Because its in nobody's financial interest. A zombie computer causes most of its harm to other networks, not the one its on.
Most of the ISPs are now large telcos and cable companies who hire support staff at would-you-like-fries-with-that wages. They don't have the capacity or the incentive to disinfect a zillion Windows boxes. It's much cheaper to buy a bigger pipe.
Of course, Microsoft owns the root problem. They sold a supposedly consumer-grade operating system that consumers can't maintain. Windows needs a dialog box that says, "You computer has been invaded by evil fuckwads. Would you like to kick them out?" where the two choices are "Yes" and "Ok".
They're nothing but flamebait and don't deserve to make slashdot's front page.
I disagree. Cringely likes to stir up controversy, but it's generally interesting controversy, and he has some of the best sources in the industry. Also, as Apple employee #12, he has been around long enough to know most of the major players personally, and his analysis based on that knowledge of character is much more insightful than the traditional fresh-minted-MBA stuff you get from analytical firms.
If you don't believe me, start with his book Accidental Empires. The ice cream coupon story alone was worth the purchase price to me.
Sure, smaller businesses are less powerful, but they're also problematic from an economic standpoint; most small business either don't hire very many employees [...]
Eh? They don't individually, but altogether they do quite a lot. In particular, they employ half of all private-sector workers and create 60-80% of all new jobs.
Moreover, they are an essential training ground for learning how business works. Any sailing instructor will tell you that a small boat is the best way to learn. Why? Because it's more responsive, because you do most of the work yourself, and because you are closest to the million little details that tell you what's going on. The same applies to small businesses.
And of course, they're where most large businesses come from. The Internet titans, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, and Google, were all started by one or two people; none were spun out of larger firms. I think that's because large companies are generally terrible at innovation.
It seems to me that people have just automatically assumed that larger businesses are bad [...] and that smaller business are somehow intrinsically "good"[...]
I have consulted in education, government, and perhaps 40 different businesses large and small. I think small businesses are, essentially, more American. Economic independence drives political independence. Every large corporation I have worked in is, in behavior, a feudal monarchy. I don't think you can spend ten hours a day bowing and scraping before one's nominal superiors and then go home and be the kind of independent citizen our founding fathers were hoping for.
So what's antiquated about making a product and selling it?
Did you even read the article? Neither Microsoft nor Apple are merely in the business of making products and selling them. They make platforms that they dominate. Every other MP3 player company was just making products; Apple is up to something different.
One of the reasons I loath the term "Web 2.0" is because people presume there is some new wave of innovation occuring in application development when every Slashdot reader know's this isn't true.
I disagree utterly. The first big wave of commercial web development generally treated sites as standalone islands, users as information consumers, and browsers as a cross between a magazine page and an IBM 3270 terminal. None of this was bad, and some perfectly nice things were built.
However, there's been an array of new applications based on three changes in perspective: the interconnection of sites (via APIs or a bit of hackery), treating users as content producers, and seeing the browser as a a smart UI platform. Sure, people did all of those before to some extent or another, but living in the Bay Area, I can assure you it has been an actual paradigm shift here.
Not necessarily. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if someone could give exemplary customer service and still be able to bitterly complain after hours. Those who cannot blow off steam don't last long.
I don't think that's true. It's been a long time since I did phone support, but some of the best people just took it all in stride. And even for the people who did need to blow off steam, I they would bellyache energetically, but not bitterly.
Having read a good chunk of the article, I agree with Pliep; I'm willing to bet money that this guy was frequently snotty with the customers. And therefore, bad at his job.
I've stopped trying to explain what it is like and how it is done.
I agree with that. The way I communicate the level of complexity is generally through estimates.
Most things are so unlike software development that metaphors are actively misleading. Our profession still struggles massively with the mistaken analogies with constructing buildings or manufacturing widgets.
Those weaned on an Ayn Rand kind of individualism aren't likely to appreciate the debt they owe to the American labor movement, or why restoring it to health is in their interests, too.
I'm not quite seeing the logic here. I think the fundamentalist Randites are immensely annoying. I think unemployment insurance is great. I even think the notion of a labor movement is a fine idea. But I'm deeply opposed to institutionalizing it through unionization, at least in the context of modern professional knowledge work.
Circa 1920, unions make a lot of sense. Workers were cogs in a giant machine, communication among workers was hard, worker education level was lower, and large businesses pushed the country in the direction of plutocracy. But large organizations, be they corporations or unions, exist primarily to promote themselves, and only secondarily to serve their nominal purpose.
