"Some.NET programs already run on other platforms - namely Mono enabled *nix."
Yes trivial hello world ones and maybe other non gui apps which don't connect to a database. I guess that maybe somewhere around.001% of apps run on mono. I guess that means some to you. Mono is not even close being a mature product what is it's version number?.17. You point to a version.17 CLR and say that it runs some windows apps and expect me to take you seriously?
".NET runs in a virtual machine; its entire standard library is documentated, and it uses standardized plain text formats for communication. "
Documented and open are different things.
" Apparently working at MS makes one very adept at wordplay.
You never quit do you? Are you this rude to all total strangers?
1. Some.NET programs already run on other platforms - namely Mono enabled *nix.
2..NET runs in a virtual machine; its entire standard library is documentated, and it uses standardized plain text formats for communication.
3. There are no technical barriers that are impossible to overcome which prevent.NET apps from running cross-platform.
"4. The only barriers that exisit are in fact legal. We will have to see how they turn out."
Given the past behaviour or MS I think we can take a fair guess at how this is going to turn out.
"Satisified now? Or are you just going to continue to be an asshole?"
I think I will continue to be an asshole as long as MS trolls like you get modded up so high here on slashdot.
Listen cross platform languages are hard but they are not rocket science. Open source developers have written PERL, PHP, Python, Ruby, and a ton of other languages and toolkits that allow you to write cross platform applications. Of course somehow Sun managed to write java which does the same thing too.
Either MS programmers are very very stupid and can't manage to write a cross platform CLR or MS does not want to. My guess is the latter.
What is that some law of physics or something? We can return to them if we want. We can also return to something like them if we want. There is no law that says we have to write apps which have dancing paper clips and dialog boxes with a dozen tabs on them. We can write purely keyboard driven applications anytime we want.
"Been there, found only GUI applications. OS was one of windowz. What country are you living in?"
Where were you? In the lab? in the billing dept? in pathology? I worked in hospitals for many years and lots of the applications ran on mainframes and VAX systems and ran on terminals.
" Time changes."
Sure it does. But as time moves forward and apps become more GUI productivity moves backwards. Both for the employees using the system and the IT staff maintaining the system. Whereas you had three or four people maintaining an AS400 or a VAX/VMS now you have an army maintaining thousands of windows PCs. That is the new reality.
Take UFOs for example. There are thousands of photos, video tapes, and eye witnesses. There are mass sighting and mass video tapings of the same event. There are radar tracks, there are physical evidence left on the ground. The list goes on and on. How long can you continue to say that a) Every single person who saw a UFO is a delusional drunk mentally ill person and b) Every single photo is a fake c) every single video tape is a fake d) every other piece of physical evidence is a fake.
Right now you and me as people have been exposed more evidence for the existance of UFOs then we have been for the existance of pluto. Have you ever seen pluto? seen a picture of it? seen a videotape of it? I once saw a picture of a bunch of stars with an arrow pointing to one of them and the caption "pluto" is that enough proof for the existance of pluto? The only reason you believe pluto exists is because you read it in a book or somebody told you or because lots of other people believe it too. Is that enough evidence? I once read that UFOs exist in a book too, someone once told me that UFOs exist, and lots of people believe that UFOs exist too. Is that enough evidence? Guess what. I once saw a UFO is that enough evidence or maybe I am a drunk mentally ill liar and I should not believe myself.
Pluto is a regularly occuring phenomena so the fact that it exists ought to be convincing to me but what about some sort of a rarely occuring phenomena. How do we prove those? Things like the existance some rare or endangered species for example. When a bilogist takes a picture of a canadian lynx and states that it proves the continual existance of such a creature do you say that he faked it? If some submarine videotaped a never before seen creature in the ocean would you dismiss it as a fake? Of course not. And do you know why?
