I guess these big software vendors are going to have to recognize that when you can get it for free, $100 aint cheap any more.:P
It's not free. The company still has to pay for training, support, and maintenence, and those costs mean you need more IT labor and more support labor (possibly even developers) than you would normally require. I'm willing to bet that you will spend way over $4000 per year in time billed supporting and maintaining your current systems, which is what Sun would charge for 40 users.
If I spend $500,000 on a server with the hardware to support 4000 users, I damn sure dont want to spend another 400,000 dollars on licensing (basically nothing, air, a slip of paper).
And that's why you're not an IT manager. You see, hardware is pretty damn useless without the appropriate software to run on it. There are 2 ways to get that software:
Write it yourself - a great idea except you have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this, as well as pay all those developers to continue supporting the software for as long as it's being used. Oh, and while it's being initially developed, of course, you're still stuck with lumps of useless hardware even though you're shelling out tens of thousands of dollars every month to develop something that will run on it.
Buy or lease software from a commercial vendor, like Sun. Unlike the IT manager, they have more than one customer that wants this kind of software. So, their development and support costs are amortized, and they can charge less per user than it costs you to develop and support it internally. And there's also the added benefit of having all those employees that would have been stuck developing your internal application now being free to work on more useful things, like whatever products your company actually sells.
I guess the other "option" is hoping that there is already an open source/free project that exactly matches your company's needs. There aren't too many of those that I am aware of, aside from the major OS projects (i.e. Linux), Apache, Samba, and a few development tools. And many companies do take advantage of these projects when they exist. But most of the time such a project does not exist, and you're stuck with the options I've outlined above.
Just so you know, C# is a (open) language standard, and has very little to do with the.NET framework other than they were announced at the same time, and developed by the same people.
The.NET framework isn't a language so much as, well, a framework. It's very much like the Java platform if you didn't limit yourself to programming for it only in Java. Only the.NET platform has the advantage of the developers having observed all the mistakes made with the Java platform, so they managed to avoid most of those and create some new ones of their own instead. Java, by the way, also fits your description of a language with basic C (well, more like C++) syntax and structures.
As an aside, there are also some experimental Java bytecode compilers out there that compile from other languages than Java. But Java doesn't have the resources of Microsoft pushing it forward, and Sun doesn't seem to be interested in letting go of their platform any more than MS does.
To further back up this statement, I'd also like to point out that every single proposal for government funded research & development has to provide a plan for commercialization and civilian applications for the technology. This requirement is not taken lightly; proposals that do not adequately address this point are not even considered for funding.
This example is stupid. You are saying that it is much easier to use a third-party library than to write your own implementation. Well, duh! And it makes no difference whether you access the library via COM or plain C++ / Java / whatever interface.
No, you are both oversimplifying what I said, and putting words in my mouth. What I'm saying is that thanks to the COM interface architecture, there are ubiquitous components that can all talk to each other with relative ease, making stuff like adding a scripting language relatively painless. Conversely, I have used C and C++ libraries for doing that stuff as well, and it is anything but painless. It's better than coding everything by hand, but not as easy as COM and WSH make it.
There! Now we get to the real reason windows programmers use COM: they are forced to!
Huh? Most programs expose a COM API exclusively because it gives you the most functionality for the effort required. It isn't costly to implement, you can access it from any language with relative ease, and it's strongly supported by the OS. Nobody is forced to use COM, and frankly I would love it if I could use COM on UNIX, too. It would make UNIX component programming much easier than it is. CORBA is a clusterfuck that really takes a lot of work to implement even if you are using the latest whiz-bang commercial libraries. I spent a lot of time doing CORBA and other component integration before I finally learned COM. COM is downright simple by comparison.
There are other ways to do it. There is no reason why excel couldn't have a scripting library to link with your application. It's no different from linking with WSH. But Microsoft chose COM...
