OK, I suppose I should have done a little research of my own. It seems that from reading the Microsoft Research Home Page that some of their innovations have apparently made it into products. A pretty anemic list, if you ask me.
Also, they've only existed since 1991, so they couldn't have come up with something 15 years ago.
What people should remember here is that this is Microsoft Research. You know, the guys who had ESR out to talk?
Microsoft has hired a lot of top people for their Research arm, and they do a lot of cool stuff, but I've yet to hear of anything they are doing making it into a product. There is a story that some research from Microsoft, about 15 years ago, led to a genetic algorithm that found a more efficient way to convert a string of digits to a binary representation, but I can't recall the details. I think Microsoft Research does what they do as a marketing activity, to prove that Microsoft can do "pure" research just like other highly capitalized high-tech businesses.
Microsoft Product divisions are all too busy renaming their distributed object technology, again, to actually integrate any real innovations.
I know it's not an "optimal" solution, but I'm really surprised that nobody has suggested NNTP/Netnews.
True, a lot of people prefer a web-based forum, but News has a lot of advantages:
Security issues well understood.
Good client software available.
High performance. I would be REALLY surprised if your configuration couldn't easily handle twice your current traffic with ease if it were a News Server.
Administration simplicity.
All the missing bits that these web-based threaded discussion packages offer could be added in with a fairly simple set of scripts. You could have custom home pages for User bios/information, for example.
I'm not really advocating dumping a web-based threaded discussion system for News, for one thing your users would probably really hate the change, but it's something that could be considered.
This is a good start, but really, if this is an Information Superhighway, and it benefits society broadly, shouldn't the Government be taking a more active role?
It's been my experience that the Internet is getting slower and more clogged all the time. It may be time for the Government to step in with some aggressive investments to push this along.
I'm not typically an advocate of Government involvement in the economy beyond what is necessary, but this is probably a good example of a place where Government can really take the lead to provide essential infrastructure.
I don't even foresee a net cost to taxpayers here. Any bandwidth that could be added could be sold at market rates, or perhaps a little less, to pay back the tax payers for the initial capital infusion.
It would seem to me to be a real good first step to encourage eBusiness in your State.
It seems to me that if States were really serious about pushing their net.friendliness, they would consider building infrastructure.
Laying some fat fiber along highway rightaways would be a fairly inexpensive thing to really improve net performance in a given state.
States could link up all the major population centers and also provide grants to carriers to increase coverage in the smaller towns if fiber isn't justified to that area. Local governments could issue bonds to chip in their part. If a small town wanted their own fiber connection to some major hub, there could be matching funds made available or something.
Doing this could really improve intrastate net performance and if the lines were located strategically, could link up with major arteries going out of the state to various high bandwidth destinations like Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc.
It's the kind of thing that is ideal for Government to consider as it requires huge capitalization up-front, but by selling line time to the carriers, at discounted commercial rates, it could be recouped over time. It might also increase the demand for new line construction so dramatically, that the companies that lay fiber could gain huge economies of scale and the price of new lines construction would go down.
Eventually, when the installation was paid for you could give the line time away to carriers based on their ability to provide high bandwidth out-of-state. The carriers who are investing a lot in laying lines now might react negatively at first, but really it's very complimentary to their services as they are generally laying the Extra-state lines that will be big connection points for these lines. Really, if states want to start providing information and services over the net, like they seem to be saying they do, they kind of have a responsibility to make sure their citizens in smaller towns are covered well too.
Having this is justified just for Schools and Universities alone, and would benefit Industry a great deal too. It also would allow Intrastate eCommerce a leg up over eCommerce from far away. I've always thought that regional eCommerce makes a lot of sense in that you can combine the benefits of eCommerce with more efficient distribution (warehouses closer to the customer). A lot of communities are concerned about eCommerce taking serious retail sales away from their local merchants.
Where would Interstate Highways and Hydro-electric power be if we had to wait for Industry to provide them?
It's always strange for me to hear about Kryotech, ever since I found out what happened to one of the cofounders. Apparently, he partied a bit too hard at some company function, had some form of heart attack, and died.
Is this feature pre-programmed into Google, or is it merely a matter of its wonderful new indexing technology?