Today I think I can directly achieve all the things a union might do indirectly, mainly thanks to modern communication tools like the Internet. And knowledge workers just aren't disposable in the same way undereducated industrial workers are. The major corporate asset lives in the workers' heads and in their relationships.
Good for you being able to avoid responsibility to the point where you can- I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for.
It seems curious for a Marxist to call somebody irresponsible for choosing to work for companies that have good labor relations.
And I don't quite get how your situation comes into this. Are you saying that people with mortages and families can't change jobs? Because I'd swear I have seen that happen. Or is it just that you're saying you'll work for the highest bidder, regardless of how socially responsible they are?
To the extent that I understand kernel architecture, what Linus says makes a lot of sense. But this bit worries me:
The whole "microkernels are simpler" argument is just bull, and it is clearly shown to be bull by the fact that whenever you compare the speed of development of a microkernel and a traditional kernel, the traditional kernel wins. By a huge amount, too.
This confuses simple with easy, and they're two very different things. For example, a copy-and-paste coder takes the easy path, whereas somebody who abstracts out the common functionality is pursuing simplicity. Linus may be right about the point, but the argument itself is bunk.
I agree, it's ridiculous. The web already has many more dimensions than three; compressing it down to a VR representation seems to be coming from people with a shiny GPU hammer looking for nails to pound. And this meme keeps cropping up; it was circa 1990 when somebody did the first 3D browser for the Gopher space. As now, the coolness of the idea carried you through about the first 15 seconds of use before you realized it was idiotic.
The 3D web guys are making the same fundamental mistake that early web designers did when they force everybody through a set of splash pages. People don't open up a web browser because they want an experience; they want to get things done. Nearly a decade ago smart people realized that changed things as fundamental as how you write text. I wish the 3D geeks (and while we're at it, the remaining goofs installing Flash intro pages) would catch up with what the rest of us figured out in the late 90s.
You are seriously misguided if you think the MPAA will take any more steps in the right direction after this deal flops horribly? Do you think they will blame the impending failure on the fatal combination of ridiculously high prices and stifling DRM, or on the bogeyman of pirates?
I think they will blame it on the pirates, but blame doesn't matter much. Both on Wall Street and Hollywood, the numbers are what matters in the end. And the numbers will get more and more compelling. I expect that it will take them another decade to get where you and I think they should get.
The studios are, IMHO, going through the five stages of grief. First comes denial, and they did that for years. The next stage is anger, and you can see that in their insane, self-defeating legal actions. Then comes bargaining. We're at the beginning of the stage, so naturally the first offer is ridiculous. After a few years they will realize that they can't turn back time, and then they'll hit depression. This will drive a number of older or less adaptable execs out of the industry. Then, finally, we'll hit acceptance, where they will start working with their new distribution channel, doing things they never could have done before.
No, what she needs is that mythical Movie-OS. You know, the one where nothing goes off screen and emails are sent in a giant animated swooshing envelope.
The worst part about living in the SF Bay Area is that every time you think of or hear about some crazy idea you have to pause for 30 seconds working out whether or not that's a reasonable startup.
I think the industry just missed the boat. If they want "pirates" to use their service instead, they'll need to provide some insentive, which same-as-DVD release date and prices are not.
I'd bet that they don't care about the pirates. This is a play for the iTunes crowd. A clumsy and slightly retarded play, but still a play.
This is a token gesture which offers nothing of value and is designed to fail. Hollywood just wants to crow about being able to offer legal alternatives, their not at all interested in giving the consumer what they really want.
I think you give them too much credit. They're not that smart. For years, every time they thought about the Internet they put their hands over their ears and shouted "LALALALALA". This is now their first step away from that, and it seems like a big step to them.
We here know it's a tiny step compared to the distance they have to go. But they've got time and plenty of money. Their losses to piracy are mostly imaginary, and the technical difficulties and legal menacings will keep most of their consumers consuming for long enough. Long enough, that is, for Steve Jobs, Disney's largest stockholder, to demonstrate that iTunes will work for movies.
It always bothers me when people use utilities to restart services that die/have been killed. Shouldn't a daemon be designed to run indefinitely?
You say it like these two things are mutually exclusive. Why not strive for both? I pay for insurance that I strive to never need. For me, system monitoring tools are in the same category.
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No, actually your buzzword retort was excellent, and I thought your original post was fine, too. I was just playing along. Sorry to confuse.