And there's no reason UNIX apps couldn't support COM, either. It's an open standard, and IMHO it's better than what you suggest since it allows my to dynamically declare and use interfaces. Meaning, I don't have to link to the programs I wish to integrate with. Instead I can just say "create an instance of this object" when I want to use it, and the OS takes care of the rest-it figures out if it needs to link to a library, start an executable, or whatever.
Actually I *did* have an acoustic coupler. Yours couldn't do 300 baud? I was happy when I upgraded to a modem that just had an RJ-45 jack since it improved my error rate quite a bit.
COM makes programmers jump through hoops to achieve what plain vanilla C++ (mostly) already provides. Anyone who has ever tried to do a large project using COM (no, that little DirectX Tetris game doesn't count) can attest to the pain and suffering the architecture inflicts on those unlucky enough to have to use it.
COM can definitely be challenging sometimes when things don't work properly, but in my experience it makes my life easier much more often than it makes my life more difficult.
For example, I'd say it's MUCH easier to use the COM-reliant WSH (Windows Scripting Host) to add scripting capabilities to my application than it is to write my own interpreters for all those languages, or make my own scripting language. I've done both, and using WSH takes almost no time or effort, whereas writing my own backend and/or language compiler/interpreter can take days.
If I want to integrate my application with other windows apps, COM is pretty much the only way to go. Some programs MIGHT offer a native C++ or Java API, but 99% of the time the applications I have to integrate with expose a COM API exclusively. So, writing my app using vanilla C++ doesn't do much since I have to do all that COM programming anyway.
Similarly, if I want other programs to be able to talk to mine, exposing a COM API is usually my best bet, since it allows people to choose from a variety of languages, perform rapid prototyping quickly and easily, and be able to quickly integrate my application into other applications I hadn't even considered. Anyone can pick up a bit of VBScript or VBA and figure out how to use my application through its COM API. I've had managers muddle through simple excel macros to control my software and do some great customization that way, but a C/C++/Java API means only other programmers will be able to take advantage of that feature. IMHO There's no point in developing features only a select few users will be able to take advantage of.
And getting back to WSH, this also means that users don't have to be programmers to use other windows programs from my application, either. Want to make my app export data directly to Excel and plot it? No problem! Record a macro in Excel and you're halfway there!
When all bets are in, I'd much rather have COM than not have it. All of the hoops you refer to are what make COM so easy to use from a higher level of abstraction, which was the goal in the first place. The places where it runs into problems are generally where the spec (IMHO) is ill-defined (or undefined) such as how to effectively handle multi-threaded apps talking to single-threaded apps and vice-versa, determining how and when to display a user interface for a program that is being controlled via COM, determining how and when a program should clean-up and exit that is being controlled by its API (e.g. some programs require you explicitly to call a "quit" function, even though releasing the object should be sufficient), and the semantics for getting/using/releasing COM objects for programs that users are already running. Despite those flaws, I still get a lot of mileage out of COM, and I spend a lot more time making useful things happen than being mired in the tedious bits.
Holy crap I remember when I finally got a 2400 baud modem after suffering with a 300 baud "brick" modem for a couple of years. It was like the Renaissance. All of a sudden I could actually send and receive files faster than I could type them by hand!
these vague patents... or more specifically, a patent without an actual implementation
It has nothing to do with whether there is an actual implementation. Patent law is all about the claims. If the claims are vague, then the domain the patent covers is also vague. Claims are deliberately worded ambiguously in the hopes that it will catch not only the implementation discussed within the patent, but alternate implementations or even other completely unrelated technologies as well. This makes the patent much more powerful and far-reaching, as we have seen.
Most high-end software (e.g. engineering software) has what are called "floating licenses" for corporate and university LANs that accomplish this task in a much more structured manner than pinging every computer on the network looking for itself. In a typical setup it connects to the license server and checks out a license (like a library book), then when the application closes it checks the license back in.
Naturally, since he makes his living in the music business, Bill is not 100% in favor of unrestricted filesharing.
There are plenty of people who are in the music business that fully support unrestricted filesharing. For example DJ Z-Trip has put out a few CDs and actively encourages copying and sharing his music with friends during his live performances and on the radio.
