We know China has been refitting some of their missiles to reach U.S. military bases in Japan. Now that China is about to test technology that can send a payload to reach Washington D.C., how is this in any way a positive thing? Some say that China will not reverse its policy on not using its missiles first. However, the U.S. has broken its policy in not attacking other countries first, so why be surprised when a new arms race is about to begin?
Science fiction is often a glimpse of the things to come. If so, I'd hate to live in the world of The Middle-Kingdom.
"An Indiana state senator is drafting legislation that would restrict the ability of public agencies in the state to outsource IT work to foreign countries or to use vendors whose staff in the United States consists largely of visa workers.
Jeff Drozda, a Republican from the Indiana district of Westfield, says he was "outraged" when he found out that a state agency charged with job creation in Indiana had outsourced work to Tata Consultancy Services of India. Drozda says Tata, which was hired by the state's Department of Workforce Development, has a long track record of replacing American high-tech workers with lower-paid L-1 visa immigrants.
Drozda also said it's particularly outrageous that the Indiana Department of Workforce Development has tapped an offshore firm, given that its mission is to "create 200,000 new high-wage, high-skill jobs" in Indiana. He hopes to introduce a bill to the Indiana Senate by Oct. 20. "
from - http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=15202049
I'd like to support @Home projects like Seti or Folding, but I'm adverse to installing anything on my PC. I'll change my browser's homepage to point to a webpage with an Java applet on it, and leave the browser/Java-WebStart up and running. But, I don't want anything else being installed on my PC and running as a crappy TSR.
Current processors run hotter than ever. Yet, innovative cooling devices previously reported by Slashdot may have been ahead of their time (truly "watercooling"). But, times may be catching up.
...I do things like switching the order of keywords and adding or removing "+" signs, etc. But, if I don't feel I'm getting the best responses, I fall back on other search engines. My current back-up search engine is Profusion, which does meta-searches.
As for the Logitech IO pen, I wonder if it's possible to use standard paper and your laser/inkjet printer to print out an "Anoto pattern of tiny pre-printed dots that allows your pen to make an exact copy of your handwriting". I'd hate to have a pen dependent on buying "special" paper, and the paper suppliers disappearing.
Just seems like a scam to generate a renewable revenue stream. Similar to how printer manufacturers lock us into their products and require us to only buy replacement cartridges from them. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that 3M (and other "special" paper manufacturers) pays Logitech a fee to make "special" paper for this pen.
I prefer a cheap, "self loading, hexagon shaped 0.5 millimeter mechanical pencil with a rubberized barrel that provides a positive grip." Zebra Posi-Grip fits the bill. Pair that with a big white eraser, and you're all set.
...you could get a degree from Penn State, R.I.T, or Skidmore. All are among the top "brick and mortar" schools and have Online/Homestudy degrees. RIT, for example, appears to have been rated in 2002 as being in the same league as CalTech by U.S. News and World Report.
The BSD license is exactly why BSD won't die, but it is also exactly why Linux, under the GPL, has eclipsed it. As it turns out, there are more people interested in fairness AND altruism (GPL), than there are in altruism alone (BSD).
BSD will simply evolve much slower than Linux, and eventually be forgotten except by a handful of zealots. Nothing wrong with that at all.
"which I have never seen the likes of spewed by any 800-lbs gorilla like Sun or Microsoft."
With only that statement to go on, I would guess that you may be new to Slashdot. Please visit and read the outrageous lies. More can be found here, here, and here.
You've confirmed for me that not many people actually looked at the code (around 500 lines) or even tried the demos that came with it before offering an opinion. The value of their opinions should be weighed with that in mind. After all, why voice an opinion on something you haven't tried? Why should someone believe that opinion? If you have a child, would you give that child the advice of following, and believing, in the opinion of others who haven't even experienced the subject firsthand, or know of actual cases where the subject warranted that opinion? Granted, a small minority of posters who didn't "think" the product could work at least prefaced their opinion with the fact that they didn't know the product at all.
did not convince that their product was useful for any real purpose
The idea that there isn't a place for this technology is proven false by the existance of products using some form of object prevalence. Simply go through the posts in this article and you'll run into a handful of people who bothered to post about their experiences and projects.