Pre-programmed, I think. The search for just "more evil" (no quotes) also turns up www.microsoft.com as #1. But, "more evil than Donald Trump" does NOT turn up www.microsoft.com.
Interestingly, "most evil" does not turn up anything Microsoft related.
I have to admit, I've never done a Linux search on northernlight, but whenever I want to find out about some governmental/law/social thing I hit northernlight.
I don't know why I've never done a Linux search there. Probably because I've been able to find things on the Linux sites so easily.
Should I dislike northernlight because they've patented their custom search folders? They really really help a lot, I've found.
I believe Cray was still at CDC for the 6600 (but someone correct me if I'm wrong).
You are not wrong. The 6600 was Cray's baby, the machine he always dreamed of making. The 6600 came out in 1964 (?) and I believe Cray was still there through the early 70's.
Of course, if you look at the instruction set for the CDC 6000 series you recognize that Cray anticipated RISC by a number of years. This observation seems to upset some people for some reason.
I think it has suddenly occurred to MS that developers are important, again, and that they need to convince geeks to develop for their environments.
MS is running full page ads in the PC Week type magazines depicting happy future developers, pretty geeky looking guys all, winning recognition from their co-workers and happily using Office 2000 development tools.
I don't really remember such ads in the past. I do remember MS pumping up their development environments and how they made you a success, but they typically showed the developers becoming corner office denizens or Italian suit wearing consultants. They didn't used to target happy geeks.
I've been wondering lately. Why, exactly, is Slashdot itself seemingly immune to the Slashdot effect. Sometimes, it does get slow, but not for hours on end as the victims do.
The easy answer is "Because it's Linux". But, I find that unsatisfying.
Someone asked this recently in an "Ask Slashdot". What do you do to prevent the Slashdot effect? The concensus opinion was that the #1 thing to avoid being Slashdotted was bandwidth.
Seems funny though. Sometimes it seems like even major media gets Slashdotted although I can't think of any good examples at the moment. Some media never seems to suffer, like the New York Times site.
Is the Slashdot effect oftentimes blamed when it's really something big going on and a lot of people, even a lot of people who've never heard of Slashdot, are hitting the site?
Just yesterday people were saying that Britannica was Slashdotted, but someone reported that it was inaccessible even before the story appeared here. This seems like they simply underestimated the demand for their service. I just tried to connect there and it's still reaaal slow.
I was quite impressed awhile back when the world's smallest webserver was featured here and I could still connect to it. It was slow, and sometimes timed out, but generally I could connect. It's at a University, so they probably have a huge fat pipe, which backs up the theory that the best way to avoid the Slashdot effect is with bandwidth. Of course, the world's smallest webserver may actually be pretty fast. No scheduling overhead, very little file system overhead. Wouldn't it be ironic if this tiny terror was actually faster at serving this simple set of pages than just about anything available? If that's the case, this makes a good argument for Webserving appliances for a lot of applications. (Duh - slaps forehead - that's probably exactly what they were trying to demonstrate. It wasn't just a Guiness Book entry. Nobody goes for the world's biggest Web Server, after all...)
It seems to me that the Slashdot effect is actually a complex thing.
A lot of you are refusing to acknowledge other operating systems as feasible alternatives for a task when it's precisely the opposite mentality that opened yourself up to using Linux in the first place.
As many have pointed out, it's not exactly as clear cut as you are saying. A lot of people value reliability over the other factors that you stated.
If it's really clear that this man will be just doing email, some web browsing, perhaps a bit of word processing, why is Linux wrong for the job? It's sounds like it is extremely unlikely that his needs will ever require him ever even to run a setup.exe.
Use what's most efficient for the task.
Linux is a flexible environment. With a little work, which includes this kind of research, configuration and experimentation, it could become quite effective for the class of users that this man's grandfather represents.
A lot of others have beat me to it here, pointing out that Linux stability is a win, etc. etc. But, there's one point that I would like to address.
Is it some techie pride that you must install Linux everywhere possible?
And what, exactly, is wrong with "techie pride"? In most fields of endeavor, pride in your work and those things you are familiar with is thought to be a good thing. You know, Pride in craftsmanship.
Is this some subtle kind of anti-geek bias here? Don't think for a minute just because you are a geek that you don't look down on them (and yourself).
