It's even funnier when you realize what you need to run Vista to even get to the point where it "competes" with a Mac:
New C2D CPU $200+
new motherboard to support that CPU under Vista $200+
2GB RAM minimum to go with that new motherboard: $180
new graphics card $300+
high end copy of Vista $300+
Good lord, and that's only if you're adding things to an existing PC! That's almost $1200 right there! Note I'm not talking about pond muck systems, but a system that actually would allow an apples to apples comparison of features with relatively equal quality parts. I think you'll find that these numbers may even be low when compared to a Dell system that will actually be able to run Aero/Glass well.
Then compare that to the prices for a Mini @ $700, a Macbook ~$1400, a Macbook Pro ~$2200, or a slightly above baseline Mac Pro ~$2800 (including the X1900XT).
IOW, Spotlight mimics google with inaccurate results? (Google's relevance in results has dropped significantly lately)
I have seen the sometimes overly broad results with Spotlight myself, but also note that you can narrow it down by category pretty quickly. Between Quicksilver and the apps that actually manage the bulk of my data, I usually don't "lose" things so that I have to find them. (Oh, and I believe the apps I use internally use Spotlight for their search capabilities).
I use spotlight for 1) typing in application names to start them 2) in File Open dialogs occasionally. Get Quicksilver You'll be glad you did and you won't even wonder why you didn't get it earlier, as it just becomes an expected part of your OS experience.
So, that means you can search across both Web content and desktop content simultaneously. And why would I want to do that?
Honestly, Google Desktop is a product necessary for windows, but seems superfluous for Macs, especially as you'll almost always have a browser open anyways.
Someone who's IM'ing 13.5 GB/Month won't be in college long... But if you're using a video IM at 640x480 @ 30fps to chat daily with your sick grand aunt....
Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) continuous uploading, downloading or streaming of audio or video programming or games;
Basically, they don't want you using the internet to purchase movies or music from anyone other than Verizon. It's an incredibly anti-competitive action. And therein lies the rub. "Continuous". It's not continuous. It's very sporadic. But, either way, this would be an argument for a net neutrality bill, because you can see where this is heading.
Companies are slowing devolving into lawyer-based companies, where they will soon have a whole codebook to define what each word in the dictionary really means. This is all for the money, no doubt. Fixed that for you.
In the UK...
The way I would show them that I was angry would be to change service. Why stick with something you're not happy with? Because in the US, all blather to the contrary, Ma Bell is still alive and well. There is often only one or two choices for broadband access: one of the former Ma Bells (that'd be the original AT&T, of which there are now only 2 entities, or soon will be) or your friendly local cable monopoly.
See, in the US when they "deregulated" the telecom industry by "breaking up" Ma Bell, they made a blunder of immense proportions. The 7 teleco's owned the publicly paid for wires (yes, we citizens paid for those wires via taxes and tax breaks) and were originally allowed exclusive access. For a short time, they had to share access, but they could still provide service. When the carrier and the service provider are one and the same, they can pretty much finagle pricing however they want to exclude others.
And what about the Bells entering each other's territories (the original naive brain-dead theory)? Well, they did that by acquisition. There's never been any real competition for the bulk of the US population regarding phone (or cable) service.
The real deregulation that hopefully will come soon is to split all these monopolies into carriers and service providers, with the carrier being a non-profit or some municipality owned company. Then we'll see real competition. Until then, you'll continue to see the US fall further and further behind the bandwidth/price curves seen elsewhere in the world.
It wasn't only Sun. Even better is when the sales droids have little or no clue about anything other than the original product but the company now has 150 different products. Made for interesting sales, to say the least. Developers wound up having to go explain what a company had bought, how it worked, and how to set it up to almost approximate what they thought they'd bought. We had excellent salesmen in that regard, considering that we got a lot of repeat business. (The software actually worked, unlike many in the dot.com boom)
First: (obligatory IANAL) downloading movies is perfectly legal - uploading them is illegal.
Now for the 5GB limit. Get real. 1 DVD ISO for a linux distro is 4GB alone. I could easily reach this limit in about 20 minutes without even trying, just setting up a new machine. Heck, I'd be willing to bet that just 2 weeks ago, I probably downloaded over 15GB of data in about a 3 hour time frame, and there wasn't a single song, movie, or illegal download involved. And that was only part of 1 day. I'd hate to see what my monthly download was. And let's not forget that all good linux distro downloaders user bittorrent with a share ratio of 1 or greater, so that's also a minimum of 4GB upload.
