Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to say whether the application or MS is at fault. It is a fact that in the past they have purposefully booby-trapped their OS against certain competitors products. So it is difficult to claim you can just blame the application. Also, since many needed details are not always forthcoming from MS it is difficult if not impossible for an external app to guarantee it will not blow up on the latest Windoze "upgrade".
This assumes:
a) the monarch can be bought;
b) the monarch will stay bought;
c) the monarch will stay in power;
d) the monarch will not decide to nationalize the company.
This seems like an awful lot of assumptions to rest the future on. Paying taxes is far less worrisome.
I was the chief architect for a distribute persistent OO development system built on ObjectiveC and a relational database backend in 1986-1988. Unfortunately, it was about 5 years ahead of its time and became shelfware before release. But I might be able to dig up some of the code if it would help.
heck. The hell with talking. Voice is S-L-O-W. I want the damn thing to read my mind. Or at least be able to interpret my literal hand-waving. Even the latter could be a lot faster than I can type if I get to teach the beast to understand what my gestures and moods and such mean. I always wanted hand-waving to mean something.:-)
Hey! I am an extremist. The middle of the road is for muddle-headed know-nothings. California has a concentration of both problems and good stuff largely simply because it has a 10th of the total population of the US in a lot less than a 10th of the area. The density leads to a bit more intensity. Do you have a problem with that? North Dakota IS boring. Vermont, though, is a pretty cool place. A bit eccentric but we Californians sort of like that.
The ASP push is a huge step into the past. It is back to centralized servers and effectively time-sharing networks. This at a time where vast amounts of computational power are on the desktop. Hell, huge amounts of power are in most appliances. What is really needful imnsho is a true distributed computational environment where updates and such are utterly automatic (with enough local control to feel secure of course) and file formats are transparent enough to ease full inter-operability. Java gives one answer to going in that direction. The capability is present in almost any language that supports a VM/interpreter and some intermediate form of executable code. In this world we have clouds of components that assemble to meet whatever task you currently need done. This is far more powerful and efficient than talking over the net to a few central servers where monolithic applications live (or even non-monolithic ones) and having some probably relatively limited local UI. If we ever want to get to a relatively uniform computational world then that is the direction we need to go in. The ASP model will not support ubiquitous computerized devices and agents that interoperate as needed. But the world of devices is going in that direction. So we have two contradictory currents.
Huh? I haven't seen many open source projects with real design documents. There usually is a reasonable description of what the system is trying to do. But the decisions, especially working decision about why to take a certain approach or why to reimplement a project specific version of some general utility (for instance) are often not only written down but queries as to why are often not answered.
I have seen specs that are incomprehensible in the Open Source community at times and seen projects that have little more than an advertising blurb and the code itself. This is not reasonable or very workable. One of the central issues in Open Source imho is adding some kind of Open Design that gives the intentions of the system and its developers. By the time you get to code the intentions are often hard to retrieve.
Source code does not document what the program does except for the computer! It does not document what was intended.
Most of that stuff is not right or at least not sufficient. Coding style per se is just way into the noise compared to what is really important. Approved APIs? Approved by whom, by what kind of process and how much does it get in the way of innovation? Fully specing all functions before coding doesn't always work because you are not a computer and you will invariably miss things including important factorings that are invisible until you actually start coding and working with the set of ideas. At the least an interative style needs to be employed. There is no reason to do a group decision process on every single function. What is crucial is to establish the interface APIs between groups and subsystems and the expected services and level of service of each subsystem. Having too many people discuss every bit of code & psuedo-code can result in Least Common Denominator code. This is not often a good thing. On code reviews I have found it more profitable to have very small review teams of say the code developer with one or two other developers at least one of which is a local coding guru and have the review have the function set to improve the coding and the coder's style of coding rather than in any sense to judge the coder. Any flavor of judgement and especially involving managers will lead to a lot of defensiveness and very little learned.
You get bullet-proof dependability more by very solid testing (of course at white box level) and by programming-by-contract sorts of practices rather than at a code review. Reviewers are not computers and are not running the code. They will inevitably miss major fault conditions that are not at all obvious form looking at the code.
Is soon to become Open Office that will not be a gated application environment any more. It will be fully Open Source (GPL) with separate processes for each application and XML format for the files. This should form a very nice basis for Linux Office tools going forward.