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creating synergy between the client and server, with bleeding edge technology, that creates a new development paradigm
As buzzwords go, those are low-hanging fruit. If you were more proactive, you would have incentivised yourself to think outsize the box.
So the more correct phrasing would be "Entity EJBs and Hibernate were both attempts to solve the object persistence problem."
Sort of. Hibernate also encourages the kind of approach you see in books like Domain-Driven Design, and in places where people talk about POJOs. That includes putting most of the business logic in the business objects. (Really, that's day one in an Object-Oriented Design class: object = data + behavior.) Ergo, a lot of the session bean shennanigans I have seen in EJB apps become unnecessary.
You're right that EJB's messaging stuff and some of the session stuff is untouched by Hibernate, and I more accurately could have said "most of EJB" in the places where I said "EJB". Given that that most people I've talked to picked up EJB to solve the persistence problem, this seems like a minor quibble to me, but I'm glad to take your word that this was worth thrashing out.
That's not what I meant, and it's a non-sequitor [sic] anyway. Hibernate uses CGLIB to do runtime optimization, which they admit provides a very minor improvement over the JVM's reflection API. [...] I fail to see what this has to do with either the end developer or with Ruby
That's not all they do. As one of the FAQs I linked you to mentions, to make a class persistent they dynamically create magic subclasses at runtime using CGLIB. This is because you can't write Hibernate in pure Java. (Don't believe me? Go try it.) Ruby on Rails, on the other hand, only requires Ruby because Ruby is a more powerful language. Sun's cathedral-style thinking means that we lose out on both the features that they should be stealing from other languages and the innovation those features enable.
And that's my main point here: a more open-source attitude would mean that Sun doesn't have to be years behind the curve, like they were with Hibernate and all of the stuff they stole from C#.
This is true. I meant that EJB and Hibernate were both attempts to solve the object persistence problem.
either Hibernate nor EJB does any bytecode manipulation or other JVM tricks.
This is incorrect. Hibernate uses CGLIB and ASM to do runtime magic. They explain this in theirFAQs. Rails is possible because Ruby gives developers power that Java denies unless you do magic like that.
Second, EJB is very much alive [...], and was designed with a lot of the features of Hibernate in mind. [...] You should really check out the features in Java EE 5. It was designed to make developer's lives easier.
Yes, this is exactly my point. For years, EJBs were hideous to use and bad performers; I made several "enterprise" systems perform 10x better (and, as a bonus, much easier to work on) by ripping out the EJB crap that others put in when EJBs were fashionable. The Hibernate guys showed years and years ago that there was no need to suffer like that, and Sun has finally come around.
This is exactly the sort of good influence open source can have on Sun's cathedral-style, enterprise-bunker view of the world. But both C# and Hibernate show that Sun needs to keep getting their noses rubbed in it before the realize that making developer's lives easier is the primary point of a programming language. Hopefully Rails will give them a kick in their web-framework keister the way that Hibernate's independent success made them realize their persistence sucked.
And unlike Perl and PHP, Ruby has the potential to be an enterprise-scale language
You mean, Perl, as in Amazon? C'mon...don't be such a fanboy.
Oh, please. Who's the fanboy here?
I started writing Perl somewhere over 15 years ago, and I wrote some yesterday. I still love it, but I think I know its strengths and weaknesses. There's a list of reasons they're building Perl 6: Perl 5 is not well suited for certain kinds of development.
As to Amazon, their jobspages make it pretty clear that Perl is a secondary language there. Perl was a great thing in the early days of the web, but it's been a loooong time since I've seen a new company doing serious web work in it. I hope Perl 6 fixes that, but for now if you think Perl 5 is just as good as anything else for large projects, you need to get out more.
You can't write Ruby on Rails in Java? Oh. Best tell these guys: https://trails.dev.java.net/ Enterprise developers deal with inadequacies in Java by doing what everyone else does: Writing their way around it. This is where struts, hibernate, ant, junit came from.
I'm sure the Trails guys will be the first to admit that Trails (like peers RIFE, Sails, and Stripes) is not as simple as Rails is. We Java developers are used to looking past the 30 lines of getter/setter boilerplate and other mysterious Java incantations. But that's not true for a lot of devs.