Heck, is there an upload limit? I upload 8MB pictures for printing at my favorite printing place. I'm sure a 1 day upload of roughly 1GB might raise eyebrows as well?
5GB might have been a realistic threshold in 2000, when everything was a lot smaller. It's ridiculously small today for anyone that actually does anything.
To be fair, I've been in Paris on 4 separate occasions and only once did I have this issue.
A filter that lasts the lifetime of a diesel engine? That seems hard to believe as every filter on my car needs periodic replacement and a diesel engine can last several hundred thousand miles. Even catalytic converters wear out eventually in that time frame.
Considering what I've seen XML based items do, I seriously doubt you've exceeded the capability of SOAP or XML. I'd much more readily believe that it's your implementation/architecture that has issues. (I happen to have worked on a large scale app that messaged an average 800KB messages for each of 35K concurrent users. Another app transferred the data of tens of thousands of transactions from a SAP instance to a secondary DB for metric and reporting purposes using XML in near real time (less than 1s delay on average).
I don't know what you've been programming, but "Web services" perform just fine, provided you design and program them optimally for what you're doing. They can also handle inheritance and "callbacks" just fine, you just may have to use a particular subset or framework to make that easier to deal with.
Now, will they necessarily integrate with some particular legacy system as easily? That might be where CORBA rules, but that falls into the category of "predating better technology solutions". That case does not apply to building new systems. BTW, I don't know what could possibly be more interoperable than XML. It's ascii text (LCD) if you want it to be, supported by just about everything.
Having built CORBA, JMS, WSDL, Jibx and JAXB and pure socket systems I can say that CORBA definitely would not be my choice except in rare circumstances for any new or even moderately "old" system that needed modification. I certainly wouldn't add it unless there were no other way. It's clunky plumbing.
The definition of messaging is precisely the point here. In truth, what is CORBA but a messaging transport layer that delivers some information and a request to perform some operation on it to an endpoint and optionally returns some information? CORBA does not (easily) facilitate the transfer of arbitrary code to a remote system for execution, although it can be done.
So, if all I'm doing is transferring data with an operational request, isn't that the pure definition of messaging?
* I'm skipping over pretty much all of the additional "services" provided by the ORB, as they are not fundamental to what's actually happening. Synchronous behavior is easy and almost natural. Asynchronous behavior can be implemented in a number of ways, and I don't feel that's germane to the core discussion either.
The difference between MoM and CORBA is that CORBA pretends to be tightly integrated with the actual execution layer while requiring an external framework while MoM is an external framework with a very simple integration in the execution layer.
Your RPC list should really be CORBA, EJB, and.NET remoting. J2EE shouldn't be tarnished more than it needs to be by its bastard EJB aspect.
SOAP itself is a more specification of a message than a framework. Frameworks have been built to make SOAP easier to develop, but it really isn't a framework. SOAP can be run directly or across a MoM if you need the additional features a MoM provides. I've seen both.
CORBA's biggest usage is in a space most people would have never predicted - embedded. But it is usually a much tighter subset of the CORBA spec.
>>It's last century's technology for a problem that has since been elegantly solved several times over with many fewer pain points.
Maybe. My sense is that it is a problem with too many variables for a one-size-fits-all solution which is why so many people continue to fashion custom solutions.
CORBA in essence is messaging, nothing more or less. There are less complicated solutions out there that are significantly easier to use than CORBA, and some of those are considerably more robust as well, having loose integration.
Now you're just being evil and dredging up old memories.
CORBA is hopelessly broken. It's like using XML for coding. It's last century's technology for a problem that has since been elegantly solved several times over with many fewer pain points. It's like saying COBOL is a good web development language with a straight face and meaning it.
2 and half years ago I stepped out of the car in Paris and... hack, cough, gasp, sandpaper.....
Paris had the worst pollution of any city I've ever been in throughout N America or Europe. I haven't seen the results of these filters yet nor how expensive they are.
