This is not true. Go take a look at the online resources at the Library of Congress. Many of the resources presented are just fine presented using AJAX technologies. Others use Flash needlessly. Obviously it all depends upon which contractor they used at the time. In any case, the LoC is now replacing all resources with a "Silverlight Kiosk" as they are calling it, meaning all of the resources, even ones that have no need for video are being replaced.
Have you implemented that kind of setup/kiosk before with Flash before? I have.
Have you implemented that kind of UI with Microsoft technologies before? I have.
Have you tried to do it with Silverlight? Do you have any real sense of the boundaries of the technology and what you would or wouldn't do with it? Or real sense of the kinds of libraries and fancy AJAX widgets MS has out there, should they take an "if it's not MS, it's crap!" approach to setting up the kiosk?
You could do the entire thing in Silverlight come hell or high water, just like you CAN walk cross-country and get the best gas mileage, but basically no one serious actually would.
No, you've made up your mind and god help any kind of facts or informed opinion should they get in the way.
You don't see that as a significant step backwards? I don't see how anyone could claim otherwise, unless perhaps they were an astroturfer being paid to have a certain opinion.
First... no. I'm a developer, and I'm a consultant. I work with whatever technology does the job best for my clients. Sometimes that's free stuff, and sometimes that's closed stuff like Flash or.NET. In the last six months alone it's been both. My opinion is much more likely to be based in objective pros and cons, and reality in general, than someone for whom Microsoft is always the devil.
For many many many software projects, the price of the hardware it runs on is so insignificant as to be a rounding error. A good developer's time for a day costs more than a server, and it's usually going to take a lot more than one good developer and a lot more than a day.
Second... who would seriously hire anyone to astroturf on Slashdot of all places? I can't imagine a bigger waste of money. Occam's Razor should clean that tinfoil hat brigade idea right up, and if it doesn't, you've got bigger problems. If that seems inflammatory to say, see parent post.
They currently use a combination of AJAX and Flash depending upon the resource.
If a resource didn't make sense to present with Flash, it wouldn't make sense to present with Silverlight either. Someone developing a Microsoft solutions version of the site would almost certainly use AJAX in the exact same places.
In any case, it's not like the LoC was talking about ripping out their Flash and replacing it with an all-AJAX solution, so it's your choice of disingenuous or wrong to say that Silverlight beat out AJAX there.
While Flash is proprietary, it has been making strides towards becoming more open, with most of the specification now public.
Silverlight runs in any browser on any OS. It could be fairly said that this is a great stride towards openness from Microsoft.
Flash is not owned by a company with a monopoly to leverage and so the risk of monopolistic lock in is much less.
Right, Adobe isn't Microsoft. We knew that.
Flash also supports interfaces for the disabled, which Silverlight does not yet.
I don't have sources to cite, but my understanding from people who have worked with both is that this is one of the very few areas where Silverlight blows Flash clean out of the water.
Finally, Silverlight only supports Windows as a server, while Flash supports Linux as well; so even ignoring the AJAX in use, Silverlight is a significant step towards both more proprietary and more potential for abusive lock-in.
Eh. I can't agree with "significant" there. We'll have to agree to disagree about that one.
Or, look at the Library of Congress, who MS just paid to standardize on using the proprietary standard "silverlight" instead of the open standard AJAX. They don't know or care about the difference, especially in the face of a fairly small donation from MS. They are now locked into an MS proprietary format and MS only servers for the future unless they want to spend a large sum trying to break free.
The way I remember that story reading, they were paid to standardize on using Silverlight instead of Flash for their UI, which is also a proprietary standard. AJAX was never even in the picture.
Right. Some free software lawyers came to a consensus on its legal meaning, happening to agree that a group they (perhaps correctly) see as the enemy isn't doing enough for them.
In other news, a dozen Catholic bishops came to a consensus that Catholicism is the one true faith and that promises made by other religions might not be as good.
That the free software world can copy a successful closed source project, copy almost all of the significant or hard work, and then make some improvements upon it?
I'm not sure I'd point to that with much in the way of pride. It's about on the level of copying War and Peace, fixing a few spelling or grammar errors, and calling it an accomplishment.
While I agree with you that a lot of the best people for a job like this will have somewhat dirty pasts, I can also see the serious cultural/bureaucratic struggle it would be to get higher-ups/lawmakers to agree and make the necessarsy changes.
