Hah! Just got mine today!
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Wireless Mania
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· Score: 2
Funny! Just got back from CompUSA and I see this/. post. Still haven't hooked it up, but I picked up a Linksys BEFW11S4 combo Wireless AP/DSL Router/Switch for $169 and a Linksys WPC11 Wireless PC Card for $79. At these prices it was barely more than I originally paid for the failing hub that I am replacing.
I wish I had some way of marking every "Wal-Mart is evil!" post as offtopic in one fell swoop. Walmart probably is evil to some extent; every large corporation is. But the author's use of Wal-Mart as an example tends to obscure his real point. The key passage in the article is the closing paragraph, quoted here with every instance of 'Wal-Mart' changed to '[Big-Biz]':
Today's economic reality is that high-tech decisions made in Arkansas play a larger role in boosting America's productivity than decisions made in Silicon Valley or Seattle. If you appreciate clever innovations, spend more time with inventors, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. If you want to know which innovations will rewrite the productivity statistics, ignore early adopters and identify the [Big-Biz] in key vertical markets. Moore's Law is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic growth; [Big-Biz]'s motto is what makes Moore's Law matter.
Those of you who want to focus on '[Big-Biz]' as evil are obscuring a more important question; can Open Source break into [Big-Biz]? The thing is, computers really have produced a considerable pay-off for [Big-Biz] and small-biz. That is why they use them. In the case of [Big-Biz], however, cost-effictiveness is probably the sole reason they use them. [Big-Biz] doesn't care about the cool factor.
So, if we want to see Open Source grow beyond colleges and a few small-bizs we need to seriously consider how to show [Big-Biz] they can save money by adopting Open Source Tools.
Implicit, but not mentioned explicitily, in the article is the extra question "Can we get [Big-Biz] to adopt the philosophy of Open Source as a cost saving measure as well?" By definition [Big-Biz] wants to make lots of money and to squeeze out their competitors. That kind of behavior is what made them [Big-Biz] in the first place. From their viewpoint you don't squeeze out your competitors by creating great tools and giving them away for your competitors to use against you. We need to find ways to make the argument that the win from this behavior is greater than any possible loss.
However, if you hate [Big-Biz] because you hold anti-capitalist views, then you should also be against helping them to understand Open Source. Personally I think that kind of stance is both quixotic and wrong-headed. But you should be clear in you purposes.
You see this so often here on/., an article that seems designed to get the different UI/OS/License/Programming Language camps at each other's throats. Clearly the/. editors think controversy is a good thing.
The surprising thing for the above article? Seeing the Python people (who I tend to agree with) and the Smalltalk weenies speaking up more authoritatively than the Java contingent. Cool!
Microsoft must know by now that good things come from the programming community, therefore having the community suggest (and even implement) useful enhancements to their standard only helps them gain popularity.
Hurray! Someone that understands my point and can make it more clear and concise than I can!
Jack William Bell, who thinks that we need to keep a gimlet eye on Microsoft anyway.
Finally, you're arguments for embrace and extend apply just as much to Java as they do to C# - you can embrace and extend but if the owner of the trademark doesn't approve you have to rename it. Java is an open standard, go to http://java.sun.com and grab a copy of the *full* specification if you desire as well as specifications for new additions that are under review. If you think that standards only work when they come from non-profit standards organisations then perhaps you should look at the mess that is HTML these days and rethink how well international standards work.
Given time I can come up with several examples, but lets go with one here: Basic is an open standard with lots of (varied) implementations. PICK is a language (among other things) that ended up looking rather like Basic after several evolutionary changes. Why did PICK evolve towards Basic? PICK was arguably better on several levels. But it was a closed, proprietary standard.
If you created your own version of PICK you couldn't call it PICK and you could not participate in the mind-share generated by PICK. But anyone (including Bill Gates) could create a version of Basic and call it 'Basic'. As a result everyone knew what it was. It was part of the idea space for Basic, even if it wasn't exactly a kosher 'Basic'. So Basic, despite being technically less powerful, ended up owning the most mind-share. In the marketplace of ideas it became something that was traded at a higher level. PICK could only keep up by following, because its mind-share was smaller.
Make no mistake; mind-share is important. Sun knows this. Microsoft knows this. There is no way Microsoft would be playing the game the way they are if they were not playing catch-up. In this case the real winners are the programmers of five years from now when idea convergence and the natural workings of the marketplace of ideas create a better technology.
If your only argument for C# is that it's open I think you a) have no clue about how to decide upon an appropriate programming language and b) are sorely mistaken about what is open and how useful it works.