So, I suppose my question is: If people like DJ Z-Trip can make a good living while still fully supporting free distribution of music, why can't everyone else?
How do you think the S/N ratio will change when MS adds out-of-the-box pimping of NNTP? All those people who post on/. and other web forums will have a brand new place that's easy to troll.
Investor sentiment CAUSES market movements. So every single market movement ever was "predicted" by the majority of investors.
Really? I'll let you explain how the share prices of...say...Amazon falling predicted some cataclysmic event in the company before it happened. If there is any connection at all (sometimes there isn't) share prices usually fall *after* something bad has happened, not before.
Look at how unpredictably the stock markets behave already. When was the last time a major drop or surge in the NYSE or NASDAQ was accurately predicted by the majority of investors?
At best this kind of analysis helps you see trends over a long time period, but I don't see how that can help the pentagon except when they ask for more funding (See! Carbombings will increase by 50% over the next 5 years! Please give us money).
I'm quite sure I'm not the only one who doesn't have english as primary language.
Now, while this certainly doesn't *preclude* them from being American (there are plenty of Americans whose primary language is not English, after all), I'd suspect they are not. That being said, at least in first world countries the original poster is somehwat correct; most children in first world countries spend some number of years studying English. Whether they are capable of conversing in the language is another story.
However thanks to the huge populations accounted for by the third world, the number of English speakers per capita in the world is fairly small.
Native Japanese speakers new to the US *used* to think it was a bank (the word for bank in Japanese is "ginko"), so I'd have some fun screwing with them, taking them to Kinko's and telling them to ask to open an account. But now they have Kinko's in Japan so that little joke doesn't work anymore.
Screw bringing laptops and PDAs to class. I can't think of many classes I took that didn't involve me copying pictures and diagrams off the board, which I have yet to see handled well on a laptop or PDA, although some of the tablet PCs come close.
If we need a greater than 2-party discussion about the lecture there's thing thing called "voice" that people have been using since the dawn of structured education which seems to work pretty well in my experience. Plus, this also happens to involve the professor in the discussion which helps to clarify points, and pace the lecture appropriately rather than having the lecture blaze on while you and your buddies are trying to figure out a point he stated 20 minutes ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Duh. They're going to use the same colors as the terror index: Red, Scarlet, Crimson, Cherry, and Yellow.
It's not free. The company still has to pay for training, support, and maintenence, and those costs mean you need more IT labor and more support labor (possibly even developers) than you would normally require. I'm willing to bet that you will spend way over $4000 per year in time billed supporting and maintaining your current systems, which is what Sun would charge for 40 users.
And that's why you're not an IT manager. You see, hardware is pretty damn useless without the appropriate software to run on it. There are 2 ways to get that software:
- Write it yourself - a great idea except you have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this, as well as pay all those developers to continue supporting the software for as long as it's being used. Oh, and while it's being initially developed, of course, you're still stuck with lumps of useless hardware even though you're shelling out tens of thousands of dollars every month to develop something that will run on it.
- Buy or lease software from a commercial vendor, like Sun. Unlike the IT manager, they have more than one customer that wants this kind of software. So, their development and support costs are amortized, and they can charge less per user than it costs you to develop and support it internally. And there's also the added benefit of having all those employees that would have been stuck developing your internal application now being free to work on more useful things, like whatever products your company actually sells.
I guess the other "option" is hoping that there is already an open source/free project that exactly matches your company's needs. There aren't too many of those that I am aware of, aside from the major OS projects (i.e. Linux), Apache, Samba, and a few development tools. And many companies do take advantage of these projects when they exist. But most of the time such a project does not exist, and you're stuck with the options I've outlined above.Just so you know, C# is a (open) language standard, and has very little to do with the .NET framework other than they were announced at the same time, and developed by the same people.
.NET framework isn't a language so much as, well, a framework. It's very much like the Java platform if you didn't limit yourself to programming for it only in Java. Only the .NET platform has the advantage of the developers having observed all the mistakes made with the Java platform, so they managed to avoid most of those and create some new ones of their own instead. Java, by the way, also fits your description of a language with basic C (well, more like C++) syntax and structures.