It's clear from other answers that the General is aware that many traits traditionally valued in soldiers are, if not unwelcome, at least a lower priority for this position. I'd assume that what's within his power is relaxed, but everything may not be.
Luckily for open source projects there's an easy audit trail (so long as you compile from that source - a premade binary distributed with source could still contain malicious code simply not included in the provided source).
is the catch that, in a lot of cases, neuters this advantage open source projects has over closed source projects. Probably even 99% of the users of Linux don't compile it themselves from source.
It really does come down to whether you trust the software provider.
That being said, I think the bigger Open Source projects do "live the dream", in that you probably need an unrealistic number of people to be complicit in distributing a 'secret malware binary' of something like OpenOffice. At least, from more than one mirror.
It was 1700 e-mails in the account at the point at which someone else found it.
From the sources, I don't think we can be sure that there weren't many more over the life of the software that were cleared out earlier. If the G-Archiver guy had access to some kind of GMail archival software, he could easily make a local backup of them, say, once a week and delete what was there, figuring someone would eventually get wise to it.
I'm with you there. All developers have sent code to production unintentionally, and just reading the summary I thought to myself, I probably have made that kind of mistake before, maybe this is innocent.
It's reading the story and seeing all the details that makes it just not add up to me.
that if, hypothetically, Microsoft and let's say... Dell merged, all of Microsoft's legal troubles would go away forever and no one could legitimately criticize their ethics ever again?
The difference is that it is unthinkable that most companies should have a "Chief Plumbing Officer", but the IT world seems to think that they need to be involved at the highest reaches of every company's management.
On the other hand (for most businesses), plumbing is something that you either have or you don't. You need it for your employees to be productive, but getting better toilets probably won't make them more productive.
There's almost always potential for some facet of IT to add new value to a company, though. Maybe it's replacing a previously expensive phone system for an international call center with VoIP. Maybe it's replacing a mostly manual order-entry system that takes a lot of time and is prone to human error with a workflow system that can automate 90% of the steps, saving time and cutting errors way down. Maybe it's revamping some internal (software) process to add high availability to a system that incurs significant profit losses whenever it's down for an hour.
For any company big enough to have some of these possibilities, hell yes it makes sense to have a person knowledgeable about technology at the higher levels of leadership to help decide when technology can add more value to the business.
By good, we mean people who have worked on 1-2 games before and have more than 3 years experience
This is the catch right here.
The games industry is notorious (even among IT, which is bad about it already) about not being willing to hire entry-level people. If you haven't shipped a couple games, forget it.
I'm not saying I have a hundred friends in the game industry, but everyone I do know struggled and struggled to get their first job in the industry and finally did because they knew someone. After that, finding further work was easy and they could demand ridiculously more money.
We have a couple basic problem solving questions and 2 algorithm questions which we routinely ask.. This is stuff I learned in high school, or my 2nd year algorithms class in college. People who are professing CS degrees and 0-5 years experience are routinely getting these questions wrong.
That doesn't surprise me. Thinking back on the kind of stuff I learned in programming classes in high school or in algorithms classes in college... I've used roughly 0% of it in my career since.
If you're interviewing people who have been working on "modern" business apps, it's no surprise they struggle to bust out something like a bubble sort (or whatever) off the top of their heads.
What, exactly, would a Web 2.0 3D solid-modeling CAD program be?
Probably, the closest thing I can think of is something like mfg.com -- and that's a Web 2.0-ish business that interacts with a program like a Solidworks and the people using it -- not something that tries to replace it.
It'd be unnecessary and a little silly to run a CAD program on that scale in a browser, and it's boggling to me that de Icaza doesn't seem to see that.
The rest of this aside... I don't think the last chapter of the book about Microsoft buying Yahoo! is written yet. Not that I'm predicting MS will successfully buy Yahoo! in the near future either, but I doubt the initial offer was much more than your choice of an opening gambit or a shot across the bow.
I think he expects too much out of "Web 2.0"... just as people expected too much out of the Web in terms of finance and relevance ten years ago.
That's not to say that we didn't see a lot of money out of the dot com era, or that the Web isn't much more relevant to life than it was then... but I'm not really seeing OSes become irrelevant in the near future. There's always a guy out there saying that everything will happen on the Web, and Google Documents or no Google Documents, we're not there yet and I'm not sure we ever will be.
