I'd second that guess. The distributed nature of the net and Google using it as a giant database would make any narcissistic paranoid like Uncle Larry worry himself sick. What's to stop Google from producing small Googlets and licensing them to individual companies to use. A bit of front end work and the massive parallelism might blow Oracle out of some of the companies they are milking.
No, few people were worried about MS suing open source implementors of.NET because no one in their right mind would bother using such a thing that MS call pull the rug from underneath were they to get any traction. Sun with Java was the right decision. Oracle with Java might still be the right decision, but it won't be because of this lawsuit. It will be because Oracle will bollix the Java implementations they shift. Has anyone ever pointed with pride at Oracle software?
Most organizations have no reason to move away from Java because of Oracle's lawsuit since most organizations aren't attempting to do what Google is trying to do with Java (the language)...if indeed we can actually call what Google has implemented Java.
The reason organizations might wish to move away from Java is because Oracle is more or less boneheaded when it comes to software development. That's the right reason to move.
Most researchers are very good at a narrow niche. This what they are trained to do, that's how PhDs are spawned. If you have ever tried to cross areas in a research paper, you'll find no area you covered will publish your paper because of all those "foreign" elements. Take the programming languages community, the most inbred, cross-eyed bunch of ingrates you'll ever want to meet. So are most of the others. They think science started when their particular subdiscipline was invented, nary a new idea not within their narrow, blinkered sight shall cross their path and be published.
This means that to expect MS research to come up with the next big thing, forget it. They do not do that. It would take someone much farther down the line using many different ideas to come up with something groundbreaking. They are likely to have more of an artistic sense of painting a grand mosaic. Take lasers, brilliant, and it took many years and new ideas to make them useful in chips. It took another set of ideas to make them useful in medicine. So if MS wants to wait 30 years, fine. But it won't be the people at MS that find the use, it will be someone from outside seeing things they could never see which will make something out it.
Just to be a prick, if you are a firm retail stores in 50 states, you must keep up with 50 state laws. Internet retailers are no different. We have computers to figure out the tax, take the money from the credit card companies, and pay the internet retailers' current tax bill. I admit it will cost them some money to get the changes in their systems which will handle the state taxes. The real problem is not going to be places like Amazon which can afford the expense. The real problem will be Ma and Pop internet sales. This will be a new problem since Ma and Pop previously were very local.
Requiring states to keep up with the deluge of data is also an expense to be born by the taxpayers as the states' systems will need to be upgraded. And it will be a continuing expense since they'll then have to keep records of every internet retail transaction. New internet stores pop up and go bankrupt all the time, that will also make things more complicated.
Between the two sets of problems, I tend to think the first is easier to solve. And I don't think it is an answer to say that no internet sales tax should be charged because it puts brick and mortar stores at a disadvantage. Also, many states have their finances built in part around sales taxes.
Another way to go is for the Federal Government to institute country-wide sales tax for internet purchases. Then it must disburse the proceeds among the states according to some formula. Maybe use the states' current tax rates to apportion the pie. That would at least centralize the problem...and open more political problems. But there's a solution to that too, shoot the politicians.
You have a lot of points. I won't respond to them all. I don't think Jobs is psychotic, and I cannot imagine him doing this without first discussed it with Uncle Larry at Oracle...if indeed we are to believe they are good friends. So, let's take that as writ. I cannot imagine Oracle would be pleased unless Apple threw them a bone, maybe they turned over the Java codebase.
This doesn't address why. I'm mystified. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that Apple doesn't want a large software development department because it causes too many moving pieces. If they can remove one, Jobs might see that as an advantage in keeping a smaller, leaner software development effort. MS is classic example of what happens when the developing dept(s) get so large they are essentially disconnected. Jobs is very interested (from what I read) in clean development hoping it leads to clean products.
I do not buy that crap that Jobs is somehow a Stalinist in disguise. He's up against the MS juggernaut and the Linux push; Apple, pre-consumer products, could have easily been blown out of the water. Now, their income stream includes consumer products, and keeping a clear engineering direction is no easy task.