Uh, high-speed wireless enables a lot more than reading your mail on your cell-phone. Like being able to pop your laptop open anywhere and surf at DSL speeds, for instance. Or better yet, to have a true wearable computer that can access the entire net instead of some tiny little slice some corporation wants to charge you to look at on your pda or cell-phone.
A lot of us are techies in part because the "soft" world of politics and philosophy and such makes very little sense to us. That isn't entirely our fault. Since, rightly or wrongly, most philosophers gave up on forming any coherent philosophy, especially one that offered any sort of objective morality/ethics, there quite literally is no solid basis for some of these discussions of politics. To wade into these waters with much more intent than a few sound-bites or to stir in a couple of memes is to soon be mired in endless muck and murkiness. Few self-respecting tech folk will go in there.
Selfish? Oh my! Such a naughty, naughty word! I must be suitably cowed that someone thought they could get it to stick to me or "my community". When are we going to at least get smart enough to know that "selfish" is not necessarily synonymous with "bad" or "evil"? Nor is "selfless" synonymous with "good". Such mucking around in knee-jerk accusations and meaningless bromides does nothing but dull the mind and turn off more people who like to thing more clearly.
Many of us are libertarian because it makes more sense to us than the alternatives. Damned if I see how that makes us automatically "selfish" or "self-centered" or meaningfully described by any other such bully-word. People attempt to shame and dismiss opinions and their holders that they do not know how to address civilly or intelligently.
Despite some quite valid points the chapter in questions spends too much time perpetuating tired ideas about why no one, and especially those "lucky" enough or "favored by nature" enough to be knowledge works don't really deserve any market compensation but only what "society" (whatever that is) deems equitable to give us. After all, our work (and very existence) is dependent on so many others around us and those in preceeding generations. But this can be said of any person or group. If this line were valid it would invalidate everyone's right to compensation according to the perceived value of their work. It would say that I do not have the right to trade something I produce for something you produce freely and by mutual agreement. Instead both of our products and all our abilities are put into some common view and society (State) decides what compensation we do or do not get. This has been tried over and over again and simply does not work.
Quoted ideas from Hettinger include the notion that one's compensation is a matter of social policy and claim that receiving market value can only be a right once one has established the right of ownership. But if one own's one body and mind and time then one should have the right to trade one's energy and talents with others. The ownership is ownership of one's life and time. It is irrelevant if one is simply "lucky" or not. Life is not about some bogus notion of "fairness". Intelligence is not distributed equally. Nor is ambition. Nor dedication to a goal. Nor insight. Nature is a crap-shoot. But that fact does not mean that the successes that occur should not be rewarded. Evolution, including evolution of ideas and technology, works off of rewarding or selecting that which succeeds.
The market does not have to be "fair" in the sense of equal results or some rarefied and as yet unidentified measure of one's efforts or worthiness. To be fair the market simply needs to be free to all to trade their efforts and products for the effort and products of others.
This of course does not mean that most types of "intellectual property" are actually owned property. We need ways of trading the effort, ability, creativity, dedication and so on without tying up the products of these traits. Tying up the products reduces the useable value of the things we would like to reward and be rewarded for and actually slows down the future manifestation of these valuable qualities.
While I certainly believe in open standards, it occurs to me that standards bodies are attempts in part to control software evolution. Imagine if there was a standards body that needed to deliberate before homo sap models with extended brains could come on the scene.:-) I recognize this is a bit busted as an analogy. But perhaps the rest of the world could more profitably be embracing and extending what innovations are being produced or be busy building adaptors to make these things interoperate in addition to wringing its hands over lack of unified development to the uber-plan.
The so-called problem of reviewers giving better reviews to products in order to get more free product from the vendor is a non-issue. The reviews are only as trusted as their reputation over time allows. A reviewer who too often glosses over or doesn't mention issues that burn real users will come to have his/her statements disvalued. Such a reviewer is not a boon to the vendor and will not get goodies for being an ineffectual reviewer. Also, the goodies are not bribes but products to be reviewed that the viewer may get to keep in exchange for their time and energy.
It is NOT legitimate. It is a direct interference with free passage, the cyber equivalent of barring the door to keep you from leaving. Sites that do this deserve to lose customers and get tons of flak. I wouldn't be surprised if a few ticked off hacker folks decide to "fix" their site's annoying traits for them.
second hand? Really? Seeing equations graphically is not helpful? Having definitions and theoreoms online is not helpful when designing a mathematical proof? Having evolution play out in front of you in an a-life program doesn't get the point across better than staring at a bunch of fossils? Having an online planetarium program doesn't facilitate learning astronomy? Having hyperlinked text doesn't facilitate getting a more holistic view of various subjects? Either/or thinking is pointless. Whether education is aided or fun or not is a matter of the skill of the teachers *and* the tools available. It is also a matter of motivation and of how direct the feedback loop is.
