I'm not ignorant of OS X - I actually have commecial shipping OS X software - but to my knowledge, you can't use AppleScript directly from a command shell, can you?
This is an excellent idea, bringing this to the shell.
If you look at the command prompt in VS.NET you'll see some of this technology today - you can type "Project." and get a list of things you can do with the current project... If you want to do a build you can type "Build.BatchBuild". If you type "b.b", down arrow, return, you've done the same thing with 5 keystrokes (the autocomplete fills in the rest). Same number of keystrokes that typing "make" and hitting return takes.
Difference between this and typing "make" is that when I type "Build." I get a list of things I can do with the current build - it becomes an object oriented command line. It's pretty nice once you work with it a bit - You want to work with the current project (add a file to it for example) type Project. and look at the list - same for File. Debug. etc
Interesting thing about this new shell that Microsoft is talking about is it will take capabilities ALREADY exposed by most Windows apps (through OLE automation) and make them available at the command line. If I could type this in a shell:
Then I can print a Word document, using Word, from shell (and without ever seeing Word) using the same scripting interface available to VBScript (etc).
Most Windows apps support scripting (even non-MS apps). It's getting at this functionality from the shell that's new here - something I don't think there's any Unix equivalent of yet.
Still, the article is a pretty negative one considering that I don't think there's a better response HP could have made.. Most companies deny the existence of problems.
I have an iPaq and I'm still miffed about the fact that you can't push more than one button at a time (makes playing games on it very difficult). Compaq doesn't think it's a problem.
It's a shame that Slashdot linked to an article about the Jornada's problem that didn't mention HP's awesome response: Offering a full refund to anyone who bought one. Palm is coming nowhere close to this.
Once a musician signs with a label and agrees to have their stuff recorded and sold on little shiny plastic things, it becomes content. Musicians are never forced to do so, and you're never forced to buy it.
The record companies find musicians, pay for the production of their stuff, and then get it into stores worldwide. Unless the musicians were filthy stinking rich already, that probably wouldn't happen without the record companies. Many artists don't get rich off their music but it does pay the bills or supplement other income. Getting paid to play music and go on tour is a dream for a lot of people.
Yes, any musician can put their stuff on mp3.com and go play in local bars.. but unless your stuff is really, really good nobody's going to hear it. Really, who's going to notice yet another mp3. So you sign your rights over to the record company, they send you on tour, promote your music, get it on the radio, lots of people hear your music, and maybe you succeed and maybe you don't - but it's a chance you wouldn't have without them.
EverQuest's huge 3D world is divided into around Zones (over 200 I believe), and moving from zone to zone involves basically stopping the game and loading all the data for the next zone, a process that can easily take over a minute. Any monsters chasing you in the previous zone forget about you when you zone, and monsters right on the other side of the zone line that you couldn't see may be hitting you once you step across it. Hardly seamless.
Microsoft has a ton of software patents and whatnot that they could be using to go after competitors but I was under the impression that generally, they don't do this. Since you're saying they "use lawyers as much as possible" can you give me a few examples?
My computer already knows who I talk to, where I go, and how I work. If it didn't, well, we'd all be using UDP instead of TCP, and I wouldn't be able to see what's on the screen.
Putting a ton of code in a page is a pretty silly thing to do, even in an example.. but ASP.NET makes it easy to do code-behind (and the tools do it by default).
Write a "Web Form" with Visual Studio.NET and you get a.aspx page which is basically marked up HTML (ala JSP) with the code implemented as a class that gets compiled into bytecode.
Best thing about this is the ASP.NET code has access to the same class library as any other app.. so it's really easy to do things like get a graphics object, render some stuff into it, convert it into a jpeg and stream it back to the client. Stuff that'd be nearly impossible with ASP.
(There are toolkits to do this for ASP, the same as there are for Perl and other languages - the difference in this case is that the ASP.NET code is calling the same drawing functions that any other non-web application would be calling.. not calling through a wrapper etc).
Maybe you should try using it before you try to say something about it. Using the.NET framework you never see the Windows API - you see all new stuff. Pretty nice stuff too.
Just as example implementations of a whole ton of core CS concepts and an example implementation of a working VM the Rotor source is useful. Go read some of it.
- Steve
Why this happens..
on
Version Fatigue
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One of the main reasons this happens is as a result of focus group testing and other usability testing on the current version.
If you take the current version of most software and do some usability testing with new users, you'll probably find that there are things that could be done better.
But when you make those changes, to please the new users, you're messing with the users who already know how the thing works.
Microsoft Visual C++ is a perfect example. With each new version they move things around - but they have "compatibility" modes for people who liked the old way. Even with the newest Visual Studio.NET you can still pick the old VC 2.x keyboard layout and use it.
That's a pretty good solution, as long as your app is customizable enough that you can use the customization to emulate the previous version...
