But you CAN'T do that with consoles. If you make a loser, you can't ditch it and go on. If you do that, developers don't trust you, even if you are Microsoft - at least, probably. They didn't trust Sega, and for God's sake, Sega is a massive player in the arcade market, and is pretty financially solvent.
Look at Windows CE: The first version was atrocious, the second version wasn't much better. Neither of them sold any copies of any significance, but with unlimited resources, competition didn't work and so a third version was made along the lines of dead third-party developers. This version isn't spectacular, but is starting to sell a bit more mostly because of Microsoft's first-party software like Office, Outlook and IE.
Now, take a look at what Microsoft's been doing with games; they've been ramping up first-party titles for quite a while now. Their lineup is getting impressive -- stuff like Halo, which used to be slated for a PC version now appears to be X-Box only. Look at the number of software houses out there, and look again at the unlimited resources Microsoft has. They can own this market if they want to; even if they have to buy EA and Square to get it. You can't compete against Microsoft if they are determined to crush you.
Sony can play dirty tricks like this as well, so this should at least be entertaining to watch as two mega-corps go at it. Somehow, though, I think we'll all be left with something that sucks as the end result (witness Windows). Nintendo is going to die off first, as a console maker anyway; they'll still make games for other consoles like Sega does, and their handheld line will continue until Microsoft puts out the X-Palm or whatever.
Linux has already ripped off BSD's VM and TCP/IP stacks
What a load of bollocks. No wonder you're posting anonymously. Linux, for those that are curious, has a VM system that is generally thought to scale much better than that of the BSDen (with FreeBSD having the most modern VM of the bunch). Linux also has 100% non-BSD-bug-compliant TCP/IP stack as well (see RFC961, if you interested). Just parouse/usr/src/linux/net/ipv4/* if you don't believe me.
It'd be next to impossible to detect a second free() of some chunk of code because machines are horrible at guessing what a programmer meant to do, rather than what they did. There are many tools available to diagnose memory problems, but they are slow and must be monitoring the code while it's running to do any good; to boot, they proabably won't find errors under normal program use. Besides, isn't this the C programmer's creed (the computer does what I tell it to do)? Well, zlib is doing exactly what the C programmer told it to do.
We're doing it right now. We have a lab of 20 machines (www.isu.edu), half of which are real X11 terms (Wyse) and the other half are pentium 166 machines with RedHat 7.2 on them. We have a custom kickstart image on a webserver that completely installs Linux to our exact taste with one line:
LILO: ks http://ourserver/ksconfig.cfg
It'll then take off and format the disk, and intall Linux plus all our customizations (it even handles different hard disk sizes nicely). We have other config files for the print server, the beowulf cluster and the IDS. It's really nice and neat; we hardly have to touch the lab. As for how the thin clients work: we run KDE on the server (1ghz Athlon with 512MB RAM), and we fired up all workstations plus Konqueror, Mozilla 0.9.8, XEmacs and the KDE desktop. The system was still very very quick to respond, even though the load was sitting at about 6 at that point. Good stuff!
We just finished moving about a quarter of our Mac users to OSX. It was almost painless; I was expecting many problems from different people about the new design. One user even went from OS8 to OSX on a B&W G3/300/192MB, and I haven't heard a peep from her since. The most "power" user we have runs Photoshop, Pagemaker and Illustrator, all of which run under Classic and she had the most problems migrating -- but after a couple of weeks of using it , she stopped in to thank me and to inform me that she hadn't had to reboot her Mac in over a week. Previously it was at least once a day (ie, "System Error -1 : Restart your Macintosh"). They unversally love the dock, and the all seem confused by the new finder. They also don't like the s l o w window resizing, but the consensous is that it's well worth the niggles and bugs that do exist.
I don't know of any quotes regarding StarOffice, but Larry Wall holds a similar view:
"You've got to understand their market has always been the Windows space, where you're actually doing people a favor by charging them money for things, because that's the only way to keep from confusing them. Linux users are smarter than this, of course, but some Linux users aren't quite smart enough to realize Windows is a different culture, and Perl, being a postmodern language that is sensitive to context, will look different in a different culture."
