Buying a competitor only to lay off the employees and discontinue the product is unethical. If my company did that, I would start looking for another job. In fact, I wouldn't even accept a company like that as a customer.
For our company (business software, hardware and implementation) the Y2K bug was a very real thing, which generated significant extra work, and forced the company to hire a number of extra people that they probably wouldnt have hired under normal conditions, when it turned out that starting in '97-'98 was too late, especially since it coincided with the conversion to the euro.
However, none of our customers never noticed any Y2K effect whatsoever. Not because it was a hoax, but because we fixed it in time.
You have to give them away though, companies generally don't want to pay for client side java applications...
No matter how excellent JEdit is, most of the time it takes longer to start up than the task you will be using it for takes you.
Eclipse takes about a minute and a half to start up on my machine at work, and makes the thing noisy (almost constant high CPU load causes the fans to speed up).
One of the main reasons for Java's failure to take the desktop in my opinion was the fact that until not so long ago, java applications would just crash or hang all the time. This problem has not been an issue for years now, but you can never repair a bad first impression. Much like the way Microsoft will never ever ever repair the impression they made with MS-DOS, Windows95/98/ME etc.
Another reason is that native rapid application development tools for Windows have become really good, making it simply more efficient to write a native app for each client you wish to support. The platform independance of Java turns out to be a disadvantage when there is only one type of client anyway: windows on intel.
Server side Java thrives, because there is not one architecture dominating the server market, so Java's platform independance is actually an advantage there.
Web developers make sure not to have the functionality of their website depend on applets, as Windows only comes with a mutant of java 1.2 - if any - installed, and of the clients on the interweb, the overwhealming majority will be windows PCs with Internet Explorer. You just can't count on visitors being willing to download a 14 megabyte installer to use your site.
Also the performance of client side Java is still very poor compared to the alternatives, and in the early years, when Java was still heralded as the future of computing, it was so unreliable, that it's image has been tainted forever.
Database servers are regularly rebooted or shut down to single user mode, because cetain kinds of database maintainance tasks cannot easily be performed on a running system, due to file- and record locking, so this is not necessarily a faulty assumption on the side of the software developer.
If regularly scheduled downtime is absolutely unacceptable, then maybe they chose the wrong architecture?
Open source isn't profitable for IBM by a long shot at this time. It is costing them a fortune. What their contributions have done, is make selling linux servers a credible option for their competitors HP, dell and even Sun. Their Linux strategy does not seem to be harming IBM terribly either, (not as much as for example apache tomcat seems to be harming websphere) so is their current support for Linux a public relations investment? Or perhaps it was meant to prevent the not entirely unrealistic scenario of a future where all servers would be Xeons running either windows NT or Solaris x86 ?
I don't know why your comment is modded up, in my opinion you are blaming the victim here.
Thousands of people, clearly not entirely sane or conscious, having the audacity to demand support for a product they pirated?
Shouldn't users who don't want to pay for the product use one of the many dozens of other HTML editors available? Freeware, shareware, GPL etc, it's not like the OP is a HTML-editor monopolist.
Same in math, physics, chemisty etc. I don't know why dutch women are so adverse to anything technical. They also suck at Counterstrike. I ended up marrying an american girl...
The foundations of our mainframe ERP package are basically almost 30 years old, only having needed a recompile when moving from 32 bit CISC to 64 bit RISC hardware a couple of years ago. Only last year the last customer who was still using our code from the seventies finally upgraded to the latest version, finally ending our need to support it If it lasts 30 years, why not 200?:)
Corollary: If MM approves of F911 torrents it's because he thinks doing so will maximize longer term revenue.
I think in the case of this film there is another motive. Throughout his career, well at least since Bush senior was president, he has been very outspoken about his grudge with the Bush dynasty. He wants as many americans as possible to see this film before the elections in November.
I don't see him plead for power to the proletariat, abolition of democracy and private property etc etc. He's no more a left wing extremist than Rush Limbaugh is a right wing extremist.
If you see his file 'Roger and Me' you get an idea where his anti corporate views come from. It was a film about his home town Flint, Michigan, after a plant closed and was moved to a low wage country, making a large chunk of the population unemployed.
He also has a personal grudge against the Bush dynasty, about which he wrote in his otherwise not very impressive book 'Stupid white men'.
Unlike his books, his films are pretty good, and funny, just keep in mind that it's not meant as objective news reporting, but as political commentary packed up in an entertaining film.
What I found infuriating about other copy protection techniques was that I couldn't play crippled CD's at work or on my PC, not that it would be more difficult to rip them.
Apparently this CD is crippled in a way that still allows you to play the thing on a PC.
Then again, I don't need to hear an album by "a group made of alumni from Stone Temple Pilots, Guns N' Roses and others" with a poofter name to know it is not my thing.