Both Struts and Hibernate prove my point in different ways. Struts gets around Java's limitations with reams of XML, a cure frequently worse than the disease. Hibernate is closer to the spirit of RoR, but that's not really Java either; they have to do heavy wizardry with bytecode manipulation and dynamic subclassing because Java doesn't give them the necessary power. And note that Hibernate came from outside Sun. Sun's attempt at the same the same thing was EJB, which has been deservedly, if belatedly, shot in the head.
As a senior technical person in a large enterprise I too seek the holy grail of letting business people enter their business processes into a pretty front-end and getting a fully featured website with full supply chain integration automatically generated.
Actually, that's not what I seek at all. I believe that software development is inherently complex; you can't ever automate the thinking away. What you can do is give the developer tools to aid their productivity, to make simple things easy and dangerous things hard. Let them focus their brainpower on the things that are actually worthy tasks.
For a data driven system, it's great. For a complex system integrating with multiple other systems, it's no easier to use.
Exactly. At the low end, it's easier; at the high end, it's the same (or perhaps a little worse). But what Sun is missing is the idea that development need not always be hard. Pehaps they'll learn that from Hibernate, which comes from an attitude very like RoR. If not, I hope they learn it from Rails.
And because it does so much magic under the skin, if that magic doesn't meet your needs, you struggle more to change it.
I agree completely. This is where I'm waiting to see how the RoR and Ruby communities mature. They've got the entry-level system taken care of, but can they provide a path to complex systems without the kinds of complexity cliffs that you see amateurs using Access or VB run smack into? I think that Ruby the language has horsepower that other easy-to-use tools don't, but we'll see if they can turn that potential into actual results.
Gets its ass kicked? I don't see many people moving from Java to Ruby. From Perl, Python, and PHP, people are switching to Ruby in hordes. But from Java? A trickle, if anything.
You are missing my point. I am saying the enterprise approach to things only applies to a selection of software projects. Sun has ignored the ease-of-use and low-barrier-to-entry criteria for years and years. This means that small projects correctly don't use Java because it's not economical. They uses PHP, Rails, and the like.
But large projects often start as small projects, so Sun is, presumably accidentally, driving a lot of users away from Java. There is no good reason for this; the world wanted Rails, and Sun missed the boat. When I look at the Alexa Global 100, none of the up-and-comers I recognize seem to be using Java. I know that Craigslist, MySpace, and Flickr are built on those non-enterprise technologies you disdain; in a few years I'd bet will see some Ruby on Rails entries, but none for, say, Java Server Faces or Struts.
Enterprise developers are, by nature, unlikely to use Rails yet because they are relatively conservative. Java is, in many ways, the new COBOL. But Rails, which used Ruby's greater power to dramatically increase ease of use, now has created a substantial user base for Ruby.
And unlike Perl and PHP, Ruby has the potential to be an enterprise-scale language. It's a much better OO language than Java in many ways. With a few improvements, some supporting tools, and another five years, you will see Ruby invading enterprise shops if Sun doesn't counter effectively.
do you actually think a couple dorks yelling at each other on tv "hurts america"?.
It seems to me that, not unlike the people I'm complaining about, you more interested in argument than dialog. But I'll give it one more try before I give up.
I think that a political debate show on a major news network is not just any couple of dorks yelling at one another. I believe that the news media, of which the Cable News Network is a part, has a responsibility to be more than vapid entertainment. News media has a critical role in a democracy, and rightly has special constitutional protection because of that. To abdicate that responsibility does indeed hurt America.
And I'm not the only one who thinks that Crossfire was trying to do something more serious than Bum Fights with guys in suits; Begala and Carlson clearly claim that as well. I just watched the segment again, and you can see Carlson repeatedly argue for that higher journalistic standard to be applied to Stewart as well. Giving ground, Begalia tries to claim that they are a debate show; Stewart comes back to say that he'd welcome debate, but Crossfire is to political debate what pro wrestling is to sport. And their claim of a higher standard fits with their backgrounds: Carlson was a journalist and Begala a political heavyweight, and both continue to write seriously.
So yes, I'm saying that news networks today fail to fulfill their democratic role. And as both a citizen and a consumer, I say it's bullshit.
I am a big fan of vapid entertainment, and don't mind that it fills 97% of the pipe. But I do object to vapid entertainment masquerading as news, and to the near demise of serious journalism in the US. That includes both obvious news shows and what you call the "talking heads". That they are now idiots is undeniable, but the Crossfire Wikipedia entry makes clear that this is a recent phenomenon. It can be a temporary one--if that's what we demand.
Slashdot Mirror
Why has no one tackled this problem?