However, if you have no interest in using the product, there is nothing wrong with that. There may be a myriad of legitimate technical reasons why someone wouldn't use it (I know of very few). However, let's be clear here. To base a reason on packaging is nothing more than a simple matter of taste, not true objectivity. It has absolutely nothing to do with technical merits.
Thanks for the links, but what you're offering as a solution is apparently Apple's version of Enterprise JavaBeans. I don't have to pay Apple for that. I can download EJB for free from Sun, but I'll still have to deal with an Object-to-RDBMS-to-Object issue at a particular location within an application.
Also, I'm not sure about this part, but it seems to me that WebObjects = Web-Services. Just the names of the innocent have been changed. There's nothing stopping a Prevayler built app to perform or utilize Web-Services, or even EJBs.
It's a good one, and wish I had added it to the article. Kinda gives you the content of the wiki in one spot. I wish the product's author would change the Wiki into a more cohesive website.
These jerks invited wrath by saying quite directly "you are ingorant subhuman morons if you don't want to use our tool for absolutely everything imaginable,"
They said no such thing. Admittedly, there may be posts where they may have been feeling particularly defensive due to unwarranted attacks by dbms fundamentalists. Or, they may have just been weary of repeatedly giving the same advice one more time to someone who'd rather just talk instead of taking eight simple classes out for spin. Or, they could've been irritated for any hundreds of reasons that could irritate coders (not marketers) and might've lost their patience. God forbid we should see something like that happen on Slashdot!
However, if your perception of their posts have led you to believe as such without trying their code, I'll give you some advice I gave a younger cousin, "Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me."
Don't throw away the gift just because you don't like the package. Don't confuse the gift with the package. Take it and add it to your toolbox. Don't thank them for it if you don't think they'll appreciate it. But, if you find that it's the right tool for the right job, then use it to help your clients.
There are many wacky and dangerous things that come from the mouths of M$ and Sun. Do I stop using their tools? Nope. I just throw away the packaging before my clients see them, and help make the world just a little bit easier for them.
In the "old" days, this was called RPC. Currently, in Java, you might recognize is as RMI. The recent buzzword for it is Web-Services. The new incarnation simply adds a long-missed feature: programming language independence. Java's RMI had already introduced platform independence.
You probably should have said so up front, while you were pimping it.
In hindsight, you're probably right. Although, there's no guarantee it wouldn't have sounded false to those who flame first and ask questions later, which encourages the same response from others of similar temperment; at least until the patient-explainers and the truly-curious start posting. Let's hope you don't make the same mistake when your first article gets accepted.
"who *are* you?"
A heavy question. No one could give you a satisfactory answer to that one, so I'll just have to allow my article's questions to define for you who I am.
I also can't prove to you that I'm not *astroturfing*. As your questions are honest ones, I'll explain something about the article. You'll note that the first paragraph is different from the ones that follow. The reason is simple; slashdot wouldn't allow me to submit a book-sized article and I had to fit all my questions into an unfortunately cramped format. The result is an unappealing, marketoid style. Though, as it turned out, quite effective in eliciting responses.
The knee-jerk reactions from the crock-o-shitters clearly had more to do with the style than the content of the piece. People were posting responses immediately after the article was made available, not having had much time to look into the subject in depth (or the working links). As much as I regret the waste of eye-bandwidth from the first-posters, I actually empathize with the strong emotional need to conserve the status-quo. We all have convervative and liberal elements in our character. It's just a matter of perspective. To make an analogry, one man's conservationist is another man's tree-hugger. Here was what appeared to be inflamatory statements made about a fundamental aspect, even cornerstone, of modern-day development. Something that all developers had to expend tremendous mana to gain an understanding of. Who wouldn't want to grab a torch and pitchfork?
The article's intent was very simple, and it wasn't to be a focal point for furious discussions. Wait, that's a lie; of course it was. I didn't post it to be ignored. I wanted to learn more about the product and its place from others.