I am certainly no expert on GUIs as I tend to stay in the deep server-side. But something that is percolating in my brain is that current GUIs are seriously retarded by being tied to a mouse. It is basically point at a single thing or select it and do something to it. It seems to me that better might start with all screens being touch screens. The next step would include being able to touch-pick-chord multiple things at once instead of one at a time. Opening up full touch modality should make more options available to the folks designing human/computer interface.
Another wacky idea is to have some kind of sensors around a screen that pick up user body movements quite accurately. So I could do things on the computer without seemingly touching any input device. Always did tend to hand-waving when it was time to get things done.
Who needs keyboards and mice? Have virtual keyboards on screen or in the air and select/ manipulate things directly on screen or in the air. Get at least some of the computer gear out of the way. And of course such virtual interfaces lend themselves much more easily to wearables.
Are you sure about that? If the network is the only way to get to a certain location then its private ownership seems analagous to a toll road or bridge. The owner of such might charge a fee but generally they cannot discriminate at will against who uses the road.
Those places need to fire their provider and find one a bit less brain-dead and greedy. As the prosperity and well-being of us all is increasingly dependent on information flow, paying by the byte for information is like paying by the breath for oxygen.
Why on earth would anyone in the internet age make the bold statement that "the vast majority of apps will run locally"? In this day why in the hell is it anyone's business to make assumptions about whether the components of an app reside? I was under the impression that a lot of software system development effort went in to making that sort of second-guessing the runtime environment unnecessary. But here we have a system that builds on a proprietary framework on the basis of such guessing. We should be opening systems and removing assumptions NOT enshrining them YET AGAIN.
You know, I've been around the block with software for a lot of years now. I have a lot of respect for KDE and the team. But what is the macho BS of not bothering to include simple installation instructions with the binary distribution? I am sitting experimenting with the rpms to find an order where they load without errors. But after loading the kdesupport, kdeutil and qt stuff, none of the rest of them seem to have their dependencies satisfied. Accuse me of being a wimp if you wish but why isn't there a manifest or document saying what the dependencies are, their order and where to find them if they aren't part of the distribution? It seems like common sense and courtesy to me.
Before I believe we are remotely ready for prime time I believe some simple housekeeping and moderate reasonableness of installation is called for. Put everthing needed in a distribution or say clearly where the needed pieces are found. Don't lead would be users and testers in the lurch.
If someone has the information I need then please send it to me.
What is so useful about having a space worker robot have a basically humanoid form? I would think that more arms or a variable number and more "eyes" could be advantageous. What is with the torso and neck? How are these shapes useful or preferable for the jobs at hand?
Otherwise, IT IS ABOUT TIME! Sending fragile humans to space to do minor repairs is unnecessarily dangerous and expensive. It is about time we notice our cyber creations are more suited to space than ourselves and made more use of this fact.
The security concern is probably reasonable. But having extra contributors is sure not the only reason that open source is of benefit. I would be happy simply not to have to reinvent the wheel and deal with serveral other peoples version of the same damn wheel. Every piece of code you open source is potentially a piece somebody else will not have to rewrite from scratch. Of course this still leaves the large and fairly intersting logistics problem of how you find out someone has already written something very much like you are considering. It would be good if we could answer that one all the way down to the function/method level.
But what did MS do with all that talent they hired? Cutler gave them NT but I don't think the infamous picture of him with the bottle of booze on his desk or his reputation for a terrible temper were exactly signs he was well utilized or happy. But maybe that is just his style.
What did they do with the Mach stuff including built-in distribute object and object message stuff? Nothing really. DCOM just recently (COM+) manages to even address fundamental aspects of such like distributed dictionary problems.
TP expertise? Where the heck did that go at MS? Into MTS? Don't make me laugh.
Compiler experts? Well, counting method completion and on-the-fly compilation snippets, how much innovation has been done there by MS? The C++ compiler is reasonable but a series of incremental fix-ups rather than any real innovations I see. The link-editor is straight out of the early 80s. The include file handling is similarly primitive and no, their precompiled headers if anything made things worse. Where are reasonable innovations like source code analyzers that produce multiply viewable and browsable takes on the structures of systems? The meager stuff that you get only once everything compiles if you turn on the right options is a bad joke.
