Re:Everyone loves to bash MS and VB...
on
Build a Program Now
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Heading for Karma hell on this one but...
I've used VS 2005, and I have to say that its poor at doing this sort of thing in comparison with a decent Java IDE these days. MS has lost a lot of its "ease of use" in this area (decent layout managers for instance) that it used to pride itself on.
I'll burn some Karma... but then I'm probably one of the few who has actually tested this stuff out.
I struggling to think of a single time that companies had to "jump" to keep up with Microsoft due to a new MS iniative...
The internet... nope last there Enterprise Software... nope last there Spreadsheets, Wordprocessors... nope last there Multi-tasking operating system... nope last there Games Console... nope last there Mobile Phone OS... nope last there Desktop Search... nope last there etc etc etc
Microsoft has NEVER dictated the direction of the market, its just leveraged a monopoly position to successfully copy other people's strategies and dominate in that segment.
The only place where MS are seen to lead is in marketing, where they announce the week after another company has done something that Microsoft will be doing that "any day now"... 2 years later you may still be waiting.
Its amazing just how innovative that Microsoft is these days. I mean just look at what they produce for the (allegedly) huge R&D budget they have. They've got TABS in a browser (unbelivable) and now they are either ripping off GoogleBase or CraigsList depending on how you read it.
Its great being a monopoly, you never have to innovate, just leverage your position to copy other people's good ideas.
Come on guys, cut down the flames and lets think... its only a SMALL start but it is a very significant start. While this might be a one-off tactical move its from one of the most important divisions in Microsoft, its an important move. This is Microsoft ACTIVELY accepting and PROMOTING an Open Source licensing model.
Dinosaurs take a long time to turn (remember IBM?)... has the first synapse fired?
Applaud them when they do good things, it gives more weight to your later critisism.
That adjust the seats based on the the person whose key is being used? So if you share the car it automatically goes to your setting.
Or really this is just another technical version of "logging in" to a personalised service, just using RF-ID as the authentication device.
Hardly novel, hardly new, its just the same technology as ever put together in a VERY slightly different way. RF-ID is already used to do automatic authentication and "personalisation" in many places today.
Love that US Patent system. I'm going to patent a system that selects based on the person who most often holds the remote control when they are in the room using proximity both to the PVR and the remote control, so what if the kids sit in front of the TV, I'm on the Sofa with ultimate cosmic power... and I want it to stay that way.
Nope a Straw man is an initial or hypothesis that is open to challenge.
I think the term he means is "Aunt Sally" i.e. creating an opponent who cannot defend themselves due to the way in which you portray them. Like saying "immigrants are all stealing our jobs and spreading disease and should all be shot or sent home"
What a load of cobblers...
on
The Demise of IP?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Of course IP people have to worry this is why Copyright now goes on pratically for ever, why patents are granted for the bleeding obvious and why no actually owns anything they buy these days they just license it.
The Economist had a more interesting, and realistic, section on this a couple of weeks back, they were saying there would be MORE IP economy not less, but that things like opening up IP often helped areas.
To imply that the US Goverment, the creator of the world's most corporate friendly IP regime is in-fact loosening the controls is about as barking as it gets.
To then follow that up with a complete misunderstanding of the importance of standards for communication and information sharing (802.11x anyone?) and imply that specifying open standards is a constraint on IP put this article right in the "honey-nut fruit loops" category of journalism.
Specifying standards is about creating commodity marketplaces and reducing the cost of entry, and as any free-market economist (as opposed to close market politicians pretending to be economists) will tell you, reducing the cost of entry increases competition, standardising a market has the ability to decrease the cost of an individual good (product) but raise the total value of the market. 802.11x is a great example of this, and so is Apple v MS in terms of how the protectionism of Apple created a SMALLER market for them as they insisted on total control of their IP.
Releasing IP is often smart for business. Morons who have political opinions masquerading as journalists really irritate me.
This is a great application, and one which probably has the largest benefits for the 3rd World and developing world. As with drugs however the issue is going to be the cost to those countries of deploying it (and having the reliable power network to support it).
How long before its cheap enough to not just be about making people in Florida feel more comfortable living in a swamp?
Microsoft and Linux distros have had a policy for some time of including more and more functionality in the base operating system, the latest example is the inclusion of "Local Workflow" in Windows Vista.
