The web without all this proprietary stuff would be so boring it would be unreal.
Really? Why. The vast majority of what Flash can do is standardized in SVG, SMIL and many other standards that Adobe and Microsoft studiously ignore. What do you do on the Web that is so exciting that it cannot be accomplished with SVG and SMIL? Of course there are things that Flash can do but SVG cannot and vice versa. But in general, all of the major Web app categories would be served just fine with SVG et. al.
There SHOULD be a "glass ceiling" for Marketing and Sales guys. If they want to advance, they should have to learn some technical skills.
What does that mean? What do you mean by "technical skills"? Does Steve Jobs have "technical skills"? Does Jeff Bezos? Does Larry Ellison? Is your opinion grounded in anything empirical?
So, um, how's jPHP and Jython coming along? Would you deploy a real life application on Jython?
So, um, how's jPHP and Jython coming along? Would you deploy a real life application on Jython?
Go team. Rah! Rah! Rah! YEAH!!!!
But I have two questions:
1. What does the relative merit of Jython versus Jruby have to do with the price of tea in China? Are you moving your apps from the buggy MRI to JRuby this week to avoid these security holes?
2. What evidence do you have that Jruby is more appropriate for "real life applications" than Jython? I know people who have deployed real life applications on Jython since before the first checkin of JRuby. For example, Websphere ships with Jython.
A tabloid is a physical format for a magazine. The fact that you disagree with the opinions in the magazine does not mean it is a tabloid. Let me guess, you also think that the Washington Post is a tabloid.
By demonstrating once and for all how embarassingly corruptible the ISO is, it calls into doubt the validity of many past and future ISO standards, and will force us into a proper re-evaluation of self-appointed standards bodies and the standards they whore around.
Can you please point me to an institution that is not corruptible?
For too long we've taken the rather naive view that being an 'open standard' is enough. At last we see the foolishness of that view.
What does that mean? Being an open standard has never meant any more or less than having the approval of some standards body. Were you really so naive before to think that they had some kind of magic voodoo?
And in this case, I think it's somewhat unfair to judge Microsoft too harshly for wanting to game the system any way they could- what company wouldn't have done in their position?
What company would not have launched a massive international vote-rigging scheme despite enormous cost to their public image? I can think of thousands.
But it is to ISO's massive, disgusting and probably reputation-destroying shame they they simply laid back and allowed themselves to be corrupted, defiled and sodomised by a large multinational. And they didn't even get a kiss afterwards.
A standards body is more than anything a process. ISO is just a vote counter. What would you have preferred they do. Change the rules to prevent a particular standard from being passed?
I hope everyone who played their part in this sordid venture has plenty of time to repent at leisure when they realise that the ISO can never, WILL never, be trusted again.
I don't think that ISO really depends on the support of Slashdotters that much. It has never been the case that ISO certification guaranteed anything in particular about the quality of a standard, any more than the American electoral system guarantees anything about the quality of a president. ISO certification means: "this standard got enough votes to pass." Nothing more and nothing less. The standard could be total crap: anyone who really cared about ISO standards has known this for decades.
I agree with the poster who said you are blaming the victim. ISO manages a process and counts votes. Nothing more. Nothing less. There is nobody at ISO with the authority to say: "Well this standard passed through the procedures but we can't allow it through, so we'll change the procedures." After the fact it might make sense to change the procedures but it would be totally wrong to change the rules of the game in the middle of a standardization process.
Someone could make a Windows clone and compete with Microsoft for, say, a couple tens of millions. That nobody does it is the stupidity of most of the industry, who don't understand the power of compatability.
Your idea has already been tried twice: both WABI and OS/2 were attempts to build a "better Windows than Windows". There are not many companies better poised to take a run at Microsoft than IBM and Sun in their heydays.