I think wanting to try and meet an unusual need should be encouraged rather than jeered at from the sidelines. Must we surrender the beginner's desktop to MS or Apple or wait for some big corporate sponsor to do the work necessary to make Linux easy-to-use for the beginner?
As others have pointed out, there are a lot of pieces that can be put together here to make a system that's just the thing for Grandpa. Let's see how it works.
Yeah, but who gets to decide what is the Best of Slashdot? Hint - use the analogy, Luke! It's the same person who gets to decide which is the Best Distribution.
Sure, but it won't hurt to put a nice box around it and sell it in stores.
Kind of goes well with the Andover IPO when you think about it!
Sun seems like they are being dragged around by Java these day.
It continued to be such a joke and a failure on the client side for so long that they had to play up this server side story for it. They've completely lost sight of what Java was going to do for them.
There was once a coherent strategy in pushing Windows off the desktop in favor of thin-clients, but now, well, it's hard to imagine that you could field a thin-client that could compete with commodity thin-client hardware based on PC components. So, even if, and it's a HUGE if, you could displace Windows (and Linux) on the desktops, you'd still have to talk to PC hardware being used as thin-clients. Seems like a win for Intel or StrongArms maybe, but not for Sun.
So, Sun turns toward the server and middleware for Java dominance. This seems like a move of desparation, to show SOMETHING for their Java investment. If they succeed at flattening the server side with write-once-run-anywhere Java applications, they will have succeeded in commoditizing the server side.
In such an environment, you'll have IBM, HP, Windows NT and some large number of commodity server Java boxes (made in the far east) to compete against. Why would Sun, who have done so well in differentiating themselves on the server side with the best compilers, best RAS, most scaleability want to flatten out the software landscape? It just doesn't make sense from the standpoint of strategy.
Sun is being pulled around by the nose by a Java Strategy that's taken on a life of it's own. They pay $500,000,000 for the world's most popular Java application (StarOffice, which BTW uses C/C++ on the server side) only to give it away apparently in a desparate attempt to legitimize Java on the desktop. They now have to support the development of Java on their biggest up-and-coming competitive environment, Linux, to make sure that the phenomenal growth of Linux doesn't marginalize their precious Java. It seems crazy.
At the end of the day, what large server side applications will be written entirely in Java? All of those systems will have working C/C++ compilers, after all. With C/C++ you should be able to get much greater performance, stability, more immunity to environmental changes, less developmental headaches (no nervously watching evolving Java standards) and more qualified programmers (most good Java programmers are good C++ programmers, but not vice versa).
I can see Java used like stored DB procedures, and for various kinds of utility programs, middleware glue, quick projects, you know, all those things that Perl does quite adequately already, but take over the server side? How? If anybody dares to field a commercial package written in Java, someone else could beat them up with one written in C/C++.
This is the essential point that people don't seem to understand about C/C++. Your operating systems are written in them for a reason. Because your operating systems are written in them, they will always be the most stable and mature compilers available. Because this is true pretty much everywhere, they will be the standard in portability. Maybe not the kind of VM portability where you can compile it here and it will migrate over to execute somewhere else, but what does that buy you over just having good C/C++ compilers everywhere (which you already do, see above).
Java is probably a better language than C++ because of garbage collection alone (and there are other significant advantages), but you need more than just better to displace a truly ubiquitous language like C/C++.
From my perspective, I see far more developers using Java than users for the forseeable future.
When some wide-eyed Java fanatic tries to tell me that everyone will be using Java next year, I'm reminded of the Amway guy who told me 10 years ago that I could be making $90,000/yr. in just 90 days with Amway, much more in 6 months. I told him to go away and come back in 90 days if he was making $90,000/yr. Needless to say, he wasn't. Java was supposed to be really big next year for the last 3 years now. It's getting tired.
Weren't we supposed to be using Java for SOMETHING by now? People using the Hot Java browser, raise your hands! Let's see, it's not good for browsers, nobody would dream of writing an RDBMS like Oracle in it and in the middle, it competes with Perl, Python, C/C++ and Tcl/Tk. Seems like a squeeze to me.
I see where Lotus got out of the Java client business just the other day. Corel got out awhile back too. StarOffice and their free product is not much of a showcase of a vibrant Java marketplace.
