First of all, that payout isn't necessary. The federal government gave them a monopoly and they got filthy rich off of it. Consider that the payment for the last mile infrastructure. But even if you do give them a hefty payout, it's still profitable for taxpayers in the long run because we'll have a dozen providers in a price war to give us the best bandwidth and the best service instead of one company screwing us with a $60 monthly charge for something they could profitably sell us for $6 per month.
I understand NuGet is pretty good, and when I do use Windows I've had good experiences with Chocolatey. But I think my original point still stands - comparing C# to Java alone isn't as useful as comparing all of your options around the JVM versus all of your options around.NET. The two may well be evenly matched, considering the points you brought up.
I would argue it is, in fact, more complicated than a Linux distribution or graphics editor. It's hard to compare source code between them because the Linux distribution managers are of course repackaging a lot of existing code with their changes. GIMP has 750,000 source lines of code, according to Ohloh.net. GNOME has 8.8 million lines of code. Firefox has 12.5 million. That's colossal. Not much is bigger.
List them, please. List all of the 'bigger and more complex free and/or open source projects' that are larger than Firefox in terms of technical complexity and don't have a big source of corporate funding.
Making a browser is more complicated than making a music player, or a blog engine, or a file-sharing application. That's why the only widely adopted open source browsers have been based on projects with big funding - Gecko and WebKit/Blink.
It's safe to say C# trumps Java. But even with.NET as open source under the excellent MIT license, I'm not sure.NET trumps the JVM and the JVM ecosystem.
Even if Microsoft were 100% ethical today, they now have the reputation, the established position, and the financial resources to keep open source and proprietary competitors out of their desktop market due to the dirty tricks they pulled fifteen to thirty years ago. I won't ever forgive the company for that. To use a metaphor, if General Motors monopolizes the US car market by bombing all of the headquarters of the other automakers, even if GM takes the profits of its monopoly and uses it to create the best cars ever built I still wouldn't buy one. If Linux, or BeOS, or OS/2, or some other player had been able to establish a foothold in the US consumer PC market in the 1990s the competition between them and Microsoft would have made the world technology market look dramatically different than it does today.
But further, Microsoft still stifles innovation by wielding its patent portfolio offensively against other companies. Microsoft has more profits than Google, and Google - which is plenty evil in some other ways - only uses its patents defensively. Microsoft has also waged FUD campaigns against competitors as recently as earlier this year (Scroogled).
You can put a tuxedo on a gangster, but he's still just a crook.
Good posts, thanks for the discussion. I don't see how this is a surprise, or upsetting, to anyone that's paying attention. Mozilla gets most of its hundred-million-dollar funding from Google, and they have no guarantees Google will keep giving them money. What other realistic option do they have for generating revenue? They already accept user donations, how many people angry over this move give the Mozilla Foundation any money?
They need revenue to pay their developers. Most of their revenue comes from Google grants - hundreds of millions of dollars. If Google stops paying them, where do you expect them to get the money from? I'd cover the cost myself, but I just checked my bank balance and I don't have a quarter of a billion dollars handy.
Thank you. My internet service provider, cell phone provider, Costco Membership, and bank all have me as a paying customer, and I'm still the product to them.
People are leaving Firefox because for a long time Chrome was flat out better (not counting add-ons) - faster, more stable. Firefox has been kicking ass in the last few browser comparisons at Tom's Hardware ( http://www.tomshardware.com/re... ) but I think public perception hasn't caught up.
And Mozilla is probably happy to take Google's money from the Google Ad Network instead of direct grants, if that's what it takes to keep the Mozilla Foundation open. What they can't do is survive on end user donations. The number of major open source projects with as many developers as Firefox that survive on that model is near zero.
The Mozilla Foundation needs revenue. If you're not willing to accept the ads, use another browser.
The only alternative is for them to offer a paid proprietary ad-free version, and I'd rather see open source + ads than taking one of the most prominent open source software projects in the world and making it proprietary.
Re:make us care when $random version $ver released
on
Trisquel 7 Released
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· Score: 2
I agree with you. I don't run Trisquel either, and for the same reasons. I want to live in a world where proprietary software is laughed at, but right now if I insist on fully open source software from top to bottom I'll be kneecapped with respect to what I can do. And if I want to insist on a job working on only fully open source software (ideally free-as-in-freedom software, GPL, AGPL, or MPL) I have to get good enough to attract the attention of someone at Red Hat or Mozilla Foundation, or maybe start my own company.
Re:make us care when $random version $ver released
on
Trisquel 7 Released
·
· Score: 1
I think the notable part is that Trisquel is FSF-endorsed. Few Linux distributions are FSF-endorsed, because most support the use of proprietary firmware. If you care about that sort of thing, then a rare update to one of the totally free ones is notable.