[Regarding ActivePerl, which sells Perl for Windows]
Sometimes you have to actually charge money so that people will take you seriously. ActivePerl is used by quite a few Windows shops.
The idea is they want you to use their OS on their hardware to get the free staroffice.
Linux and Windows (NT, dunno about others) run on sun hardware as well, and that is what they are wanting to stop.
The problem with that logic is that Sun isn't going to sell even one Sparc box because of StarOffice. Nobody is going to buy one because of this. People, however, would be less averse to buying one if StarOffice became some sort of de-facto standard under Windows, Macs and Linux/BSD boxes. I think they're making a big mistake by doing this, but it's their mistake to make.
What was the whole point of releasing the source for OpenOffice in the first place? One of the key reasons Microsoft sits on top is that Microsoft Office is the Must Have application; people can't buy Sparc machines for desktop use because it doesn't run Office. So, Sun came along and opened up the source to combat this trend, and it seemed like a good attack plan to sell more Sparc machines (ie, Sun is a hardware company) because it would run the same Office software that Windows users could download for free.
Now, Sun is having delusions of being a software company for some reason (unless this is simply something like a $29.99 el-cheapo license, we don't know yet). Hopefully they'll come to their senses and remember why they opened the source to StarOffice in the first place; otherwise it's going to further pave their doom to becoming a Windows VAR.
What the hell does KDE have to do with CDE? What is "CDE icing" and why is it "too bad"? What does CDE's archecture have to do with blinding Sun? I use CDE every day, so please explain this to me...
How the hell did this post get modded up to Insightful? Is it time to differentiate Geek Karma from Polictical/Social Karma? The one group knows nothing about the other, and those that get a bunch of Karma by moderating Katz' insipid pieces jump into technology discussions with mod points burning a hole in their pockets. The result is embarassing, IMHO.
I'm sick of the "I know this is gonna get me modded down buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut" posts that go on and on about the oppressive regime of Slashdot, and then the insipid moderators mod the lame post up to prove that they really do care, and that they really do have open minds (when nothing further from the truth could be said). Like a bunch of sheep being led by wordsmiths, these lie-ridden posts, like the super-parent to this one, become +5 Insightful to appease some twisted sense of guilt and/or ignorance.
I have to ask all the moderators of the super-parent: Do you know jack-shit about what was said in the post? Did you do any research at all about the topic? No, you don't and no, you didn't; so I must ask: Why did you mod the post up?
In addition, ngpth has been accepted by Linus and they are very close to 100% compliant as well as providing for M:N mapping to scale on multiple processors, and to give programmers choice of kernel or userland threads with standard calls. BSD is great and all, but you guys do way too much chest-pounding.
Seriously, this is reaching a point where the corporate profit motive is starting to get in the way of pesky things like morals and human rights, etc.
Oh? So we should completely cut off all contact with governments that we do not agree with? That's going to help our cause? That's going to "show them" how superior democracy is?
Personally, I'd rather export Cisco routers than hate and derision, even if they deserve it. The routers, even though crippled, will bring democracy faster in the long run. To "export democracy" as it were, we need to do things like this; step by step to give the populace a taste of freedom. After the people understand freedom, their government will be a minor hinderance.
I think this is already happening in China. The 2012 bid for the Olympics will be an even bigger eye-opener for the population, IMHO.
.NET is just another one of Microsoft's over-engineered solutions. It looks simple on the outside, but when you get down to it the complexity is overwhelming. It's really sad to see so many open source developers being lulled by Microsoft's latest technological tactic.
Ugh. How many times does it need to be said? dotNET is a marketing term for many technologies, APIs and products. Mono is not attempting to implement dotNET, they are simply using the "core" technologies from it. I was very skeptical of dotNET when it was announced and brought out, and as a Java programmer I was wondering what was going to happen with it. But, Microsoft has managed to create an open technology that binds to many different languages: Something Sun has never been able to do with Java. That Microsoft has a whole bunch of proprietary frameworks, applications and APIs all lined up to go with dotNET doesn't matter at all. There are many proprietary extensions to the Java platform which don't diminish the usability of Java and its core (JDK) libraries.