Your reply makes a lot of sense. I don't see, although I would like to see, Macs becoming a development platform for the rest of the net. The problem there is that it won't translate into enough sales to make a significant dent in Apple's bottom line (directly), at least I don't think it will. However, Apple would do well to increase developer use of their platform lest it be relegated to an unused backwater.
My problem with MS is their past behavior, can't trust them further than I can spit a two headed rat...and their interfaces could gag a horse. Linux I feel better about, except their interfaces could also gag a horse.
"the onus will really be on Apple to develop its own developer tools if it wants to compete at all in the business/scientific technology space." Ever hear of XCode, Apple's free developer suite.
Not only that, any Oracle software interfaces I've seen in Java sucked ass. They don't get small machines in the same way Sun never got small machines. Java AWT and Swing is what happens when you take a company with essentially a big iron (well, in Sun's case, medium iron) mentality and expect them to produce an interface suite. It's like asking an elephant to perform a ballet.
So, yeah, we might get something out of Snoracle which will be an alleged JVM for the Mac, but I'm willing to bet it will be crap. They cannot even write good Java interface code, there's not a chance in hell of them being able to write good internals.
"With oracle now suing every other Java implementation out there", oh please, Oracle is suing one company over Java, and it isn't even clear Google has implemented a Java. You cannot patent a language, it is an abstract idea. They did a clean room implementation, so Oracle can take their (bought) implementation and stick it where the Sun don't shine.
I see, so someone liking Apple's UI is automatically superficial? Look at the collection of applications on Linux, do they follow any common interface guidelines? Or MS?
"There are some things in the Mac UI that do a very good job of "getting to the point" while others are just plain odd. Still others manage to get some semblance of "ease" by pretty much eliminating most useful options. Then there are other things that just have questionable designs or are technically implemented in a superficial way."
Oh please, list them for us. We await your insight. You sound like someone who got used to something else, tried Mac, and got frustrated. Fine, don't use it. For those of us who do like it, we apologize for not bowing to your alternate UI sensibilities.
Because market economics still works. It was cheaper to allow China to do it albeit the "cheaper" had no way to factor in externaliities like having the market cornered or national security. For that, the U.S. government would have had to impose controls and then enforce them, which is actually a tax. Now that China is essentially raising the price of those raw materials, they are betting the price rise will be small enough not to allow others to sneak into the market. It is now that the U.S. government could make a real dent in the situation by judiciously encouraging homegrown production and recycling. This is still a tax but when the outside price is rising, a small tax could make a real difference.
Hear, hear! In the long term, I think it will be a good thing that China's regime is finally showing its true colors as a childish mannequin of a government, too brittle to accept even the mildest criticism due to having no legitimacy. They were never elected, and the Heavens aren't smiling like they used to in the olden days when claiming a Heavenly mandate was all that was needed.
This will force the U.S. and the West in general to get smarter about what materials are necessary for modern life and find substitutes for the ones China controls. It will have the effect of shifting the West's economy further away from China's.
"Apple is for people who want to appear to be tech savvy to everyone else and look down their noses at people who don't purchase Apple stuff."
No, Apple is for people who looked MS and later Linux and decided their interfaces could knock a dead buzzard off a shit wagon at 20 paces. That's why most people use Apple. I use it for that and its Unix underground.
I think it is worse than that. Let's look at theory of *whatever*. I do a lot mathematics. How many theoretical mathematicians would this new uni support? I'm guessing not a lot. So, if we were to have this back when number theory had no practical applications unlike as it does today in security, we'd probably have no number theory upon which to base our computer security that underlies our new web based companies like Amazon and countless others. How do we measure that loss before the loss can be seen?
What about physics? Quantum theory was developed because a lot of physicists and mathematicians thought it would be really neat to understand nature in a deep level. There were no applications obvious at that time yet it underlies much of modern electronic computation. Why would they get funded to do their research? How about Einstein and relativity...the use of which makes GPS actually work. No obvious use, why would yer basic Joe Gimme-a-Job schlump take a course in relativity?