Okay, you're buying much higher end machines than I am, and you do less gaming than my kids do. So you're right, you don't get any room to upgrade.
I buy mid to low range parts, and then the upgrade options are excellent and I get six to eight years out of every machine. My wild guess is that the same thing will hold for modular smart phones - buy top end, and you've got to replace the whole thing to upgrade. Buy mid range or low range but based on the most modern core architecture, and you can get a lot of upgrades out of it for years.
I don't know about a full desktop operating system - but it might have one - but what if it's got a 3GHz 64-bit octa-core processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, 3 days between charges, a 4K screen, speakers that don't suck and can be heard 30 feet away, and (maybe most of all in the eyes of the average consumer) an 80MP camera?
I think the Samsung Galaxy S3 and equivalent competing hardware hit a point where Android was fast enough in day to day use to not be annoying and the pictures were decent. So in that respect, no need to upgrade, period - just buy a new battery as needed and maybe reflash the ROM when bloatware and accumulated cruft gets annoying. But each new generation of phones adds some features consumers seem to be in a hurry to get.
But more seriously, I think the real thing Google wants is to make the super cheap commodity phones sold in India, rural areas, etc... to get even cheaper, so that they can open the market to another two billion customers. Americans might not care if a commodotized phone is $22 instead of $25 or $9.44 instead of $9.77, but it might make a big deal to someone scraping to get every rupee (or whatever).
You got it in one. I think real flame war over systemd would have been much smaller if there wasn't so much money to be made in fanning the flames. Sorry I don't have mod points at the moment.
Right. This is an attempt to commodotize smart phones much further than they already are. The big manufacturers will hate it, because it will drive their profit margins down to nothing. But if it gets enough momentum, they'll have no choice but to get involved. At launch these phones will probably be more expensive than competing monolithic devices. But in five years, maybe a $300 off-contract componentized Android phone will crush an iPhone 9 on specs.
The trick is getting a PC with a dedicated PCI-Express x8 or x16 slot that has room in the case to hold a dedicated video card, and can hold at least 8GB of RAM. It doesn't need 8GB when you get it, just make sure the option is there. You also don't need a dedicated video card in the PCI-Express x8 or x16 slot when you buy the machine, just the option to get one. Onboard video cards are fine to start.
Upgrade 1: increase the available RAM. 8GB is good, more won't hurt but probably doesn't help unless you're a software developer or play with lots of virtual machines.
Upgrade 2: swap out the primary hard drive with an SSD. (This may be a hassle with Windows licensing. I don't care, I don't run Windows. If you do run Windows, you may need to consult an expert or just buy a new copy.) An SSD makes a huge improvement in responsiveness.
Upgrade 3: upgrade your video card. If necessary, get a better power supply first.
Your CPU? You probably don't need to upgrade it. Most applications spend far more time waiting for information from the disk, swapping information from CPU cache to RAM and back, etc... than running a modern 2+ core CPU to its limit. You can get 6-10 years of decent service from any mid-range or better ($100+) modern CPU as-is.
I have a PC in the house with an AMD X2 4200+ processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD as the primary hard drive. It runs Windows 7, Firefox, Chrome, a basic photo editor, and Minecraft just fine. It boots in under 20 seconds. Most of the components are 8 years old.
By contrast, a modern smart phone is lucky to provide two years of service before something critical to operation (microphone, speakers, screen) breaks, or it's too slow to keep up with increasingly heavyweight newer versions of Android, or a newer model's camera is three times better. If modularization means that instead of two phones in four years I can use one phone and $150 in miscellaneous repair and upgrade parts that are easy to install, that's still a big win for my budget, my convenience, and a little win for the environment. And at the end of four years instead of having a worthless monolithic gadget, I can re-use or sell the upgrade parts that are still competitive.
Dynamic languages were under discussion, and the only dynamic language I'm aware of that's slower on the JVM than in its original interpreter is Javascript. The Javascript interpreter Nashorn on the JVM is fast, but not as fast as Chrome's V8 or Firefox's IonMonkey Javascript engines.
For other languages, sure - I imagine Ocaml, Haskell, C, C++, etc... would be slower if they ran interpreted on the JVM.
You will be sitting in the corner holding to your best practices and ideals while the world uses Facebook, Twitter, Google Mail, Office 365, Google search with autocomplete, Netflix, Youtube, Hulu Plus, Ebay, Amazon, and a hundred other websites that make extensive use of Javascript.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, that payout isn't necessary. The federal government gave them a monopoly and they got filthy rich off of it. Consider that the payment for the last mile infrastructure. But even if you do give them a hefty payout, it's still profitable for taxpayers in the long run because we'll have a dozen providers in a price war to give us the best bandwidth and the best service instead of one company screwing us with a $60 monthly charge for something they could profitably sell us for $6 per month.