As a security expert do you think that bundling more and more increases or decreases the risks, and should both Windows and Linux distros be doing more to create reduced platforms that just act as good operating systems.
And not just Rebadged Intel Chips? I mean its quite a coincidence that these stories appear just after each other on Slashdot... a sure sign of an international conspiracy surely!
One thing you need to realise is that JRR Tolkein is more of a kids book (these days I know it wasn't when released) than a "Geek" book. The second thing you have to realise is that the UK and US definitions and groups of Geeks are very seperate.
Basically the UK can't hope to compare with the US Geeks in the "never getting laid stakes" and equally the literature is a little less "hard-core", hence things like the superb Terry Pratchett books get a high rating.
I always thought I was a geek until I went to my first US Developer conference...
This might be the first in the US... but its miles from being the first available elsewhere in the world. Usually the US is a mobile backwater that lags the rest of the world by around 2 years or so, in this case its around about that mark again.
Japan and Europe have had legal download services for a significant amount of time either via 3rd parties or more recently directly, when it was being talked of as "what is next" in this market.
So like Sprint now do NFL, Europe has been doing Football (Soccer) goals for 3-4 years. TV on your mobile... yup got that... loads of crappy shit you never want... got that... and you'll be getting it soon.
Its expensive over in Europe too against iTunes et al, but that is down to the "convenience" factor (and normally lower quality) of the mobile downloads.
Errr you did read the bit that said that IPv4 can't support the number of people on the planet already? Also you do know that all you are talking about is a secondary addressing approach (network 1 : 1.2.1.2, sub-network : 2.3.3.3) which is already possible on IPv4, but requires an agreed standard for the secondary networking approach.
Oddly secondary networks have been considered during all of this, but it was easier to update the primary network addresses rather than formalising NATs which had other issues.
I am sure I would set such a machine off every time I walk through a security gate - I'm just a generally nervous person.
Where as someone who believes they are on their way to paradise on a mission from god could well be 100% they are doing the right thing, and therefore not nervous at all.
A standard line from Bill, "wait till you see Vista its better", "wait till you see compute its faster".
Amazingly the press continue to take Microsoft at face value on annoucing their version as better when they don't release what they announce.
So sure MS is better at supercomputers... I mean they have such a history in it, just look at the top 500 its just littered with MS boxes.
This isn't Windows v Linux, this is MS Research v IBM Research. The people behind the CPU, Relational databases, reliable messaging and of course the huge amount of work on massively scalable computers. If MS had real ability they'd be working with the big processing boys from the goverment and weather prediction areas.
I know that Symbian is a "bad" OS, after all its only a reliable ground up operating system that has had the misfortune to have been created in Europe and be closed source.
But given that it has nearly 3/4 of the market and is clearly the dominant player, and its supported by companies that embrace open-source... shouldn't there be more OSS support for Symbian rather than an obsession with having Linux as the OS?
Think of Symbian as the Mac OSX for mobiles, but with Windows Marketshare.
Nope I thought not. Fibre-attach is the standard way that people connect from a server to a SAN, its very expensive at the moment and its much easier to use things like USB 2.0 or Firewire 2.0 as they have much lower production costs.
So its already invented but you probably can't afford it.
Interestingly of course SAP has actually had a history of doing Open Source, including releasing its own product (sapdb, now MaxDB) and certifying R/3 on Open Source platforms including Linux, and the MaxDB database. They probably also use some of the Apache libraries in Netweaver.
So far from breaking their product suite SAP actually enable you to rely on Open Source to deliver the sort of availability you'd expect from a proper ERP.
Adds weight?
on
Space Lichens
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· Score: 2, Interesting
But not much, 2 weeks doesn't even get you to Mars... I thought most of the theories of life coming from other planets were based around elements being embedded inside rocks etc rather than being directly exposed to space.
But it is nice to see Europe continuing to treat Space as a learning experience rather than a PR stunt.
And yet if Japan was to release films claiming to be "Hollywood Films", music that was "New Orleans Jazz" or selling "Texas BBQ Steak Mix" there would be little question of them cynically ripping off an American idea just to make a quick buck...
Manga is Japanese, in the same was as Champagne is French, you can make it the same way, it might even taste the same... but no matter what you do its not the real thing.
