Well... good ole khan died, so did hitler, so does everybody, in the end they can take the money to the rest of their belongings, to the worms, all they had was a pathetic life running after some kind of genie that they never will be able to reach fully.
After their dead the money will be dispersed again, and both will become an entry in history, just like the Fuggers are nowadays.
(The fuggers were basically some of the first super rhich families trying to control anything, lots of the European atrocities in South America in the early 16th century can be blamed on them, nowadays, they are sort of an entry in history, with a few buildings left, the money has dispersed over then centuries)
Bill Gates and Stevie boy will become also such entries in history, with probably no real lasting impact over centuries, I see Linux and other stuff in the public domain having the bigger impact in the long run, and people like Torvalds probably by future generations being higher regarded than Steve and Bill.
Java is alive and happy, thanks to the fact, that the people did not flock to.net (only Microsoft shops did), because they did not like the vendor and platform lockin...
Sames goes for apple, they found their nieche, although the market share is smaller the overall number of sold computers is much higher.
Linux is alive well, although Microsoft has been fighting it for years,
the automotive software industry still does well, palm well the pda market generally is sort of in its death cycles replaced by smart phones ( a move which I expected five years earlier)
Microsoft has the problem their death grip worked in the past because they were fighting aginst 1-2 enemies, but they now fight 20-100 enemies and they simply lose focus, because they shift their enemy #1 target almost every month, while their real long term threat is something entirely different, the whole world situation is the biggest threat to their long term survival as a company.
One of the reasons why their grip does not work, is because they fight a sensless unwinnable war on too many frontiers, they should develop into something more ibmish, trying to keep their value and income on a very high level and trying to be part of an ecosystem, instead they try to be the ecosystem and loose themselves entirely.
They have lost the focus of things years ago anyway.
Besides that, both personality seem to be so obsessed, that anything can become powerful enough, to screw them like they did with IBM in the early nineties, and are so obsessed with their company going down either by google, Linux or fill in whatever monthly obsession there is, that they do not see the real dangers and start to fight them.
The real danger is the current world political climant, which could lead to something which would take most coporations down. And I do not see the climat itself as the real problem, but the grabbing of the corporations for more and more, which Microsoft is a heavy part of, which is the biggest part of the problem.
To sum it up, the biggest problem for the long term survival of their company, is their own greed and the greed of others, which basically destroy the infrastructure, they also live on.
But they do not see that, because they are too obsessed with trying to control everything, that their thinking revolves around that instead of trying to see the bigger implications of their actions and the actions of others.
They are probably so obsessed with their desire of controlling anything computer related (I can remember one early interview with Bill where he said, he wanted to have anything computer related running Microsoft software) that they simply have forgotten, that they have to die as well as anybody of us...
Add to that a shitload of stress and a lot of temperament and you get reactions like that, to me Ballmer is heavily in need over a bigger vacation where he should rething his life and what he wants to do with it.
I dont think he is insane, but he definitely seems to have lost the focus on what is important in life, after all, he probably will be dead in 10-20 years (more likely a heart attack within the next ten years than anything else, given his shape and temperament) and then his billions will do him nothing anymore, and if there is an afterlife, he will ask himself the question, what did I do with my life, I constantly was running after full control and trying to destroy others people life support of being able to have their own company.
A sad life if you ask me...
Same goes for Bill, although he spends a lot, which I regard high of him, all his day to day thinkins seems to revelove around getting more power instead of trying to have something from life.
You really should read up on Microsofts history, almost none of their products was the best at the market, the reason for their monopoly is different, and close to what you describe...
Someone hits the radars... they do their usual lets make a press release before we have any code strategy, so that some possible customers hold off..
In this case it is totally irrelevant, since the Microsoft offer either probably will break the SIP standard, or will be a closed island like skype, and to the worse will run Windows only as well, while all other alternatives are available on all platforms...
Microsoft should be more worried that their company could go down with the rest of the economy if the environmental situation becomes worse, than to try to dominate every corner of the IT market...