Don't point me at Java support in Oracle or Java support in some ORB or another. All of those environments have quite stable and working C interfaces too, thank you. Show me large numbers of users using Java day in and day out. I bet those same users use about 20 times more C/C++ in their OS alone to support this one app. For every one user who is using a Java app today, I'll give you 50 VB/VBA users and 100 users of apps written in C/C++. There may be growth in Java today, but is it like the growth of Linux where almost no Java is used?
I'm not a Sun hater, nor am I anti-Java. I really like Java as a language. I was turned off years ago by it because I didn't want to jump on while they were changing it so rapidly and it seems that it's just now starting to stabilize.
Maybe Java will be really big someday, but I don't see that someday from where I stand.
Maybe the Editorial Board is unnecessary, I don't know. Without some editing, I doubt it [Slashdot] would ever be taken seriously in the industry.
Don't we already have an editorial board? I thought they were called moderators.
Sure, We, the geeks of Slashdot have editors, called moderators, but this may not be the kind of editing required to get these reports taken seriously.
Let me ask you, should Rob had told Jane's "Sure, we'll ask the Slashdot geeks about cyberterrorism for you, but instead of putting together an article in your book from the responses, just put the URL to our discussion in your book. We have all the editing you need."?
It wouldn't have flown and frankly, the Jane's article will probably be more accessible to most of the people interested in the subject matter than the Slashdot discussion ever would.
I liken Open Analysis to Open Source, with Open Analysis the ideas are all there for free on Slashdot, just like with Open Source the source is all out there on ftp servers - for all to read and examine. But, there's a premium service where we edit it and digest it into a form that you'll be more likely to be able to use. This is what the various Linux distribution projects do for Linux, put it into a form that people are more likely to be able to use.
Whether Slashdot is taken seriously in "the Industry" will depend largely on whether the ideas and opinions presented on Slashdot are well thought-out and relevant. Not on whether there's an editorial board or peer review.
Yeah, right... And the best technology is always adopted by the market.
As I said, CIOs aren't going to read Slashdot, maybe they should. I think they are interested in what we have to say. If we could meet them in the middle a bit, give them our insights in a form more familiar to them, we might be able to help them in their decision making processes that directly affect our lives and society.
As it stands, most CIOs will stop reading Slashdot immediately after seeing their first "First!" Comment.
Look, I'm not sold on adding a bunch of infrastructure to try to make Slashdot into a new-media Industry Analyst platform. I don't know about any of this.
I do know that now, I read more good stuff on Slashdot everyday than I can read in a year of ZDNet publications, or 5 Analysts Whitepapers. If there was some way we could get the Best of Slashdot before a larger audience, we might all benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... wouldn't surprise me if they were the ones that came up with the brilliant innovation that is the Annoying Talking Paperclip (TM). In fact, they do claim to have invented that! From their home page: Applications of our research are found in numerous products, such as Office Assistant ... They are so proud of that talking paperclip that they put it at the top of their list of "accomplishments". I had heard that the Office Assistant was based on "technology" that they developed along with Microsoft Bob and we all know what a dog that was. Heh, heh... I wonder why they don't list Microsoft Bob as one of their accomplishments...
Maybe he's working to finally get that GPL'd Slash code into a state where it can be released. Heh...
Also, they've only existed since 1991, so they couldn't have come up with something 15 years ago.
Microsoft has hired a lot of top people for their Research arm, and they do a lot of cool stuff, but I've yet to hear of anything they are doing making it into a product. There is a story that some research from Microsoft, about 15 years ago, led to a genetic algorithm that found a more efficient way to convert a string of digits to a binary representation, but I can't recall the details. I think Microsoft Research does what they do as a marketing activity, to prove that Microsoft can do "pure" research just like other highly capitalized high-tech businesses.
Microsoft Product divisions are all too busy renaming their distributed object technology, again, to actually integrate any real innovations.
Well, yes, it's not nanotechnology, but it is an interesting new use of an old technology.
My mistake...
True, a lot of people prefer a web-based forum, but News has a lot of advantages:
All the missing bits that these web-based threaded discussion packages offer could be added in with a fairly simple set of scripts. You could have custom home pages for User bios/information, for example.