How about philosophy? Descartes had some pretty neat algebraic ideas...no one ever conceived of them before him and in their original text, they are very obscure. Yet much of modern mathematics is built on algebraic theories. I cannot imagine him getting a job. How about the logicians who worked on philosophical logic? Some of that spawned modal logic which in turn spawned Floyd-Hoare logic and the whole notion of proving programs correct with respect to some mathematical specification. It is used intimately in security arguments. How do we fund the philosophers now? How do we predict which philosophical theories will be of use in the future? What about Aristotle? He invented logic. How does he get funded when the common man couldn't see what use it would ever be as short-sighted as they were that they couldn't see modern computers?
The basic problem with numb-nuts ideas such as wiki-university is that it is spawned by Business School Product who can see no value in anything that doesn't immediately translate into increased sales of widgets. It pretty much consigns humans to no greater intellectual curiosity than what Business School Product can put a price on. And that price has nothing to do with any future value. It is a prescription for consigning the human race to extinction; it would merely become an experiment it how short term gain will doom long term sustainability.
Arrgggghhh. As a conservative Republican, and I'm sure I'm not alone, I find Palin reprehensible as I find a lot of the Tea Party. In my opinion, what should happen is ALL the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to go bye-bye. The impact on the budget should be ascertained. If we are still short, we should increase taxes across the board to cover it. Then the American people should decide which government programs they are willing to do without for what amount of tax relief they desire.
The American people are not blameless when it comes to the current economic condition. They voted for people promising tax reduction and they voted for people promising new social programs. Not only that, they are the root of the current economic meltdown, they had help but they were ones who flipped houses, bought houses they couldn't afford, took the equity out of their properties to spend on whatever, bought second houses on flimsy loans, etc. They deserve the pain they are now feeling.
All of this is generalities, real people who did nothing wrong got hurt. But unless the American people take responsibility as a collective, the problems will only fester as special interest groups will take them to cleaners...once again.
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I'd second that guess. The distributed nature of the net and Google using it as a giant database would make any narcissistic paranoid like Uncle Larry worry himself sick. What's to stop Google from producing small Googlets and licensing them to individual companies to use. A bit of front end work and the massive parallelism might blow Oracle out of some of the companies they are milking.
No, few people were worried about MS suing open source implementors of .NET because no one in their right mind would bother using such a thing that MS call pull the rug from underneath were they to get any traction. Sun with Java was the right decision. Oracle with Java might still be the right decision, but it won't be because of this lawsuit. It will be because Oracle will bollix the Java implementations they shift. Has anyone ever pointed with pride at Oracle software?
Most organizations have no reason to move away from Java because of Oracle's lawsuit since most organizations aren't attempting to do what Google is trying to do with Java (the language)...if indeed we can actually call what Google has implemented Java.
The reason organizations might wish to move away from Java is because Oracle is more or less boneheaded when it comes to software development. That's the right reason to move.
Most researchers are very good at a narrow niche. This what they are trained to do, that's how PhDs are spawned. If you have ever tried to cross areas in a research paper, you'll find no area you covered will publish your paper because of all those "foreign" elements. Take the programming languages community, the most inbred, cross-eyed bunch of ingrates you'll ever want to meet. So are most of the others. They think science started when their particular subdiscipline was invented, nary a new idea not within their narrow, blinkered sight shall cross their path and be published.
This means that to expect MS research to come up with the next big thing, forget it. They do not do that. It would take someone much farther down the line using many different ideas to come up with something groundbreaking. They are likely to have more of an artistic sense of painting a grand mosaic. Take lasers, brilliant, and it took many years and new ideas to make them useful in chips. It took another set of ideas to make them useful in medicine. So if MS wants to wait 30 years, fine. But it won't be the people at MS that find the use, it will be someone from outside seeing things they could never see which will make something out it.
Just to be a prick, if you are a firm retail stores in 50 states, you must keep up with 50 state laws. Internet retailers are no different. We have computers to figure out the tax, take the money from the credit card companies, and pay the internet retailers' current tax bill. I admit it will cost them some money to get the changes in their systems which will handle the state taxes. The real problem is not going to be places like Amazon which can afford the expense. The real problem will be Ma and Pop internet sales. This will be a new problem since Ma and Pop previously were very local.
Requiring states to keep up with the deluge of data is also an expense to be born by the taxpayers as the states' systems will need to be upgraded. And it will be a continuing expense since they'll then have to keep records of every internet retail transaction. New internet stores pop up and go bankrupt all the time, that will also make things more complicated.