Well the catastrophy has nothing to do with it, if you want a christian view... for all narrow minded bible belters look at a thousand years old prophecy by Hildegard von Bingen, the prophecy basically was like that, that mankind will be punished as long as they fill the rivers ocean and air with poison...
so what we have now is a society exactly doing that and we get back the punishment by heavier environmental desasters than they used to be. This woman thousand years ago she simply wanted to make a point (prophecy or not) that mankind is part of the nature and if you try to kill nature you have to pay the price until you stop doing it.
It is as simple as that so if one of those so called we have every right to pollute our living base Christians would go over their collective asses and stop preaching the end of the world, but instead look at those things, which do not predict anything than you have to live sanely with nature being your lifestock, they probably would behave differently.
A few tits do not make a difference, but pollution and killing off your own base of living for the sake of greed does.
Simple... php inferior language
C much longer development time for server side stuff, with not too much performance gain in that area, and to few portable libraries which are really portable (thank Microsoft and the ISO consortium for that)
Python... much slower, and not really an improvement over java language wise
Lisp... not as common, you cannot find enough people
The ideal language for that kind of development probably would be smalltalk, but the Smalltalk vendors killed themselves in the Digital Parcplace fiasko and their inability to extend the common base to something java could deliver out of the box.
The only contender in the long run I see currently is Ruby, with their excellent rails framework.
Add to that that you basically have half the classes sitting with a thin layer on a 20 year old api designed with no security at all in the mind of the developers and some stuff basicall moved 1:1 over.....Net can have lots of security features as long as you can pump a string directly into win32 in half of the classes, which triggers a buffer overflow everything is null and void in this article.
wake me up... when.Net ends to be a vehicle to lock users and developers more and more into windows...
From day 1.Net was designed to lure over the Java devs so that they get rid of the dangerous cross platform capabilities of Java!
And dont come with Mono we all know where it stands!
Actually most of them probably are better than the ones which are actually made, most better scripts either go down or are altered to the state of oblivion by the dumbing down machine, Hollywood has become.
I used to go to the theatre once per week, but currently it is twice per year.
The reason: simple, over here in german speaking Europe, you go to a movie theatre, you usually sit through 10 minutes of commercials, then you even have to go through the no piracy blblabla shit at least twice then you have to go through the previews and then the movie starts.
That means on the average you spent around 10-20 minutes of getting terror from the advertisers and then even worse terror for being blamed to be a pirate before a usually really lousy til mediocre hollywood movie starts.
Movie theatres are not fun anymore, to the worse, the customer insulting has started on buy dvds as well, so DVD sales are stagnant over here as well...
One word yes...
more words... in about 10 projects I had in the recent past, I had to apply lucene in about 3 of them due to the requirements of the project....
Dresden was an act of warcrime, the city basically was a refugee camp for people who fled from other cities, there was no major industry surrounding it.
It simply was retaliation for the atrocities of the germans, nevertheless, it was a warcrime.
Many peoples had blood on their hands in the war.
The german... well no word anymore there, but there are much more forgotten things.
Tschechia had a small holocaust done on the germans after the war by forcing them out of their homes into death marches to Austria and germany (you still can see the abandoned houses of back then in the no mans land between the borders)
The usa had the japanese imprisnoment camps, and the atomic blasts (which were due to more modern knowledge unjustified because the japs were to give up already)
The Soviet Union bascially did mass rapes on the german and Austrian population in the later days of the war and in the weeks and months after the war (I still have family stories about that).
The japanese were basically as brutal as the germans were, the location was just different.
The bombing of Dresden basically also was an act of warcrime, because Dresden sort of was a huge refugee camp at that time and had no significant industry, it sort of was a retaliation for the german V2 which were shot against London.
Face it war is a bloody mess and it is always those who win who write the books, but the personal stories of families often do not fully reflect the books, because they have a selective view of the history.
Delayed salaries, not trying to raise the expenses and then being surprised because you leave, is a sure sign of a bunch of crooks in front of the company in conjunction with bad times for the company (the later one not being obligatory)
Been there done that, usually most of these companies go down under once the low paid techie who runs the place leaves and the crooks stand alone and not being able to find a replacement.
JSF is absolutely great, but has a steep learning curve. If you have a good component set (like myfaces has one) you can get significantly work done in a relatively low time.