I'm not really advocating dumping a web-based threaded discussion system for News, for one thing your users would probably really hate the change, but it's something that could be considered.
It's been my experience that the Internet is getting slower and more clogged all the time. It may be time for the Government to step in with some aggressive investments to push this along.
I'm not typically an advocate of Government involvement in the economy beyond what is necessary, but this is probably a good example of a place where Government can really take the lead to provide essential infrastructure.
I don't even foresee a net cost to taxpayers here. Any bandwidth that could be added could be sold at market rates, or perhaps a little less, to pay back the tax payers for the initial capital infusion.
It would seem to me to be a real good first step to encourage eBusiness in your State.
Laying some fat fiber along highway rightaways would be a fairly inexpensive thing to really improve net performance in a given state.
States could link up all the major population centers and also provide grants to carriers to increase coverage in the smaller towns if fiber isn't justified to that area. Local governments could issue bonds to chip in their part. If a small town wanted their own fiber connection to some major hub, there could be matching funds made available or something.
Doing this could really improve intrastate net performance and if the lines were located strategically, could link up with major arteries going out of the state to various high bandwidth destinations like Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc.
It's the kind of thing that is ideal for Government to consider as it requires huge capitalization up-front, but by selling line time to the carriers, at discounted commercial rates, it could be recouped over time. It might also increase the demand for new line construction so dramatically, that the companies that lay fiber could gain huge economies of scale and the price of new lines construction would go down.
Eventually, when the installation was paid for you could give the line time away to carriers based on their ability to provide high bandwidth out-of-state. The carriers who are investing a lot in laying lines now might react negatively at first, but really it's very complimentary to their services as they are generally laying the Extra-state lines that will be big connection points for these lines. Really, if states want to start providing information and services over the net, like they seem to be saying they do, they kind of have a responsibility to make sure their citizens in smaller towns are covered well too.
Having this is justified just for Schools and Universities alone, and would benefit Industry a great deal too. It also would allow Intrastate eCommerce a leg up over eCommerce from far away. I've always thought that regional eCommerce makes a lot of sense in that you can combine the benefits of eCommerce with more efficient distribution (warehouses closer to the customer). A lot of communities are concerned about eCommerce taking serious retail sales away from their local merchants.
Where would Interstate Highways and Hydro-electric power be if we had to wait for Industry to provide them?
He was 33.
Sounds like he died from overclocking.
Pre-programmed, I think. The search for just "more evil" (no quotes) also turns up www.microsoft.com as #1. But, "more evil than Donald Trump" does NOT turn up www.microsoft.com.
Interestingly, "most evil" does not turn up anything Microsoft related.
I don't know why I've never done a Linux search there. Probably because I've been able to find things on the Linux sites so easily.
Should I dislike northernlight because they've patented their custom search folders? They really really help a lot, I've found.
If only it were that simple. Here's the spell I would cast:
Eye of newt, wings unfurled.
Disperse! Disperse! Oh Windows world!
Ehehehehehe (cackling laughter)
You are not wrong. The 6600 was Cray's baby, the machine he always dreamed of making. The 6600 came out in 1964 (?) and I believe Cray was still there through the early 70's.
Of course, if you look at the instruction set for the CDC 6000 series you recognize that Cray anticipated RISC by a number of years. This observation seems to upset some people for some reason.
MS is running full page ads in the PC Week type magazines depicting happy future developers, pretty geeky looking guys all, winning recognition from their co-workers and happily using Office 2000 development tools.
I don't really remember such ads in the past. I do remember MS pumping up their development environments and how they made you a success, but they typically showed the developers becoming corner office denizens or Italian suit wearing consultants. They didn't used to target happy geeks.
The easy answer is "Because it's Linux". But, I find that unsatisfying.
Someone asked this recently in an "Ask Slashdot". What do you do to prevent the Slashdot effect? The concensus opinion was that the #1 thing to avoid being Slashdotted was bandwidth.
Seems funny though. Sometimes it seems like even major media gets Slashdotted although I can't think of any good examples at the moment. Some media never seems to suffer, like the New York Times site.
Is the Slashdot effect oftentimes blamed when it's really something big going on and a lot of people, even a lot of people who've never heard of Slashdot, are hitting the site?