Most light cars are dangerous, and it has nothing to do with Hummers (well, it could but you should really be concentrating on driving) Someone pulls out in front of you, moves into your lane, sideswipes you into a tree or concrete embankment, all are pretty hard on cars, especially ones that don't have enough strength in the passenger safety cage. European cars do not meet American safety standards. I believe the difference is about 150-200 pounds of metal in things like side bar protection in doors, increased lateral strength for side impact, and a couple of other items like that.
But all that aside. I can get awesome acceleration and speed and not burn an ounce of fuel. Look at the Tesla. Since they already claim 135 mpg equivalent, why have this prize for 100 mpg at all? I don't know a single person that wouldn't love to own this car. It's a little pricey, but 6700+ laptop batteries aren't cheap. It does have its limitations, such as not suitable for long haul driving due to the recharge time.
having owned both, I wouldn't be to sure. In my experience, they seemed about the same - up to about 50K miles (80K km) they were equivalent. I made the mistake of keeping my American car past that point, and at 70K a couple of design flaws emerged (well past warranty of course).
As for those that say "Hey, it ran to 70K as designed" I respond with "Yes, it ran to 70K. I expect a minimum of 200K out of a car these days. Multiple Toyotas, 2 Volvos (pre Ford) and the European built motor in the Ford Thunderbird TurboCoupe all easily exceeded 180K miles (that latter one did have a bunch of technical issues though, mostly due to inept Ford dealership mechanics not knowing the difference between metric and standard wrenches though;).
People buy SUVs for several reasons - they're easier to get kids into and out of because they're larger and allow for mom to reach in comfortably and buckle the kid(s) in. Station wagons suck in so many ways, that even the Magnum 300 with a Hemi hasn't really removed the stigma.
But to disrupt some perceptions, I own a V8 Toyota 4Runner. It gets 19 mpg in the city, which for a 2+ ton vehicle is incredible. If I babied it, I could probably up that to 22-23 in the city. Highway has been as high as 30 @ 70 mph. It can tow 8000 pounds.
What's the point of the previous? Make all trucks have a minimum 20/30 city/hwy CAFE standard. It's obviously possible, so just make it so. Add tax to those under the limit.
Doubtful on the diesel. Particulates in the emissions contribute far too much to smog and hurt air quality. We're already on the border line in many of our cities, and a large move to even those "cleaner" diesels would push us over the edge.
I wish I could say "Who still uses CORBA?", unfortunately, the answer would include me.:( Give me Sun's RMI implementation any day of the week, or even C++ married to JMS. CORBA gives black holes a run for the money.
Good lord, and that's only if you're adding things to an existing PC! That's almost $1200 right there! Note I'm not talking about pond muck systems, but a system that actually would allow an apples to apples comparison of features with relatively equal quality parts. I think you'll find that these numbers may even be low when compared to a Dell system that will actually be able to run Aero/Glass well.
Then compare that to the prices for a Mini @ $700, a Macbook ~$1400, a Macbook Pro ~$2200, or a slightly above baseline Mac Pro ~$2800 (including the X1900XT).
IOW, Spotlight mimics google with inaccurate results? (Google's relevance in results has dropped significantly lately)
I have seen the sometimes overly broad results with Spotlight myself, but also note that you can narrow it down by category pretty quickly. Between Quicksilver and the apps that actually manage the bulk of my data, I usually don't "lose" things so that I have to find them. (Oh, and I believe the apps I use internally use Spotlight for their search capabilities).
Honestly, Google Desktop is a product necessary for windows, but seems superfluous for Macs, especially as you'll almost always have a browser open anyways.
Basically, they don't want you using the internet to purchase movies or music from anyone other than Verizon. It's an incredibly anti-competitive action. And therein lies the rub. "Continuous". It's not continuous. It's very sporadic. But, either way, this would be an argument for a net neutrality bill, because you can see where this is heading.
The way I would show them that I was angry would be to change service. Why stick with something you're not happy with? Because in the US, all blather to the contrary, Ma Bell is still alive and well. There is often only one or two choices for broadband access: one of the former Ma Bells (that'd be the original AT&T, of which there are now only 2 entities, or soon will be) or your friendly local cable monopoly.