People first bitched about JSF because they did not see some stuff which they were used to in other frameworks (Action mappings in Struts for instance) but all this stuff is there, but solved more logically.
JSF is a wonderful framework and component model, but the learning curve is one of the biggest there is, currently, but hand in hand with that comes a huge flexibility which is not obvious at the first glance.
The whole framework is developed like a huge toolset instead of a tight framework, and once you think things become really complicated you find another shortcut the developers have put in there.
If you want to stay cross platform.
Java with JSF/MyFaces for big sized webapps (the component model slashes development time significantly although the learning curve is very steep)
Ruby/Rails for small to medium sized apps with small dev teams. Active Recordsetzs and other nifty things slash also development time down to nothing, but do not scale very well once teams get bigger of apps more complex.
All other interesting options (Tapestry) either lack tool support or lack crossplatform support or are crippled by deployment licenses.
(ADF Faces, Webobjects,.Net Webforms)
I think you make a huge point there, the prior art database search is sort of limited to the patent database, so what happens at an already broken system where technical means are obfuscated by laywer language to make things harder for the patent examiner to find prior art.
Things are constantly pushed as patent applications which sometimes even go way back to the mathematical theories of the 18th century, it has been publich domain at least for decades and has been known knowlege, but no patent entry. An obvious thing even with no invention height, but good laywer language behind it which makes things more obfuscated and complicated than they really are.
On the other hand we have an overworked patent officer close to quitting and his only real means to find something out is the patent database itself. He probably does not even have an extensive education in the field, and wham we have a patent on the wheel, the government gets its money for the patent, the laywer moves on and we probably have the next patent crook on our hand, who sues half the world for using his invention, the wheel.
I am not kidding there, the wheel has been patented to show how broken the system is, and we have lots of those sueing crooks around (The interferon case is the perfect example in the medical industries, streaming patent holders who never invented anything in the computer field)
In the end all who do the grundwork, implementing and researching the stuff basically are the ones who are screwed, because they do the grundwork for stuff which was patentend under vague descriptions by some laywers and crooks behind them, who just had vague ideas.
So what we have currently is a huge sellout of general public knowledge to a handful of crooks who try to establish themselves as middlemen, sort of like the european robbers of the middle ages.
The comparison is pretty equal, in Europe there used to be local lords and holders of property in the 11th and 12th century who basically gathered pass through taxes, it became such a huge problem, that the emperors had intervene and shut the system down, because you could not move a handful of kilometers anymore without running into the next "legalized" robbery.
Perfect example of a system which in the beginning made sense, and then due to myriads of highway robbers basically had to be shut down, otherwise it would have crumbled or caused the economy to go on a standstill.
Interesting aspect... because Opera, Konqueror and Safari already passed it, I expect Firefox to be Acid2 compliant within a year.
The IE still does not even implement CSS 2.x properly, I hope for heavens sake they finally have fixed the already 8 year old CSS 1.0.
But so far it seems to me that they just do an interface overhaul to satisfy the users. Their long term plan is to move away from open standards entirely to their own proprietary stuff, which is copied from SVG, XUL etc...
Well you sound like a theory book. The fact is that every knowlegde is built upon prior art, even Newton knew that and said, I could look farther than anyone, because I was standing on the backs of giants.
So basically finding a novelty in something is vague.
Also the patent offices all over the world have started to go into a sellout frenzy the last 10 years, prior art in 90% of all patents I have read were blatantly ignored, also the height of invention. Technical aspects basically were rendered useless (which goes against the original spirits of a patent of getting a time limited monopoly by openíng the invention), by not using technical terms and mathematical language but laywer language.
Patents granted were so broad that they tried to cover everything under the sun, and to the worse most cases hat prior art way back at least 30-40 years.
So what you describe is the theory you have to defend (you are a upholder of this stinking broken system), the practice is that patent offices even have granted patents for a wheel the last years, and around 90% of all other granted patents are not better regarding invention scope or prior art!