Yes, fear dotNET, you have reason to. Please, though, differentiate between what Mono is doing and what dotNET is trying to do. dotNET will bring a new transport to the internet which will have presentations that are completely proprietary (something that ActiveX and MSN have as yet failed to do). Yes, they are taking the entire w3c in their sights with it by circumventing their standards all together. Yes, it will be yet another attempt by Microsoft to control the internet. But we shouldn't disregard the technology underneath, because it
Has multi-lingual bindings
Has simple XML/SOAP transactions
Uses published standards
.. and is actually HERE and available.
I suppose the only legitimate critique of Mono (other than you simply don't like multi-lingual object transparency) would be that it somehow legitimizes this technology for other ends. I don't buy that, because after all -- both Linux and Windows are written with C, a good technolgy. You wouldn't stop using C/C++ because Microsoft wrote MFC would you? That analogy perfectly mirrors throwing out the dotNET framework because of the overall dotNET strategies employed at Microsoft.
But when he changes certain key, and proprietary, aspects of his pool, and starts charging for their use, your pool won't interoperate with everyone else's pool (read, the 90% of desktops that run the Shark's OS, and.NET frameworks). So life passes you by.
Where is it written that Mono's goal is to inter-operate with Microsoft Windows? You are letting your hatred and fear blind you. Microsoft dotNET is evil, no doubt about it, but the dotNET foundation classes, CLR, and C# are very simple and good technologies. That they probably won't inter-operate with Windows is no big loss, we are already at that point right now; and if they happen to inter-operate on some level then that's just icing on the cake.
Yes, but this is all still manual memory managment. You may not need to call malloc() and free() all the time, but you still need to remember to wrap *all* of your allocations with auto_ptr, and you need to avoid libraries that don't make use of it. It's still in the way. I suppose whether something has "memory managment" or not is in the eye of the beholder; to a hard-core assembly programmer, C must seem to have a memory manager. Without getting into a pedantic word-war, I'd say that it's generally accepted that C++ does not have memory management because it lacks garbage collection of some sort.
I think this remark just demonstrates a serious lack of proper experience with C++.
Are you implying that C++ has memory management? It doesn't. Everything is still manually done, or have you not had the joy of chasing memory leaks in C++ programs yet? It may be a step-up from C, but it isn't a picnic either.
Java is NOT broken or lacking because it is inferior. If it is lacking anything, it is because no one has gone the one step further and fixed it. Do THAT instead of rebuilding from M$-poopie.
Actually, Java is broken when it comes to multiple language bindings. Java (the language) was written with Java (the virutal machine) and they are designed to work hand-in-hand. It's easy for you to sit there and complain that someone should be re-coding Java so that it has Perl, Eiffel, Haskel, Visual Basic, and any other language's bindings; it's quite another for that to be done.
All this is very different from the Java approach, "use my language or die". Only three years ago, Scott McNealy wrote "Think Java. Write new applications in Java. Rewrite legacy apps with Java. Don't upgrade or downgrade. Sidegrade instead to a Java desktop device... I don't understand why anybody would be programming in anything other than Java" (in Open Finance, a Sun publication, Spring 1997). I'm not sure anyone would still dare speak like that today..NET recognizes that the world is multi-lingual, especially the world of component-based development, and that the duty of a component model is to help interoperability, not force a language corset onto everyone.
Most of the criticisms of Mono stem from those who misunderstand dotNet and Mono (you included). Mono is not trying to integrate services with Microsoft's dotNet services, they are trying to write a good component model. If Microsoft decides to change the internals of their dotNet implementations such that it "breaks" compatibility with Mono, then we've still lost nothing. Do you understand now? This isn't the "Samba problem" re-hashed.
Open source programmers decided to dedicate the month of February to make their applications more user-friendly, with common menu items, and similar print dialog boxes that actually print.;)
Oracle makes their money from the ERP products more often now. Their database software still makes a pretty penny, but it is often integrated with Financials or other Oracle add-ons. I think Oracle knows that they can't milk the database market for much longer, but they are very well diversified.
And.... What's to prevent Sun from selling E15k boxes loaded with some tricked-out Linux? We can all be happy here.