What else? MS Repository? A half-way useful idea implemented as a total toy. I spent a few months rewriting part of it to make it remotely useful. Most of my questions to MS met with shrugs or vague promises of adding some simple feature that should have been there from the beginning (like OLE DB support) some number of months down the road.
XML stuff? MS has done some decent work on driving various XML models for different domains. But I am paranoid they want to own those domain's communication channels and own the XML tool space itself.
UML support? The Visual Modeler is a badly scaled down Rational Rose clone built for MS by Rational. It is a toy for feeding the Repository toy. It is talked about being tied to development environments but only so far in very rudimentary ways.
New programming paradigms? I hear rumors but I haven't seen anything real.
So where is the beef? Did they buy up the talent to do something good with it or simply to neutralize possibly dangerous competition? In general MS ticks me off because all that wealth is being used for so very little to really advance the state of the programming art.
An object oriented operating system? Give me a break! MS is to enamored of VB. They just barely got a little bit of object based (not object oriented) stuff into VB6 that is really only a cover for ActiveX/COM stuff. Not object oriented at all. InProc COM as an attempt at an OO system? Sort of but not really. InProc grew out of DLL stuff which I was using back in 1985 or so when IBM/Microsoft were playing with OS/2. You can use it as part of an OO OS but it is certainly not the whole enchilda nor will it make it happen by itself.
Innovators? Like having VB6 a single thread for IDE, debugger, program which means any real error will blow the entire misbegotten thing out of the water? Don't make me laugh. MS has mainly been working out possibilities of DLLs and ActiveX plus some UI work. That is not exactly major innovation. Some of their component stuff is only beginning to catch up with things that have been part of CORBA world for some time now. They finally, for instance, came out with a publish and subscribe MOM. About freakin time.
Feedback? When you have to pay to even get a bug report filed and dealt with? Never mind actual feedback on features and design. Those go nowhere but, if you're very lucky, into Microsoft's list of things to maybe someday do with no credit to you and to charge you big bucks for. BAH.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to say whether the application or MS is at fault. It is a fact that in the past they have purposefully booby-trapped their OS against certain competitors products. So it is difficult to claim you can just blame the application. Also, since many needed details are not always forthcoming from MS it is difficult if not impossible for an external app to guarantee it will not blow up on the latest Windoze "upgrade".
This assumes:
a) the monarch can be bought;
b) the monarch will stay bought;
c) the monarch will stay in power;
d) the monarch will not decide to nationalize the company.
This seems like an awful lot of assumptions to rest the future on. Paying taxes is far less worrisome.
I was the chief architect for a distribute persistent OO development system built on ObjectiveC and a relational database backend in 1986-1988. Unfortunately, it was about 5 years ahead of its time and became shelfware before release. But I might be able to dig up some of the code if it would help.
heck. The hell with talking. Voice is S-L-O-W. I want the damn thing to read my mind. Or at least be able to interpret my literal hand-waving. Even the latter could be a lot faster than I can type if I get to teach the beast to understand what my gestures and moods and such mean. I always wanted hand-waving to mean something. :-)
Hey! I am an extremist. The middle of the road is for muddle-headed know-nothings. California has a concentration of both problems and good stuff largely simply because it has a 10th of the total population of the US in a lot less than a 10th of the area. The density leads to a bit more intensity. Do you have a problem with that? North Dakota IS boring. Vermont, though, is a pretty cool place. A bit eccentric but we Californians sort of like that.
The ASP push is a huge step into the past. It is back to centralized servers and effectively time-sharing networks. This at a time where vast amounts of computational power are on the desktop. Hell, huge amounts of power are in most appliances. What is really needful imnsho is a true distributed computational environment where updates and such are utterly automatic (with enough local control to feel secure of course) and file formats are transparent enough to ease full inter-operability. Java gives one answer to going in that direction. The capability is present in almost any language that supports a VM/interpreter and some intermediate form of executable code. In this world we have clouds of components that assemble to meet whatever task you currently need done. This is far more powerful and efficient than talking over the net to a few central servers where monolithic applications live (or even non-monolithic ones) and having some probably relatively limited local UI. If we ever want to get to a relatively uniform computational world then that is the direction we need to go in. The ASP model will not support ubiquitous computerized devices and agents that interoperate as needed. But the world of devices is going in that direction. So we have two contradictory currents.