It's because the existance of a creature in the ocean does not challange your world view but existance of UFOs does. You ignore or minimize the evidence of any thing which will contradict your world view. You insist on a higher level of proof for those things you deem "impossible". Carl Sagan was the worst proponent of this uttering the famous (and ugly) phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". It was an ugly to thing to say by a scientist because in science all things require equal proof. Proof is proof and you don't get to decide that it's not "extraodinary enough" because you think the claim is "extraordinary"
" I might even go so far as to say (re religion) if you dont believe it, it may not even affect you"
That's simply wrong. Christians are a very organized and powerful lobby in the US and the same goes for Jews. If you are homosexual then it definately effects you if you don't belong to the christian religion because that religion is actively working to deny you your choice of jobs, your housing options, your marital status and your ability to serve your country. The vast majority of the US citizens are christians and there are both subtle and profound repurcussions for all non christians because of that.
" That is correct only for advanced users - for users who can learn virtually everything."
That's what I was saying.
" Most of users cannot learn anything if it is not in the menu. Deal with it or leave UI business alone."
This is where I disagree with you. For years secretaries learned wordperfect 5.2 and all the weird shift function key combinations. For years there were thousands of custom apps written on mainframes which had no gui at all (go to any bank or hospital today to see them). All those people secrataries, nurses, bank tellers all learned to use the application they needed to get their job done. I have been witness to too many migrations from mainframe apps to windows based apps and in every single case the users of the programs complained of lost productivity.
" I understand what you're saying here but Nagios is billed as a replacement for a product like Unicenter TNG, with which I'm familiar. CA goes to great lengths to ensure that even the most technically impaired data center operator can use it. Ergo, Nagios is really no competition unless you already have the expertise and you're going for it to save the money, which also makes sense, of course. But that's not the point."
I really tried hard to parse that sentence and even read it a couple of times and If I may rephrase you you seem to be saying.
Nagios is not as good as Unicenter and it's documentation is not nearly as good and yet somebody (who?) is billing it as a replacement for Unicenter.
Now I don't know who is going around saying that nagios is a replacement for unicenter because I have never heard and the author admits that unicenter will always do more then nagios and will always be better then nagios. Given that unicenter will always be better then nagios the only remaining criterea is price. If unicenter cost a few hundred bucks then maybe it would be worth it to pay the money and save the headaches but if it costs "a crapload of money" then you have nothing to complain about.
This sounds like a great money making opportunity for you. You could write the definitive documentation for this project and sell it. This way you can actually piggy back on the labor of all those programmers without actually contributing anything back to the project.
You make money, they code, it's great isn't it? Sure beats whining about the lack of documentation.
Great story. In an ideal world your company would pay the author 50K and roll out Nagios everywhere. They would save half a million dollars and get a nice monitoring system.
In the actual world they will spend the half million and buy a piece of software which will never work as advertised and they will ditch it in two years when a new salesman takes the CIO out to dinner in a strip club.
" That's a fine theory, until you realize that every one who purchased Turbopower tools got the source anyway."
That may have been the case for that set of products but there are many products which were not open sourced when the company folded. Not everybody offers the source for sale.
Once again you are concentrating on how things look as opposed to how things work. I agree that it would be better if emacs could show you the text as it would be printed but I still say if you had to use menus and dialog boxes for all your emacs commands and lisp scripts life would suck for you.
Emacs is easier to use then Word. Not easier to learn but easier to actually get your work done once you have learned it.
"I don't like corn, but if i had to buy it at the store every time I bought carrots, I would own a lot of corn, and you would never know I hated it."
And this is exactly why there are constraints on monopolies. Of course any constraint on a monopoly is purely theoretical at this moment given the current administration.
" I thing it's a quite typical pattern in open source community - ignoring the usability, even in situations when there is an available opensource-based way to improve the user experience."
No. You are confused about what "usability" means. You are confusing "easy to use" with "easy to learn but hard to use". Gui interfaces are easier to learn but they are harder to use.
Once you learn emacs it's much easier to use then any gui based word processor could ever be. Just watch an experiences user with emacs and that should convince you.
"I actually know of three relational systems: Ingres QUEL (obsolete), IBM BS12 (not available), and Dataphor Alphora."
