Just to clarify, Firefox, along with Mozilla was originaly a Windows application. The OSX, OS 9, Linux, BeOS etc ports are just that -- ports of the original windows code base.
Well, not exactly, since back at the very, very beginning Mosaic was a Unix-only X-window-based application. Netscape has always been multiplatform also.
Besides, my point is that open-source developers, in the large sense, are quite willing to support Windows, so why not MS Linux? Dvorak is full of it.
He has to keep writing trolling articles like these, just to remain relevant in the IT industry, when in fact, he no longer is.
From reading other people's comments, I'm getting this message now. I kind of regret rising to his troll, but I wasn't the one who put the story on Slashdot to begin with...:)
What he's saying is, if Microsoft starts supporting Linux that Linux will go away?
If that were true, why hasn't Windows gone away?
Dvorak thinks that open-source developers will stop working on their stuff if they perceive it as benefitting Microsoft. I say this is obviously not true; there are many, many projects now that run on Windows (like Firefox, just to pick one major example), and their developers don't seem the least bit deterred by running on Windows.
The Turing award is slowly starting to recognize people who have designed, built, and deployed systems. Up until recently, it had been given solely to people in theory.
I don't think you have the faintest idea what you're talking about. The winners (list below, from ACM's website) have always been a mixture of practitioners and theorists. For example, Wilkes built the first stored-program computer, Backus was in charge of the first successful compiler project, Knuth created TeX, and everybody knows about Thompson & Ritchie's accomplishments in "designing, building and deploying systems". (except you, maybe:).
1966 A.J. Perlis
1967 Maurice V. Wilkes
1968 Richard Hamming
1969 Marvin Minsky
1970 J.H. Wilkinson
1971 John McCarthy
1972 E.W. Dijkstra
1973 Charles W. Bachman
1974 Donald E. Knuth
1975 Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon
1976 Michael O. Rabin, Dana S. Scott
1977 John Backus
1978 Robert W. Floyd
1979 Kenneth E. Iverson
1980 C. Antony R. Hoare
1981 Edgar F. Codd
1982 Stephen A. Cook
1983 Ken Thompson, Dennis M. Ritchie
1984 Niklaus Wirth
1985 Richard M. Karp
1986 John Hopcroft, Robert Tarjan
1987 John Cocke
1988 Ivan Sutherland
1989 William (Velvel) Kahan
1990 Fernando J. Corbato'
1991 Robin Milner
1992 Butler W. Lampson
1993 Juris Hartmanis, Richard E. Stearns
1994 Edward Feigenbaum, Raj Reddy
1995 Manuel Blum
1996 Amir Pnueli
1997 Douglas Engelbart
1998 James Gray
1999 Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
2000 Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
2001 Ole-Johan Dahl, Kristen Nygaard
2002 Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard M. Adleman
2003 Alan Kay
Delivered to the queueing system. At that point the queueing system takes responsibility until a client takes delivery of the message and commits. You seemed to be saying that the message would be lost if the client wasn't available when the message was sent, and that's just not true; the queueing system guarantees delivery (or it remains in the queue, or the building containing the computer burns down or whatever, but that's a different issue). High-reliability systems like this have to be monitored for non-delivery situations like the client dying, but that has nothing to do with the queueing system itself.
This whole thing is suspect anyway until they release their source code. It isn't "open-source" if the source is kept secret!
Asynchronous connection precludes reliability. If there is no receiver waiting, there is no gurantee that the message will get to the recipient. At best, the sender will get a bounce message.
If you've ever used MQ (or any other message-queueing system, such as Tuxedo queues), you wouldn't misunderstand the problem so badly.
"Asynchronous" means the message is potentially delivered at some future time, not necessarily immediately. "Transactional" means that once the sender has delivered the message to the queueing system and committed the transaction, it WILL GET DELIVERED at some point, not just quietly thrown away (as you seem to think it will be).
The key feature of this kind of system: guaranteed delivery. Very important to financial systems. Email, by contrast, can be faulty and nobody much cares (98% of it is spam anyway these days:).
Yeah, somebody else made that same point. Also mentioned was the use of a mirror to reverse the direction of the incoming light beam (which works because the sail is actively shedding mass to enhance the effect).
Since Gregory Benford is also a scifi author, I expect to see this in a book soon.
I don't expect to see it in reality anytime, though, due to the basic problems with a one-way propulsion system. How do they decelerate when they arrive? There won't be anybody waiting for them at Mars with a laser pointed the other way, after all.
I got my start in programming in the late 70's, writing Fortran code on punch cards in college. Later, I spent a long period doing Fortran compilers and Fortran programming tools, so I'm kind of a Fortran expert.
I thought those days were long behind me, but then...