See, in the US when they "deregulated" the telecom industry by "breaking up" Ma Bell, they made a blunder of immense proportions. The 7 teleco's owned the publicly paid for wires (yes, we citizens paid for those wires via taxes and tax breaks) and were originally allowed exclusive access. For a short time, they had to share access, but they could still provide service. When the carrier and the service provider are one and the same, they can pretty much finagle pricing however they want to exclude others.
And what about the Bells entering each other's territories (the original naive brain-dead theory)? Well, they did that by acquisition. There's never been any real competition for the bulk of the US population regarding phone (or cable) service.
The real deregulation that hopefully will come soon is to split all these monopolies into carriers and service providers, with the carrier being a non-profit or some municipality owned company. Then we'll see real competition. Until then, you'll continue to see the US fall further and further behind the bandwidth/price curves seen elsewhere in the world.
It wasn't only Sun. Even better is when the sales droids have little or no clue about anything other than the original product but the company now has 150 different products. Made for interesting sales, to say the least. Developers wound up having to go explain what a company had bought, how it worked, and how to set it up to almost approximate what they thought they'd bought. We had excellent salesmen in that regard, considering that we got a lot of repeat business. (The software actually worked, unlike many in the dot.com boom)
First: (obligatory IANAL) downloading movies is perfectly legal - uploading them is illegal.
Now for the 5GB limit. Get real. 1 DVD ISO for a linux distro is 4GB alone. I could easily reach this limit in about 20 minutes without even trying, just setting up a new machine. Heck, I'd be willing to bet that just 2 weeks ago, I probably downloaded over 15GB of data in about a 3 hour time frame, and there wasn't a single song, movie, or illegal download involved. And that was only part of 1 day. I'd hate to see what my monthly download was. And let's not forget that all good linux distro downloaders user bittorrent with a share ratio of 1 or greater, so that's also a minimum of 4GB upload.
Heck, is there an upload limit? I upload 8MB pictures for printing at my favorite printing place. I'm sure a 1 day upload of roughly 1GB might raise eyebrows as well?
5GB might have been a realistic threshold in 2000, when everything was a lot smaller. It's ridiculously small today for anyone that actually does anything.
Why? MS. Coding. Barn. Open.
It's better.
(For my purposes. If I needed a pickup, I'd probably get a Tundra, same engine, slightly lighter, same fuel efficiency.)
You do realize you can get XP running under 60MB of RAM, right? In a Parallels VM you can hit about 43MB.
To be fair, I've been in Paris on 4 separate occasions and only once did I have this issue.
A filter that lasts the lifetime of a diesel engine? That seems hard to believe as every filter on my car needs periodic replacement and a diesel engine can last several hundred thousand miles. Even catalytic converters wear out eventually in that time frame.
Considering what I've seen XML based items do, I seriously doubt you've exceeded the capability of SOAP or XML. I'd much more readily believe that it's your implementation/architecture that has issues. (I happen to have worked on a large scale app that messaged an average 800KB messages for each of 35K concurrent users. Another app transferred the data of tens of thousands of transactions from a SAP instance to a secondary DB for metric and reporting purposes using XML in near real time (less than 1s delay on average).
I don't know what you've been programming, but "Web services" perform just fine, provided you design and program them optimally for what you're doing. They can also handle inheritance and "callbacks" just fine, you just may have to use a particular subset or framework to make that easier to deal with.
Now, will they necessarily integrate with some particular legacy system as easily? That might be where CORBA rules, but that falls into the category of "predating better technology solutions". That case does not apply to building new systems. BTW, I don't know what could possibly be more interoperable than XML. It's ascii text (LCD) if you want it to be, supported by just about everything.
Having built CORBA, JMS, WSDL, Jibx and JAXB and pure socket systems I can say that CORBA definitely would not be my choice except in rare circumstances for any new or even moderately "old" system that needed modification. I certainly wouldn't add it unless there were no other way. It's clunky plumbing.
The definition of messaging is precisely the point here. In truth, what is CORBA but a messaging transport layer that delivers some information and a request to perform some operation on it to an endpoint and optionally returns some information? CORBA does not (easily) facilitate the transfer of arbitrary code to a remote system for execution, although it can be done.
.NET remoting. J2EE shouldn't be tarnished more than it needs to be by its bastard EJB aspect.