This is like Microsoft introducing C# when we already have C++ and Java.
And yet, despite having years of experience with all three of those languages, I prefer to work in C# when possible. I also believe that competition from C# is pushing Java to become better now in a way that it wasn't when it had no real competition for the kinds of applications for which Java is a good choice.
Probably in 5 years Java will have improved to the point that it's my choice for most business applications again. In a world without C# it'd still be the choice by default, but it'd be a lot crappier of a language to work with.
What if they stop making the player for operating systems other than Windows when Silverlight becomes popular. What if they stop making a player for browsers other than IE?
The market fixes this problem itself very nicely, if not immediately.
If Microsoft does those things, there's suddenly a golden opportunity for another competitor or competitors to get going -- they'll be able to gain mindshare and traction much more easily from nothing, because they'll be providing something Microsoft isn't.
Witness the way that Microsoft won the browser war and stopped work on IE, only to have Firefox emerge and provide strong competition. I know this is slashdot and it's free software uber alles and all, but realistically, if Microsoft had kept working on IE as hard as they were when they were trying to beat Netscape, there either never would have been a Firefox, or basically no one outside of slashdot-like communities would care. They didn't do that, and so a lot of people that in the continually-improving-super-IE alternate world wouldn't even be looking for a Firefox or who wouldn't want to work on improving a Firefox or who wouldn't want to make plug-ins for Firefox were primed for it.
So in short, yes, Microsoft could do what you're saying if Silverlight crushed Flash, but it wouldn't last for long.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not true. Go take a look at the online resources at the Library of Congress. Many of the resources presented are just fine presented using AJAX technologies. Others use Flash needlessly. Obviously it all depends upon which contractor they used at the time. In any case, the LoC is now replacing all resources with a "Silverlight Kiosk" as they are calling it, meaning all of the resources, even ones that have no need for video are being replaced.
Have you implemented that kind of setup/kiosk before with Flash before? I have.
Have you implemented that kind of UI with Microsoft technologies before? I have.
Have you tried to do it with Silverlight? Do you have any real sense of the boundaries of the technology and what you would or wouldn't do with it? Or real sense of the kinds of libraries and fancy AJAX widgets MS has out there, should they take an "if it's not MS, it's crap!" approach to setting up the kiosk?
You could do the entire thing in Silverlight come hell or high water, just like you CAN walk cross-country and get the best gas mileage, but basically no one serious actually would.
No, you've made up your mind and god help any kind of facts or informed opinion should they get in the way.
You don't see that as a significant step backwards? I don't see how anyone could claim otherwise, unless perhaps they were an astroturfer being paid to have a certain opinion.
First... no. I'm a developer, and I'm a consultant. I work with whatever technology does the job best for my clients. Sometimes that's free stuff, and sometimes that's closed stuff like Flash or
For many many many software projects, the price of the hardware it runs on is so insignificant as to be a rounding error. A good developer's time for a day costs more than a server, and it's usually going to take a lot more than one good developer and a lot more than a day.
Second... who would seriously hire anyone to astroturf on Slashdot of all places? I can't imagine a bigger waste of money. Occam's Razor should clean that tinfoil hat brigade idea right up, and if it doesn't, you've got bigger problems. If that seems inflammatory to say, see parent post.
You are incorrect.
That's debateable. I'll elaborate.
They currently use a combination of AJAX and Flash depending upon the resource.
If a resource didn't make sense to present with Flash, it wouldn't make sense to present with Silverlight either. Someone developing a Microsoft solutions version of the site would almost certainly use AJAX in the exact same places.
In any case, it's not like the LoC was talking about ripping out their Flash and replacing it with an all-AJAX solution, so it's your choice of disingenuous or wrong to say that Silverlight beat out AJAX there.
While Flash is proprietary, it has been making strides towards becoming more open, with most of the specification now public.
Silverlight runs in any browser on any OS. It could be fairly said that this is a great stride towards openness from Microsoft.
Flash is not owned by a company with a monopoly to leverage and so the risk of monopolistic lock in is much less.
Right, Adobe isn't Microsoft. We knew that.
Flash also supports interfaces for the disabled, which Silverlight does not yet.
