it was the first dynamic web server technology that used a multithreaded model in addition to runtime-compiled code (bye-bye CGI)
I wonder about this -- ASP/IIS used a multithreaded model with runtime-compiled code (although the 'compiler' was significantly less sophisticated) -- and I'm pretty sure that was out years before JSP appeared.
I hope nobody takes this the wrong way, but both Python and Ruby seem to be "VB for the 21st Century" -- as in tools to build quick-and-dirty apps without all that annoying type safety. In other words, they don't really directly compete with Java at all.
However, I don't think either have even registered at all in the commerical job market, so comparisons to Java are especially silly. As long as the Java programming market is so huge, there will be plenty of hype.
It just means they don't care anymore. If Apple isn't going to ship their browser as the default, there's not really a point in releasing it.
Actually, they stopped caring a long time ago. The Mac/IE development team was dissolved in 2000, and nothing has happened to the browser since the contractually-mandated OS X port in 2001 (except a couple security fixes). It's suprising it took Apple so long to replace it.
Thanks -- I of course meant that Gates was not driven by money.
The key with Gates is that he's (at heart) an owner-operator, not a financial capitalist. My belief is that he gets his kicks running his direct competitors into dirt, not "pulling the strings" like a Rockefeller etc.
> In fact, as a percentage of income, I probably have.
Gates' plan is to give away nearly all of his fortune before he dies.
I believe that the common slashbot stance on this is simply wrong -- Gates is not trying to atone for his sins, because he doesn't believe he committed any sins.
I don't think that Gates wasn't a guy who was driven by the love of money. He was a guy who wore dirty t-shirts and had tape on his glasses until well after he became the richest man in the world. He was driven by power and control and the riches were just a side-effect of that. Which is why he'll gladly give it all away.
Jeez, give MS some credit... Obviously after 20 years of obscuring their file formats, they had to realize that an open spec would improve other suites' interoperability with MS Office.
The bottom line is that OpenOffice is a pretty irrelvant competitor, when compared to older versions of MS Office that work just fine.
In my understanding, these certifications are based on operating system features such as permissions and logging, and have nothing to do with implementation faults (buffer overflows, etc.) IT professionals aren't going to abandon them because, except for certain government applicaitons, everyone ignored them anyway.
Not to mention that Windows does have certain security features that are simply not present in standard Unix.
For example, an administrator can be denied access to a file. The admin can change the ACLs by taking ownership, but doing this generates a log event. Deleting the logs generates another log event. AFAIK, it's impossible to restrict the unix superuser in this way.
Probably not important in most environments, but for government-type security it can be.
It's simple, really. When the government does something, it generally has to state a legal reason for the action. If their reasoning is faulty, they can be sued.
In MA's case, they have every right to choose an open file format, but they must define the policy narrowly enough to justify why MS Office's XML formats are not acceptable but ODF and PDF are, which it is not clear that they've done. Had they simply concluded that "OpenOffice has the best price for the feature set", they wouldn't have this problem. But they didn't.
> Have they changed their minds?
I read somewhere they were OK with an ECMA-certified MS file format, but checking back, it's not a good reference.
I think that Microsoft is starting to realize that karma actually counts towards something
More likely they realized that their commitment to W3C standards between 1997 and 2000 put them about 5 years ahead of Netscape/Mozilla in the browser wars.
With the proper application of resources, they could easily catch up and bury Firefox in standards support and extended features.
> They might have done if it could be demonstrated that he'd favoured one vendor over another for no reason.
Exactly. It would take a very sharply designed policy to include ODF and exclude MSOffice XML. Instead they just picked ODF as the winner. Without the policy rationale, the courts would have likely overturned it, and that's why they changed their mind about MSO XML.
With the threat to switch to OpenOffice (rather than using a ODF filter), it was clear this was all about the vendor and not the format.
Actually it's quite easy to grasp -- Microsoft supported TCP/IP because it made Windows compatible with a huge number of existing systems, routers, and networks.
Right now, basically nobody uses ODF, so there's very little customer demand (except for MA). The only people who care about the format are non-MS customers. So regardless of the politics, it is just a very low priority feature for most MSO users.
You propose instead what? That Microsoft create and give to the world standards that anyone can write to for any platform?
That's basically what Microsoft has done -- the Office 2003/2006 XML formats are documented and can be implemented by anyone willing to accept their patent grant.
(Reading these discussions would be a lot less frustrating if people actually kept up with the news instead of talking about the situation 3 years ago.)
Apparently they've now changed their mind and Office XML is OK for them. Probably because they realized that that just picking OpenDocument wouldn't have stood up legally.
From the sounds of it, the whole policy process was done in an extremely hamhanded fashion by a guy who didn't have the clout or executive backing to make such a decision. He might understand the technology, but he failed to understand the process, and thus he came away looking like he was being arbietrary. Which just would have gotten MA into a lawsuit that they likely would have lost.
I'm not saying a political commission is the ideal solution, but it would give a file format policy more political weight, as well as ensuring the process was followed to the point that such a decision would stand up.
Slashdot Mirror
it was the first dynamic web server technology that used a multithreaded model in addition to runtime-compiled code (bye-bye CGI)
I wonder about this -- ASP/IIS used a multithreaded model with runtime-compiled code (although the 'compiler' was significantly less sophisticated) -- and I'm pretty sure that was out years before JSP appeared.
I hope nobody takes this the wrong way, but both Python and Ruby seem to be "VB for the 21st Century" -- as in tools to build quick-and-dirty apps without all that annoying type safety. In other words, they don't really directly compete with Java at all.