I'll share with you some findings (thanks to some very perceptive slashdotters). Simply stated, the tool has very good qualities (I won't go into the specifics, you know where to find that), and some qualities that require further work. It can be used as of today, but it will come into its own in a few years. If I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say somewhere between 2006 and 2009. It may not even be this product, but something like it. If it were to be used today, it's best niche would be to replace the countless FoxPro, Access, FileMaker Pro "departmental" file-based database applications with a web-based solution. You won't see many 1 gigabyte.dbf or.mdb files out there due to easy corruptibility, and Prevayler can step in to take their place. Its biggest flaw, and there aren't many, is that once an application has been structured, it's difficult to alter the "database" design (or schema) within the application. This also happens to be the flaw in file-based database applications made in Clipper, dBase, or Paradox. There may be a way for Prevayler (and its clones) to get around this, though at the moment I can only guess that Aspect Oriented Programming practices might be of use.
I wish the Prevayler team thanks for thinking outside the box, and giving us something interesting to think about.
I agree with your statements. The system appears to be perfect for replacing FoxPro, Access, dBase, or FileMaker type databases with a high-speed web-based application. Good project for OOP newcomers.
When the more advanced RAM tech comes out, the only limiting factor will be "evolving" a Prevayler system. I wouldn't be surprised if the appropriate framework gets developed for it (Aspect Oriented Programming?).
Cults in themselves aren't bad. It's only when they ignore facts that conflict with their dogma that they become dangerous or ridiculous.
I wouldn't characterize this group as cultists as they don't ignore the facts, but appear to welcome them. Most projects tend to develop some degree of "core" fans as the base who are enthusiastic about their "cause" (i.e., Linux, Gnome, Apache). What's admirable about this project is that they take every challenge head-on and have successfully answered the questions posed to them at their wiki and other sites as honestly as I've seen any other group. If they don't have the answers, they admit it.
I see Prevayler as a bit ahead of its time in the sense of hardware requirements (though that may change in a few short years). Also, it would benefit greatly if it gained a flexible schema framework; maybe by incorporating suggestions from Aspect Oriented Programming?
On the other hand, I don't see why this couldn't be used to replace any file-based database app such as FoxPro, Access, Paradox, Clipper, FileMaker or dBase. 1 GB.dbf or.mdb files are rare, and often easily corrupted. A web-based Prevayler application would be a boon to this departmental application niche.
Actually, I hadn't. You're absolutely right, it would be incredibly cheap in comparison to the insane Oracle licensing costs. Naturally, you'd have to consider where the memory would go (a cluster would be nice).
= 9J =
I suspect you could replace most file-based databases with this application, and at the same time offer a web-based solution. Wherever there are Access, FoxPro, dBase, FileMaker Pro databases, this can take their place.
Actually, I ran into this project about a day before I posted the article. I found a reference to it in a previous slashdot article, and read as much as I could find on the project. I was impressed enough by the range of applications this could be used in, that I wanted to let slashdot know it had been developed further since its first coverage. I'm not sure what can be meant by "marketing unethically" as I wasn't "marketing" for personal gain other than information and opinions. I'm happy to say, that there are some gem responses in the rough.
I have no connections with this project, and never claimed to have anything to do with it. However, the first batch of comments making various unverified assumptions in slashdot, is a study in sociological responses to what is conceived as an attack on an age-old belief (RDBMS is good, anything else is bad). This can be construed as conservatism. True, Slashdot as a whole has never claimed to be a liberal thinking body. It is easier to see in this article, more than most, the fundamentalist nature of quite a few slashdotters. Introduce a possible new perspective, and a small percentage of knee-jerkers claim first post, followed shortly by the more rational thinkers. The project's author writes about such responses at his wiki (which needs to be replaced by a more cohesive website).
You make a good point on the interdependence of Free Software and proprietary development. It's clear that the "cycle" as you explain it exists, and has existed from the beginning of software development.
Open Source and proprietary models have existed since the first government or university sponsored research dealing with software. However, the proprietary software development model has long dominated the marketplace, which has caused an unnatural tip in that insightful "balance" that you refer to. To those who develop expensive proprietary software, this has brought great profits. Unfortunately, it has done so at the expense of mindshare for the Open Source model. It has engendered ridiculous fear of anything non-proprietary from pointy-haired-bosses, despite the great promise of lower cost, more reliability through peer review, and some of the best support in the software world.
When the balance shifts the other way, it will be because business will finally realize the trap that proprietary software development models have kept them in. Currenty, when a company buys proprietary software, it has swallowed the false notion that when they do internal software development, it should ALSO be proprietary. Why? Their competitor has done the same development, and their competitor's competitor have done the same development...and so on.