I am not against patents per se, but I am against the huge sellout of the most important good, public knowledge which currently is happening all over the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Well... good ole khan died, so did hitler, so does everybody, in the end they can take the money to the rest of their belongings, to the worms, all they had was a pathetic life running after some kind of genie that they never will be able to reach fully. After their dead the money will be dispersed again, and both will become an entry in history, just like the Fuggers are nowadays. (The fuggers were basically some of the first super rhich families trying to control anything, lots of the European atrocities in South America in the early 16th century can be blamed on them, nowadays, they are sort of an entry in history, with a few buildings left, the money has dispersed over then centuries) Bill Gates and Stevie boy will become also such entries in history, with probably no real lasting impact over centuries, I see Linux and other stuff in the public domain having the bigger impact in the long run, and people like Torvalds probably by future generations being higher regarded than Steve and Bill.
Java is alive and happy, thanks to the fact, that the people did not flock to .net (only Microsoft shops did), because they did not like the vendor and platform lockin...
Sames goes for apple, they found their nieche, although the market share is smaller the overall number of sold computers is much higher.
Linux is alive well, although Microsoft has been fighting it for years,
the automotive software industry still does well, palm well the pda market generally is sort of in its death cycles replaced by smart phones ( a move which I expected five years earlier)
Microsoft has the problem their death grip worked in the past because they were fighting aginst 1-2 enemies, but they now fight 20-100 enemies and they simply lose focus, because they shift their enemy #1 target almost every month, while their real long term threat is something entirely different, the whole world situation is the biggest threat to their long term survival as a company.
One of the reasons why their grip does not work, is because they fight a sensless unwinnable war on too many frontiers, they should develop into something more ibmish, trying to keep their value and income on a very high level and trying to be part of an ecosystem, instead they try to be the ecosystem and loose themselves entirely.
They have lost the focus of things years ago anyway.
Besides that, both personality seem to be so obsessed, that anything can become powerful enough, to screw them like they did with IBM in the early nineties, and are so obsessed with their company going down either by google, Linux or fill in whatever monthly obsession there is, that they do not see the real dangers and start to fight them.
The real danger is the current world political climant, which could lead to something which would take most coporations down. And I do not see the climat itself as the real problem, but the grabbing of the corporations for more and more, which Microsoft is a heavy part of, which is the biggest part of the problem.
To sum it up, the biggest problem for the long term survival of their company, is their own greed and the greed of others, which basically destroy the infrastructure, they also live on. But they do not see that, because they are too obsessed with trying to control everything, that their thinking revolves around that instead of trying to see the bigger implications of their actions and the actions of others.
They are probably so obsessed with their desire of controlling anything computer related (I can remember one early interview with Bill where he said, he wanted to have anything computer related running Microsoft software) that they simply have forgotten, that they have to die as well as anybody of us... Add to that a shitload of stress and a lot of temperament and you get reactions like that, to me Ballmer is heavily in need over a bigger vacation where he should rething his life and what he wants to do with it. I dont think he is insane, but he definitely seems to have lost the focus on what is important in life, after all, he probably will be dead in 10-20 years (more likely a heart attack within the next ten years than anything else, given his shape and temperament) and then his billions will do him nothing anymore, and if there is an afterlife, he will ask himself the question, what did I do with my life, I constantly was running after full control and trying to destroy others people life support of being able to have their own company.
A sad life if you ask me...
Same goes for Bill, although he spends a lot, which I regard high of him, all his day to day thinkins seems to revelove around getting more power instead of trying to have something from life.
You really should read up on Microsofts history, almost none of their products was the best at the market, the reason for their monopoly is different, and close to what you describe...
Someone hits the radars... they do their usual lets make a press release before we have any code strategy, so that some possible customers hold off..
In this case it is totally irrelevant, since the Microsoft offer either probably will break the SIP standard, or will be a closed island like skype, and to the worse will run Windows only as well, while all other alternatives are available on all platforms...
Microsoft should be more worried that their company could go down with the rest of the economy if the environmental situation becomes worse, than to try to dominate every corner of the IT market...
Wait till something really big hits California again.. it is pretty much the same situation.