1. online course materials via products like Blackboard (grades, tests, syllabi, lecture notes, discussions, etc)
Done.
2. Wireless networking (encrypted and/or MAC filtered) in libraries and public places
Done; and the wireless is in most campus buildings.
3. Wireless laptops, either for everyone or for "borrowing" perhaps at the library or other public places.
We have laptops to loan out, and students can get free wireless cards for their own laptops, so "done".
4. Intelligent routing to prevent the gnutella users from sucking up all the bandwidth. You can do this without entirely blocking the ports, thus letting it happen but preserving the bulk of the bandwidth for other (presumably more legitimate) uses.
We have a Packeteer shaper, so "done".
5. Internet stations placed in public places for general email and web.
That's been done for years already.
6. IMAP mail (including a Web client) if you currently use POP.
That's been done for a long time as well. What do we do now? In the midst of a buget crisis (Idaho State University), we have spent a ton of money on technology. We are now installing these useless "smart boards" that came with state-of-the-art laptops that can copy the contents down (let me tell you, facutly are just lining up to take notes for their students [sarcasm]). It seems we may have too much money for technology? Is there nothing left?
We also just finished installing our first all-Linux lab for the computer science department (yay!). We could have spent more money if we had used Windows, I suppose...
So it doesn't automagicly resolve problems, like apt-get does, which is why, having used both, I prefer apt-get.
For the (hopefully) last time: APT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PACKAGING SYSTEM other than requiring the package system to know about dependencies. APT works just fine with RPM, just as it works fine with debs and I see no reason why it couldn't work with OpenPKG.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at Windows CE: The first version was atrocious, the second version wasn't much better. Neither of them sold any copies of any significance, but with unlimited resources, competition didn't work and so a third version was made along the lines of dead third-party developers. This version isn't spectacular, but is starting to sell a bit more mostly because of Microsoft's first-party software like Office, Outlook and IE.
Now, take a look at what Microsoft's been doing with games; they've been ramping up first-party titles for quite a while now. Their lineup is getting impressive -- stuff like Halo, which used to be slated for a PC version now appears to be X-Box only. Look at the number of software houses out there, and look again at the unlimited resources Microsoft has. They can own this market if they want to; even if they have to buy EA and Square to get it. You can't compete against Microsoft if they are determined to crush you.
Sony can play dirty tricks like this as well, so this should at least be entertaining to watch as two mega-corps go at it. Somehow, though, I think we'll all be left with something that sucks as the end result (witness Windows). Nintendo is going to die off first, as a console maker anyway; they'll still make games for other consoles like Sega does, and their handheld line will continue until Microsoft puts out the X-Palm or whatever.
Whitney Houston:Celine Dion | Linux:BSD
Isn't that like saying "4-5 times faster than the SR-71 at 1/5th the weight of a Buick Regala"? Can't we keep our denominators straight here?
What a load of bollocks. No wonder you're posting anonymously. Linux, for those that are curious, has a VM system that is generally thought to scale much better than that of the BSDen (with FreeBSD having the most modern VM of the bunch). Linux also has 100% non-BSD-bug-compliant TCP/IP stack as well (see RFC961, if you interested). Just parouse /usr/src/linux/net/ipv4/* if you don't believe me.
It'd be next to impossible to detect a second free() of some chunk of code because machines are horrible at guessing what a programmer meant to do, rather than what they did. There are many tools available to diagnose memory problems, but they are slow and must be monitoring the code while it's running to do any good; to boot, they proabably won't find errors under normal program use. Besides, isn't this the C programmer's creed (the computer does what I tell it to do)? Well, zlib is doing exactly what the C programmer told it to do.
We just finished moving about a quarter of our Mac users to OSX. It was almost painless; I was expecting many problems from different people about the new design. One user even went from OS8 to OSX on a B&W G3/300/192MB, and I haven't heard a peep from her since. The most "power" user we have runs Photoshop, Pagemaker and Illustrator, all of which run under Classic and she had the most problems migrating -- but after a couple of weeks of using it , she stopped in to thank me and to inform me that she hadn't had to reboot her Mac in over a week. Previously it was at least once a day (ie, "System Error -1 : Restart your Macintosh"). They unversally love the dock, and the all seem confused by the new finder. They also don't like the s l o w window resizing, but the consensous is that it's well worth the niggles and bugs that do exist.