The skills I developed as a teenager in hand coding self modifying code written in 6502 assembly and writing DOS programs straight in microsofts debug still come in useful every day, even though the 6502 has long been defunct, and the Pentium 4 has ver little to do with the 8086 I learned to master. Oh my youth was spent so productively.
It impresses the girls more than anything else, I tell you!
It's not the programming language Java perse, but the writing in an interpreted language for an application server sitting on top of a virtual machine sitting on top of the operating system's HAL sitting on top of the hardware as opposed to writing a natively compiled app for the HAL as we did before.
But you're right, I'm not an enterprise Java developer.
The POWER architecture isnt really for the average Joe's computer, it is for servers. In servers, many tasks are done by coprocessors and independant subsystems without taxing the CPU. The extra CPU performance is now suddenly needed because IBM keeps encouraging ISV'S to write for Websphere, in Java, so you now need 10 times more memory and CPU performance than you previously did to perform the same task. In servers, the worst bottleneck at the moment are afaik still the moving parts in the disks and tapes.
The PPC is a cousin of the embedded version of the chip, where the performance per watt power usage is relevant. It is hugely successful.
Sales of Apples with desktop POWER chips aren't really significant. Although IBM aren't ready to admit it yet, the battle for the desktop is long over. No amount of performance advantage is going to outweigh the main advantage of the x86 architecture there: backward compatibility, preserving the value of past investments in software for the customer. IBM should know this, as they still make their zSeries mainframes compatible with the 40+ year old 360 architecture for the same reason.
In the PC, unlike most servers, most everything goes through the CPU, which is why for the average Joe raw CPU performance _does_ matter.
When I was still at uni, studying numbercrunching, one of the thing the department (phys. chem.) was working on was trying to extend the lifespan of the blue colour OLED, and to invent a white one (the holy grail as it were), research sponsored by the EU I think. The best they had lasted mere months, whereas red and monochrome (yellowish iirc) lasted pretty much indefinitely.
Slashdot Mirror
They bought the customers and sales channels and removed a competitor. Oracle has no real interest in the products or the employees.
It seems to be the norm nowadays. Where are the former Compaq and DEC products and employees now?
Now only SAP and Oracle are left in that market segment, Peoplesoft and J.D. Edwards are gone.
Buying a competitor only to lay off the employees and discontinue the product is unethical. If my company did that, I would start looking for another job.
In fact, I wouldn't even accept a company like that as a customer.
A link would have been nice.
There is little point in linking to a site in a language people on slashdot can't read
According to WINmagazine.nl it uses Linux, not a proprietary OS
For our company (business software, hardware and implementation) the Y2K bug was a very real thing, which generated significant extra work, and forced the company to hire a number of extra people that they probably wouldnt have hired under normal conditions, when it turned out that starting in '97-'98 was too late, especially since it coincided with the conversion to the euro.
However, none of our customers never noticed any Y2K effect whatsoever. Not because it was a hoax, but because we fixed it in time.
You have to give them away though, companies generally don't want to pay for client side java applications...
No matter how excellent JEdit is, most of the time it takes longer to start up than the task you will be using it for takes you.
Eclipse takes about a minute and a half to start up on my machine at work, and makes the thing noisy (almost constant high CPU load causes the fans to speed up).
One of the main reasons for Java's failure to take the desktop in my opinion was the fact that until not so long ago, java applications would just crash or hang all the time. This problem has not been an issue for years now, but you can never repair a bad first impression. Much like the way Microsoft will never ever ever repair the impression they made with MS-DOS, Windows95/98/ME etc.
Another reason is that native rapid application development tools for Windows have become really good, making it simply more efficient to write a native app for each client you wish to support. The platform independance of Java turns out to be a disadvantage when there is only one type of client anyway: windows on intel.
Server side Java thrives, because there is not one architecture dominating the server market, so Java's platform independance is actually an advantage there.
The parent is right, client-side Java is dead.
Web developers make sure not to have the functionality of their website depend on applets, as Windows only comes with a mutant of java 1.2 - if any - installed, and of the clients on the interweb, the overwhealming majority will be windows PCs with Internet Explorer. You just can't count on visitors being willing to download a 14 megabyte installer to use your site.
Also the performance of client side Java is still very poor compared to the alternatives, and in the early years, when Java was still heralded as the future of computing, it was so unreliable, that it's image has been tainted forever.
Reminds me of this
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0182587/
Database servers are regularly rebooted or shut down to single user mode, because cetain kinds of database maintainance tasks cannot easily be performed on a running system, due to file- and record locking, so this is not necessarily a faulty assumption on the side of the software developer.
If regularly scheduled downtime is absolutely unacceptable, then maybe they chose the wrong architecture?
The stock market is like gambling with forged money... ... in many ways a stock emission is almost like companies printing their own dollars.