Well the catastrophy has nothing to do with it, if you want a christian view... for all narrow minded bible belters look at a thousand years old prophecy by Hildegard von Bingen, the prophecy basically was like that, that mankind will be punished as long as they fill the rivers ocean and air with poison...
so what we have now is a society exactly doing that and we get back the punishment by heavier environmental desasters than they used to be. This woman thousand years ago she simply wanted to make a point (prophecy or not) that mankind is part of the nature and if you try to kill nature you have to pay the price until you stop doing it.
It is as simple as that so if one of those so called we have every right to pollute our living base Christians would go over their collective asses and stop preaching the end of the world, but instead look at those things, which do not predict anything than you have to live sanely with nature being your lifestock, they probably would behave differently.
A few tits do not make a difference, but pollution and killing off your own base of living for the sake of greed does.
Simple... php inferior language
C much longer development time for server side stuff, with not too much performance gain in that area, and to few portable libraries which are really portable (thank Microsoft and the ISO consortium for that)
Python... much slower, and not really an improvement over java language wise
Lisp... not as common, you cannot find enough people
The ideal language for that kind of development probably would be smalltalk, but the Smalltalk vendors killed themselves in the Digital Parcplace fiasko and their inability to extend the common base to something java could deliver out of the box.
The only contender in the long run I see currently is Ruby, with their excellent rails framework.
Add to that that you basically have half the classes sitting with a thin layer on a 20 year old api designed with no security at all in the mind of the developers and some stuff basicall moved 1:1 over.... .Net can have lots of security features as long as you can pump a string directly into win32 in half of the classes, which triggers a buffer overflow everything is null and void in this article.
wake me up... when .Net ends to be a vehicle to lock users and developers more and more into windows...
From day 1 .Net was designed to lure over the Java devs so that they get rid of the dangerous cross platform capabilities of Java!
And dont come with Mono we all know where it stands!
British way of life? Being drunk and naked on a beach screwing openly in public, and puking into the next garbage bin?
Actually most of them probably are better than the ones which are actually made, most better scripts either go down or are altered to the state of oblivion by the dumbing down machine, Hollywood has become.
I used to go to the theatre once per week, but currently it is twice per year. The reason: simple, over here in german speaking Europe, you go to a movie theatre, you usually sit through 10 minutes of commercials, then you even have to go through the no piracy blblabla shit at least twice then you have to go through the previews and then the movie starts. That means on the average you spent around 10-20 minutes of getting terror from the advertisers and then even worse terror for being blamed to be a pirate before a usually really lousy til mediocre hollywood movie starts. Movie theatres are not fun anymore, to the worse, the customer insulting has started on buy dvds as well, so DVD sales are stagnant over here as well...
One word yes... more words... in about 10 projects I had in the recent past, I had to apply lucene in about 3 of them due to the requirements of the project....
Dresden was an act of warcrime, the city basically was a refugee camp for people who fled from other cities, there was no major industry surrounding it. It simply was retaliation for the atrocities of the germans, nevertheless, it was a warcrime.
Many peoples had blood on their hands in the war. The german... well no word anymore there, but there are much more forgotten things. Tschechia had a small holocaust done on the germans after the war by forcing them out of their homes into death marches to Austria and germany (you still can see the abandoned houses of back then in the no mans land between the borders) The usa had the japanese imprisnoment camps, and the atomic blasts (which were due to more modern knowledge unjustified because the japs were to give up already) The Soviet Union bascially did mass rapes on the german and Austrian population in the later days of the war and in the weeks and months after the war (I still have family stories about that). The japanese were basically as brutal as the germans were, the location was just different. The bombing of Dresden basically also was an act of warcrime, because Dresden sort of was a huge refugee camp at that time and had no significant industry, it sort of was a retaliation for the german V2 which were shot against London. Face it war is a bloody mess and it is always those who win who write the books, but the personal stories of families often do not fully reflect the books, because they have a selective view of the history.
Delayed salaries, not trying to raise the expenses and then being surprised because you leave, is a sure sign of a bunch of crooks in front of the company in conjunction with bad times for the company (the later one not being obligatory) Been there done that, usually most of these companies go down under once the low paid techie who runs the place leaves and the crooks stand alone and not being able to find a replacement.