The problem with that logic is that Sun isn't going to sell even one Sparc box because of StarOffice. Nobody is going to buy one because of this. People, however, would be less averse to buying one if StarOffice became some sort of de-facto standard under Windows, Macs and Linux/BSD boxes. I think they're making a big mistake by doing this, but it's their mistake to make.
What was the whole point of releasing the source for OpenOffice in the first place? One of the key reasons Microsoft sits on top is that Microsoft Office is the Must Have application; people can't buy Sparc machines for desktop use because it doesn't run Office. So, Sun came along and opened up the source to combat this trend, and it seemed like a good attack plan to sell more Sparc machines (ie, Sun is a hardware company) because it would run the same Office software that Windows users could download for free.
Now, Sun is having delusions of being a software company for some reason (unless this is simply something like a $29.99 el-cheapo license, we don't know yet). Hopefully they'll come to their senses and remember why they opened the source to StarOffice in the first place; otherwise it's going to further pave their doom to becoming a Windows VAR.
What the hell does KDE have to do with CDE? What is "CDE icing" and why is it "too bad"? What does CDE's archecture have to do with blinding Sun? I use CDE every day, so please explain this to me...
How the hell did this post get modded up to Insightful? Is it time to differentiate Geek Karma from Polictical/Social Karma? The one group knows nothing about the other, and those that get a bunch of Karma by moderating Katz' insipid pieces jump into technology discussions with mod points burning a hole in their pockets. The result is embarassing, IMHO.
Oh wow!
http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_img/matrWhere does Blizzard make a profit from battle.net?
I'm sick of the "I know this is gonna get me modded down buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut" posts that go on and on about the oppressive regime of Slashdot, and then the insipid moderators mod the lame post up to prove that they really do care, and that they really do have open minds (when nothing further from the truth could be said). Like a bunch of sheep being led by wordsmiths, these lie-ridden posts, like the super-parent to this one, become +5 Insightful to appease some twisted sense of guilt and/or ignorance.
I have to ask all the moderators of the super-parent: Do you know jack-shit about what was said in the post? Did you do any research at all about the topic? No, you don't and no, you didn't; so I must ask: Why did you mod the post up?
When did FreeBSD get 100% compliance?
In addition, ngpth has been accepted by Linus and they are very close to 100% compliant as well as providing for M:N mapping to scale on multiple processors, and to give programmers choice of kernel or userland threads with standard calls. BSD is great and all, but you guys do way too much chest-pounding.Get real. Be is going to settle for $BIGNUM dollars, and nothing useful will come of it.
Oh? So we should completely cut off all contact with governments that we do not agree with? That's going to help our cause? That's going to "show them" how superior democracy is?
Personally, I'd rather export Cisco routers than hate and derision, even if they deserve it. The routers, even though crippled, will bring democracy faster in the long run. To "export democracy" as it were, we need to do things like this; step by step to give the populace a taste of freedom. After the people understand freedom, their government will be a minor hinderance.
I think this is already happening in China. The 2012 bid for the Olympics will be an even bigger eye-opener for the population, IMHO.
Ugh. How many times does it need to be said? dotNET is a marketing term for many technologies, APIs and products. Mono is not attempting to implement dotNET, they are simply using the "core" technologies from it. I was very skeptical of dotNET when it was announced and brought out, and as a Java programmer I was wondering what was going to happen with it. But, Microsoft has managed to create an open technology that binds to many different languages: Something Sun has never been able to do with Java. That Microsoft has a whole bunch of proprietary frameworks, applications and APIs all lined up to go with dotNET doesn't matter at all. There are many proprietary extensions to the Java platform which don't diminish the usability of Java and its core (JDK) libraries.