The only real problem with this solution is that it makes it so nobody else can use your customized version. If I go over to my co-workers desk to try to fix a bug, I can never remember what hotkey to hit to get it to compile..
(Maybe the solution to this particular problem is to make it easy to set a "guest" profile that temporarily overrides the current profile).
Windows is a huge victim of this problem too - the whole redesigned Start menu in XP annoys most existing users, but new users (users new to computers, what few there are - I helped a friend "get online" and got to watch this) seem to like it..
The JVM that Microsoft included in Windows was only "incompatible" in that it extended the Java standard. It wasn't incompatible in the sense that some Java stuff wouldn't work on it - it was incompatible in that you could write code that would run on it that wouldn't run on any other VM.
If Sun had let them keep shipping it, but stuck to its "Pure Java" type branding, then any "Pure Java" program would have run on Windows on the Microsoft VM.
This would have been good for everyone, I think - sure you could write something for Microsoft's JVM that wouldn't run on Sun's JVM.. but I can still do that today if I really want to (tie my code to a particular VM or a particular set of native code).
Instead we have the situation we have now, which is pretty bad for Java. Maybe Sun should supply Microsoft with a VM and give Microsoft a free license to ship it - that is if Sun really does want everyone to have access to Java on an "out of the box" Windows installation..
(Making Microsoft pay for the right to ship Sun's JVM would be silly since Microsoft spent the time and money developing their own JVM to ship with Windows.. and it was a pretty decent one too).
Problem is HTML intentionally leaves some presentation issues up to the browser, and Netscape/Mozilla and IE have made different choices. It isn't always that one browser is "right" and the other is "wrong".
When all you have is an encrypted SSL session how are you going to figure out if its a legitimate bit of ebusiness with a related company or someone in your company uploading your entire company customer database?
This is supposedly referring to the dangers of.NET - but if you allow an encrypted SSL session to send data outside your company, you don't need.NET or any other particular technology to upload sensitive company data.
The right way to do it would probably be to require SOAP connections to be done unencrypted on the inside, encrypted at the firewall and communicated externally that way.. Then the firewall gets the ability to examine the data before encrypting it and sending it out (or not).
HTTP supports posting data and files through encrypted sessions - you don't need anything more than a copy of Netscape to send a sensitive document out in a way the firewall can't prevent (assuming you allow any outgoing SSL connections.. and most companies do).
SOAP doesn't require that it be done over port 80 HTTP; that's one of the implementations but not the only one, and if you don't like it, don't use it. It's really easy to move it to another port, for example, or use a different transport completely like SMTP, straight TCP, or even Jabber.
Cool thing about people braggin about uptime is it tells you when they last patched their kernel... If someone says they have 100 days uptime then it means they're missing more than three months worth of of patches..
We don't need a special purpose filesystem for this; just one that supports metadata. I know NTFS does; do any of the common Linux filesystems?
Either way you're going to need a custom tool to do searching and whatnot, the custom tool might as well just index the stuff in the ID3 tag and work with an existing filesystem.
The current.NET framework works fine on 98 and even works on 95 (though it's not officially supported).
They've released full source for a BSD and Win32 reference implementation of the base stuff including compilers, JIT, even the build tools (though not the GUI or web services stuff) which should make building a compatible Unix version much easier.
"One of the key considerations that went into the design of the Rotor's shared source license is that a programmer should be able to look at the Rotor source without becoming tainted."
It's pretty simple. Users seem to like running Microsoft's software, and Microsoft has creating a whole new environment in which software will run.
It's not a big leap to imagine that in the future Microsoft will release software that users will want to use, that will run in the CLR.
If the CLR exists on the Macintosh, then Mac users can run it.
I'm not talking about Word or Excel here because those exist for the Mac today - but plenty of other apps (like Microsoft Money for example) exist only for Windows. It's not real likely Microsoft is going to develop any desktop applications in Java (the only real alternative when it comes to cross platform binaries) but it seems like a given they will for.NET.
So (down the road a bit) if you can run.NET software, you have a whole lot more software to choose from. Having more software available to Mac users will help Apple sell Mac's. That's why Apple should care (even if you personally don't).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not ignorant of OS X - I actually have commecial shipping OS X software - but to my knowledge, you can't use AppleScript directly from a command shell, can you?
Scripting isn't the same as a command prompt...
This is an excellent idea, bringing this to the shell.
l eOpen "my.doc"
If you look at the command prompt in VS.NET you'll see some of this technology today - you can type "Project." and get a list of things you can do with the current project... If you want to do a build you can type "Build.BatchBuild". If you type "b.b", down arrow, return, you've done the same thing with 5 keystrokes (the autocomplete fills in the rest). Same number of keystrokes that typing "make" and hitting return takes.