This week, I got the new DVD release of the 1970 movie "THX 1138" from the local library; you know, George Lucas' college project about a dystopian future, that set him on his way to fame and fortune. Pretty bad movie, although I did like the "somebody ran over a Wookie" line in the background police chatter.
But the funniest part was when they wanted to show some "computer" stuff (this movie was from 1970, remember). They showed....Fortran code! Printed on green-and-white line-printer paper! Ohmigod, deja vu! And now, today, we get this story! AAAAAAAAAGH! It won't die!
Just what we need, a system so that programmers can make their programs stop working on other programmer's environment. This sounds like a formula for disaster, as it will be that much harder to get a consistent build of a project with multiple programmers done, since each one will potentially be programming in a different language. (I've never liked the way the C "&" operator doesn't short-stop execution, so I'll just make it work like "&&". Oops, my partner's bit-twiddling code doesn't work any more.)
Also, I think the XML thing, which everybody here seems to be harping on, is totally irrelevant. How you represent each developer's custom language settings isn't the issue; the fact that the language can be changed on the fly is.
In 1995, the CIA probably did predict a major terrorist attack. After all, this was not long after the first WTC attack. And when the OK City bombing occurred (April 1995), for several days everybody assumed it was Islamic terrorists.
The first standard I thought of when I saw this article was ASN.1. Is that what Sun is basing their binary-XML work on?
ASN.1 was a major pain to deal with, as I recall from my application-development days, and there was a dearth of freely-available tools for manipulating it (my projects always had to use expensive proprietary encoder/decoder libraries), despite being a supposedly open standard. In fact, you couldn't even download the standard itself; it cost fairly major bucks just to get the documents describing it.
You got that right. The software development company at which I work dumped Rational for CVS about a year ago (for both monetary and usability reasons), and we haven't regretted it for a second. Their tools were much more of a hindrance than a help. Plus we can't read our old source code change histories because we don't have a Clearcase license any more. Vendor lock-in sucks when you're entrusting your precious source code to a company like that.
Good lord, why can't the marketroids keep coopting every useful word?
Or is Rational now selling liquids containing dissolved substances?
Re:GaAs??? GaAs is material of the future...
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You would not want to build a processor out of those, Cray tried with Cray 4 and failed...;-(
I worked at Cray Computer, so I know something about this... The Cray-3 (also GaAs) was working OK when the bankruptcy hit, and the Cray-4 would probably have worked.
The failure of Cray Computer was due to competition and missing market windows, not due to the choice of technology per se. (Admittedly the late deliveries were due to difficulties with getting the processors working, but much of that was due to aggressive circuit-board designs that led to problems with open contacts, and the difficulty of repairing them).
btw, the 10th anniversary of the CCC bankruptcy is coming up on March 24th. My, how the years fly by sometimes.
Hmmm, add to all this the fact that 04/13/2029 will be my 55th birthday, and I start to get the idea that it will be a very bad day for me. Such a shame, I usually have great luck on Friday 13th's.
Does your birthday always fall on Friday the 13th?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, not exactly, since back at the very, very beginning Mosaic was a Unix-only X-window-based application. Netscape has always been multiplatform also.
Besides, my point is that open-source developers, in the large sense, are quite willing to support Windows, so why not MS Linux? Dvorak is full of it.
From reading other people's comments, I'm getting this message now. I kind of regret rising to his troll, but I wasn't the one who put the story on Slashdot to begin with... :)
If that were true, why hasn't Windows gone away?
Dvorak thinks that open-source developers will stop working on their stuff if they perceive it as benefitting Microsoft. I say this is obviously not true; there are many, many projects now that run on Windows (like Firefox, just to pick one major example), and their developers don't seem the least bit deterred by running on Windows.
...is the sound of thousands of geeks cancelling their orders for broadcast-flag-free tuner cards.
Hmmm, that's not such a bad image...exploding spammers....
I don't think you have the faintest idea what you're talking about. The winners (list below, from ACM's website) have always been a mixture of practitioners and theorists. For example, Wilkes built the first stored-program computer, Backus was in charge of the first successful compiler project, Knuth created TeX, and everybody knows about Thompson & Ritchie's accomplishments in "designing, building and deploying systems". (except you, maybe :).