Huh? I haven't seen many open source projects with real design documents. There usually is a reasonable description of what the system is trying to do. But the decisions, especially working decision about why to take a certain approach or why to reimplement a project specific version of some general utility (for instance) are often not only written down but queries as to why are often not answered.
I have seen specs that are incomprehensible in the Open Source community at times and seen projects that have little more than an advertising blurb and the code itself. This is not reasonable or very workable. One of the central issues in Open Source imho is adding some kind of Open Design that gives the intentions of the system and its developers. By the time you get to code the intentions are often hard to retrieve.
Source code does not document what the program does except for the computer! It does not document what was intended.
Most of that stuff is not right or at least not sufficient. Coding style per se is just way into the noise compared to what is really important. Approved APIs? Approved by whom, by what kind of process and how much does it get in the way of innovation? Fully specing all functions before coding doesn't always work because you are not a computer and you will invariably miss things including important factorings that are invisible until you actually start coding and working with the set of ideas. At the least an interative style needs to be employed. There is no reason to do a group decision process on every single function. What is crucial is to establish the interface APIs between groups and subsystems and the expected services and level of service of each subsystem. Having too many people discuss every bit of code & psuedo-code can result in Least Common Denominator code. This is not often a good thing. On code reviews I have found it more profitable to have very small review teams of say the code developer with one or two other developers at least one of which is a local coding guru and have the review have the function set to improve the coding and the coder's style of coding rather than in any sense to judge the coder. Any flavor of judgement and especially involving managers will lead to a lot of defensiveness and very little learned.
You get bullet-proof dependability more by very solid testing (of course at white box level) and by programming-by-contract sorts of practices rather than at a code review. Reviewers are not computers and are not running the code. They will inevitably miss major fault conditions that are not at all obvious form looking at the code.
Is soon to become Open Office that will not be a gated application environment any more. It will be fully Open Source (GPL) with separate processes for each application and XML format for the files. This should form a very nice basis for Linux Office tools going forward.
Uh, high-speed wireless enables a lot more than reading your mail on your cell-phone. Like being able to pop your laptop open anywhere and surf at DSL speeds, for instance. Or better yet, to have a true wearable computer that can access the entire net instead of some tiny little slice some corporation wants to charge you to look at on your pda or cell-phone.
A lot of us are techies in part because the "soft" world of politics and philosophy and such makes very little sense to us. That isn't entirely our fault. Since, rightly or wrongly, most philosophers gave up on forming any coherent philosophy, especially one that offered any sort of objective morality/ethics, there quite literally is no solid basis for some of these discussions of politics. To wade into these waters with much more intent than a few sound-bites or to stir in a couple of memes is to soon be mired in endless muck and murkiness. Few self-respecting tech folk will go in there.
Selfish? Oh my! Such a naughty, naughty word! I must be suitably cowed that someone thought they could get it to stick to me or "my community". When are we going to at least get smart enough to know that "selfish" is not necessarily synonymous with "bad" or "evil"? Nor is "selfless" synonymous with "good". Such mucking around in knee-jerk accusations and meaningless bromides does nothing but dull the mind and turn off more people who like to thing more clearly.
Many of us are libertarian because it makes more sense to us than the alternatives. Damned if I see how that makes us automatically "selfish" or "self-centered" or meaningfully described by any other such bully-word. People attempt to shame and dismiss opinions and their holders that they do not know how to address civilly or intelligently.
Despite some quite valid points the chapter in questions spends too much time perpetuating tired ideas about why no one, and especially those "lucky" enough or "favored by nature" enough to be knowledge works don't really deserve any market compensation but only what "society" (whatever that is) deems equitable to give us. After all, our work (and very existence) is dependent on so many others around us and those in preceeding generations. But this can be said of any person or group. If this line were valid it would invalidate everyone's right to compensation according to the perceived value of their work. It would say that I do not have the right to trade something I produce for something you produce freely and by mutual agreement. Instead both of our products and all our abilities are put into some common view and society (State) decides what compensation we do or do not get. This has been tried over and over again and simply does not work.