Because its in nobody's financial interest. A zombie computer causes most of its harm to other networks, not the one its on.
Most of the ISPs are now large telcos and cable companies who hire support staff at would-you-like-fries-with-that wages. They don't have the capacity or the incentive to disinfect a zillion Windows boxes. It's much cheaper to buy a bigger pipe.
Of course, Microsoft owns the root problem. They sold a supposedly consumer-grade operating system that consumers can't maintain. Windows needs a dialog box that says, "You computer has been invaded by evil fuckwads. Would you like to kick them out?" where the two choices are "Yes" and "Ok".
They're nothing but flamebait and don't deserve to make slashdot's front page.
I disagree. Cringely likes to stir up controversy, but it's generally interesting controversy, and he has some of the best sources in the industry. Also, as Apple employee #12, he has been around long enough to know most of the major players personally, and his analysis based on that knowledge of character is much more insightful than the traditional fresh-minted-MBA stuff you get from analytical firms.
If you don't believe me, start with his book Accidental Empires. The ice cream coupon story alone was worth the purchase price to me.
Sure, smaller businesses are less powerful, but they're also problematic from an economic standpoint; most small business either don't hire very many employees [...]
Eh? They don't individually, but altogether they do quite a lot. In particular, they employ half of all private-sector workers and create 60-80% of all new jobs.
Moreover, they are an essential training ground for learning how business works. Any sailing instructor will tell you that a small boat is the best way to learn. Why? Because it's more responsive, because you do most of the work yourself, and because you are closest to the million little details that tell you what's going on. The same applies to small businesses.
And of course, they're where most large businesses come from. The Internet titans, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, and Google, were all started by one or two people; none were spun out of larger firms. I think that's because large companies are generally terrible at innovation.
It seems to me that people have just automatically assumed that larger businesses are bad [...] and that smaller business are somehow intrinsically "good"[...]
I have consulted in education, government, and perhaps 40 different businesses large and small. I think small businesses are, essentially, more American. Economic independence drives political independence. Every large corporation I have worked in is, in behavior, a feudal monarchy. I don't think you can spend ten hours a day bowing and scraping before one's nominal superiors and then go home and be the kind of independent citizen our founding fathers were hoping for.
So what's antiquated about making a product and selling it?
Did you even read the article? Neither Microsoft nor Apple are merely in the business of making products and selling them. They make platforms that they dominate. Every other MP3 player company was just making products; Apple is up to something different.
One of the reasons I loath the term "Web 2.0" is because people presume there is some new wave of innovation occuring in application development when every Slashdot reader know's this isn't true.
I disagree utterly. The first big wave of commercial web development generally treated sites as standalone islands, users as information consumers, and browsers as a cross between a magazine page and an IBM 3270 terminal. None of this was bad, and some perfectly nice things were built.
However, there's been an array of new applications based on three changes in perspective: the interconnection of sites (via APIs or a bit of hackery), treating users as content producers, and seeing the browser as a a smart UI platform. Sure, people did all of those before to some extent or another, but living in the Bay Area, I can assure you it has been an actual paradigm shift here.
Not necessarily. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if someone could give exemplary customer service and still be able to bitterly complain after hours. Those who cannot blow off steam don't last long.
I don't think that's true. It's been a long time since I did phone support, but some of the best people just took it all in stride. And even for the people who did need to blow off steam, I they would bellyache energetically, but not bitterly.
Having read a good chunk of the article, I agree with Pliep; I'm willing to bet money that this guy was frequently snotty with the customers. And therefore, bad at his job.
I've stopped trying to explain what it is like and how it is done.
I agree with that. The way I communicate the level of complexity is generally through estimates.
Most things are so unlike software development that metaphors are actively misleading. Our profession still struggles massively with the mistaken analogies with constructing buildings or manufacturing widgets.
Those weaned on an Ayn Rand kind of individualism aren't likely to appreciate the debt they owe to the American labor movement, or why restoring it to health is in their interests, too.
I'm not quite seeing the logic here. I think the fundamentalist Randites are immensely annoying. I think unemployment insurance is great. I even think the notion of a labor movement is a fine idea. But I'm deeply opposed to institutionalizing it through unionization, at least in the context of modern professional knowledge work.
Circa 1920, unions make a lot of sense. Workers were cogs in a giant machine, communication among workers was hard, worker education level was lower, and large businesses pushed the country in the direction of plutocracy. But large organizations, be they corporations or unions, exist primarily to promote themselves, and only secondarily to serve their nominal purpose.