Companies in a particular business, a movie company for instance, share strong similarities in their business models. Many departments in one company, will have a very similar counterpart in another company. Their business flow isn't identical, but its close enough that when one person leaves an entertainment company, he doesn't leave the "business". He simply finds a job in a similar department in another entertainment company. It takes a very short time to learn the new deparment's "culture".
Part of the "culture" that makes up a department is the software that models the business flow. I can't tell you how many times I've seen similar software in different companies. They're all usually at a sub-par stage of usefullness and stability. The reason for this is that the cost of development and the expertise of development may not be as expected. So, all these entertainment companies end up reinventing the wheel at a cost that gets them lousy, buggy software.
When businesses start realizing that just because they buy proprietary OS/Office/Server software, it doesn't mean that they have to follow the same model. In fact, they will find that they all benefit if "departmental" or "divisional" software is open sourced under the GPL. The companies in a particular type of business can share code and customize it for their particular "culture" at a fraction of the cost of new development. The code will improve over the years, and those who do the customization will learn from the experience of others and improve themselves for their company's benefit.
Because the demo was on a CD, the reviewer couldn't test an important aspect of business PCs: The ease of installation and de-installation of applications.
Presumably, Sun will want all future business application development to be web-based with java-on-the-server. However, the reality is that no matter how superior the Java-on-the-server or any web-based architecture is, not all businesses can or will go with web or Java development. Sun will need to be sure that if a customer wishes to include an application that Sun allows for easy deployment and removal.
Slashdot Mirror
Science fiction is often a glimpse of the things to come. If so, I'd hate to live in the world of The Middle-Kingdom.
= 9J =
"An Indiana state senator is drafting legislation that would restrict the ability of public agencies in the state to outsource IT work to foreign countries or to use vendors whose staff in the United States consists largely of visa workers.
j html?articleID=15202049
Jeff Drozda, a Republican from the Indiana district of Westfield, says he was "outraged" when he found out that a state agency charged with job creation in Indiana had outsourced work to Tata Consultancy Services of India. Drozda says Tata, which was hired by the state's Department of Workforce Development, has a long track record of replacing American high-tech workers with lower-paid L-1 visa immigrants.
Drozda also said it's particularly outrageous that the Indiana Department of Workforce Development has tapped an offshore firm, given that its mission is to "create 200,000 new high-wage, high-skill jobs" in Indiana. He hopes to introduce a bill to the Indiana Senate by Oct. 20. "
from - http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.
= 9J =
= 9J =
= 9J =
= 9J =
Just seems like a scam to generate a renewable revenue stream. Similar to how printer manufacturers lock us into their products and require us to only buy replacement cartridges from them. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that 3M (and other "special" paper manufacturers) pays Logitech a fee to make "special" paper for this pen.
= 9J =
I prefer a cheap, "self loading, hexagon shaped 0.5 millimeter mechanical pencil with a rubberized barrel that provides a positive grip." Zebra Posi-Grip fits the bill. Pair that with a big white eraser, and you're all set.
= 9J =
= 9J =
BSD will simply evolve much slower than Linux, and eventually be forgotten except by a handful of zealots. Nothing wrong with that at all.
= 9J =
= 9J =
With only that statement to go on, I would guess that you may be new to Slashdot. Please visit and read the outrageous lies. More can be found here, here, and here.
You've confirmed for me that not many people actually looked at the code (around 500 lines) or even tried the demos that came with it before offering an opinion. The value of their opinions should be weighed with that in mind. After all, why voice an opinion on something you haven't tried? Why should someone believe that opinion? If you have a child, would you give that child the advice of following, and believing, in the opinion of others who haven't even experienced the subject firsthand, or know of actual cases where the subject warranted that opinion? Granted, a small minority of posters who didn't "think" the product could work at least prefaced their opinion with the fact that they didn't know the product at all.
did not convince that their product was useful for any real purpose
The idea that there isn't a place for this technology is proven false by the existance of products using some form of object prevalence. Simply go through the posts in this article and you'll run into a handful of people who bothered to post about their experiences and projects.