I know. You said that. Two of those are no longer around and one is brand spanking new (and according to their web site it's a "Automated Application Development foundation." whatever that means.
"Just look at Intel vs RISC, or MS-WXP vs Unix, or C vs Lisp."
Again that proves my point. Although RISC, Unix, and Lisp are not popular they do exist in niche areas. I guess it depends on how you look at it but RISC systems are very prevalent in high end workstations and embedded systems, unix is gaining popularity every day (especially if you add linux, freebsd and MacOSX) and lisp is still being used and actively developed. That brings up my question again. If Lisp, unix, and RISC have manged to survive so far why hasn't the "truly relational database".
If business is war then Miguel is an idiot for entering into a war with the last remaining superpower in the software industry. Remember when the taliban declared war on the US? It will be just like that. MS will bomb the shit out Mono and Miguel will die.
You seem to be saying that the non existance of purely relational databases is for political reasons only. I guess that's what I find so hard to believe. If purely relational systems could be built and if they offered clear advantages over SQL and other non relational databases one would think they would have gained some foothold no matter how small. I see people selling XML databases, SQL databases, OO databases, hybird databases, and all kinds of weird and funky stuff but nobody sells relational databases. Not even to a really small niche market. If sleepycat can make money selling db then somebody ought to be able to make money selling relational databases don't you think?
I have read many of the articles on dbdebunk and it's obvious that the authors are briliant people. What puzzles me though is why they have never asked nor answered the question "why is it that despite decades of research and development, millions of dollars spent by IBM, MS, Informix, Oracle and others no database is can be called truly relational"?
Maybe it's just not possible to build a truly relational database or perhaps building one has severe cnsequences that people are not willing to accept.
I think it's a question worth asking and answering don't you think.
" Just to be clear, my complaint is not at all about the service provided by SourceForge. My issue is what people have chosen to use that service for. SourceForge is undeniably a public good; however, when people misuse it, that misuse is bad."
It's not abuse or misuse to use a service as it was intended. The mantra of open source is publish early and publish often and sourceforge gives people an opportunity to do just that. Maybe sourceforge ought to give people the ability to delete projects they are no longer interested in or perhaps to move those projects into an "attic" or something but that's a pretty minor complaint. The fact is that the trove software map and activity percentile stats allow you to filter the projects any way you like.
"Some of your other comments have mentioned SourceForge implementation, making me think you might have a personal involvement with SF."
Nothing could be further from the truth. I don't work for SF or any company even remotely affiliated with SF. Nonetheless I consider it an invaluable service which VA will probably not be able to sustain indefinately. It just gets me pissed off then people whine about it instead of doing something to help. One day the doors to sourceforge will be closed and that will be sad day indeed. MS and the rest of the mainstream media will take that opportunity to pronounce the death of open source and linux, it will be a serious body blow to the open source community at large.
" You are totally misinterpreting my motives. No where do I demand that someone do something for me. I simply comment that what they are doing is not helpful, no matter how much they believe it is."
Which only illustrates what a rude and stupid jerk you are. When you get a gift from somebody that you don't like do you tell them that the gift sucked. Do you publicly humiliate them for giving you a gift you did not like? Do you post the fact that the gift was useless or ugly on the web for everybody to see? Apparently you do.
The proper response to a gift you think is ugly or useless is to 1) put in the closet and forget about it 2) throw it away 3) give it to somebody else. The improper response is to bitch, moan and whine.
Slashdot Mirror
"Some .NET programs already run on other platforms - namely Mono enabled *nix."
.001% of apps run on mono. I guess that means some to you. Mono is not even close being a mature product what is it's version number? .17. You point to a version .17 CLR and say that it runs some windows apps and expect me to take you seriously?
.NET programs already run on other platforms - namely Mono enabled *nix.
.NET runs in a virtual machine; its entire standard library is documentated, and it uses standardized plain text formats for communication.
.NET apps from running cross-platform.