Between the two sets of problems, I tend to think the first is easier to solve. And I don't think it is an answer to say that no internet sales tax should be charged because it puts brick and mortar stores at a disadvantage. Also, many states have their finances built in part around sales taxes.
Another way to go is for the Federal Government to institute country-wide sales tax for internet purchases. Then it must disburse the proceeds among the states according to some formula. Maybe use the states' current tax rates to apportion the pie. That would at least centralize the problem...and open more political problems. But there's a solution to that too, shoot the politicians.
You have a lot of points. I won't respond to them all. I don't think Jobs is psychotic, and I cannot imagine him doing this without first discussed it with Uncle Larry at Oracle...if indeed we are to believe they are good friends. So, let's take that as writ. I cannot imagine Oracle would be pleased unless Apple threw them a bone, maybe they turned over the Java codebase.
This doesn't address why. I'm mystified. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that Apple doesn't want a large software development department because it causes too many moving pieces. If they can remove one, Jobs might see that as an advantage in keeping a smaller, leaner software development effort. MS is classic example of what happens when the developing dept(s) get so large they are essentially disconnected. Jobs is very interested (from what I read) in clean development hoping it leads to clean products.
I do not buy that crap that Jobs is somehow a Stalinist in disguise. He's up against the MS juggernaut and the Linux push; Apple, pre-consumer products, could have easily been blown out of the water. Now, their income stream includes consumer products, and keeping a clear engineering direction is no easy task.
Probably too hard for Oracle to grok; ever have to use their Java interfaces? Yeccchhhhh!!! I cannot get the taste out of my brain.
Your reply makes a lot of sense. I don't see, although I would like to see, Macs becoming a development platform for the rest of the net. The problem there is that it won't translate into enough sales to make a significant dent in Apple's bottom line (directly), at least I don't think it will. However, Apple would do well to increase developer use of their platform lest it be relegated to an unused backwater.
My problem with MS is their past behavior, can't trust them further than I can spit a two headed rat...and their interfaces could gag a horse. Linux I feel better about, except their interfaces could also gag a horse.
"the onus will really be on Apple to develop its own developer tools if it wants to compete at all in the business/scientific technology space." Ever hear of XCode, Apple's free developer suite.
Maybe it would help if you rewrote that in English.
Not only that, any Oracle software interfaces I've seen in Java sucked ass. They don't get small machines in the same way Sun never got small machines. Java AWT and Swing is what happens when you take a company with essentially a big iron (well, in Sun's case, medium iron) mentality and expect them to produce an interface suite. It's like asking an elephant to perform a ballet.
So, yeah, we might get something out of Snoracle which will be an alleged JVM for the Mac, but I'm willing to bet it will be crap. They cannot even write good Java interface code, there's not a chance in hell of them being able to write good internals.
"With oracle now suing every other Java implementation out there", oh please, Oracle is suing one company over Java, and it isn't even clear Google has implemented a Java. You cannot patent a language, it is an abstract idea. They did a clean room implementation, so Oracle can take their (bought) implementation and stick it where the Sun don't shine.
"There's a prison whose sole purpose is to absolutely contain the most feared creature in the universe."
I hardly think we need to bring Jimmy Carter into this.
I see, so someone liking Apple's UI is automatically superficial? Look at the collection of applications on Linux, do they follow any common interface guidelines? Or MS?
"There are some things in the Mac UI that do a very good job of "getting
to the point" while others are just plain odd. Still others manage to
get some semblance of "ease" by pretty much eliminating most useful
options. Then there are other things that just have questionable designs
or are technically implemented in a superficial way."
Oh please, list them for us. We await your insight. You sound like someone who got used to something else, tried Mac, and got frustrated. Fine, don't use it. For those of us who do like it, we apologize for not bowing to your alternate UI sensibilities.
And you know this how?
Wow, you can predict the future. Do you have any predictions for some stocks that we can all take advantage of?