The plan most companies have now is smarter: build layers like Java, Flash, HTML and Javascript that make the operating system irrelevant. Then you can "compete" on your own terms rather than putting Microsoft in the driver's seat by allowing them to control the API. Every year, the proportion of software that depends on Microsoft APIs shrinks a bit.
Anyone can copy Wikipedia, but like the GPL, the result remains open. So anything copied from Wikipedia into Knol, and anything derived therefrom, remains freely copyable, regardless of any terms Google may seek to impose..
It would be more accurate to say that it is a copyright violation to copy from Wikipedia to Knol if Knol's copyright provisions are not compatible with Wikipedias. One cannot "infect" Knol just by copying. One can only violate its Terms Of Service and presumably get kicked off when someone complains.
Just about everything you said is incorrect. You said:
You said: People aren't buying Windows Vista and Office 2007 because they have Windows XP and Office 2003 that does the job just fine, and possibly better, and it costs nothing to continue using it.
But the facts are: "Better-than-expected worldwide PC shipments, tougher anti-piracy measures and growing numbers of businesses switching to long-term volume software licenses helped boost revenue for the two Microsoft divisions responsible for Windows and Office to a total of $9.14 billion, 50 percent more than a year ago."
Microsoft has never depended on people going out and buying Windows and Office as shrinkwrapped software. People buy them when they buy computers because it is the easiest thing to do.
You said: . None of their other attempts to diversify - Zune, X Box, Windows Live etc have been very succesful, so there are problems ahead.
But the facts are: "The division responsible for the Xbox 360 video game system swung to a profit on rising sales of games and accessories, which deliver better margins than the console itself. Microsoft said the division is still on track to be profitable in fiscal 2008."
You said: They aren't bankrupt yet, but they are taking action to try and avoid it while they still can.
But the facts say: "Microsoft blew by Wall Street's expectations for a second consecutive quarter." (announced just a couple of weeks ago) Quantitatively speaking they are not only "not bankrupt yet" but not even heading in that direction.
Do I think that all is well in Microsoft land? No way: but no massively profitable company with a gargantuan bank account can be said to be "on the ropes". There is a big difference with "perhaps pointed in the wrong direction" and "on the ropes". It would be more accurate to say: "There are indications in the early rounds of fighting that the current champ will have to adjust strategy to win against a promising upstart competitor."
I'm no Microsoft fanboy: I think that they need to fire Ballmer and reform the culture. But that's actually an easier thing to do than the sorts of things that their competitors need to do to become as entrenched and powerful as Microsoft is. Or to put it another way: Microsoft will lose if they don't adjust strategy, but the fight is still theirs to lose. i.e. they are a bit bloodied, not "on the ropes".
Although "hosting" is not totally irrelevant to Python programmers, it is a much less important aspect of the Python world than for PHP. Python is not primarily used for web development and when it is, it is often in a virtual machine-type situation.
The genious of this move is that Canadian musicians get the money but most of the music being shared is from American musicians. So it's really a way of stealing money from Americans.
Well I hope that the museum goes out of business but I can't see how your anecdotal evidence tells us anything helpful. After all, your set of friends is a pretty self-selecting group. Do you go to a Southern Baptist church?
That said, I take your point that a) popularity does not equate to agreement and b) it is hard to tell whether the initial success implies long-term success. We should be skeptical that it will succeed based upon early visits and skeptical that it will fail based upon selective, anecdotal evidence.
"So would you run your business on hardware made by a company that refuses to run their own business on the same hardware?"
Yes. I would run my business from a company that runs their business on their own hardware which is managed by a third party. Like if I called up Lucent to order some hardware and asked them about their own use of it. I would not be at all worried if they said: "Sure we use Lucent hardware but we let AT&T (or whoever) manage most of it for us. In fact, we sell it to them and lease it back from them along with the rest of our phone service. Operations management is not our core competency." Similarly, I would expect a Boeing executive to say: "I proudly fly Boeing planes. But typically I use commercial airliners that USE Boeing planes."