So, if all I'm doing is transferring data with an operational request, isn't that the pure definition of messaging?
* I'm skipping over pretty much all of the additional "services" provided by the ORB, as they are not fundamental to what's actually happening. Synchronous behavior is easy and almost natural. Asynchronous behavior can be implemented in a number of ways, and I don't feel that's germane to the core discussion either.
The difference between MoM and CORBA is that CORBA pretends to be tightly integrated with the actual execution layer while requiring an external framework while MoM is an external framework with a very simple integration in the execution layer.
Your RPC list should really be CORBA, EJB, and
SOAP itself is a more specification of a message than a framework. Frameworks have been built to make SOAP easier to develop, but it really isn't a framework. SOAP can be run directly or across a MoM if you need the additional features a MoM provides. I've seen both.
>>It's last century's technology for a problem that has since been elegantly solved several times over with many fewer pain points.
Maybe. My sense is that it is a problem with too many variables for a one-size-fits-all solution which is why so many people continue to fashion custom solutions.
CORBA in essence is messaging, nothing more or less. There are less complicated solutions out there that are significantly easier to use than CORBA, and some of those are considerably more robust as well, having loose integration.Now you're just being evil and dredging up old memories.
CORBA is hopelessly broken. It's like using XML for coding. It's last century's technology for a problem that has since been elegantly solved several times over with many fewer pain points. It's like saying COBOL is a good web development language with a straight face and meaning it.
2 and half years ago I stepped out of the car in Paris and... hack, cough, gasp, sandpaper.....
Paris had the worst pollution of any city I've ever been in throughout N America or Europe. I haven't seen the results of these filters yet nor how expensive they are.
Most light cars are dangerous, and it has nothing to do with Hummers (well, it could but you should really be concentrating on driving) Someone pulls out in front of you, moves into your lane, sideswipes you into a tree or concrete embankment, all are pretty hard on cars, especially ones that don't have enough strength in the passenger safety cage. European cars do not meet American safety standards. I believe the difference is about 150-200 pounds of metal in things like side bar protection in doors, increased lateral strength for side impact, and a couple of other items like that.
But all that aside. I can get awesome acceleration and speed and not burn an ounce of fuel. Look at the Tesla. Since they already claim 135 mpg equivalent, why have this prize for 100 mpg at all? I don't know a single person that wouldn't love to own this car. It's a little pricey, but 6700+ laptop batteries aren't cheap. It does have its limitations, such as not suitable for long haul driving due to the recharge time.
having owned both, I wouldn't be to sure. In my experience, they seemed about the same - up to about 50K miles (80K km) they were equivalent. I made the mistake of keeping my American car past that point, and at 70K a couple of design flaws emerged (well past warranty of course).
As for those that say "Hey, it ran to 70K as designed" I respond with "Yes, it ran to 70K. I expect a minimum of 200K out of a car these days. Multiple Toyotas, 2 Volvos (pre Ford) and the European built motor in the Ford Thunderbird TurboCoupe all easily exceeded 180K miles (that latter one did have a bunch of technical issues though, mostly due to inept Ford dealership mechanics not knowing the difference between metric and standard wrenches though;).
People buy SUVs for several reasons - they're easier to get kids into and out of because they're larger and allow for mom to reach in comfortably and buckle the kid(s) in. Station wagons suck in so many ways, that even the Magnum 300 with a Hemi hasn't really removed the stigma.
But to disrupt some perceptions, I own a V8 Toyota 4Runner. It gets 19 mpg in the city, which for a 2+ ton vehicle is incredible. If I babied it, I could probably up that to 22-23 in the city. Highway has been as high as 30 @ 70 mph. It can tow 8000 pounds.
What's the point of the previous? Make all trucks have a minimum 20/30 city/hwy CAFE standard. It's obviously possible, so just make it so. Add tax to those under the limit.
Doubtful on the diesel. Particulates in the emissions contribute far too much to smog and hurt air quality. We're already on the border line in many of our cities, and a large move to even those "cleaner" diesels would push us over the edge.
I wish I could say "Who still uses CORBA?", unfortunately, the answer would include me. :( Give me Sun's RMI implementation any day of the week, or even C++ married to JMS. CORBA gives black holes a run for the money.