Because market economics still works. It was cheaper to allow China to do it albeit the "cheaper" had no way to factor in externaliities like having the market cornered or national security. For that, the U.S. government would have had to impose controls and then enforce them, which is actually a tax. Now that China is essentially raising the price of those raw materials, they are betting the price rise will be small enough not to allow others to sneak into the market. It is now that the U.S. government could make a real dent in the situation by judiciously encouraging homegrown production and recycling. This is still a tax but when the outside price is rising, a small tax could make a real difference.
Actually, the U.S. continues to manufacture more than China.
Does anyone believe anything the Chinese leadership says anymore? They are nothing more than marketing execs for their state owned enterprises.
Hear, hear! In the long term, I think it will be a good thing that China's regime is finally showing its true colors as a childish mannequin of a government, too brittle to accept even the mildest criticism due to having no legitimacy. They were never elected, and the Heavens aren't smiling like they used to in the olden days when claiming a Heavenly mandate was all that was needed.
This will force the U.S. and the West in general to get smarter about what materials are necessary for modern life and find substitutes for the ones China controls. It will have the effect of shifting the West's economy further away from China's.
Yeah, well if cutting taxes would increase tax receipts, how come after Bush's tax cuts deficits are higher than ever?
"Apple is for people who want to appear to be tech savvy to everyone else and look down their noses at people who don't purchase Apple stuff."
No, Apple is for people who looked MS and later Linux and decided their interfaces could knock a dead buzzard off a shit wagon at 20 paces. That's why most people use Apple. I use it for that and its Unix underground.
Google's version was clean room, you cannot patent ideas, only implementations.
I think it is worse than that. Let's look at theory of *whatever*. I do a lot mathematics. How many theoretical mathematicians would this new uni support? I'm guessing not a lot. So, if we were to have this back when number theory had no practical applications unlike as it does today in security, we'd probably have no number theory upon which to base our computer security that underlies our new web based companies like Amazon and countless others. How do we measure that loss before the loss can be seen?
What about physics? Quantum theory was developed because a lot of physicists and mathematicians thought it would be really neat to understand nature in a deep level. There were no applications obvious at that time yet it underlies much of modern electronic computation. Why would they get funded to do their research? How about Einstein and relativity...the use of which makes GPS actually work. No obvious use, why would yer basic Joe Gimme-a-Job schlump take a course in relativity?
How about philosophy? Descartes had some pretty neat algebraic ideas...no one ever conceived of them before him and in their original text, they are very obscure. Yet much of modern mathematics is built on algebraic theories. I cannot imagine him getting a job. How about the logicians who worked on philosophical logic? Some of that spawned modal logic which in turn spawned Floyd-Hoare logic and the whole notion of proving programs correct with respect to some mathematical specification. It is used intimately in security arguments. How do we fund the philosophers now? How do we predict which philosophical theories will be of use in the future? What about Aristotle? He invented logic. How does he get funded when the common man couldn't see what use it would ever be as short-sighted as they were that they couldn't see modern computers?
The basic problem with numb-nuts ideas such as wiki-university is that it is spawned by Business School Product who can see no value in anything that doesn't immediately translate into increased sales of widgets. It pretty much consigns humans to no greater intellectual curiosity than what Business School Product can put a price on. And that price has nothing to do with any future value. It is a prescription for consigning the human race to extinction; it would merely become an experiment it how short term gain will doom long term sustainability.
Arrgggghhh. As a conservative Republican, and I'm sure I'm not alone, I find Palin reprehensible as I find a lot of the Tea Party. In my opinion, what should happen is ALL the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to go bye-bye. The impact on the budget should be ascertained. If we are still short, we should increase taxes across the board to cover it. Then the American people should decide which government programs they are willing to do without for what amount of tax relief they desire.
The American people are not blameless when it comes to the current economic condition. They voted for people promising tax reduction and they voted for people promising new social programs. Not only that, they are the root of the current economic meltdown, they had help but they were ones who flipped houses, bought houses they couldn't afford, took the equity out of their properties to spend on whatever, bought second houses on flimsy loans, etc. They deserve the pain they are now feeling.
All of this is generalities, real people who did nothing wrong got hurt. But unless the American people take responsibility as a collective, the problems will only fester as special interest groups will take them to cleaners...once again.