Difference between this and typing "make" is that when I type "Build." I get a list of things I can do with the current build - it becomes an object oriented command line. It's pretty nice once you work with it a bit - You want to work with the current project (add a file to it for example) type Project. and look at the list - same for File. Debug. etc
Interesting thing about this new shell that Microsoft is talking about is it will take capabilities ALREADY exposed by most Windows apps (through OLE automation) and make them available at the command line. If I could type this in a shell:
$Word=CreateObject("Word.Application")
Word.Fi
Word.Print
Word.Quit
Then I can print a Word document, using Word, from shell (and without ever seeing Word) using the same scripting interface available to VBScript (etc).
Most Windows apps support scripting (even non-MS apps). It's getting at this functionality from the shell that's new here - something I don't think there's any Unix equivalent of yet.
- Steve
Ah yes you're right, I missed that.
Still, the article is a pretty negative one considering that I don't think there's a better response HP could have made.. Most companies deny the existence of problems.
I have an iPaq and I'm still miffed about the fact that you can't push more than one button at a time (makes playing games on it very difficult). Compaq doesn't think it's a problem.
= Steve
It's a shame that Slashdot linked to an article about the Jornada's problem that didn't mention HP's awesome response: Offering a full refund to anyone who bought one. Palm is coming nowhere close to this.
- Steve
My rackmount server is going to suck at 3D games. Crap.
Once a musician signs with a label and agrees to have their stuff recorded and sold on little shiny plastic things, it becomes content. Musicians are never forced to do so, and you're never forced to buy it.
The record companies find musicians, pay for the production of their stuff, and then get it into stores worldwide. Unless the musicians were filthy stinking rich already, that probably wouldn't happen without the record companies. Many artists don't get rich off their music but it does pay the bills or supplement other income. Getting paid to play music and go on tour is a dream for a lot of people.
Yes, any musician can put their stuff on mp3.com and go play in local bars.. but unless your stuff is really, really good nobody's going to hear it. Really, who's going to notice yet another mp3. So you sign your rights over to the record company, they send you on tour, promote your music, get it on the radio, lots of people hear your music, and maybe you succeed and maybe you don't - but it's a chance you wouldn't have without them.
- Steve
EverQuest's huge 3D world is divided into around Zones (over 200 I believe), and moving from zone to zone involves basically stopping the game and loading all the data for the next zone, a process that can easily take over a minute. Any monsters chasing you in the previous zone forget about you when you zone, and monsters right on the other side of the zone line that you couldn't see may be hitting you once you step across it. Hardly seamless.
- Steve
>use lawyers as much as possible
When has Microsoft done this?
Microsoft has a ton of software patents and whatnot that they could be using to go after competitors but I was under the impression that generally, they don't do this. Since you're saying they "use lawyers as much as possible" can you give me a few examples?
- Steve
I'd guesss "WU" is more likely "Windows Update" than "Windows Usage"..
- Steve
My computer already knows who I talk to, where I go, and how I work. If it didn't, well, we'd all be using UDP instead of TCP, and I wouldn't be able to see what's on the screen.
- Steve
Putting a ton of code in a page is a pretty silly thing to do, even in an example.. but ASP.NET makes it easy to do code-behind (and the tools do it by default).
.aspx page which is basically marked up HTML (ala JSP) with the code implemented as a class that gets compiled into bytecode.
Write a "Web Form" with Visual Studio.NET and you get a
Best thing about this is the ASP.NET code has access to the same class library as any other app.. so it's really easy to do things like get a graphics object, render some stuff into it, convert it into a jpeg and stream it back to the client. Stuff that'd be nearly impossible with ASP.
(There are toolkits to do this for ASP, the same as there are for Perl and other languages - the difference in this case is that the ASP.NET code is calling the same drawing functions that any other non-web application would be calling.. not calling through a wrapper etc).
- Steve
A spasdic mess of Windows APIs?
.NET framework you never see the Windows API - you see all new stuff. Pretty nice stuff too.
Maybe you should try using it before you try to say something about it. Using the
Just as example implementations of a whole ton of core CS concepts and an example implementation of a working VM the Rotor source is useful. Go read some of it.
- Steve
One of the main reasons this happens is as a result of focus group testing and other usability testing on the current version.
If you take the current version of most software and do some usability testing with new users, you'll probably find that there are things that could be done better.
But when you make those changes, to please the new users, you're messing with the users who already know how the thing works.
Microsoft Visual C++ is a perfect example. With each new version they move things around - but they have "compatibility" modes for people who liked the old way. Even with the newest Visual Studio.NET you can still pick the old VC 2.x keyboard layout and use it.
That's a pretty good solution, as long as your app is customizable enough that you can use the customization to emulate the previous version...