Yes trivial hello world ones and maybe other non gui apps which don't connect to a database. I guess that maybe somewhere around
".NET runs in a virtual machine; its entire standard library is documentated, and it uses standardized plain text formats for communication. "
Documented and open are different things.
" Apparently working at MS makes one very adept at wordplay.
You never quit do you? Are you this rude to all total strangers?
1. Some
2.
3. There are no technical barriers that are impossible to overcome which prevent
"4. The only barriers that exisit are in fact legal. We will have to see how they turn out."
Given the past behaviour or MS I think we can take a fair guess at how this is going to turn out.
"Satisified now? Or are you just going to continue to be an asshole?"
I think I will continue to be an asshole as long as MS trolls like you get modded up so high here on slashdot.
Listen cross platform languages are hard but they are not rocket science. Open source developers have written PERL, PHP, Python, Ruby, and a ton of other languages and toolkits that allow you to write cross platform applications. Of course somehow Sun managed to write java which does the same thing too.
Either MS programmers are very very stupid and can't manage to write a cross platform CLR or MS does not want to. My guess is the latter.
" .NET should also facilitate the possibility of cross-platform applications."
Wow a great string of "weasel words". A definate possibility of a probable maybe!. It depends on what IS is.
Apparently working at MS makes one very adept at wordplay.
"You cannot return users to those years."
What is that some law of physics or something? We can return to them if we want. We can also return to something like them if we want. There is no law that says we have to write apps which have dancing paper clips and dialog boxes with a dozen tabs on them. We can write purely keyboard driven applications anytime we want.
"Been there, found only GUI applications. OS was one of windowz. What country are you living in?"
Where were you? In the lab? in the billing dept? in pathology? I worked in hospitals for many years and lots of the applications ran on mainframes and VAX systems and ran on terminals.
" Time changes."
Sure it does. But as time moves forward and apps become more GUI productivity moves backwards. Both for the employees using the system and the IT staff maintaining the system. Whereas you had three or four people maintaining an AS400 or a VAX/VMS now you have an army maintaining thousands of windows PCs. That is the new reality.
How much evidence is actually required?
Take UFOs for example. There are thousands of photos, video tapes, and eye witnesses. There are mass sighting and mass video tapings of the same event. There are radar tracks, there are physical evidence left on the ground. The list goes on and on. How long can you continue to say that a) Every single person who saw a UFO is a delusional drunk mentally ill person and b) Every single photo is a fake c) every single video tape is a fake d) every other piece of physical evidence is a fake.
Right now you and me as people have been exposed more evidence for the existance of UFOs then we have been for the existance of pluto. Have you ever seen pluto? seen a picture of it? seen a videotape of it? I once saw a picture of a bunch of stars with an arrow pointing to one of them and the caption "pluto" is that enough proof for the existance of pluto? The only reason you believe pluto exists is because you read it in a book or somebody told you or because lots of other people believe it too. Is that enough evidence? I once read that UFOs exist in a book too, someone once told me that UFOs exist, and lots of people believe that UFOs exist too. Is that enough evidence? Guess what. I once saw a UFO is that enough evidence or maybe I am a drunk mentally ill liar and I should not believe myself.
Pluto is a regularly occuring phenomena so the fact that it exists ought to be convincing to me but what about some sort of a rarely occuring phenomena. How do we prove those? Things like the existance some rare or endangered species for example. When a bilogist takes a picture of a canadian lynx and states that it proves the continual existance of such a creature do you say that he faked it? If some submarine videotaped a never before seen creature in the ocean would you dismiss it as a fake? Of course not. And do you know why?