Quoted ideas from Hettinger include the notion that one's compensation is a matter of social policy and claim that receiving market value can only be a right once one has established the right of ownership. But if one own's one body and mind and time then one should have the right to trade one's energy and talents with others. The ownership is ownership of one's life and time. It is irrelevant if one is simply "lucky" or not. Life is not about some bogus notion of "fairness". Intelligence is not distributed equally. Nor is ambition. Nor dedication to a goal. Nor insight. Nature is a crap-shoot. But that fact does not mean that the successes that occur should not be rewarded. Evolution, including evolution of ideas and technology, works off of rewarding or selecting that which succeeds.
The market does not have to be "fair" in the sense of equal results or some rarefied and as yet unidentified measure of one's efforts or worthiness. To be fair the market simply needs to be free to all to trade their efforts and products for the effort and products of others.
This of course does not mean that most types of "intellectual property" are actually owned property. We need ways of trading the effort, ability, creativity, dedication and so on without tying up the products of these traits. Tying up the products reduces the useable value of the things we would like to reward and be rewarded for and actually slows down the future manifestation of these valuable qualities.
While I certainly believe in open standards, it occurs to me that standards bodies are attempts in part to control software evolution. Imagine if there was a standards body that needed to deliberate before homo sap models with extended brains could come on the scene. :-) I recognize this is a bit busted as an analogy. But perhaps the rest of the world could more profitably be embracing and extending what innovations are being produced or be busy building adaptors to make these things interoperate in addition to wringing its hands over lack of unified development to the uber-plan.
The so-called problem of reviewers giving better reviews to products in order to get more free product from the vendor is a non-issue. The reviews are only as trusted as their reputation over time allows. A reviewer who too often glosses over or doesn't mention issues that burn real users will come to have his/her statements disvalued. Such a reviewer is not a boon to the vendor and will not get goodies for being an ineffectual reviewer. Also, the goodies are not bribes but products to be reviewed that the viewer may get to keep in exchange for their time and energy.
It is NOT legitimate. It is a direct interference with free passage, the cyber equivalent of barring the door to keep you from leaving. Sites that do this deserve to lose customers and get tons of flak. I wouldn't be surprised if a few ticked off hacker folks decide to "fix" their site's annoying traits for them.
second hand? Really? Seeing equations graphically is not helpful? Having definitions and theoreoms online is not helpful when designing a mathematical proof? Having evolution play out in front of you in an a-life program doesn't get the point across better than staring at a bunch of fossils? Having an online planetarium program doesn't facilitate learning astronomy? Having hyperlinked text doesn't facilitate getting a more holistic view of various subjects? Either/or thinking is pointless. Whether education is aided or fun or not is a matter of the skill of the teachers *and* the tools available. It is also a matter of motivation and of how direct the feedback loop is.
I am certainly no expert on GUIs as I tend to stay in the deep server-side. But something that is percolating in my brain is that current GUIs are seriously retarded by being tied to a mouse. It is basically point at a single thing or select it and do something to it. It seems to me that better might start with all screens being touch screens. The next step would include being able to touch-pick-chord multiple things at once instead of one at a time. Opening up full touch modality should make more options available to the folks designing human/computer interface.
Another wacky idea is to have some kind of sensors around a screen that pick up user body movements quite accurately. So I could do things on the computer without seemingly touching any input device. Always did tend to hand-waving when it was time to get things done.
Who needs keyboards and mice? Have virtual keyboards on screen or in the air and select/ manipulate things directly on screen or in the air. Get at least some of the computer gear out of the way. And of course such virtual interfaces lend themselves much more easily to wearables.
Are you sure about that? If the network is the only way to get to a certain location then its private ownership seems analagous to a toll road or bridge. The owner of such might charge a fee but generally they cannot discriminate at will against who uses the road.
Those places need to fire their provider and find one a bit less brain-dead and greedy. As the prosperity and well-being of us all is increasingly dependent on information flow, paying by the byte for information is like paying by the breath for oxygen.
Why on earth would anyone in the internet age make the bold statement that "the vast majority of apps will run locally"? In this day why in the hell is it anyone's business to make assumptions about whether the components of an app reside? I was under the impression that a lot of software system development effort went in to making that sort of second-guessing the runtime environment unnecessary. But here we have a system that builds on a proprietary framework on the basis of such guessing. We should be opening systems and removing assumptions NOT enshrining them YET AGAIN.