First rule of civil debate: Attack the message, not the messenger. Personally I believe that I am fully capable of making such distinctions by using a rich and approprite set of heuristic comparisons which I need not detail here. Can you accept that and choose to disagree with me solely on the basis of my ideas and opinions? If so then you are trading in that 'marketplace of ideas' I keep blathering about. Otherwise you are only trading in insult and antipathy. I have nothing to offer in exchange there.
Just because they are ECMA standards doesn't mean MS can't "embrace and extend" them should they choose to. It just means that their extended version won't be the "ECMA" version. Microsoft doesn't control the IETF Kerberos specification but that didn't keep them from embracing and extending it.
Actually that was exactly my point! MS can do exactly that. But if they do there is nothing (except patents) to keep ECMA from adding those enhancements to the standard if the enhancements really do provide something worthwhile.
Patents are a problem here, no way around that. But they are a problem everywhere! ECMA can always argue that an enhancement that cannot be reproduced is enough to keep the implementation from being called 'C#' or whatever. I don't think this is likely though. I am sure MS is a major financial contributor to ECMA for one thing.
In any case I consider this ability of MS (or anyone else) to embrace and extend a good thing. At least so long as we can pick and choose, in the marketplace of ideas, those enhancements we think add value then we will continually improve the standard. As has been pointed out you can do this with Java too -- but you cannot call it Java. In the case of an open standard like C# you can still call it C# and make some claim of being part of the C# idea-space. That is vital to the evoloution of an open standard. If the MS extensions to Kerebos are something people like you and me want to use then they should be added to Kerebos. Simple as that (patents aside).
Jack William Bell, who thinks that (generally) software patents are evil.
Java is controlled through the trademark, not the language standard. Microsoft is free to embrace and extend Java all they want (and the have in fact with C# and J#). What Microsoft cannot do is call their variant Java.
Valid point, but doesn't it cut both ways?
Jack William Bell, who likes the idea of coding with mix-n-match programming languages.
As somewone who has to maintain code from time to time, the idea horrifies me.
As do I. And I already have to deal with multiple languges, backends, frontends, extension libraries, coding styles, naming standards and everything else under the sun. At least with the CLI I know that I have a better chance of things interoperating. Besides some languages do map to a particular problem space better than another. And I can split work up between expert coders (with C#) and less skilled coders (with VB or Python).
Jack William Bell, who notes that the only responses posted so far supporting his stance come from Anonymous Cowards...
This point has been made before, but it bears repeating. only tiny parts of C# and the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) are ECMA standards. Those standards are of no relevence in the real world due to their high level of incompletness and the very high degree of power that MS has amongst developers on the dominant platform.
Can you back that up with details? So far as I know all of the C# standard is open, all of the CLI standard is open and the all (or at least the most significant) non-platfrom specific libraries of the CLS are open.
Yes, but from a practical standpoint, if Microsoft decides to take the products in a direction away from the Open Standard version, then the Open Standard version will immediately become irrelevant.
Which, come to think of it, was exactly what they intended to do with Java. Make the Sun version irrelevant.
Why? Apply that same question to Unix. Is Unix irrelevant because AT&T created a closed version of it? Or, for that matter, any number of other closed versions from any number of vendors? Or, even, an Open Source version? There is a common thread through all of those versions of Unix: Posix -- which is an open standard. Non-Posix implementations did not succeed in the long run no matter who created them.
Look, I don't trust MS either. And yes, they did try to hijack the Java standard. They did it by providing enhancements to the Java standard that were compelling enough that people used them. Sun had two choices; absorb the enhancements into the standard or take their ball and go home. They chose the latter.
So who was the winner in that little spat? MS? Sun? We programmers? I would call it losers all around.
With an open standard at least you know there is a chance some third-party enhancement that survives in the marketplace because people want to use it will get into the standard. And MS can only extend the standard with their own proprietary enhancements. They have limited control the standard as it exists now and (with the exception of patented stuff) cannot keep us from adding the enhancements to the standard if we like them.
This point has been made before, but it bears repeating. C# and the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) are ECMA standards! As such Microsoft no longer truly controls them. There is nothing to keep Microsoft from 'embracing and extending' these standards if they do not like the direction they are going. Just as they can with any open standard. Just as you can with any open standard.
MS tried the embrace and extend strategy with Java, remember? And they ran into a huge roadblock. Namely Java is not an open standard. Despite what Sun says in the press releases the standard is not open in the same sense. Sun controls it and Sun can shut down any attempt to create a non-conforming version.