It's because the existance of a creature in the ocean does not challange your world view but existance of UFOs does. You ignore or minimize the evidence of any thing which will contradict your world view. You insist on a higher level of proof for those things you deem "impossible". Carl Sagan was the worst proponent of this uttering the famous (and ugly) phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". It was an ugly to thing to say by a scientist because in science all things require equal proof. Proof is proof and you don't get to decide that it's not "extraodinary enough" because you think the claim is "extraordinary"
" I might even go so far as to say (re religion) if you dont believe it, it may not even affect you"
That's simply wrong. Christians are a very organized and powerful lobby in the US and the same goes for Jews. If you are homosexual then it definately effects you if you don't belong to the christian religion because that religion is actively working to deny you your choice of jobs, your housing options, your marital status and your ability to serve your country. The vast majority of the US citizens are christians and there are both subtle and profound repurcussions for all non christians because of that.
" That is correct only for advanced users - for users who can learn virtually everything."
That's what I was saying.
" Most of users cannot learn anything if it is not in the menu. Deal with it or leave UI business alone."
This is where I disagree with you. For years secretaries learned wordperfect 5.2 and all the weird shift function key combinations. For years there were thousands of custom apps written on mainframes which had no gui at all (go to any bank or hospital today to see them). All those people secrataries, nurses, bank tellers all learned to use the application they needed to get their job done. I have been witness to too many migrations from mainframe apps to windows based apps and in every single case the users of the programs complained of lost productivity.
Well I'll quote you.
" I understand what you're saying here but Nagios is billed as a replacement for a product like Unicenter TNG, with which I'm familiar. CA goes to great lengths to ensure that even the most technically impaired data center operator can use it. Ergo, Nagios is really no competition unless you already have the expertise and you're going for it to save the money, which also makes sense, of course. But that's not the point."
I really tried hard to parse that sentence and even read it a couple of times and If I may rephrase you you seem to be saying.
Nagios is not as good as Unicenter and it's documentation is not nearly as good and yet somebody (who?) is billing it as a replacement for Unicenter.
Now I don't know who is going around saying that nagios is a replacement for unicenter because I have never heard and the author admits that unicenter will always do more then nagios and will always be better then nagios. Given that unicenter will always be better then nagios the only remaining criterea is price. If unicenter cost a few hundred bucks then maybe it would be worth it to pay the money and save the headaches but if it costs "a crapload of money" then you have nothing to complain about.
This sounds like a great money making opportunity for you. You could write the definitive documentation for this project and sell it. This way you can actually piggy back on the labor of all those programmers without actually contributing anything back to the project.
You make money, they code, it's great isn't it? Sure beats whining about the lack of documentation.
The vast majority of developers have a "day job". The percentage of programmers who make money by selling software is very small.
How much does Unicenter cost?
Great story. In an ideal world your company would pay the author 50K and roll out Nagios everywhere. They would save half a million dollars and get a nice monitoring system.
In the actual world they will spend the half million and buy a piece of software which will never work as advertised and they will ditch it in two years when a new salesman takes the CIO out to dinner in a strip club.
" That's a fine theory, until you realize that every one who purchased Turbopower tools got the source anyway."
That may have been the case for that set of products but there are many products which were not open sourced when the company folded. Not everybody offers the source for sale.
Once again you are concentrating on how things look as opposed to how things work. I agree that it would be better if emacs could show you the text as it would be printed but I still say if you had to use menus and dialog boxes for all your emacs commands and lisp scripts life would suck for you.
Emacs is easier to use then Word. Not easier to learn but easier to actually get your work done once you have learned it.
"I don't like corn, but if i had to buy it at the store every time I bought carrots, I would own a lot of corn, and you would never know I hated it."
And this is exactly why there are constraints on monopolies. Of course any constraint on a monopoly is purely theoretical at this moment given the current administration.
" I thing it's a quite typical pattern in open source community - ignoring the usability, even in situations when there is an available opensource-based way to improve the user experience."
No. You are confused about what "usability" means. You are confusing "easy to use" with "easy to learn but hard to use". Gui interfaces are easier to learn but they are harder to use.
Once you learn emacs it's much easier to use then any gui based word processor could ever be. Just watch an experiences user with emacs and that should convince you.
I think it's the opposite. WIth OS at least you have the source. If you bought it from some vendor then you'd be up the creek when they folded.