JSF is absolutely great, but has a steep learning curve. If you have a good component set (like myfaces has one) you can get significantly work done in a relatively low time. People first bitched about JSF because they did not see some stuff which they were used to in other frameworks (Action mappings in Struts for instance) but all this stuff is there, but solved more logically. JSF is a wonderful framework and component model, but the learning curve is one of the biggest there is, currently, but hand in hand with that comes a huge flexibility which is not obvious at the first glance. The whole framework is developed like a huge toolset instead of a tight framework, and once you think things become really complicated you find another shortcut the developers have put in there.
If you want to stay cross platform. Java with JSF/MyFaces for big sized webapps (the component model slashes development time significantly although the learning curve is very steep)
.Net Webforms)
Ruby/Rails for small to medium sized apps with small dev teams. Active Recordsetzs and other nifty things slash also development time down to nothing, but do not scale very well once teams get bigger of apps more complex.
All other interesting options (Tapestry) either lack tool support or lack crossplatform support or are crippled by deployment licenses. (ADF Faces, Webobjects,
Feels like communism eh? ;-)
I think you make a huge point there, the prior art database search is sort of limited to the patent database, so what happens at an already broken system where technical means are obfuscated by laywer language to make things harder for the patent examiner to find prior art.
Things are constantly pushed as patent applications which sometimes even go way back to the mathematical theories of the 18th century, it has been publich domain at least for decades and has been known knowlege, but no patent entry. An obvious thing even with no invention height, but good laywer language behind it which makes things more obfuscated and complicated than they really are.
On the other hand we have an overworked patent officer close to quitting and his only real means to find something out is the patent database itself. He probably does not even have an extensive education in the field, and wham we have a patent on the wheel, the government gets its money for the patent, the laywer moves on and we probably have the next patent crook on our hand, who sues half the world for using his invention, the wheel.
I am not kidding there, the wheel has been patented to show how broken the system is, and we have lots of those sueing crooks around (The interferon case is the perfect example in the medical industries, streaming patent holders who never invented anything in the computer field)
In the end all who do the grundwork, implementing and researching the stuff basically are the ones who are screwed, because they do the grundwork for stuff which was patentend under vague descriptions by some laywers and crooks behind them, who just had vague ideas.
So what we have currently is a huge sellout of general public knowledge to a handful of crooks who try to establish themselves as middlemen, sort of like the european robbers of the middle ages.
The comparison is pretty equal, in Europe there used to be local lords and holders of property in the 11th and 12th century who basically gathered pass through taxes, it became such a huge problem, that the emperors had intervene and shut the system down, because you could not move a handful of kilometers anymore without running into the next "legalized" robbery. Perfect example of a system which in the beginning made sense, and then due to myriads of highway robbers basically had to be shut down, otherwise it would have crumbled or caused the economy to go on a standstill.
it did for sony ;-)
Interesting aspect... because Opera, Konqueror and Safari already passed it, I expect Firefox to be Acid2 compliant within a year.
The IE still does not even implement CSS 2.x properly, I hope for heavens sake they finally have fixed the already 8 year old CSS 1.0. But so far it seems to me that they just do an interface overhaul to satisfy the users. Their long term plan is to move away from open standards entirely to their own proprietary stuff, which is copied from SVG, XUL etc...
Well you sound like a theory book. The fact is that every knowlegde is built upon prior art, even Newton knew that and said, I could look farther than anyone, because I was standing on the backs of giants. So basically finding a novelty in something is vague. Also the patent offices all over the world have started to go into a sellout frenzy the last 10 years, prior art in 90% of all patents I have read were blatantly ignored, also the height of invention. Technical aspects basically were rendered useless (which goes against the original spirits of a patent of getting a time limited monopoly by openíng the invention), by not using technical terms and mathematical language but laywer language. Patents granted were so broad that they tried to cover everything under the sun, and to the worse most cases hat prior art way back at least 30-40 years.
So what you describe is the theory you have to defend (you are a upholder of this stinking broken system), the practice is that patent offices even have granted patents for a wheel the last years, and around 90% of all other granted patents are not better regarding invention scope or prior art!
I am not against patents per se, but I am against the huge sellout of the most important good, public knowledge which currently is happening all over the world.