However, if you have no interest in using the product, there is nothing wrong with that. There may be a myriad of legitimate technical reasons why someone wouldn't use it (I know of very few). However, let's be clear here. To base a reason on packaging is nothing more than a simple matter of taste, not true objectivity. It has absolutely nothing to do with technical merits.
= 9J =
Also, I'm not sure about this part, but it seems to me that WebObjects = Web-Services. Just the names of the innocent have been changed. There's nothing stopping a Prevayler built app to perform or utilize Web-Services, or even EJBs.
= 9J =
= 9J =
They said no such thing. Admittedly, there may be posts where they may have been feeling particularly defensive due to unwarranted attacks by dbms fundamentalists. Or, they may have just been weary of repeatedly giving the same advice one more time to someone who'd rather just talk instead of taking eight simple classes out for spin. Or, they could've been irritated for any hundreds of reasons that could irritate coders (not marketers) and might've lost their patience. God forbid we should see something like that happen on Slashdot!
However, if your perception of their posts have led you to believe as such without trying their code, I'll give you some advice I gave a younger cousin, "Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me."
Don't throw away the gift just because you don't like the package. Don't confuse the gift with the package. Take it and add it to your toolbox. Don't thank them for it if you don't think they'll appreciate it. But, if you find that it's the right tool for the right job, then use it to help your clients.
There are many wacky and dangerous things that come from the mouths of M$ and Sun. Do I stop using their tools? Nope. I just throw away the packaging before my clients see them, and help make the world just a little bit easier for them.
= 9J =
In the "old" days, this was called RPC. Currently, in Java, you might recognize is as RMI. The recent buzzword for it is Web-Services. The new incarnation simply adds a long-missed feature: programming language independence. Java's RMI had already introduced platform independence.
= 9J =
Great website, thanks!
= 9J =
In hindsight, you're probably right. Although, there's no guarantee it wouldn't have sounded false to those who flame first and ask questions later, which encourages the same response from others of similar temperment; at least until the patient-explainers and the truly-curious start posting. Let's hope you don't make the same mistake when your first article gets accepted.
"who *are* you?"
A heavy question. No one could give you a satisfactory answer to that one, so I'll just have to allow my article's questions to define for you who I am.
I also can't prove to you that I'm not *astroturfing*. As your questions are honest ones, I'll explain something about the article. You'll note that the first paragraph is different from the ones that follow. The reason is simple; slashdot wouldn't allow me to submit a book-sized article and I had to fit all my questions into an unfortunately cramped format. The result is an unappealing, marketoid style. Though, as it turned out, quite effective in eliciting responses.
The knee-jerk reactions from the crock-o-shitters clearly had more to do with the style than the content of the piece. People were posting responses immediately after the article was made available, not having had much time to look into the subject in depth (or the working links). As much as I regret the waste of eye-bandwidth from the first-posters, I actually empathize with the strong emotional need to conserve the status-quo. We all have convervative and liberal elements in our character. It's just a matter of perspective. To make an analogry, one man's conservationist is another man's tree-hugger. Here was what appeared to be inflamatory statements made about a fundamental aspect, even cornerstone, of modern-day development. Something that all developers had to expend tremendous mana to gain an understanding of. Who wouldn't want to grab a torch and pitchfork?
The article's intent was very simple, and it wasn't to be a focal point for furious discussions. Wait, that's a lie; of course it was. I didn't post it to be ignored. I wanted to learn more about the product and its place from others.
I'll share with you some findings (thanks to some very perceptive slashdotters). Simply stated, the tool has very good qualities (I won't go into the specifics, you know where to find that), and some qualities that require further work. It can be used as of today, but it will come into its own in a few years. If I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say somewhere between 2006 and 2009. It may not even be this product, but something like it. If it were to be used today, it's best niche would be to replace the countless FoxPro, Access, FileMaker Pro "departmental" file-based database applications with a web-based solution. You won't see many 1 gigabyte .dbf or .mdb files out there due to easy corruptibility, and Prevayler can step in to take their place. Its biggest flaw, and there aren't many, is that once an application has been structured, it's difficult to alter the "database" design (or schema) within the application. This also happens to be the flaw in file-based database applications made in Clipper, dBase, or Paradox. There may be a way for Prevayler (and its clones) to get around this, though at the moment I can only guess that Aspect Oriented Programming practices might be of use.