No: you miss the point.
Sun would only make this announcement if they believed that "hardware in the cloud" was appropriate for their customers as well as themselves. In that case, the customers of their hardware ceases to be mainstream businesses and instead would be cloud computing vendors.
So your claim is that a company cannot make hardware without running a datacenter. If Sun does not have a datacenter then it cannot sell hardware.
Similarly, I suppose, Boeing cannot sell airplanes unless it runs a commercial airline.
It only took me 2 minutes of Googling to come up with this:
"Want to give someone a video clip from your camera? Just stick it next to a phone with TransferJet embedded in it and press go. The file swaps over."
"The technology, moreover, is somewhat insulated from privacy concerns because the two devices can only be 1.75 inches away from each other for the connection to work. Someone would have to snuggle up awfully close to extract the contact list from your phone."
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9842512-7.html
According to Slashdot GroupThink, there whole enterprise software business could not exist. Because no startup could ever possibly make software for big companies: how would they possibly "dogfood test it". Even Sun itself could not exist because Sun started as a little company that sold to big companies.
It also implies they'll be completely out of the software business by then.
Why? What is the relationship between outsourcing their own application hosting and being out of the business of selling software. There is no correspondence.
It only makes sense if they're planning to totally reinvent themselves along the way. Personally, if I were at Sun and thought SaaS was going to be the model of the future, I'd be making moves to ensure that other companies would be getting their services from me, not dismantling anything I owned that could possibly be used to offer such a service.
Why? Why can't Sun sell the hardware and software infrastructure that powers the SaaS companies
Still, the whole model is predicated on networking technology becoming so efficient that there's no significant cost to running your apps and accessing your data at an arbitrarily distant data center.
If I am Sun, with hundreds of offices, how does running my application at one of those offices make it "closer" to the end-user than running it at one or several of the NOCs of a big hosting company?
To believe this will ever be true is to deny reality. E.g., disk usage always expands to fill available disk capacity. Network usage always expands to fill available bandwidth. Service levels in this brave new SaaS world will always be prone to outages and traffic overloads, and they will invariably cause failures at the least convenient possible moment.
And in-house IT never, ever has failures. And hard drives owned by the company never fill up. DO you know that there was a time when most factories provided their own power, probably for similar reasons. According to your logic, power generation could never have been centralized with power companies because "reality dictates that power usage always expands to fill available capacity." Well: yes. But specialized companies are better at increasing that capacity than divisions of companies that specialize in something else altogether.
The computers will be in someone's house, just not Sun's. This just means that Sun will be completely out of the hardware business by then.
Why? What does one have to do with the other? Of course the computers will be "somewhere." That's what "no in-house" XXX means. "No in-house catering" does not imply the non-existence of food elsewhere!
Re: "Eat your own dog food"
Do you understand what the word "utility" means? It means like electricty. Or Networking. The guys who make dams do not also run power companies to "eat their own dog food." They build the stuff and sell it to people who are experts at managing it (which is a very different situation). Similarly, not every router vendor is going to have a super-bad-ass internal network. When appropriate, they probably use VPN over the public Internet just like anybody else. They sell their routers to the guys who run the Internet. Tractor companies do not need to run farms to "eat their own dogfood."
Man, if *Sun* can't afford to maintain a Solaris data center, then who can?
It isn't that Sun can't afford to. It's that it doesn't make sense. They are in the business of inventing stuff, not in the business of laying down cables, plugging in blades and pouring gas into backup generators. That's a very different set of competencies.
How can a search engine that nobody has ever heard of be worth 1.3 billion?
If you cared about either enterprise search or enterprise content management, you would have heard of FAST. The article title might have mislead you into thinking that this has anything whatsoever to do with Web search. It doesn't.
Yes, but Google's search appliances are nearly irrelevant to Google's business profitability. It's like saying that Google is "going after Microsoft" by releasing a flight simulator to compete with Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Microsoft ALREADY has a bigger part of the Enterprise search market than Google just through Sharepoint.