Yes, fear dotNET, you have reason to. Please, though, differentiate between what Mono is doing and what dotNET is trying to do. dotNET will bring a new transport to the internet which will have presentations that are completely proprietary (something that ActiveX and MSN have as yet failed to do). Yes, they are taking the entire w3c in their sights with it by circumventing their standards all together. Yes, it will be yet another attempt by Microsoft to control the internet. But we shouldn't disregard the technology underneath, because it
I suppose the only legitimate critique of Mono (other than you simply don't like multi-lingual object transparency) would be that it somehow legitimizes this technology for other ends. I don't buy that, because after all -- both Linux and Windows are written with C, a good technolgy. You wouldn't stop using C/C++ because Microsoft wrote MFC would you? That analogy perfectly mirrors throwing out the dotNET framework because of the overall dotNET strategies employed at Microsoft.
Where is it written that Mono's goal is to inter-operate with Microsoft Windows? You are letting your hatred and fear blind you. Microsoft dotNET is evil, no doubt about it, but the dotNET foundation classes, CLR, and C# are very simple and good technologies. That they probably won't inter-operate with Windows is no big loss, we are already at that point right now; and if they happen to inter-operate on some level then that's just icing on the cake.
Yes, but this is all still manual memory managment. You may not need to call malloc() and free() all the time, but you still need to remember to wrap *all* of your allocations with auto_ptr, and you need to avoid libraries that don't make use of it. It's still in the way. I suppose whether something has "memory managment" or not is in the eye of the beholder; to a hard-core assembly programmer, C must seem to have a memory manager. Without getting into a pedantic word-war, I'd say that it's generally accepted that C++ does not have memory management because it lacks garbage collection of some sort.
I think this remark just demonstrates a serious lack of proper experience with C++.
Are you implying that C++ has memory management? It doesn't. Everything is still manually done, or have you not had the joy of chasing memory leaks in C++ programs yet? It may be a step-up from C, but it isn't a picnic either.
Actually, Java is broken when it comes to multiple language bindings. Java (the language) was written with Java (the virutal machine) and they are designed to work hand-in-hand. It's easy for you to sit there and complain that someone should be re-coding Java so that it has Perl, Eiffel, Haskel, Visual Basic, and any other language's bindings; it's quite another for that to be done.
Quoted from http://eiffel.com/doc/manuals/technology/bmarticlMost of the criticisms of Mono stem from those who misunderstand dotNet and Mono (you included). Mono is not trying to integrate services with Microsoft's dotNet services, they are trying to write a good component model. If Microsoft decides to change the internals of their dotNet implementations such that it "breaks" compatibility with Mono, then we've still lost nothing. Do you understand now? This isn't the "Samba problem" re-hashed.
Open source programmers decided to dedicate the month of February to make their applications more user-friendly, with common menu items, and similar print dialog boxes that actually print. ;)
And.... What's to prevent Sun from selling E15k boxes loaded with some tricked-out Linux? We can all be happy here.
1. online course materials via products like Blackboard (grades, tests, syllabi, lecture notes, discussions, etc)
Done.
2. Wireless networking (encrypted and/or MAC filtered) in libraries and public places
Done; and the wireless is in most campus buildings.
3. Wireless laptops, either for everyone or for "borrowing" perhaps at the library or other public places.
We have laptops to loan out, and students can get free wireless cards for their own laptops, so "done".
4. Intelligent routing to prevent the gnutella users from sucking up all the bandwidth. You can do this without entirely blocking the ports, thus letting it happen but preserving the bulk of the bandwidth for other (presumably more legitimate) uses.
We have a Packeteer shaper, so "done".
5. Internet stations placed in public places for general email and web.
That's been done for years already.
6. IMAP mail (including a Web client) if you currently use POP.
That's been done for a long time as well. What do we do now? In the midst of a buget crisis (Idaho State University), we have spent a ton of money on technology. We are now installing these useless "smart boards" that came with state-of-the-art laptops that can copy the contents down (let me tell you, facutly are just lining up to take notes for their students [sarcasm]). It seems we may have too much money for technology? Is there nothing left?
We also just finished installing our first all-Linux lab for the computer science department (yay!). We could have spent more money if we had used Windows, I suppose...
For the (hopefully) last time: APT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PACKAGING SYSTEM other than requiring the package system to know about dependencies. APT works just fine with RPM, just as it works fine with debs and I see no reason why it couldn't work with OpenPKG.