Today I think I can directly achieve all the things a union might do indirectly, mainly thanks to modern communication tools like the Internet. And knowledge workers just aren't disposable in the same way undereducated industrial workers are. The major corporate asset lives in the workers' heads and in their relationships.
Good for you being able to avoid responsibility to the point where you can- I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for.
It seems curious for a Marxist to call somebody irresponsible for choosing to work for companies that have good labor relations.
And I don't quite get how your situation comes into this. Are you saying that people with mortages and families can't change jobs? Because I'd swear I have seen that happen. Or is it just that you're saying you'll work for the highest bidder, regardless of how socially responsible they are?
Is it just my browser, or are they all using sans serif fonts for the body copy? I find that much harder on the eyes.
To the extent that I understand kernel architecture, what Linus says makes a lot of sense. But this bit worries me:
The whole "microkernels are simpler" argument is just bull, and it is clearly shown to be bull by the fact that whenever you compare the speed of development of a microkernel and a traditional kernel, the traditional kernel wins. By a huge amount, too.
This confuses simple with easy, and they're two very different things. For example, a copy-and-paste coder takes the easy path, whereas somebody who abstracts out the common functionality is pursuing simplicity. Linus may be right about the point, but the argument itself is bunk.
How, exactly, can a 3D Web be useful in any way?
I agree, it's ridiculous. The web already has many more dimensions than three; compressing it down to a VR representation seems to be coming from people with a shiny GPU hammer looking for nails to pound. And this meme keeps cropping up; it was circa 1990 when somebody did the first 3D browser for the Gopher space. As now, the coolness of the idea carried you through about the first 15 seconds of use before you realized it was idiotic.
The 3D web guys are making the same fundamental mistake that early web designers did when they force everybody through a set of splash pages. People don't open up a web browser because they want an experience; they want to get things done. Nearly a decade ago smart people realized that changed things as fundamental as how you write text. I wish the 3D geeks (and while we're at it, the remaining goofs installing Flash intro pages) would catch up with what the rest of us figured out in the late 90s.
You are seriously misguided if you think the MPAA will take any more steps in the right direction after this deal flops horribly? Do you think they will blame the impending failure on the fatal combination of ridiculously high prices and stifling DRM, or on the bogeyman of pirates?
I think they will blame it on the pirates, but blame doesn't matter much. Both on Wall Street and Hollywood, the numbers are what matters in the end. And the numbers will get more and more compelling. I expect that it will take them another decade to get where you and I think they should get.
The studios are, IMHO, going through the five stages of grief. First comes denial, and they did that for years. The next stage is anger, and you can see that in their insane, self-defeating legal actions. Then comes bargaining. We're at the beginning of the stage, so naturally the first offer is ridiculous. After a few years they will realize that they can't turn back time, and then they'll hit depression. This will drive a number of older or less adaptable execs out of the industry. Then, finally, we'll hit acceptance, where they will start working with their new distribution channel, doing things they never could have done before.
No, what she needs is that mythical Movie-OS. You know, the one where nothing goes off screen and emails are sent in a giant animated swooshing envelope.
The worst part about living in the SF Bay Area is that every time you think of or hear about some crazy idea you have to pause for 30 seconds working out whether or not that's a reasonable startup.
I think the industry just missed the boat. If they want "pirates" to use their service instead, they'll need to provide some insentive, which same-as-DVD release date and prices are not.
I'd bet that they don't care about the pirates. This is a play for the iTunes crowd. A clumsy and slightly retarded play, but still a play.
This is a token gesture which offers nothing of value and is designed to fail. Hollywood just wants to crow about being able to offer legal alternatives, their not at all interested in giving the consumer what they really want.
I think you give them too much credit. They're not that smart. For years, every time they thought about the Internet they put their hands over their ears and shouted "LALALALALA". This is now their first step away from that, and it seems like a big step to them.
We here know it's a tiny step compared to the distance they have to go. But they've got time and plenty of money. Their losses to piracy are mostly imaginary, and the technical difficulties and legal menacings will keep most of their consumers consuming for long enough. Long enough, that is, for Steve Jobs, Disney's largest stockholder, to demonstrate that iTunes will work for movies.
It always bothers me when people use utilities to restart services that die/have been killed. Shouldn't a daemon be designed to run indefinitely?
You say it like these two things are mutually exclusive. Why not strive for both? I pay for insurance that I strive to never need. For me, system monitoring tools are in the same category.