Good points. There's also a Clojure port to .NET.
.NET. The two may well be evenly matched, considering the points you brought up.
I understand NuGet is pretty good, and when I do use Windows I've had good experiences with Chocolatey. But I think my original point still stands - comparing C# to Java alone isn't as useful as comparing all of your options around the JVM versus all of your options around
I would argue it is, in fact, more complicated than a Linux distribution or graphics editor. It's hard to compare source code between them because the Linux distribution managers are of course repackaging a lot of existing code with their changes. GIMP has 750,000 source lines of code, according to Ohloh.net. GNOME has 8.8 million lines of code. Firefox has 12.5 million. That's colossal. Not much is bigger.
I think D is spectacular and I'm sorry it hasn't seen more adoption.
List them, please. List all of the 'bigger and more complex free and/or open source projects' that are larger than Firefox in terms of technical complexity and don't have a big source of corporate funding.
Making a browser is more complicated than making a music player, or a blog engine, or a file-sharing application. That's why the only widely adopted open source browsers have been based on projects with big funding - Gecko and WebKit/Blink.
C# > Java
.NET as open source under the excellent MIT license, I'm not sure .NET trumps the JVM and the JVM ecosystem.
Scala ? C#
Kotlin ? C#
Groovy ? C#
Clojure ? C#
NuGet ? Maven
NuGet ? Gradle
NuGet ? Leiningen
( NuGet > SBT because _ > SBT )
It's safe to say C# trumps Java. But even with
Even if Microsoft were 100% ethical today, they now have the reputation, the established position, and the financial resources to keep open source and proprietary competitors out of their desktop market due to the dirty tricks they pulled fifteen to thirty years ago. I won't ever forgive the company for that. To use a metaphor, if General Motors monopolizes the US car market by bombing all of the headquarters of the other automakers, even if GM takes the profits of its monopoly and uses it to create the best cars ever built I still wouldn't buy one. If Linux, or BeOS, or OS/2, or some other player had been able to establish a foothold in the US consumer PC market in the 1990s the competition between them and Microsoft would have made the world technology market look dramatically different than it does today.
But further, Microsoft still stifles innovation by wielding its patent portfolio offensively against other companies. Microsoft has more profits than Google, and Google - which is plenty evil in some other ways - only uses its patents defensively. Microsoft has also waged FUD campaigns against competitors as recently as earlier this year (Scroogled).
You can put a tuxedo on a gangster, but he's still just a crook.
Good posts, thanks for the discussion. I don't see how this is a surprise, or upsetting, to anyone that's paying attention. Mozilla gets most of its hundred-million-dollar funding from Google, and they have no guarantees Google will keep giving them money. What other realistic option do they have for generating revenue? They already accept user donations, how many people angry over this move give the Mozilla Foundation any money?
They need revenue to pay their developers. Most of their revenue comes from Google grants - hundreds of millions of dollars. If Google stops paying them, where do you expect them to get the money from? I'd cover the cost myself, but I just checked my bank balance and I don't have a quarter of a billion dollars handy.
Thank you. My internet service provider, cell phone provider, Costco Membership, and bank all have me as a paying customer, and I'm still the product to them.
People are leaving Firefox because for a long time Chrome was flat out better (not counting add-ons) - faster, more stable. Firefox has been kicking ass in the last few browser comparisons at Tom's Hardware ( http://www.tomshardware.com/re... ) but I think public perception hasn't caught up.
And Mozilla is probably happy to take Google's money from the Google Ad Network instead of direct grants, if that's what it takes to keep the Mozilla Foundation open. What they can't do is survive on end user donations. The number of major open source projects with as many developers as Firefox that survive on that model is near zero.
The Mozilla Foundation needs revenue. If you're not willing to accept the ads, use another browser.
The only alternative is for them to offer a paid proprietary ad-free version, and I'd rather see open source + ads than taking one of the most prominent open source software projects in the world and making it proprietary.
I agree with you. I don't run Trisquel either, and for the same reasons. I want to live in a world where proprietary software is laughed at, but right now if I insist on fully open source software from top to bottom I'll be kneecapped with respect to what I can do. And if I want to insist on a job working on only fully open source software (ideally free-as-in-freedom software, GPL, AGPL, or MPL) I have to get good enough to attract the attention of someone at Red Hat or Mozilla Foundation, or maybe start my own company.
I think the notable part is that Trisquel is FSF-endorsed. Few Linux distributions are FSF-endorsed, because most support the use of proprietary firmware. If you care about that sort of thing, then a rare update to one of the totally free ones is notable.