The
As an aside, there are also some experimental Java bytecode compilers out there that compile from other languages than Java. But Java doesn't have the resources of Microsoft pushing it forward, and Sun doesn't seem to be interested in letting go of their platform any more than MS does.
You turn ONE LITTLE bus full of nuns into burning wreckage and that's all everyone talks about. "Hey AL! How many hail Marys did ya get?"
To further back up this statement, I'd also like to point out that every single proposal for government funded research & development has to provide a plan for commercialization and civilian applications for the technology. This requirement is not taken lightly; proposals that do not adequately address this point are not even considered for funding.
No, you are both oversimplifying what I said, and putting words in my mouth. What I'm saying is that thanks to the COM interface architecture, there are ubiquitous components that can all talk to each other with relative ease, making stuff like adding a scripting language relatively painless. Conversely, I have used C and C++ libraries for doing that stuff as well, and it is anything but painless. It's better than coding everything by hand, but not as easy as COM and WSH make it.
Huh? Most programs expose a COM API exclusively because it gives you the most functionality for the effort required. It isn't costly to implement, you can access it from any language with relative ease, and it's strongly supported by the OS. Nobody is forced to use COM, and frankly I would love it if I could use COM on UNIX, too. It would make UNIX component programming much easier than it is. CORBA is a clusterfuck that really takes a lot of work to implement even if you are using the latest whiz-bang commercial libraries. I spent a lot of time doing CORBA and other component integration before I finally learned COM. COM is downright simple by comparison.
And there's no reason UNIX apps couldn't support COM, either. It's an open standard, and IMHO it's better than what you suggest since it allows my to dynamically declare and use interfaces. Meaning, I don't have to link to the programs I wish to integrate with. Instead I can just say "create an instance of this object" when I want to use it, and the OS takes care of the rest-it figures out if it needs to link to a library, start an executable, or whatever.
Actually I *did* have an acoustic coupler. Yours couldn't do 300 baud? I was happy when I upgraded to a modem that just had an RJ-45 jack since it improved my error rate quite a bit.
COM can definitely be challenging sometimes when things don't work properly, but in my experience it makes my life easier much more often than it makes my life more difficult.
For example, I'd say it's MUCH easier to use the COM-reliant WSH (Windows Scripting Host) to add scripting capabilities to my application than it is to write my own interpreters for all those languages, or make my own scripting language. I've done both, and using WSH takes almost no time or effort, whereas writing my own backend and/or language compiler/interpreter can take days.
If I want to integrate my application with other windows apps, COM is pretty much the only way to go. Some programs MIGHT offer a native C++ or Java API, but 99% of the time the applications I have to integrate with expose a COM API exclusively. So, writing my app using vanilla C++ doesn't do much since I have to do all that COM programming anyway.
Similarly, if I want other programs to be able to talk to mine, exposing a COM API is usually my best bet, since it allows people to choose from a variety of languages, perform rapid prototyping quickly and easily, and be able to quickly integrate my application into other applications I hadn't even considered. Anyone can pick up a bit of VBScript or VBA and figure out how to use my application through its COM API. I've had managers muddle through simple excel macros to control my software and do some great customization that way, but a C/C++/Java API means only other programmers will be able to take advantage of that feature. IMHO There's no point in developing features only a select few users will be able to take advantage of.
And getting back to WSH, this also means that users don't have to be programmers to use other windows programs from my application, either. Want to make my app export data directly to Excel and plot it? No problem! Record a macro in Excel and you're halfway there!