I wish the Prevayler team thanks for thinking outside the box, and giving us something interesting to think about.
= 9J =
= 9J =
When the more advanced RAM tech comes out, the only limiting factor will be "evolving" a Prevayler system. I wouldn't be surprised if the appropriate framework gets developed for it (Aspect Oriented Programming?).
= 9J =
I wouldn't characterize this group as cultists as they don't ignore the facts, but appear to welcome them. Most projects tend to develop some degree of "core" fans as the base who are enthusiastic about their "cause" (i.e., Linux, Gnome, Apache). What's admirable about this project is that they take every challenge head-on and have successfully answered the questions posed to them at their wiki and other sites as honestly as I've seen any other group. If they don't have the answers, they admit it.
I see Prevayler as a bit ahead of its time in the sense of hardware requirements (though that may change in a few short years). Also, it would benefit greatly if it gained a flexible schema framework; maybe by incorporating suggestions from Aspect Oriented Programming?
On the other hand, I don't see why this couldn't be used to replace any file-based database app such as FoxPro, Access, Paradox, Clipper, FileMaker or dBase. 1 GB .dbf or .mdb files are rare, and often easily corrupted. A web-based Prevayler application would be a boon to this departmental application niche.
= 9J =
Actually, I hadn't. You're absolutely right, it would be incredibly cheap in comparison to the insane Oracle licensing costs. Naturally, you'd have to consider where the memory would go (a cluster would be nice). = 9J =
= 9J =
I have no connections with this project, and never claimed to have anything to do with it. However, the first batch of comments making various unverified assumptions in slashdot, is a study in sociological responses to what is conceived as an attack on an age-old belief (RDBMS is good, anything else is bad). This can be construed as conservatism. True, Slashdot as a whole has never claimed to be a liberal thinking body. It is easier to see in this article, more than most, the fundamentalist nature of quite a few slashdotters. Introduce a possible new perspective, and a small percentage of knee-jerkers claim first post, followed shortly by the more rational thinkers. The project's author writes about such responses at his wiki (which needs to be replaced by a more cohesive website).
Open Source and proprietary models have existed since the first government or university sponsored research dealing with software. However, the proprietary software development model has long dominated the marketplace, which has caused an unnatural tip in that insightful "balance" that you refer to. To those who develop expensive proprietary software, this has brought great profits. Unfortunately, it has done so at the expense of mindshare for the Open Source model. It has engendered ridiculous fear of anything non-proprietary from pointy-haired-bosses, despite the great promise of lower cost, more reliability through peer review, and some of the best support in the software world.
When the balance shifts the other way, it will be because business will finally realize the trap that proprietary software development models have kept them in. Currenty, when a company buys proprietary software, it has swallowed the false notion that when they do internal software development, it should ALSO be proprietary. Why? Their competitor has done the same development, and their competitor's competitor have done the same development...and so on.
Companies in a particular business, a movie company for instance, share strong similarities in their business models. Many departments in one company, will have a very similar counterpart in another company. Their business flow isn't identical, but its close enough that when one person leaves an entertainment company, he doesn't leave the "business". He simply finds a job in a similar department in another entertainment company. It takes a very short time to learn the new deparment's "culture".
Part of the "culture" that makes up a department is the software that models the business flow. I can't tell you how many times I've seen similar software in different companies. They're all usually at a sub-par stage of usefullness and stability. The reason for this is that the cost of development and the expertise of development may not be as expected. So, all these entertainment companies end up reinventing the wheel at a cost that gets them lousy, buggy software.
When businesses start realizing that just because they buy proprietary OS/Office/Server software, it doesn't mean that they have to follow the same model. In fact, they will find that they all benefit if "departmental" or "divisional" software is open sourced under the GPL. The companies in a particular type of business can share code and customize it for their particular "culture" at a fraction of the cost of new development. The code will improve over the years, and those who do the customization will learn from the experience of others and improve themselves for their company's benefit.
= 9J =
Presumably, Sun will want all future business application development to be web-based with java-on-the-server. However, the reality is that no matter how superior the Java-on-the-server or any web-based architecture is, not all businesses can or will go with web or Java development. Sun will need to be sure that if a customer wishes to include an application that Sun allows for easy deployment and removal.
= 9J =