I write portable code, I'm writing on Windows, deploying to an AMD Solaris box and the target is SPARC. I've also done this same "magic" trick on AS/400 and OS/360...
Now me I just use the tool designed for the job of being platform portable, rather than trying to invent new standard headers (STL anyone?) that address a fraction of the problem.
Want to do sound on multiple platforms? Graphics? Business Process? Then use Java, its what it was designed to do. And to all those muppets who shout "its not possible"... the deploy has just finished and within 30 seconds its running on two different platforms.
For me the big issue here is that the aim of a central server that controls all of your media means that people will have to all become system adminstrators. This is hardly likely, the idea of my Wife worrying about menus to record programmes off the TV is not the sort of thing I look forwards to. Something like a TiVo is perfect as its a TV device that intends to record programmes and nothing else. My wife's iPod is perfect to listen to music on even if there is the irritant of having to connect it to the PC (and this is an irritant for her) and finally actually having paper photos to hand around is what her and her friends like doing. We could have a digital home with me as the sys admin... but my wife would hate it.
The alternative of lots of seperate devices that do their jobs pretty well and have to communicate together clearly requires too much collaboration and innovation for those companies pushing the "Digital Home" vision around a central server.
Media Centre is a great example of a company trying to force an idea it think SHOULD make it billions down the throats of people who don't want it. Give us loosely coupled devices that work together seemlessly not videos that chase us around the house or a central server that needs constant administration and updating.
The biggest thing here isn't the stored procs et al... its that SAP, you know the worlds biggest enterprise software vendor... will CERTIFY its application on MySQL (when using the old SAPdb stuff). This means that organisations that spend MILLIONS on SAP systems can get support if they run it on OSS.
That is the big deal, not functionality its about the support. MySQL might be the poor relation to Postgres in terms of functionality, but MySQL has a MUCH big best friend who can open doors where functionality doesn't count.
This is a real moment IMO, as a well known OSS database has a massive seal of approval from one of the most famous for reliability vendors in the market.
Next time your boss says that OSS can't do a DB, tell him that SAP disagrees.
Slashdot Mirror
Heading for Karma hell on this one but...
I've used VS 2005, and I have to say that its poor at doing this sort of thing in comparison with a decent Java IDE these days. MS has lost a lot of its "ease of use" in this area (decent layout managers for instance) that it used to pride itself on.
I'll burn some Karma... but then I'm probably one of the few who has actually tested this stuff out.
I struggling to think of a single time that companies had to "jump" to keep up with Microsoft due to a new MS iniative...
The internet... nope last there
Enterprise Software... nope last there
Spreadsheets, Wordprocessors... nope last there
Multi-tasking operating system... nope last there
Games Console... nope last there
Mobile Phone OS... nope last there
Desktop Search... nope last there
etc etc etc
Microsoft has NEVER dictated the direction of the market, its just leveraged a monopoly position to successfully copy other people's strategies and dominate in that segment.
The only place where MS are seen to lead is in marketing, where they announce the week after another company has done something that Microsoft will be doing that "any day now"... 2 years later you may still be waiting.
Its amazing just how innovative that Microsoft is these days. I mean just look at what they produce for the (allegedly) huge R&D budget they have. They've got TABS in a browser (unbelivable) and now they are either ripping off GoogleBase or CraigsList depending on how you read it.
Its great being a monopoly, you never have to innovate, just leverage your position to copy other people's good ideas.
Come on guys, cut down the flames and lets think... its only a SMALL start but it is a very significant start. While this might be a one-off tactical move its from one of the most important divisions in Microsoft, its an important move. This is Microsoft ACTIVELY accepting and PROMOTING an Open Source licensing model.
Dinosaurs take a long time to turn (remember IBM?)... has the first synapse fired?
Applaud them when they do good things, it gives more weight to your later critisism.
That adjust the seats based on the the person whose key is being used? So if you share the car it automatically goes to your setting.
Or really this is just another technical version of "logging in" to a personalised service, just using RF-ID as the authentication device.
Hardly novel, hardly new, its just the same technology as ever put together in a VERY slightly different way. RF-ID is already used to do automatic authentication and "personalisation" in many places today.