You know, I've been around the block with software for a lot of years now. I have a lot of respect for KDE and the team. But what is the macho BS of not bothering to include simple installation instructions with the binary distribution? I am sitting experimenting with the rpms to find an order where they load without errors. But after loading the kdesupport, kdeutil and qt stuff, none of the rest of them seem to have their dependencies satisfied. Accuse me of being a wimp if you wish but why isn't there a manifest or document saying what the dependencies are, their order and where to find them if they aren't part of the distribution? It seems like common sense and courtesy to me.
Before I believe we are remotely ready for prime time I believe some simple housekeeping and moderate reasonableness of installation is called for. Put everthing needed in a distribution or say clearly where the needed pieces are found. Don't lead would be users and testers in the lurch.
If someone has the information I need then please send it to me.
thanks.
What is so useful about having a space worker robot have a basically humanoid form? I would think that more arms or a variable number and more "eyes" could be advantageous. What is with the torso and neck? How are these shapes useful or preferable for the jobs at hand?
Otherwise, IT IS ABOUT TIME! Sending fragile humans to space to do minor repairs is unnecessarily dangerous and expensive. It is about time we notice our cyber creations are more suited to space than ourselves and made more use of this fact.
The security concern is probably reasonable.
But having extra contributors is sure not the only reason that open source is of benefit. I would be happy simply not to have to reinvent the wheel and deal with serveral other peoples version of the same damn wheel. Every piece of code you open source is potentially a piece somebody else will not have to rewrite from scratch. Of course this still leaves the large and fairly intersting logistics problem of how you find out someone has already written something very much like you are considering. It would be good if we could answer that one all the way down to the function/method level.
But what did MS do with all that talent they hired? Cutler gave them NT but I don't think the infamous picture of him with the bottle of booze on his desk or his reputation for a terrible temper were exactly signs he was well utilized or happy. But maybe that is just his style.
What did they do with the Mach stuff including built-in distribute object and object message stuff? Nothing really. DCOM just recently (COM+) manages to even address fundamental aspects of such like distributed dictionary problems.
TP expertise? Where the heck did that go at MS? Into MTS? Don't make me laugh.
Compiler experts? Well, counting method completion and on-the-fly compilation snippets, how much innovation has been done there by MS? The C++ compiler is reasonable but a series of incremental fix-ups rather than any real innovations I see. The link-editor is straight out of the early 80s. The include file handling is similarly primitive and no, their precompiled headers if anything made things worse. Where are reasonable innovations like source code analyzers that produce multiply viewable and browsable takes on the structures of systems? The meager stuff that you get only once everything compiles if you turn on the right options is a bad joke.
What else? MS Repository? A half-way useful idea implemented as a total toy. I spent a few months rewriting part of it to make it remotely useful. Most of my questions to MS met with shrugs or vague promises of adding some simple feature that should have been there from the beginning (like OLE DB support) some number of months down the road.
XML stuff? MS has done some decent work on driving various XML models for different domains. But I am paranoid they want to own those domain's communication channels and own the XML tool space itself.
UML support? The Visual Modeler is a badly scaled down Rational Rose clone built for MS by Rational. It is a toy for feeding the Repository toy. It is talked about being tied to development environments but only so far in very rudimentary ways.
New programming paradigms? I hear rumors but I haven't seen anything real.
So where is the beef? Did they buy up the talent to do something good with it or simply to neutralize possibly dangerous competition? In general MS ticks me off because all that wealth is being used for so very little to really advance the state of the programming art.
An object oriented operating system? Give me a break! MS is to enamored of VB. They just barely got a little bit of object based (not object oriented) stuff into VB6 that is really only a cover for ActiveX/COM stuff. Not object oriented at all. InProc COM as an attempt at an OO system? Sort of but not really. InProc grew out of DLL stuff which I was using back in 1985 or so when IBM/Microsoft were playing with OS/2. You can use it as part of an OO OS but it is certainly not the whole enchilda nor will it make it happen by itself.
Innovators? Like having VB6 a single thread for IDE, debugger, program which means any real error will blow the entire misbegotten thing out of the water? Don't make me laugh. MS has mainly been working out possibilities of DLLs and ActiveX plus some UI work. That is not exactly major innovation. Some of their component stuff is only beginning to catch up with things that have been part of CORBA world for some time now. They finally, for instance, came out with a publish and subscribe MOM. About freakin time.
Feedback? When you have to pay to even get a bug report filed and dealt with? Never mind actual feedback on features and design. Those go nowhere but, if you're very lucky, into Microsoft's list of things to maybe someday do with no credit to you and to charge you big bucks for. BAH.