I don't have sources to cite, but my understanding from people who have worked with both is that this is one of the very few areas where Silverlight blows Flash clean out of the water.
Finally, Silverlight only supports Windows as a server, while Flash supports Linux as well; so even ignoring the AJAX in use, Silverlight is a significant step towards both more proprietary and more potential for abusive lock-in.
Eh. I can't agree with "significant" there. We'll have to agree to disagree about that one.
You're right about EA wanting a piece of the next release but I don't think it has to do with GTA, it has to do with the upcoming BioShock 2.
Nah, I don't think so. Bioshock was great and all, but I'd surprised if it sold anywhere near the volume of, say, GTA 3 across all platforms.
(I could be wrong.)
Or, look at the Library of Congress, who MS just paid to standardize on using the proprietary standard "silverlight" instead of the open standard AJAX. They don't know or care about the difference, especially in the face of a fairly small donation from MS. They are now locked into an MS proprietary format and MS only servers for the future unless they want to spend a large sum trying to break free.
The way I remember that story reading, they were paid to standardize on using Silverlight instead of Flash for their UI, which is also a proprietary standard. AJAX was never even in the picture.
Right. Some free software lawyers came to a consensus on its legal meaning, happening to agree that a group they (perhaps correctly) see as the enemy isn't doing enough for them.
In other news, a dozen Catholic bishops came to a consensus that Catholicism is the one true faith and that promises made by other religions might not be as good.
Some software freedom people don't think Microsoft is going far enough with guarantees of openness and freedom.
How was this news, again?
So your point is... what, exactly?
That the free software world can copy a successful closed source project, copy almost all of the significant or hard work, and then make some improvements upon it?
I'm not sure I'd point to that with much in the way of pride. It's about on the level of copying War and Peace, fixing a few spelling or grammar errors, and calling it an accomplishment.
You lost me at Lotus being superior software.
It's a nice manifesto, but it's more about how you'd like the world to be than how it actually is or will be anytime soon.
While I agree with you that a lot of the best people for a job like this will have somewhat dirty pasts, I can also see the serious cultural/bureaucratic struggle it would be to get higher-ups/lawmakers to agree and make the necessarsy changes.
It's clear from other answers that the General is aware that many traits traditionally valued in soldiers are, if not unwelcome, at least a lower priority for this position. I'd assume that what's within his power is relaxed, but everything may not be.
I was assuming the source does not match binaries case, and for a one-man project like G-Archiver.
How trivial is that to verify if I control both? Depending on the compiler/options you could get some different executables...
This:
Luckily for open source projects there's an easy audit trail (so long as you compile from that source - a premade binary distributed with source could still contain malicious code simply not included in the provided source).
is the catch that, in a lot of cases, neuters this advantage open source projects has over closed source projects. Probably even 99% of the users of Linux don't compile it themselves from source.
It really does come down to whether you trust the software provider.
That being said, I think the bigger Open Source projects do "live the dream", in that you probably need an unrealistic number of people to be complicit in distributing a 'secret malware binary' of something like OpenOffice. At least, from more than one mirror.
It was 1700 e-mails in the account at the point at which someone else found it.
From the sources, I don't think we can be sure that there weren't many more over the life of the software that were cleared out earlier. If the G-Archiver guy had access to some kind of GMail archival software, he could easily make a local backup of them, say, once a week and delete what was there, figuring someone would eventually get wise to it.
I'm with you there. All developers have sent code to production unintentionally, and just reading the summary I thought to myself, I probably have made that kind of mistake before, maybe this is innocent.
It's reading the story and seeing all the details that makes it just not add up to me.
that if, hypothetically, Microsoft and let's say... Dell merged, all of Microsoft's legal troubles would go away forever and no one could legitimately criticize their ethics ever again?
I don't buy that.
The difference is that it is unthinkable that most companies should have a "Chief Plumbing Officer", but the IT world seems to think that they need to be involved at the highest reaches of every company's management.
On the other hand (for most businesses), plumbing is something that you either have or you don't. You need it for your employees to be productive, but getting better toilets probably won't make them more productive.
There's almost always potential for some facet of IT to add new value to a company, though. Maybe it's replacing a previously expensive phone system for an international call center with VoIP. Maybe it's replacing a mostly manual order-entry system that takes a lot of time and is prone to human error with a workflow system that can automate 90% of the steps, saving time and cutting errors way down. Maybe it's revamping some internal (software) process to add high availability to a system that incurs significant profit losses whenever it's down for an hour.