Love that US Patent system. I'm going to patent a system that selects based on the person who most often holds the remote control when they are in the room using proximity both to the PVR and the remote control, so what if the kids sit in front of the TV, I'm on the Sofa with ultimate cosmic power... and I want it to stay that way.
Nope a Straw man is an initial or hypothesis that is open to challenge.
I think the term he means is "Aunt Sally" i.e. creating an opponent who cannot defend themselves due to the way in which you portray them. Like saying "immigrants are all stealing our jobs and spreading disease and should all be shot or sent home"
At least for those of us in the UK
Of course IP people have to worry this is why Copyright now goes on pratically for ever, why patents are granted for the bleeding obvious and why no actually owns anything they buy these days they just license it.
The Economist had a more interesting, and realistic, section on this a couple of weeks back, they were saying there would be MORE IP economy not less, but that things like opening up IP often helped areas.
To imply that the US Goverment, the creator of the world's most corporate friendly IP regime is in-fact loosening the controls is about as barking as it gets.
To then follow that up with a complete misunderstanding of the importance of standards for communication and information sharing (802.11x anyone?) and imply that specifying open standards is a constraint on IP put this article right in the "honey-nut fruit loops" category of journalism.
Specifying standards is about creating commodity marketplaces and reducing the cost of entry, and as any free-market economist (as opposed to close market politicians pretending to be economists) will tell you, reducing the cost of entry increases competition, standardising a market has the ability to decrease the cost of an individual good (product) but raise the total value of the market. 802.11x is a great example of this, and so is Apple v MS in terms of how the protectionism of Apple created a SMALLER market for them as they insisted on total control of their IP.
Releasing IP is often smart for business. Morons who have political opinions masquerading as journalists really irritate me.
This is a great application, and one which probably has the largest benefits for the 3rd World and developing world. As with drugs however the issue is going to be the cost to those countries of deploying it (and having the reliable power network to support it).
How long before its cheap enough to not just be about making people in Florida feel more comfortable living in a swamp?
Microsoft and Linux distros have had a policy for some time of including more and more functionality in the base operating system, the latest example is the inclusion of "Local Workflow" in Windows Vista.
As a security expert do you think that bundling more and more increases or decreases the risks, and should both Windows and Linux distros be doing more to create reduced platforms that just act as good operating systems.
And not just Rebadged Intel Chips? I mean its quite a coincidence that these stories appear just after each other on Slashdot... a sure sign of an international conspiracy surely!
One thing you need to realise is that JRR Tolkein is more of a kids book (these days I know it wasn't when released) than a "Geek" book. The second thing you have to realise is that the UK and US definitions and groups of Geeks are very seperate.
Basically the UK can't hope to compare with the US Geeks in the "never getting laid stakes" and equally the literature is a little less "hard-core", hence things like the superb Terry Pratchett books get a high rating.
I always thought I was a geek until I went to my first US Developer conference...
This might be the first in the US... but its miles from being the first available elsewhere in the world. Usually the US is a mobile backwater that lags the rest of the world by around 2 years or so, in this case its around about that mark again.
Japan and Europe have had legal download services for a significant amount of time either via 3rd parties or more recently directly, when it was being talked of as "what is next" in this market.
So like Sprint now do NFL, Europe has been doing Football (Soccer) goals for 3-4 years. TV on your mobile... yup got that... loads of crappy shit you never want... got that... and you'll be getting it soon.
Its expensive over in Europe too against iTunes et al, but that is down to the "convenience" factor (and normally lower quality) of the mobile downloads.
But "first"? Not by a long chalk.
Errr you did read the bit that said that IPv4 can't support the number of people on the planet already? Also you do know that all you are talking about is a secondary addressing approach (network 1 : 1.2.1.2, sub-network : 2.3.3.3) which is already possible on IPv4, but requires an agreed standard for the secondary networking approach.
Oddly secondary networks have been considered during all of this, but it was easier to update the primary network addresses rather than formalising NATs which had other issues.
I am sure I would set such a machine off every time I walk through a security gate - I'm just a generally nervous person.
Where as someone who believes they are on their way to paradise on a mission from god could well be 100% they are doing the right thing, and therefore not nervous at all.
A standard line from Bill, "wait till you see Vista its better", "wait till you see compute its faster".