Slashdot Mirror
The web without all this proprietary stuff would be so boring it would be unreal.
Really? Why. The vast majority of what Flash can do is standardized in SVG, SMIL and many other standards that Adobe and Microsoft studiously ignore. What do you do on the Web that is so exciting that it cannot be accomplished with SVG and SMIL? Of course there are things that Flash can do but SVG cannot and vice versa. But in general, all of the major Web app categories would be served just fine with SVG et. al.
There SHOULD be a "glass ceiling" for Marketing and Sales guys. If they want to advance, they should have to learn some technical skills.
What does that mean? What do you mean by "technical skills"? Does Steve Jobs have "technical skills"? Does Jeff Bezos? Does Larry Ellison? Is your opinion grounded in anything empirical?
So, um, how's jPHP and Jython coming along? Would you deploy a real life application on Jython?
So, um, how's jPHP and Jython coming along? Would you deploy a real life application on Jython?
Go team. Rah! Rah! Rah! YEAH!!!!But I have two questions:
1. What does the relative merit of Jython versus Jruby have to do with the price of tea in China? Are you moving your apps from the buggy MRI to JRuby this week to avoid these security holes?
2. What evidence do you have that Jruby is more appropriate for "real life applications" than Jython? I know people who have deployed real life applications on Jython since before the first checkin of JRuby. For example, Websphere ships with Jython.
http://wiki.python.org/jython/JythonUsers
Ruby has some real advantages over Python. But if you don't know them, don't just make stuff up.
A tabloid is a physical format for a magazine. The fact that you disagree with the opinions in the magazine does not mean it is a tabloid. Let me guess, you also think that the Washington Post is a tabloid.
By demonstrating once and for all how embarassingly corruptible the ISO is, it calls into doubt the validity of many past and future ISO standards, and will force us into a proper re-evaluation of self-appointed standards bodies and the standards they whore around.
Can you please point me to an institution that is not corruptible?
For too long we've taken the rather naive view that being an 'open standard' is enough. At last we see the foolishness of that view.
What does that mean? Being an open standard has never meant any more or less than having the approval of some standards body. Were you really so naive before to think that they had some kind of magic voodoo?
And in this case, I think it's somewhat unfair to judge Microsoft too harshly for wanting to game the system any way they could- what company wouldn't have done in their position?
What company would not have launched a massive international vote-rigging scheme despite enormous cost to their public image? I can think of thousands.
But it is to ISO's massive, disgusting and probably reputation-destroying shame they they simply laid back and allowed themselves to be corrupted, defiled and sodomised by a large multinational. And they didn't even get a kiss afterwards.
A standards body is more than anything a process. ISO is just a vote counter. What would you have preferred they do. Change the rules to prevent a particular standard from being passed?
I hope everyone who played their part in this sordid venture has plenty of time to repent at leisure when they realise that the ISO can never, WILL never, be trusted again.
I don't think that ISO really depends on the support of Slashdotters that much. It has never been the case that ISO certification guaranteed anything in particular about the quality of a standard, any more than the American electoral system guarantees anything about the quality of a president. ISO certification means: "this standard got enough votes to pass." Nothing more and nothing less. The standard could be total crap: anyone who really cared about ISO standards has known this for decades.
I agree with the poster who said you are blaming the victim. ISO manages a process and counts votes. Nothing more. Nothing less. There is nobody at ISO with the authority to say: "Well this standard passed through the procedures but we can't allow it through, so we'll change the procedures." After the fact it might make sense to change the procedures but it would be totally wrong to change the rules of the game in the middle of a standardization process.
Someone could make a Windows clone and compete with Microsoft for, say, a couple tens of millions. That nobody does it is the stupidity of most of the industry, who don't understand the power of compatability.