Open source isn't profitable for IBM by a long shot at this time. It is costing them a fortune.
What their contributions have done, is make selling linux servers a credible option for their competitors HP, dell and even Sun.
Their Linux strategy does not seem to be harming IBM terribly either, (not as much as for example apache tomcat seems to be harming websphere) so is their current support for Linux a public relations investment? Or perhaps it was meant to prevent the not entirely unrealistic scenario of a future where all servers would be Xeons running either windows NT or Solaris x86 ?
I don't know why your comment is modded up, in my opinion you are blaming the victim here.
Thousands of people, clearly not entirely sane or conscious, having the audacity to demand support for a product they pirated?
Shouldn't users who don't want to pay for the product use one of the many dozens of other HTML editors available? Freeware, shareware, GPL etc, it's not like the OP is a HTML-editor monopolist.
Same in math, physics, chemisty etc. I don't know why dutch women are so adverse to anything technical. They also suck at Counterstrike.
I ended up marrying an american girl...
Without a pulse you would be legally dead in most countries
The foundations of our mainframe ERP package are basically almost 30 years old, only having needed a recompile when moving from 32 bit CISC to 64 bit RISC hardware a couple of years ago. Only last year the last customer who was still using our code from the seventies finally upgraded to the latest version, finally ending our need to support it :)
If it lasts 30 years, why not 200?
Corollary: If MM approves of F911 torrents it's because he thinks doing so will maximize longer term revenue.
I think in the case of this film there is another motive. Throughout his career, well at least since Bush senior was president, he has been very outspoken about his grudge with the Bush dynasty. He wants as many americans as possible to see this film before the elections in November.
I don't see him plead for power to the proletariat, abolition of democracy and private property etc etc. He's no more a left wing extremist than Rush Limbaugh is a right wing extremist.
If you see his file 'Roger and Me' you get an idea where his anti corporate views come from. It was a film about his home town Flint, Michigan, after a plant closed and was moved to a low wage country, making a large chunk of the population unemployed.
He also has a personal grudge against the Bush dynasty, about which he wrote in his otherwise not very impressive book 'Stupid white men'.
Unlike his books, his films are pretty good, and funny, just keep in mind that it's not meant as objective news reporting, but as political commentary packed up in an entertaining film.
Then again, many people may not feel screwed.
What I found infuriating about other copy protection techniques was that I couldn't play crippled CD's at work or on my PC, not that it would be more difficult to rip them.
Apparently this CD is crippled in a way that still allows you to play the thing on a PC.
Then again, I don't need to hear an album by "a group made of alumni from Stone Temple Pilots, Guns N' Roses and others" with a poofter name to know it is not my thing.
The skills I developed as a teenager in hand coding self modifying code written in 6502 assembly and writing DOS programs straight in microsofts debug still come in useful every day, even though the 6502 has long been defunct, and the Pentium 4 has ver little to do with the 8086 I learned to master. Oh my youth was spent so productively.
It impresses the girls more than anything else, I tell you!
This doesn't really concern us because we spend far less time tracking down dangling pointers and memory leaks now.
:)
That isnt really an issue for COBOL programmers hehe
It's not the programming language Java perse, but the writing in an interpreted language for an application server sitting on top of a virtual machine sitting on top of the operating system's HAL sitting on top of the hardware as opposed to writing a natively compiled app for the HAL as we did before.
But you're right, I'm not an enterprise Java developer.
The POWER architecture isnt really for the average Joe's computer, it is for servers. In servers, many tasks are done by coprocessors and independant subsystems without taxing the CPU. The extra CPU performance is now suddenly needed because IBM keeps encouraging ISV'S to write for Websphere, in Java, so you now need 10 times more memory and CPU performance than you previously did to perform the same task. In servers, the worst bottleneck at the moment are afaik still the moving parts in the disks and tapes.
The PPC is a cousin of the embedded version of the chip, where the performance per watt power usage is relevant. It is hugely successful.
Sales of Apples with desktop POWER chips aren't really significant. Although IBM aren't ready to admit it yet, the battle for the desktop is long over. No amount of performance advantage is going to outweigh the main advantage of the x86 architecture there: backward compatibility, preserving the value of past investments in software for the customer. IBM should know this, as they still make their zSeries mainframes compatible with the 40+ year old 360 architecture for the same reason.
In the PC, unlike most servers, most everything goes through the CPU, which is why for the average Joe raw CPU performance _does_ matter.
See topic
Do you mean I might be missing out on something because my email address isn't visible on slashdot?
When I was still at uni, studying numbercrunching, one of the thing the department (phys. chem.) was working on was trying to extend the lifespan of the blue colour OLED, and to invent a white one (the holy grail as it were), research sponsored by the EU I think. The best they had lasted mere months, whereas red and monochrome (yellowish iirc) lasted pretty much indefinitely.