However, I don't think either have even registered at all in the commerical job market, so comparisons to Java are especially silly. As long as the Java programming market is so huge, there will be plenty of hype.
> under classic Mac OS it was pretty fast.
No, it's just that all the other browsers were even slower. IE/Mac was still a dog compared to IE/Windows.
It just means they don't care anymore. If Apple isn't going to ship their browser as the default, there's not really a point in releasing it.
Actually, they stopped caring a long time ago. The Mac/IE development team was dissolved in 2000, and nothing has happened to the browser since the contractually-mandated OS X port in 2001 (except a couple security fixes). It's suprising it took Apple so long to replace it.
Thanks -- I of course meant that Gates was not driven by money.
The key with Gates is that he's (at heart) an owner-operator, not a financial capitalist. My belief is that he gets his kicks running his direct competitors into dirt, not "pulling the strings" like a Rockefeller etc.
> In fact, as a percentage of income, I probably have.
Gates' plan is to give away nearly all of his fortune before he dies.
I believe that the common slashbot stance on this is simply wrong -- Gates is not trying to atone for his sins, because he doesn't believe he committed any sins.
I don't think that Gates wasn't a guy who was driven by the love of money. He was a guy who wore dirty t-shirts and had tape on his glasses until well after he became the richest man in the world. He was driven by power and control and the riches were just a side-effect of that. Which is why he'll gladly give it all away.
Jeez, give MS some credit ... Obviously after 20 years of obscuring their file formats, they had to realize that an open spec would improve other suites' interoperability with MS Office.
The bottom line is that OpenOffice is a pretty irrelvant competitor, when compared to older versions of MS Office that work just fine.
go back and read the thread.
For something like a salary spreadsheet, only limiting the superuser to read access would rather miss the point.
I run FC4 and don't see any of the features mentioned in my post. Seems like you are showing your own ignorance here.
In my understanding, these certifications are based on operating system features such as permissions and logging, and have nothing to do with implementation faults (buffer overflows, etc.) IT professionals aren't going to abandon them because, except for certain government applicaitons, everyone ignored them anyway.
Not to mention that Windows does have certain security features that are simply not present in standard Unix.
For example, an administrator can be denied access to a file. The admin can change the ACLs by taking ownership, but doing this generates a log event. Deleting the logs generates another log event. AFAIK, it's impossible to restrict the unix superuser in this way.
Probably not important in most environments, but for government-type security it can be.
Nobody used IE v1 or v2 (except to download Netscape), so you've just demolished your own argument. Good show.
It's simple, really. When the government does something, it generally has to state a legal reason for the action. If their reasoning is faulty, they can be sued.
In MA's case, they have every right to choose an open file format, but they must define the policy narrowly enough to justify why MS Office's XML formats are not acceptable but ODF and PDF are, which it is not clear that they've done. Had they simply concluded that "OpenOffice has the best price for the feature set", they wouldn't have this problem. But they didn't.
> Have they changed their minds?
I read somewhere they were OK with an ECMA-certified MS file format, but checking back, it's not a good reference.
> even though Netscape was a more mature product
So mature they threw all the code away
> and had better support for standards
Completely untrue.
> and crashed less,
Arguable at best.
I think that Microsoft is starting to realize that karma actually counts towards something
More likely they realized that their commitment to W3C standards between 1997 and 2000 put them about 5 years ahead of Netscape/Mozilla in the browser wars.
With the proper application of resources, they could easily catch up and bury Firefox in standards support and extended features.
Plus:
3) "I went to your website and my browser put up an icon that said 'ASS'." (an actual user comment about the original Firefox RSS icon)
Not to mention that ActivePerl talks COM, making it non-useless for system administration on Windows (most of the admin utilities are COM APIs).
> They might have done if it could be demonstrated that he'd favoured one vendor over another for no reason.
Exactly. It would take a very sharply designed policy to include ODF and exclude MSOffice XML. Instead they just picked ODF as the winner. Without the policy rationale, the courts would have likely overturned it, and that's why they changed their mind about MSO XML.
With the threat to switch to OpenOffice (rather than using a ODF filter), it was clear this was all about the vendor and not the format.
Actually it's quite easy to grasp -- Microsoft supported TCP/IP because it made Windows compatible with a huge number of existing systems, routers, and networks.
Right now, basically nobody uses ODF, so there's very little customer demand (except for MA). The only people who care about the format are non-MS customers. So regardless of the politics, it is just a very low priority feature for most MSO users.
You propose instead what? That Microsoft create and give to the world standards that anyone can write to for any platform?
That's basically what Microsoft has done -- the Office 2003/2006 XML formats are documented and can be implemented by anyone willing to accept their patent grant.
(Reading these discussions would be a lot less frustrating if people actually kept up with the news instead of talking about the situation 3 years ago.)
Apparently they've now changed their mind and Office XML is OK for them. Probably because they realized that that just picking OpenDocument wouldn't have stood up legally.
Anyway, it seems to be over now.
From the sounds of it, the whole policy process was done in an extremely hamhanded fashion by a guy who didn't have the clout or executive backing to make such a decision. He might understand the technology, but he failed to understand the process, and thus he came away looking like he was being arbietrary. Which just would have gotten MA into a lawsuit that they likely would have lost.
I'm not saying a political commission is the ideal solution, but it would give a file format policy more political weight, as well as ensuring the process was followed to the point that such a decision would stand up.
This was pretty widely used in Microsoft shops 5 years ago, so that's hardly a ridiclous requirement.
We did something similar using a Java Applet and Nutscrape 4 Layers in about 1997 or so. So yeah, almost.