America there is a group of well educated and well off people are starting another kind of an experiment. This experiment is in many ways just as profound as democracy. It's an experiment to see if people of all different races, languages, religions, creeds, political idiologies etc can get together and do one thing. As an added measure of difficulty this experiment dictates that the reward can not be money. I am of course talking about open source.
Go to sourceforge and look at any large project. You will see people from all over the world working on something. Some of these people are communists, some are republican, some are democrats, some are black, some are arabs, and some are jews. Somehow they find a way to work together. To put aside their deep seated beliefs, religions or ethnic loyalties and work for the greater good.
The fact that what they produce is an operating system or a desktop environment or anything is beside the point. It would not matter if they were building paper airplanes. The fact that they can produce a high quality operating system is simply nothing less then astonishing. All for no money, just to to build something you can be proud of.
So as democracy dies, as the darkness of terrorism and strife spread across this planet the second most important experiment in human history is going on right now. Jump in, be selfless, work for no reward (other then knowing you make the world a better place). Stake out your corner in this experiment. The spirit of open source as well the actual implementation is the only thing that can fight the coming darkness.
Open source unites people and there is nothing more scary to the ruling class then people united.
Personally I feel like there are too many distros in the first place. If you want a easy to install system then you have your choice of red hat, suse, mandrake and maybe tubolinux. For the geekier crowd there is debian and slackware. For people choosing debian or slackware I don't think installers are a big deal.
If I had developers and wanted a debian based distro I would try and find a way to speed up debian development. Or perhaps make some improvements to apt so that you can run a stable distro with the latest apache and php or something. If I was really bold and bright I would ditch apt (the best thing in linux) and build an even better binary mechanism that isolates apps even better.
Yes go ahead and issue a call to arms. It won't work. This is just one of a series of devestating blows to the so called "geek community". I don't need to go into the litany of awful decisions made by the govt on technical issues from the MS settlement to the anti terrorist bill. Why do you think they win all the time? Why is it that we are batting 0%. Here are few possible reasons.
1) There is no such thing as a geek community. Sure a bunch of people hang out on slashdot but most don't really care. In fact most can't even agree on anything and here to perpetuate some flame war or another.
2) Even though geeks make more money then your average teacher or auto worker they are not willing to part with their money to bribe congresspeople. Without those bribes you get shit.
3) Geeks are notoriously anti union. Not only are they anti union but they hate the idea of joining any kind of organization which smacks of resembling a union. As a result teachers and autoworkers get heard and you get shit.
4) Geeks tend to worship businesses and business. They are afraid or unwilling to critizise businesses for bribing politicians or unwilling or afraid to critize their own companies for bribing politicians. Imagine if the programmers at disney got together and told their bosses to lay off pushing stupid laws.
I am sure you can think of more but in essense you have to organize and raise money. All your emails and faxes and mails do nothing. A politicians only cares about where the money is coming from. Right now Disney, AOL, Microsoft etc are spreading around millions of dollars while the geeks are playing everquest. What do you expect?
So what happens if you forget your password or pass phrase?
Every time he gives .0001% of his net worth to some school district so that they can install windows so that he can charge them for an upgrade later.
Two things.
"what if I leave the company?"
You should exhibit loyalty and compassion towards your company exactly as much loyalty and compassion they have towards you (and maybe less).
"You can't expect all of your clients to install Python because GUIs in Java are grotty"
This is rather irrelevent. I can't count the number of times MS made me install IE or patch IE or install the latest version of MDAC or the MSI installer to install some other program. If MS can make you install 60 megabytes of stuff just to run it's XML parser then why should you care if someone has to install a tiny perl interpreter.
I think X installers could be appropriate for some distros but not debian.
Bill Clinton was publicly humiliated. His personal life was exposed to entire world. His friends were tried in court (sometimes frivolously). He was impeached and a public hearing was held in both chanbers of congress. He lost millions of dollars of money in legal fees. republicans and republican controlled media had daily clinton bashings. Blond republican women talked about his sex life and the shape of his penis on TV.
I think Bill gates should get at least that much punishment. It's only fair.
What a bunch of crock. Stop lying to defend your employer. People are already convinced that MS is full of liars and you don't help the situation. People don't choose MS products it gets chosen for them. Most people can't even afford MS products if it did not come bundled in with the PC.
Also don't forget that each copy of windows will be upgraded in a year or so when MS will more then make back what they lost in CDs. This is not a punishment it's a reward.
I don't know how big of a field computer science human computer interaction is but it sounds like a small community of acedemic researchers. Yes I have seen some nifty apps and even applets coming out of acedemia and the govt but I don't think you will be able to convince anybody that it represents a significant percentage of the applications written in java.
"Also, if Java is not being used to write GUI apps, I'm wondering why Sun would go to all the trouble of making Swing, their extensible GUI toolkit?"
Sun developed swing in order to encourage user apps written in java. it was a failure by and large. Not because swing is bad (it's quite good) but because it's slow and acts oddly and looks weird. Maybe these are acceptable trade offs to get a cross platform gui library but not many people bought into it. maybe the new IBM classes will kick java developers in the butt to develop user apps but I am not holding my breath. As it stands java is mainly used for non gui apps for which it's an excellant product.
Actually I used php to test to make sure the URL was correct and whatnot. Windows development is a drain in productivity unless you use python, perl or php.
Yesterday I was trying to write an app using VB. I was using the Microsoft.XMLHTTP control but kept getting an error message that said "bad variable type". This was very perplexing to me because I had copied the code from the MSDN web site and was testing it. I spent hours on MSDN, google, and support.microsoft.com trying to find out what this error meant (try typing it into groups.google.com one day) but there was no explation anywhere. After a while I gave up and dug up the winet.dll documentation and wrapped my own VB class on top of that just to duplicate one method of XMLHTTP object. What should have taken a few minutes took about 8 hours.
This is not the first time this has happened to me. I have spent many hours on google looking to find out what they cryptic error message means and not finding a solution. Alas I am being forced to use this crap but I figure if they don't mind lost productivity then I don't either.
Perhaps this is what the author means when he says it's not "enterprise ready".
You could have used Delphi all along but you seem to think that only products you can use on windows are MS products.
Correction 90% of the desktop software. A market getting smaller every day.
How do you overwrite the DLL? If it's being used don't you have to wait till at least a restart of the application if not a reboot?
As long as it only runs on windows then it's just another VB or Delphi. All the VB developers will have to switch (they have choice VB is dead) and maybe some of the VC++ people will switch but that's it. Nobody uses Java to write GUI apps and for them there is no motivation to switch to another language.