When all bets are in, I'd much rather have COM than not have it. All of the hoops you refer to are what make COM so easy to use from a higher level of abstraction, which was the goal in the first place. The places where it runs into problems are generally where the spec (IMHO) is ill-defined (or undefined) such as how to effectively handle multi-threaded apps talking to single-threaded apps and vice-versa, determining how and when to display a user interface for a program that is being controlled via COM, determining how and when a program should clean-up and exit that is being controlled by its API (e.g. some programs require you explicitly to call a "quit" function, even though releasing the object should be sufficient), and the semantics for getting/using/releasing COM objects for programs that users are already running. Despite those flaws, I still get a lot of mileage out of COM, and I spend a lot more time making useful things happen than being mired in the tedious bits.
Holy crap I remember when I finally got a 2400 baud modem after suffering with a 300 baud "brick" modem for a couple of years. It was like the Renaissance. All of a sudden I could actually send and receive files faster than I could type them by hand!
It has nothing to do with whether there is an actual implementation. Patent law is all about the claims. If the claims are vague, then the domain the patent covers is also vague. Claims are deliberately worded ambiguously in the hopes that it will catch not only the implementation discussed within the patent, but alternate implementations or even other completely unrelated technologies as well. This makes the patent much more powerful and far-reaching, as we have seen.
Most high-end software (e.g. engineering software) has what are called "floating licenses" for corporate and university LANs that accomplish this task in a much more structured manner than pinging every computer on the network looking for itself. In a typical setup it connects to the license server and checks out a license (like a library book), then when the application closes it checks the license back in.
I can get paid to sit around all day and smoke pot? Where do I sign up?
There are plenty of people who are in the music business that fully support unrestricted filesharing. For example DJ Z-Trip has put out a few CDs and actively encourages copying and sharing his music with friends during his live performances and on the radio.
So, I suppose my question is: If people like DJ Z-Trip can make a good living while still fully supporting free distribution of music, why can't everyone else?
Why are there so many articles about it?
How do you think the S/N ratio will change when MS adds out-of-the-box pimping of NNTP? All those people who post on /. and other web forums will have a brand new place that's easy to troll.
Really? I'll let you explain how the share prices of...say...Amazon falling predicted some cataclysmic event in the company before it happened. If there is any connection at all (sometimes there isn't) share prices usually fall *after* something bad has happened, not before.
Look at how unpredictably the stock markets behave already. When was the last time a major drop or surge in the NYSE or NASDAQ was accurately predicted by the majority of investors?
At best this kind of analysis helps you see trends over a long time period, but I don't see how that can help the pentagon except when they ask for more funding (See! Carbombings will increase by 50% over the next 5 years! Please give us money).
The original poster said:
Now, while this certainly doesn't *preclude* them from being American (there are plenty of Americans whose primary language is not English, after all), I'd suspect they are not. That being said, at least in first world countries the original poster is somehwat correct; most children in first world countries spend some number of years studying English. Whether they are capable of conversing in the language is another story.
However thanks to the huge populations accounted for by the third world, the number of English speakers per capita in the world is fairly small.
Native Japanese speakers new to the US *used* to think it was a bank (the word for bank in Japanese is "ginko"), so I'd have some fun screwing with them, taking them to Kinko's and telling them to ask to open an account. But now they have Kinko's in Japan so that little joke doesn't work anymore.
Well, no. They didn't exist when I went to school. But someone snapping pictures in the classroom is guaranteed to piss people off.
Screw bringing laptops and PDAs to class. I can't think of many classes I took that didn't involve me copying pictures and diagrams off the board, which I have yet to see handled well on a laptop or PDA, although some of the tablet PCs come close.
If we need a greater than 2-party discussion about the lecture there's thing thing called "voice" that people have been using since the dawn of structured education which seems to work pretty well in my experience. Plus, this also happens to involve the professor in the discussion which helps to clarify points, and pace the lecture appropriately rather than having the lecture blaze on while you and your buddies are trying to figure out a point he stated 20 minutes ago.
Yeah, no kidding. Robots are always boozing, carousing, gambling, and saying things like "bite my shiny metal ass". Who needs that kind of grief?
I fall asleep, you know, afterwards.
As if I needed one more thing to worry about. Now I find out that my employer is monitoring my brainwave activiy?
What the hell must they think when I fall asleep browsing porn sites?