It's suprprising popular in the corporate world, it's also very popular in poland, russia. It's also got a cult following in the US.
All and all it seems to have made more of an impact outside the US tne inside the US which is not surprising considering the dominance of MS.
Maybe the availability of powerful and open source controls like this will increase the popularity of Delphi. It would be nice.
"I actually know of three relational systems: Ingres QUEL (obsolete), IBM BS12 (not available), and Dataphor Alphora."
I know. You said that. Two of those are no longer around and one is brand spanking new (and according to their web site it's a "Automated Application Development foundation." whatever that means.
"Just look at Intel vs RISC, or MS-WXP vs Unix, or C vs Lisp."
Again that proves my point. Although RISC, Unix, and Lisp are not popular they do exist in niche areas. I guess it depends on how you look at it but RISC systems are very prevalent in high end workstations and embedded systems, unix is gaining popularity every day (especially if you add linux, freebsd and MacOSX) and lisp is still being used and actively developed. That brings up my question again. If Lisp, unix, and RISC have manged to survive so far why hasn't the "truly relational database".
"Sleepycat does a library, not a full DBMS."
Yea OK whatever.
If business is war then Miguel is an idiot for entering into a war with the last remaining superpower in the software industry. Remember when the taliban declared war on the US? It will be just like that. MS will bomb the shit out Mono and Miguel will die.
You seem to be saying that the non existance of purely relational databases is for political reasons only. I guess that's what I find so hard to believe. If purely relational systems could be built and if they offered clear advantages over SQL and other non relational databases one would think they would have gained some foothold no matter how small. I see people selling XML databases, SQL databases, OO databases, hybird databases, and all kinds of weird and funky stuff but nobody sells relational databases. Not even to a really small niche market. If sleepycat can make money selling db then somebody ought to be able to make money selling relational databases don't you think?
Eventually people will realize that the unix filesystem is very slose to the ideal database.
I have read many of the articles on dbdebunk and it's obvious that the authors are briliant people. What puzzles me though is why they have never asked nor answered the question "why is it that despite decades of research and development, millions of dollars spent by IBM, MS, Informix, Oracle and others no database is can be called truly relational"?
Maybe it's just not possible to build a truly relational database or perhaps building one has severe cnsequences that people are not willing to accept.
I think it's a question worth asking and answering don't you think.
" Just to be clear, my complaint is not at all about the service provided by SourceForge. My issue is what people have chosen to use that service for. SourceForge is undeniably a public good; however, when people misuse it, that misuse is bad."
It's not abuse or misuse to use a service as it was intended. The mantra of open source is publish early and publish often and sourceforge gives people an opportunity to do just that. Maybe sourceforge ought to give people the ability to delete projects they are no longer interested in or perhaps to move those projects into an "attic" or something but that's a pretty minor complaint. The fact is that the trove software map and activity percentile stats allow you to filter the projects any way you like.
"Some of your other comments have mentioned SourceForge implementation, making me think you might have a personal involvement with SF."
Nothing could be further from the truth. I don't work for SF or any company even remotely affiliated with SF. Nonetheless I consider it an invaluable service which VA will probably not be able to sustain indefinately. It just gets me pissed off then people whine about it instead of doing something to help. One day the doors to sourceforge will be closed and that will be sad day indeed. MS and the rest of the mainstream media will take that opportunity to pronounce the death of open source and linux, it will be a serious body blow to the open source community at large.
" You are totally misinterpreting my motives. No where do I demand that someone do something for me. I simply comment that what they are doing is not helpful, no matter how much they believe it is."
Which only illustrates what a rude and stupid jerk you are. When you get a gift from somebody that you don't like do you tell them that the gift sucked. Do you publicly humiliate them for giving you a gift you did not like? Do you post the fact that the gift was useless or ugly on the web for everybody to see? Apparently you do.
The proper response to a gift you think is ugly or useless is to 1) put in the closet and forget about it 2) throw it away 3) give it to somebody else. The improper response is to bitch, moan and whine.