Your idea has already been tried twice: both WABI and OS/2 were attempts to build a "better Windows than Windows". There are not many companies better poised to take a run at Microsoft than IBM and Sun in their heydays.
The plan most companies have now is smarter: build layers like Java, Flash, HTML and Javascript that make the operating system irrelevant. Then you can "compete" on your own terms rather than putting Microsoft in the driver's seat by allowing them to control the API. Every year, the proportion of software that depends on Microsoft APIs shrinks a bit.
Anyone can copy Wikipedia, but like the GPL, the result remains open. So anything copied from Wikipedia into Knol, and anything derived therefrom, remains freely copyable, regardless of any terms Google may seek to impose..
It would be more accurate to say that it is a copyright violation to copy from Wikipedia to Knol if Knol's copyright provisions are not compatible with Wikipedias. One cannot "infect" Knol just by copying. One can only violate its Terms Of Service and presumably get kicked off when someone complains.
Utilization is a well-defined technical term. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilization
Just about everything you said is incorrect. You said:
You said: People aren't buying Windows Vista and Office 2007 because they have Windows XP and Office 2003 that does the job just fine, and possibly better, and it costs nothing to continue using it.
But the facts are: "Better-than-expected worldwide PC shipments, tougher anti-piracy measures and growing numbers of businesses switching to long-term volume software licenses helped boost revenue for the two Microsoft divisions responsible for Windows and Office to a total of $9.14 billion, 50 percent more than a year ago."
Microsoft has never depended on people going out and buying Windows and Office as shrinkwrapped software. People buy them when they buy computers because it is the easiest thing to do.
You said: . None of their other attempts to diversify - Zune, X Box, Windows Live etc have been very succesful, so there are problems ahead.
But the facts are: "The division responsible for the Xbox 360 video game system swung to a profit on rising sales of games and accessories, which deliver better margins than the console itself. Microsoft said the division is still on track to be profitable in fiscal 2008."
You said: They aren't bankrupt yet, but they are taking action to try and avoid it while they still can.
But the facts say: "Microsoft blew by Wall Street's expectations for a second consecutive quarter." (announced just a couple of weeks ago) Quantitatively speaking they are not only "not bankrupt yet" but not even heading in that direction.
My reference: http://www.kval.com/news/business/14266747.html
Do I think that all is well in Microsoft land? No way: but no massively profitable company with a gargantuan bank account can be said to be "on the ropes". There is a big difference with "perhaps pointed in the wrong direction" and "on the ropes". It would be more accurate to say: "There are indications in the early rounds of fighting that the current champ will have to adjust strategy to win against a promising upstart competitor."
I'm no Microsoft fanboy: I think that they need to fire Ballmer and reform the culture. But that's actually an easier thing to do than the sorts of things that their competitors need to do to become as entrenched and powerful as Microsoft is. Or to put it another way: Microsoft will lose if they don't adjust strategy, but the fight is still theirs to lose. i.e. they are a bit bloodied, not "on the ropes".
Although "hosting" is not totally irrelevant to Python programmers, it is a much less important aspect of the Python world than for PHP. Python is not primarily used for web development and when it is, it is often in a virtual machine-type situation.
Guido is following through on the plans he announced years ago! Let's all discuss it as if it were amazingly novel news!
You aren't really suggesting that they are making a 44 BILLION dollar acquisition to try and interfere with the work of a single person, are you?
The genious of this move is that Canadian musicians get the money but most of the music being shared is from American musicians. So it's really a way of stealing money from Americans.
Well I hope that the museum goes out of business but I can't see how your anecdotal evidence tells us anything helpful. After all, your set of friends is a pretty self-selecting group. Do you go to a Southern Baptist church? That said, I take your point that a) popularity does not equate to agreement and b) it is hard to tell whether the initial success implies long-term success. We should be skeptical that it will succeed based upon early visits and skeptical that it will fail based upon selective, anecdotal evidence.