The only real problem with this solution is that it makes it so nobody else can use your customized version. If I go over to my co-workers desk to try to fix a bug, I can never remember what hotkey to hit to get it to compile..
(Maybe the solution to this particular problem is to make it easy to set a "guest" profile that temporarily overrides the current profile).
Windows is a huge victim of this problem too - the whole redesigned Start menu in XP annoys most existing users, but new users (users new to computers, what few there are - I helped a friend "get online" and got to watch this) seem to like it..
- Steve
I don't believe RMI was available when Microsoft shipped their first VM.. and JNI? If a developer's using JNI then he's not WORA anyway.
- Steve
The JVM that Microsoft included in Windows was only "incompatible" in that it extended the Java standard. It wasn't incompatible in the sense that some Java stuff wouldn't work on it - it was incompatible in that you could write code that would run on it that wouldn't run on any other VM.
If Sun had let them keep shipping it, but stuck to its "Pure Java" type branding, then any "Pure Java" program would have run on Windows on the Microsoft VM.
This would have been good for everyone, I think - sure you could write something for Microsoft's JVM that wouldn't run on Sun's JVM.. but I can still do that today if I really want to (tie my code to a particular VM or a particular set of native code).
Instead we have the situation we have now, which is pretty bad for Java. Maybe Sun should supply Microsoft with a VM and give Microsoft a free license to ship it - that is if Sun really does want everyone to have access to Java on an "out of the box" Windows installation..
(Making Microsoft pay for the right to ship Sun's JVM would be silly since Microsoft spent the time and money developing their own JVM to ship with Windows.. and it was a pretty decent one too).
- Steve
Problem is HTML intentionally leaves some presentation issues up to the browser, and Netscape/Mozilla and IE have made different choices. It isn't always that one browser is "right" and the other is "wrong".
- Steve
When all you have is an encrypted SSL session how are you going to figure out if its a legitimate bit of ebusiness with a related company or someone in your company uploading your entire company customer database?
This is supposedly referring to the dangers of .NET - but if you allow an encrypted SSL session to send data outside your company, you don't need .NET or any other particular technology to upload sensitive company data.
The right way to do it would probably be to require SOAP connections to be done unencrypted on the inside, encrypted at the firewall and communicated externally that way.. Then the firewall gets the ability to examine the data before encrypting it and sending it out (or not).
HTTP supports posting data and files through encrypted sessions - you don't need anything more than a copy of Netscape to send a sensitive document out in a way the firewall can't prevent (assuming you allow any outgoing SSL connections.. and most companies do).
SOAP doesn't require that it be done over port 80 HTTP; that's one of the implementations but not the only one, and if you don't like it, don't use it. It's really easy to move it to another port, for example, or use a different transport completely like SMTP, straight TCP, or even Jabber.
- Steve
I've never seen anyone state that the OS crashed - just that their proprietary application crashed (which would be enough to cripple the ship).
Or did I miss something?
Cool thing about people braggin about uptime is it tells you when they last patched their kernel... If someone says they have 100 days uptime then it means they're missing more than three months worth of of patches..
- Steve
We don't need a special purpose filesystem for this; just one that supports metadata. I know NTFS does; do any of the common Linux filesystems?
Either way you're going to need a custom tool to do searching and whatnot, the custom tool might as well just index the stuff in the ID3 tag and work with an existing filesystem.
- Steve
The current .NET framework works fine on 98 and even works on 95 (though it's not officially supported).
They've released full source for a BSD and Win32 reference implementation of the base stuff including compilers, JIT, even the build tools (though not the GUI or web services stuff) which should make building a compatible Unix version much easier.
Isn't that basically what this is:
Interfaces and Scripting Objects, from the MSHTML reference docs on MSDN.
Reimplement those interfaces, replace the GUIDs in the registry with pointers to your own modules, and you've replaced IE.
- Steve
"One of the key considerations that went into the design of the Rotor's shared source license is that a programmer should be able to look at the Rotor source without becoming tainted."
So much for that particular conspiracy theory.
- Steve
It's pretty simple. Users seem to like running Microsoft's software, and Microsoft has creating a whole new environment in which software will run.
.NET.
.NET software, you have a whole lot more software to choose from. Having more software available to Mac users will help Apple sell Mac's. That's why Apple should care (even if you personally don't).
It's not a big leap to imagine that in the future Microsoft will release software that users will want to use, that will run in the CLR.
If the CLR exists on the Macintosh, then Mac users can run it.
I'm not talking about Word or Excel here because those exist for the Mac today - but plenty of other apps (like Microsoft Money for example) exist only for Windows. It's not real likely Microsoft is going to develop any desktop applications in Java (the only real alternative when it comes to cross platform binaries) but it seems like a given they will for
So (down the road a bit) if you can run
- Steve
Someone reported it to Microsoft and they admitted it's a bug. This is a clash?
- Steve