No, actually your buzzword retort was excellent, and I thought your original post was fine, too. I was just playing along. Sorry to confuse.
creating synergy between the client and server, with bleeding edge technology, that creates a new development paradigm
As buzzwords go, those are low-hanging fruit. If you were more proactive, you would have incentivised yourself to think outsize the box.
So the more correct phrasing would be "Entity EJBs and Hibernate were both attempts to solve the object persistence problem."
Sort of. Hibernate also encourages the kind of approach you see in books like Domain-Driven Design, and in places where people talk about POJOs. That includes putting most of the business logic in the business objects. (Really, that's day one in an Object-Oriented Design class: object = data + behavior.) Ergo, a lot of the session bean shennanigans I have seen in EJB apps become unnecessary.
You're right that EJB's messaging stuff and some of the session stuff is untouched by Hibernate, and I more accurately could have said "most of EJB" in the places where I said "EJB". Given that that most people I've talked to picked up EJB to solve the persistence problem, this seems like a minor quibble to me, but I'm glad to take your word that this was worth thrashing out.
That's not what I meant, and it's a non-sequitor [sic] anyway. Hibernate uses CGLIB to do runtime optimization, which they admit provides a very minor improvement over the JVM's reflection API. [...] I fail to see what this has to do with either the end developer or with Ruby
That's not all they do. As one of the FAQs I linked you to mentions, to make a class persistent they dynamically create magic subclasses at runtime using CGLIB. This is because you can't write Hibernate in pure Java. (Don't believe me? Go try it.) Ruby on Rails, on the other hand, only requires Ruby because Ruby is a more powerful language. Sun's cathedral-style thinking means that we lose out on both the features that they should be stealing from other languages and the innovation those features enable.
And that's my main point here: a more open-source attitude would mean that Sun doesn't have to be years behind the curve, like they were with Hibernate and all of the stuff they stole from C#.
First of all, Hibernate came after EJB
This is true. I meant that EJB and Hibernate were both attempts to solve the object persistence problem.
either Hibernate nor EJB does any bytecode manipulation or other JVM tricks.
This is incorrect. Hibernate uses CGLIB and ASM to do runtime magic. They explain this in their FAQs. Rails is possible because Ruby gives developers power that Java denies unless you do magic like that.
Second, EJB is very much alive [...], and was designed with a lot of the features of Hibernate in mind. [...] You should really check out the features in Java EE 5. It was designed to make developer's lives easier.
Yes, this is exactly my point. For years, EJBs were hideous to use and bad performers; I made several "enterprise" systems perform 10x better (and, as a bonus, much easier to work on) by ripping out the EJB crap that others put in when EJBs were fashionable. The Hibernate guys showed years and years ago that there was no need to suffer like that, and Sun has finally come around.
This is exactly the sort of good influence open source can have on Sun's cathedral-style, enterprise-bunker view of the world. But both C# and Hibernate show that Sun needs to keep getting their noses rubbed in it before the realize that making developer's lives easier is the primary point of a programming language. Hopefully Rails will give them a kick in their web-framework keister the way that Hibernate's independent success made them realize their persistence sucked.
C'mon...don't be such a fanboy.
Oh, please. Who's the fanboy here?
I started writing Perl somewhere over 15 years ago, and I wrote some yesterday. I still love it, but I think I know its strengths and weaknesses. There's a list of reasons they're building Perl 6: Perl 5 is not well suited for certain kinds of development.
As to Amazon, their jobs pages make it pretty clear that Perl is a secondary language there. Perl was a great thing in the early days of the web, but it's been a loooong time since I've seen a new company doing serious web work in it. I hope Perl 6 fixes that, but for now if you think Perl 5 is just as good as anything else for large projects, you need to get out more.
You can't write Ruby on Rails in Java? Oh. Best tell these guys: https://trails.dev.java.net/ Enterprise developers deal with inadequacies in Java by doing what everyone else does: Writing their way around it. This is where struts, hibernate, ant, junit came from.
I'm sure the Trails guys will be the first to admit that Trails (like peers RIFE, Sails, and Stripes) is not as simple as Rails is. We Java developers are used to looking past the 30 lines of getter/setter boilerplate and other mysterious Java incantations. But that's not true for a lot of devs.