"So would you run your business on hardware made by a company that refuses to run their own business on the same hardware?" Yes. I would run my business from a company that runs their business on their own hardware which is managed by a third party. Like if I called up Lucent to order some hardware and asked them about their own use of it. I would not be at all worried if they said: "Sure we use Lucent hardware but we let AT&T (or whoever) manage most of it for us. In fact, we sell it to them and lease it back from them along with the rest of our phone service. Operations management is not our core competency." Similarly, I would expect a Boeing executive to say: "I proudly fly Boeing planes. But typically I use commercial airliners that USE Boeing planes."
No: you miss the point. Sun would only make this announcement if they believed that "hardware in the cloud" was appropriate for their customers as well as themselves. In that case, the customers of their hardware ceases to be mainstream businesses and instead would be cloud computing vendors.
So your claim is that a company cannot make hardware without running a datacenter. If Sun does not have a datacenter then it cannot sell hardware. Similarly, I suppose, Boeing cannot sell airplanes unless it runs a commercial airline.
It only took me 2 minutes of Googling to come up with this: "Want to give someone a video clip from your camera? Just stick it next to a phone with TransferJet embedded in it and press go. The file swaps over." "The technology, moreover, is somewhat insulated from privacy concerns because the two devices can only be 1.75 inches away from each other for the connection to work. Someone would have to snuggle up awfully close to extract the contact list from your phone." http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9842512-7.html
According to Slashdot GroupThink, there whole enterprise software business could not exist. Because no startup could ever possibly make software for big companies: how would they possibly "dogfood test it". Even Sun itself could not exist because Sun started as a little company that sold to big companies.
It also implies they'll be completely out of the software business by then.
Why? What is the relationship between outsourcing their own application hosting and being out of the business of selling software. There is no correspondence.
It only makes sense if they're planning to totally reinvent themselves along the way. Personally, if I were at Sun and thought SaaS was going to be the model of the future, I'd be making moves to ensure that other companies would be getting their services from me, not dismantling anything I owned that could possibly be used to offer such a service.
Why? Why can't Sun sell the hardware and software infrastructure that powers the SaaS companies
Still, the whole model is predicated on networking technology becoming so efficient that there's no significant cost to running your apps and accessing your data at an arbitrarily distant data center.
If I am Sun, with hundreds of offices, how does running my application at one of those offices make it "closer" to the end-user than running it at one or several of the NOCs of a big hosting company?
To believe this will ever be true is to deny reality. E.g., disk usage always expands to fill available disk capacity. Network usage always expands to fill available bandwidth. Service levels in this brave new SaaS world will always be prone to outages and traffic overloads, and they will invariably cause failures at the least convenient possible moment.
And in-house IT never, ever has failures. And hard drives owned by the company never fill up. DO you know that there was a time when most factories provided their own power, probably for similar reasons. According to your logic, power generation could never have been centralized with power companies because "reality dictates that power usage always expands to fill available capacity." Well: yes. But specialized companies are better at increasing that capacity than divisions of companies that specialize in something else altogether.
The computers will be in someone's house, just not Sun's. This just means that Sun will be completely out of the hardware business by then.
Why? What does one have to do with the other? Of course the computers will be "somewhere." That's what "no in-house" XXX means. "No in-house catering" does not imply the non-existence of food elsewhere!
Man, if *Sun* can't afford to maintain a Solaris data center, then who can?
It isn't that Sun can't afford to. It's that it doesn't make sense. They are in the business of inventing stuff, not in the business of laying down cables, plugging in blades and pouring gas into backup generators. That's a very different set of competencies.
Joyent.
How can a search engine that nobody has ever heard of be worth 1.3 billion?
If you cared about either enterprise search or enterprise content management, you would have heard of FAST. The article title might have mislead you into thinking that this has anything whatsoever to do with Web search. It doesn't.
Microsoft ALREADY has a bigger part of the Enterprise search market than Google just through Sharepoint.