Okay, you're buying much higher end machines than I am, and you do less gaming than my kids do. So you're right, you don't get any room to upgrade.
:)
I buy mid to low range parts, and then the upgrade options are excellent and I get six to eight years out of every machine. My wild guess is that the same thing will hold for modular smart phones - buy top end, and you've got to replace the whole thing to upgrade. Buy mid range or low range but based on the most modern core architecture, and you can get a lot of upgrades out of it for years.
I'm jealous of your machines. Nice.
I don't know about a full desktop operating system - but it might have one - but what if it's got a 3GHz 64-bit octa-core processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, 3 days between charges, a 4K screen, speakers that don't suck and can be heard 30 feet away, and (maybe most of all in the eyes of the average consumer) an 80MP camera?
I think the Samsung Galaxy S3 and equivalent competing hardware hit a point where Android was fast enough in day to day use to not be annoying and the pictures were decent. So in that respect, no need to upgrade, period - just buy a new battery as needed and maybe reflash the ROM when bloatware and accumulated cruft gets annoying. But each new generation of phones adds some features consumers seem to be in a hurry to get.
But more seriously, I think the real thing Google wants is to make the super cheap commodity phones sold in India, rural areas, etc... to get even cheaper, so that they can open the market to another two billion customers. Americans might not care if a commodotized phone is $22 instead of $25 or $9.44 instead of $9.77, but it might make a big deal to someone scraping to get every rupee (or whatever).
You got it in one. I think real flame war over systemd would have been much smaller if there wasn't so much money to be made in fanning the flames. Sorry I don't have mod points at the moment.
Common Lisp already runs on the JVM, http://abcl.org/
Right. This is an attempt to commodotize smart phones much further than they already are. The big manufacturers will hate it, because it will drive their profit margins down to nothing. But if it gets enough momentum, they'll have no choice but to get involved. At launch these phones will probably be more expensive than competing monolithic devices. But in five years, maybe a $300 off-contract componentized Android phone will crush an iPhone 9 on specs.
The trick is getting a PC with a dedicated PCI-Express x8 or x16 slot that has room in the case to hold a dedicated video card, and can hold at least 8GB of RAM. It doesn't need 8GB when you get it, just make sure the option is there. You also don't need a dedicated video card in the PCI-Express x8 or x16 slot when you buy the machine, just the option to get one. Onboard video cards are fine to start.
Upgrade 1: increase the available RAM. 8GB is good, more won't hurt but probably doesn't help unless you're a software developer or play with lots of virtual machines.
Upgrade 2: swap out the primary hard drive with an SSD. (This may be a hassle with Windows licensing. I don't care, I don't run Windows. If you do run Windows, you may need to consult an expert or just buy a new copy.) An SSD makes a huge improvement in responsiveness.
Upgrade 3: upgrade your video card. If necessary, get a better power supply first.
Your CPU? You probably don't need to upgrade it. Most applications spend far more time waiting for information from the disk, swapping information from CPU cache to RAM and back, etc... than running a modern 2+ core CPU to its limit. You can get 6-10 years of decent service from any mid-range or better ($100+) modern CPU as-is.
I have a PC in the house with an AMD X2 4200+ processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD as the primary hard drive. It runs Windows 7, Firefox, Chrome, a basic photo editor, and Minecraft just fine. It boots in under 20 seconds. Most of the components are 8 years old.
By contrast, a modern smart phone is lucky to provide two years of service before something critical to operation (microphone, speakers, screen) breaks, or it's too slow to keep up with increasingly heavyweight newer versions of Android, or a newer model's camera is three times better. If modularization means that instead of two phones in four years I can use one phone and $150 in miscellaneous repair and upgrade parts that are easy to install, that's still a big win for my budget, my convenience, and a little win for the environment. And at the end of four years instead of having a worthless monolithic gadget, I can re-use or sell the upgrade parts that are still competitive.
Dynamic languages were under discussion, and the only dynamic language I'm aware of that's slower on the JVM than in its original interpreter is Javascript. The Javascript interpreter Nashorn on the JVM is fast, but not as fast as Chrome's V8 or Firefox's IonMonkey Javascript engines.
For other languages, sure - I imagine Ocaml, Haskell, C, C++, etc... would be slower if they ran interpreted on the JVM.
Thank you for that link. Interesting. I was aware of about ten projects that compile to or enhance Javascript, but that list is enormous.
You will be sitting in the corner holding to your best practices and ideals while the world uses Facebook, Twitter, Google Mail, Office 365, Google search with autocomplete, Netflix, Youtube, Hulu Plus, Ebay, Amazon, and a hundred other websites that make extensive use of Javascript.