For any company big enough to have some of these possibilities, hell yes it makes sense to have a person knowledgeable about technology at the higher levels of leadership to help decide when technology can add more value to the business.
By good, we mean people who have worked on 1-2 games before and have more than 3 years experience
This is the catch right here.
The games industry is notorious (even among IT, which is bad about it already) about not being willing to hire entry-level people. If you haven't shipped a couple games, forget it.
I'm not saying I have a hundred friends in the game industry, but everyone I do know struggled and struggled to get their first job in the industry and finally did because they knew someone. After that, finding further work was easy and they could demand ridiculously more money.
We have a couple basic problem solving questions and 2 algorithm questions which we routinely ask.. This is stuff I learned in high school, or my 2nd year algorithms class in college. People who are professing CS degrees and 0-5 years experience are routinely getting these questions wrong.
That doesn't surprise me. Thinking back on the kind of stuff I learned in programming classes in high school or in algorithms classes in college... I've used roughly 0% of it in my career since.
If you're interviewing people who have been working on "modern" business apps, it's no surprise they struggle to bust out something like a bubble sort (or whatever) off the top of their heads.
What, exactly, would a Web 2.0 3D solid-modeling CAD program be?
Probably, the closest thing I can think of is something like mfg.com -- and that's a Web 2.0-ish business that interacts with a program like a Solidworks and the people using it -- not something that tries to replace it.
It'd be unnecessary and a little silly to run a CAD program on that scale in a browser, and it's boggling to me that de Icaza doesn't seem to see that.
The rest of this aside... I don't think the last chapter of the book about Microsoft buying Yahoo! is written yet. Not that I'm predicting MS will successfully buy Yahoo! in the near future either, but I doubt the initial offer was much more than your choice of an opening gambit or a shot across the bow.
I think he expects too much out of "Web 2.0"... just as people expected too much out of the Web in terms of finance and relevance ten years ago.
That's not to say that we didn't see a lot of money out of the dot com era, or that the Web isn't much more relevant to life than it was then... but I'm not really seeing OSes become irrelevant in the near future. There's always a guy out there saying that everything will happen on the Web, and Google Documents or no Google Documents, we're not there yet and I'm not sure we ever will be.
And yet that hasn't happened with web browsers or office software or 50 other things.
If not wearing a tinfoil hat is naive, so be it.
Well, for you, maybe making Internet Windows-Only wouldn't be a bad thing. For my part, I would be pissed.
We differ, then, in that I don't see this as a realistic possibility.
Besides, the original question was not whether MS crushing Flash would our would not alter the place forever.
My point isn't that it wouldn't, but that it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing even in the worst of all cases.
This is like Microsoft introducing C# when we already have C++ and Java.
And yet, despite having years of experience with all three of those languages, I prefer to work in C# when possible. I also believe that competition from C# is pushing Java to become better now in a way that it wasn't when it had no real competition for the kinds of applications for which Java is a good choice.
Probably in 5 years Java will have improved to the point that it's my choice for most business applications again. In a world without C# it'd still be the choice by default, but it'd be a lot crappier of a language to work with.
What if they stop making the player for operating systems other than Windows when Silverlight becomes popular. What if they stop making a player for browsers other than IE?
The market fixes this problem itself very nicely, if not immediately.
If Microsoft does those things, there's suddenly a golden opportunity for another competitor or competitors to get going -- they'll be able to gain mindshare and traction much more easily from nothing, because they'll be providing something Microsoft isn't.
Witness the way that Microsoft won the browser war and stopped work on IE, only to have Firefox emerge and provide strong competition. I know this is slashdot and it's free software uber alles and all, but realistically, if Microsoft had kept working on IE as hard as they were when they were trying to beat Netscape, there either never would have been a Firefox, or basically no one outside of slashdot-like communities would care. They didn't do that, and so a lot of people that in the continually-improving-super-IE alternate world wouldn't even be looking for a Firefox or who wouldn't want to work on improving a Firefox or who wouldn't want to make plug-ins for Firefox were primed for it.
So in short, yes, Microsoft could do what you're saying if Silverlight crushed Flash, but it wouldn't last for long.