Both Struts and Hibernate prove my point in different ways. Struts gets around Java's limitations with reams of XML, a cure frequently worse than the disease. Hibernate is closer to the spirit of RoR, but that's not really Java either; they have to do heavy wizardry with bytecode manipulation and dynamic subclassing because Java doesn't give them the necessary power. And note that Hibernate came from outside Sun. Sun's attempt at the same the same thing was EJB, which has been deservedly, if belatedly, shot in the head.
As a senior technical person in a large enterprise I too seek the holy grail of letting business people enter their business processes into a pretty front-end and getting a fully featured website with full supply chain integration automatically generated.
Actually, that's not what I seek at all. I believe that software development is inherently complex; you can't ever automate the thinking away. What you can do is give the developer tools to aid their productivity, to make simple things easy and dangerous things hard. Let them focus their brainpower on the things that are actually worthy tasks.
For a data driven system, it's great. For a complex system integrating with multiple other systems, it's no easier to use.
Exactly. At the low end, it's easier; at the high end, it's the same (or perhaps a little worse). But what Sun is missing is the idea that development need not always be hard. Pehaps they'll learn that from Hibernate, which comes from an attitude very like RoR. If not, I hope they learn it from Rails.
And because it does so much magic under the skin, if that magic doesn't meet your needs, you struggle more to change it.
I agree completely. This is where I'm waiting to see how the RoR and Ruby communities mature. They've got the entry-level system taken care of, but can they provide a path to complex systems without the kinds of complexity cliffs that you see amateurs using Access or VB run smack into? I think that Ruby the language has horsepower that other easy-to-use tools don't, but we'll see if they can turn that potential into actual results.
Gets its ass kicked? I don't see many people moving from Java to Ruby. From Perl, Python, and PHP, people are switching to Ruby in hordes. But from Java? A trickle, if anything.
You are missing my point. I am saying the enterprise approach to things only applies to a selection of software projects. Sun has ignored the ease-of-use and low-barrier-to-entry criteria for years and years. This means that small projects correctly don't use Java because it's not economical. They uses PHP, Rails, and the like.
But large projects often start as small projects, so Sun is, presumably accidentally, driving a lot of users away from Java. There is no good reason for this; the world wanted Rails, and Sun missed the boat. When I look at the Alexa Global 100, none of the up-and-comers I recognize seem to be using Java. I know that Craigslist, MySpace, and Flickr are built on those non-enterprise technologies you disdain; in a few years I'd bet will see some Ruby on Rails entries, but none for, say, Java Server Faces or Struts.
Enterprise developers are, by nature, unlikely to use Rails yet because they are relatively conservative. Java is, in many ways, the new COBOL. But Rails, which used Ruby's greater power to dramatically increase ease of use, now has created a substantial user base for Ruby.
And unlike Perl and PHP, Ruby has the potential to be an enterprise-scale language. It's a much better OO language than Java in many ways. With a few improvements, some supporting tools, and another five years, you will see Ruby invading enterprise shops if Sun doesn't counter effectively.
do you actually think a couple dorks yelling at each other on tv "hurts america"?.
It seems to me that, not unlike the people I'm complaining about, you more interested in argument than dialog. But I'll give it one more try before I give up.
I think that a political debate show on a major news network is not just any couple of dorks yelling at one another. I believe that the news media, of which the Cable News Network is a part, has a responsibility to be more than vapid entertainment. News media has a critical role in a democracy, and rightly has special constitutional protection because of that. To abdicate that responsibility does indeed hurt America.
And I'm not the only one who thinks that Crossfire was trying to do something more serious than Bum Fights with guys in suits; Begala and Carlson clearly claim that as well. I just watched the segment again, and you can see Carlson repeatedly argue for that higher journalistic standard to be applied to Stewart as well. Giving ground, Begalia tries to claim that they are a debate show; Stewart comes back to say that he'd welcome debate, but Crossfire is to political debate what pro wrestling is to sport. And their claim of a higher standard fits with their backgrounds: Carlson was a journalist and Begala a political heavyweight, and both continue to write seriously.
So yes, I'm saying that news networks today fail to fulfill their democratic role. And as both a citizen and a consumer, I say it's bullshit.
I am a big fan of vapid entertainment, and don't mind that it fills 97% of the pipe. But I do object to vapid entertainment masquerading as news, and to the near demise of serious journalism in the US. That includes both obvious news shows and what you call the "talking heads". That they are now idiots is undeniable, but the Crossfire Wikipedia entry makes clear that this is a recent phenomenon. It can be a temporary one--if that's what we demand.