Amazingly the press continue to take Microsoft at face value on annoucing their version as better when they don't release what they announce.
So sure MS is better at supercomputers... I mean they have such a history in it, just look at the top 500 its just littered with MS boxes.
This isn't Windows v Linux, this is MS Research v IBM Research. The people behind the CPU, Relational databases, reliable messaging and of course the huge amount of work on massively scalable computers. If MS had real ability they'd be working with the big processing boys from the goverment and weather prediction areas.
I know that Symbian is a "bad" OS, after all its only a reliable ground up operating system that has had the misfortune to have been created in Europe and be closed source.
But given that it has nearly 3/4 of the market and is clearly the dominant player, and its supported by companies that embrace open-source... shouldn't there be more OSS support for Symbian rather than an obsession with having Linux as the OS?
Think of Symbian as the Mac OSX for mobiles, but with Windows Marketshare.
Nope I thought not. Fibre-attach is the standard way that people connect from a server to a SAN, its very expensive at the moment and its much easier to use things like USB 2.0 or Firewire 2.0 as they have much lower production costs.
So its already invented but you probably can't afford it.
Interestingly of course SAP has actually had a history of doing Open Source, including releasing its own product (sapdb, now MaxDB) and certifying R/3 on Open Source platforms including Linux, and the MaxDB database. They probably also use some of the Apache libraries in Netweaver.
So far from breaking their product suite SAP actually enable you to rely on Open Source to deliver the sort of availability you'd expect from a proper ERP.
But not much, 2 weeks doesn't even get you to Mars... I thought most of the theories of life coming from other planets were based around elements being embedded inside rocks etc rather than being directly exposed to space.
But it is nice to see Europe continuing to treat Space as a learning experience rather than a PR stunt.
And yet if Japan was to release films claiming to be "Hollywood Films", music that was "New Orleans Jazz" or selling "Texas BBQ Steak Mix" there would be little question of them cynically ripping off an American idea just to make a quick buck...
Manga is Japanese, in the same was as Champagne is French, you can make it the same way, it might even taste the same... but no matter what you do its not the real thing.
Pepsi ain't Coke folks...
I write portable code, I'm writing on Windows, deploying to an AMD Solaris box and the target is SPARC. I've also done this same "magic" trick on AS/400 and OS/360...
Now me I just use the tool designed for the job of being platform portable, rather than trying to invent new standard headers (STL anyone?) that address a fraction of the problem.
Want to do sound on multiple platforms? Graphics? Business Process? Then use Java, its what it was designed to do. And to all those muppets who shout "its not possible"... the deploy has just finished and within 30 seconds its running on two different platforms.
Its intelligent design...
Of course Windows could be used as the counter argument.
For me the big issue here is that the aim of a central server that controls all of your media means that people will have to all become system adminstrators. This is hardly likely, the idea of my Wife worrying about menus to record programmes off the TV is not the sort of thing I look forwards to. Something like a TiVo is perfect as its a TV device that intends to record programmes and nothing else. My wife's iPod is perfect to listen to music on even if there is the irritant of having to connect it to the PC (and this is an irritant for her) and finally actually having paper photos to hand around is what her and her friends like doing. We could have a digital home with me as the sys admin... but my wife would hate it.
The alternative of lots of seperate devices that do their jobs pretty well and have to communicate together clearly requires too much collaboration and innovation for those companies pushing the "Digital Home" vision around a central server.
Media Centre is a great example of a company trying to force an idea it think SHOULD make it billions down the throats of people who don't want it. Give us loosely coupled devices that work together seemlessly not videos that chase us around the house or a central server that needs constant administration and updating.
The biggest thing here isn't the stored procs et al... its that SAP, you know the worlds biggest enterprise software vendor... will CERTIFY its application on MySQL (when using the old SAPdb stuff). This means that organisations that spend MILLIONS on SAP systems can get support if they run it on OSS.
That is the big deal, not functionality its about the support. MySQL might be the poor relation to Postgres in terms of functionality, but MySQL has a MUCH big best friend who can open doors where functionality doesn't count.
This is a real moment IMO, as a well known OSS database has a massive seal of approval from one of the most famous for reliability vendors in the market.
Next time your boss says that OSS can't do a DB, tell him that SAP disagrees.