1966 A.J. Perlis
1967 Maurice V. Wilkes
1968 Richard Hamming
1969 Marvin Minsky
1970 J.H. Wilkinson
1971 John McCarthy
1972 E.W. Dijkstra
1973 Charles W. Bachman
1974 Donald E. Knuth
1975 Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon
1976 Michael O. Rabin, Dana S. Scott
1977 John Backus
1978 Robert W. Floyd
1979 Kenneth E. Iverson
1980 C. Antony R. Hoare
1981 Edgar F. Codd
1982 Stephen A. Cook
1983 Ken Thompson, Dennis M. Ritchie
1984 Niklaus Wirth
1985 Richard M. Karp
1986 John Hopcroft, Robert Tarjan
1987 John Cocke
1988 Ivan Sutherland
1989 William (Velvel) Kahan
1990 Fernando J. Corbato'
1991 Robin Milner
1992 Butler W. Lampson
1993 Juris Hartmanis, Richard E. Stearns
1994 Edward Feigenbaum, Raj Reddy
1995 Manuel Blum
1996 Amir Pnueli
1997 Douglas Engelbart
1998 James Gray
1999 Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
2000 Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
2001 Ole-Johan Dahl, Kristen Nygaard
2002 Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard M. Adleman
2003 Alan Kay
This whole thing is suspect anyway until they release their source code. It isn't "open-source" if the source is kept secret!
If you've ever used MQ (or any other message-queueing system, such as Tuxedo queues), you wouldn't misunderstand the problem so badly.
"Asynchronous" means the message is potentially delivered at some future time, not necessarily immediately. "Transactional" means that once the sender has delivered the message to the queueing system and committed the transaction, it WILL GET DELIVERED at some point, not just quietly thrown away (as you seem to think it will be).
The key feature of this kind of system: guaranteed delivery. Very important to financial systems. Email, by contrast, can be faulty and nobody much cares (98% of it is spam anyway these days :).
Webroot just announced $108 million in venture capital funding. I guess they're already starting to deploy it to drum up business.
2. People haven't migrated away because it's too hard.
You're welcome!
Yeah, somebody else made that same point. Also mentioned was the use of a mirror to reverse the direction of the incoming light beam (which works because the sail is actively shedding mass to enhance the effect).
I don't expect to see it in reality anytime, though, due to the basic problems with a one-way propulsion system. How do they decelerate when they arrive? There won't be anybody waiting for them at Mars with a laser pointed the other way, after all.
I thought those days were long behind me, but then...
This week, I got the new DVD release of the 1970 movie "THX 1138" from the local library; you know, George Lucas' college project about a dystopian future, that set him on his way to fame and fortune. Pretty bad movie, although I did like the "somebody ran over a Wookie" line in the background police chatter.
But the funniest part was when they wanted to show some "computer" stuff (this movie was from 1970, remember). They showed....Fortran code! Printed on green-and-white line-printer paper! Ohmigod, deja vu! And now, today, we get this story! AAAAAAAAAGH! It won't die!
Of course! It was proposed by Mr. Scheme himself, Guy Steele. Who should know better...
Also, I think the XML thing, which everybody here seems to be harping on, is totally irrelevant. How you represent each developer's custom language settings isn't the issue; the fact that the language can be changed on the fly is.
Provided I'm the one being paid, of course...
Anybody who thinks weblogs, in general, convey useful information is an idiot; they're like newspaper columns with no editors.
If the "40 hour" week was cut by ten hours, the typical American office worker would still be working 50 hours, plus spending 10 hours commuting.
In 1995, the CIA probably did predict a major terrorist attack. After all, this was not long after the first WTC attack. And when the OK City bombing occurred (April 1995), for several days everybody assumed it was Islamic terrorists.
ASN.1 was a major pain to deal with, as I recall from my application-development days, and there was a dearth of freely-available tools for manipulating it (my projects always had to use expensive proprietary encoder/decoder libraries), despite being a supposedly open standard. In fact, you couldn't even download the standard itself; it cost fairly major bucks just to get the documents describing it.
You got that right. The software development company at which I work dumped Rational for CVS about a year ago (for both monetary and usability reasons), and we haven't regretted it for a second. Their tools were much more of a hindrance than a help. Plus we can't read our old source code change histories because we don't have a Clearcase license any more. Vendor lock-in sucks when you're entrusting your precious source code to a company like that.
Or is Rational now selling liquids containing dissolved substances?
I worked at Cray Computer, so I know something about this... The Cray-3 (also GaAs) was working OK when the bankruptcy hit, and the Cray-4 would probably have worked.
The failure of Cray Computer was due to competition and missing market windows, not due to the choice of technology per se. (Admittedly the late deliveries were due to difficulties with getting the processors working, but much of that was due to aggressive circuit-board designs that led to problems with open contacts, and the difficulty of repairing them).
btw, the 10th anniversary of the CCC bankruptcy is coming up on March 24th. My, how the years fly by sometimes.
You forgot sunglasses that play MP3's, my personal nominee for the most overhyped and ridiculous "convergence" of 2003.
Of course, this is the new, evil, HP, so I guess I shouldn't get my hopes up.
Does your birthday always fall on Friday the 13th? :)