Just yesterday people were saying that Britannica was Slashdotted, but someone reported that it was inaccessible even before the story appeared here. This seems like they simply underestimated the demand for their service. I just tried to connect there and it's still reaaal slow.
I was quite impressed awhile back when the world's smallest webserver was featured here and I could still connect to it. It was slow, and sometimes timed out, but generally I could connect. It's at a University, so they probably have a huge fat pipe, which backs up the theory that the best way to avoid the Slashdot effect is with bandwidth. Of course, the world's smallest webserver may actually be pretty fast. No scheduling overhead, very little file system overhead. Wouldn't it be ironic if this tiny terror was actually faster at serving this simple set of pages than just about anything available? If that's the case, this makes a good argument for Webserving appliances for a lot of applications. (Duh - slaps forehead - that's probably exactly what they were trying to demonstrate. It wasn't just a Guiness Book entry. Nobody goes for the world's biggest Web Server, after all...)
It seems to me that the Slashdot effect is actually a complex thing.
Now there's an angle to get moderated way up... appeal to the moderators greed!
As many have pointed out, it's not exactly as clear cut as you are saying. A lot of people value reliability over the other factors that you stated.
If it's really clear that this man will be just doing email, some web browsing, perhaps a bit of word processing, why is Linux wrong for the job? It's sounds like it is extremely unlikely that his needs will ever require him ever even to run a setup.exe.
Use what's most efficient for the task.
Linux is a flexible environment. With a little work, which includes this kind of research, configuration and experimentation, it could become quite effective for the class of users that this man's grandfather represents.
Is it some techie pride that you must install Linux everywhere possible?
And what, exactly, is wrong with "techie pride"? In most fields of endeavor, pride in your work and those things you are familiar with is thought to be a good thing. You know, Pride in craftsmanship.
Is this some subtle kind of anti-geek bias here? Don't think for a minute just because you are a geek that you don't look down on them (and yourself).
I think wanting to try and meet an unusual need should be encouraged rather than jeered at from the sidelines. Must we surrender the beginner's desktop to MS or Apple or wait for some big corporate sponsor to do the work necessary to make Linux easy-to-use for the beginner?
As others have pointed out, there are a lot of pieces that can be put together here to make a system that's just the thing for Grandpa. Let's see how it works.
I thought I saw somewhere that Dell will sell with no OS in Europe, but I can't find the reference now.
Sure, but it won't hurt to put a nice box around it and sell it in stores.
Kind of goes well with the Andover IPO when you think about it!
It continued to be such a joke and a failure on the client side for so long that they had to play up this server side story for it. They've completely lost sight of what Java was going to do for them.
There was once a coherent strategy in pushing Windows off the desktop in favor of thin-clients, but now, well, it's hard to imagine that you could field a thin-client that could compete with commodity thin-client hardware based on PC components. So, even if, and it's a HUGE if, you could displace Windows (and Linux) on the desktops, you'd still have to talk to PC hardware being used as thin-clients. Seems like a win for Intel or StrongArms maybe, but not for Sun.
So, Sun turns toward the server and middleware for Java dominance. This seems like a move of desparation, to show SOMETHING for their Java investment. If they succeed at flattening the server side with write-once-run-anywhere Java applications, they will have succeeded in commoditizing the server side.
In such an environment, you'll have IBM, HP, Windows NT and some large number of commodity server Java boxes (made in the far east) to compete against. Why would Sun, who have done so well in differentiating themselves on the server side with the best compilers, best RAS, most scaleability want to flatten out the software landscape? It just doesn't make sense from the standpoint of strategy.
Sun is being pulled around by the nose by a Java Strategy that's taken on a life of it's own. They pay $500,000,000 for the world's most popular Java application (StarOffice, which BTW uses C/C++ on the server side) only to give it away apparently in a desparate attempt to legitimize Java on the desktop. They now have to support the development of Java on their biggest up-and-coming competitive environment, Linux, to make sure that the phenomenal growth of Linux doesn't marginalize their precious Java. It seems crazy.
At the end of the day, what large server side applications will be written entirely in Java? All of those systems will have working C/C++ compilers, after all. With C/C++ you should be able to get much greater performance, stability, more immunity to environmental changes, less developmental headaches (no nervously watching evolving Java standards) and more qualified programmers (most good Java programmers are good C++ programmers, but not vice versa).
I can see Java used like stored DB procedures, and for various kinds of utility programs, middleware glue, quick projects, you know, all those things that Perl does quite adequately already, but take over the server side? How? If anybody dares to field a commercial package written in Java, someone else could beat them up with one written in C/C++.
This is the essential point that people don't seem to understand about C/C++. Your operating systems are written in them for a reason. Because your operating systems are written in them, they will always be the most stable and mature compilers available. Because this is true pretty much everywhere, they will be the standard in portability. Maybe not the kind of VM portability where you can compile it here and it will migrate over to execute somewhere else, but what does that buy you over just having good C/C++ compilers everywhere (which you already do, see above).
Java is probably a better language than C++ because of garbage collection alone (and there are other significant advantages), but you need more than just better to displace a truly ubiquitous language like C/C++.
From my perspective, I see far more developers using Java than users for the forseeable future.
When some wide-eyed Java fanatic tries to tell me that everyone will be using Java next year, I'm reminded of the Amway guy who told me 10 years ago that I could be making $90,000/yr. in just 90 days with Amway, much more in 6 months. I told him to go away and come back in 90 days if he was making $90,000/yr. Needless to say, he wasn't. Java was supposed to be really big next year for the last 3 years now. It's getting tired.
Weren't we supposed to be using Java for SOMETHING by now? People using the Hot Java browser, raise your hands! Let's see, it's not good for browsers, nobody would dream of writing an RDBMS like Oracle in it and in the middle, it competes with Perl, Python, C/C++ and Tcl/Tk. Seems like a squeeze to me.
I see where Lotus got out of the Java client business just the other day. Corel got out awhile back too. StarOffice and their free product is not much of a showcase of a vibrant Java marketplace.
Don't point me at Java support in Oracle or Java support in some ORB or another. All of those environments have quite stable and working C interfaces too, thank you. Show me large numbers of users using Java day in and day out. I bet those same users use about 20 times more C/C++ in their OS alone to support this one app. For every one user who is using a Java app today, I'll give you 50 VB/VBA users and 100 users of apps written in C/C++. There may be growth in Java today, but is it like the growth of Linux where almost no Java is used?
I'm not a Sun hater, nor am I anti-Java. I really like Java as a language. I was turned off years ago by it because I didn't want to jump on while they were changing it so rapidly and it seems that it's just now starting to stabilize.
Maybe Java will be really big someday, but I don't see that someday from where I stand.
Maybe the Editorial Board is unnecessary, I don't know. Without some editing, I doubt it [Slashdot] would ever be taken seriously in the industry.
Don't we already have an editorial board? I thought they were called moderators.
Sure, We, the geeks of Slashdot have editors, called moderators, but this may not be the kind of editing required to get these reports taken seriously.
Let me ask you, should Rob had told Jane's "Sure, we'll ask the Slashdot geeks about cyberterrorism for you, but instead of putting together an article in your book from the responses, just put the URL to our discussion in your book. We have all the editing you need."?
It wouldn't have flown and frankly, the Jane's article will probably be more accessible to most of the people interested in the subject matter than the Slashdot discussion ever would.
I liken Open Analysis to Open Source, with Open Analysis the ideas are all there for free on Slashdot, just like with Open Source the source is all out there on ftp servers - for all to read and examine. But, there's a premium service where we edit it and digest it into a form that you'll be more likely to be able to use. This is what the various Linux distribution projects do for Linux, put it into a form that people are more likely to be able to use.
Yeah, right... And the best technology is always adopted by the market.
As I said, CIOs aren't going to read Slashdot, maybe they should. I think they are interested in what we have to say. If we could meet them in the middle a bit, give them our insights in a form more familiar to them, we might be able to help them in their decision making processes that directly affect our lives and society.
As it stands, most CIOs will stop reading Slashdot immediately after seeing their first "First!" Comment.
Look, I'm not sold on adding a bunch of infrastructure to try to make Slashdot into a new-media Industry Analyst platform. I don't know about any of this.
I do know that now, I read more good stuff on Slashdot everyday than I can read in a year of ZDNet publications, or 5 Analysts Whitepapers. If there was some way we could get the Best of Slashdot before a larger audience, we might all benefit.