From some points of view this is a good thing. But, although I appreciate any argument that starts with 'We need to avoid incompatible versions.' I also know that Sun has not proven any better than Microsoft as a steward when it comes to keeping the commons clean and competitive. To put it simply; I just don't trust them. And I think there is an equally persuasive argument that competing products evolve faster while products without competition tend towards stagnation. This eco-system analogy appeals to me.
From this point of view let us return to 'embrace and extend'. In a closed standard a single organization controls all progress for that standard, with limited participation from the outside. In an open standard the process is, at least titually, open to outside input and you are more likely to see third-party enhancements absorbed into the standard itself. Furthermore no corporation is going to sue you if you create your own implementation of the standard. Even if it is tweaked to work best on a competing platform. (Can we all say 'Mono'?)
So, the way I look at it, C# and the CLI will drive Sun to improve Java. Third-party implementors will drive the C# and CLI specifications faster than MS would alone. In the end we get better technology. I like better technology. So I win either way.
Besides, I like the design of the CLI a lot. And C# looks like an arguably better language than Java.
Finally, many arguments in the 'One Runtime' article seem a bit weak to me. For example, "... Design-by-Contract, a fundamental strength of Eiffel that.NET does not support." Since when does 'Design By Contract' have to be baked into the underlying runtime to make it work? What is keeping you from implementing any kind of runtime you want on top of the CLS?
Jack William Bell, who likes the idea of coding with mix-n-match programming languages.
Yes, this is a key area where I think de Icaza has a problem. He's clearly planning on implementing Winforms (I checked on the Mono site) and those are not part of the ECMA C#/CLI/CLR spec. Microsoft will not permit those classes to be cloned - its already dropped strong hints about it.
Hmm... If I was Miguel I would take a different route to avoid this problem - I would create a UIML based tool that would generate code for both Winforms (on Windows based platforms) and MozillaXUL for everywhere else (and your little Windows too, deary!) Plus UIML is a handy intermediate form for other forms-based UI platforms, such as Java Swing and HTML. Just standardize on Javascript for the local scripting needs...
Personally I think UIML is a damn good stab at creating a standardized common syntax for cross-platform UI design. Given a couple of revisions to add scripting capability and a decent event model it would rule (if enough tools supported it). And I like this kind of general approach a lot more than I like the idea of emulating MS Winforms.
Aunt Tillie doesn't need this. But, as a computer consultant and VAR, I need the ability to easily make these kinds of changes based on what my customers need.
Sure, I can do this myself the old-fashioned way. But this is the kind of thing I prefer to delegate to someone with a lower billing rate so I can focus on the things that really bring in the bucks. It is easier to train someone to use Eric's AutoConfigurator than it is to explain make files and such...
Jack William Bell, who likes the KISS method in most things.
William Gibson and True Names
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True Names
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Most anything I can bring to this discussion has already been said. Many of the posts on Vinge's concept of the Singularity are especially good. Although one point - Vinge said 'orders of magnitude' smarter than us, not just smarter than us - an important difference.
But I do have an interesting tale about William Gibson and the origins of Gibson's 'Matrix' and Virtual Reality! Many people have noted that Vinge wrote 'True Names', with a complete description of an Internet and Virtual Reality, years before Gibson published Neuromancer. Often people wonder if Gibson had read 'True Names' and lifted the ideas wholesale from it.
I once had an opportunity bring this up with Gibson. A few years later I posted the story of this conversation to alt.cyberpunk as part of an on-going conversation there. Thanks to the wonders of Google you can read the original or you can read on here for an edited version:
Back in 1995 I had a girlfriend who was attending The Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington. One of her classes was a kind of
on-going seminar thingy about 'cyberculture' and one of the seminar leaders was a teacher at that school named Tom Maddox who knew Gibson personally. Tom Maddox also wrote exactly one (not bad) cyberpunk novel, 'Halo', which is now available on the Internet.
Anyway, one of the seminars featured William Gibson as a speaker (and apparently this is something he never does). My girlfriend made sure I knew about it so I could attend (they were open to the public, but attendance was required for the students). It was a strange 'talk'. Rather than Gibson giving a speech, it was presented as the 'Tom and Bill Show' with the two of them sitting across a table from each other and having a straight ahead discussion on whatever they liked. Incredibly interesting; like being a fly on the wall at someone else's bullshit session.
During a break, right before the talk, Gibson was outside smoking a cigarette and looking about as out-of-place as you can get. I was
probably the only one there that recognized him before he got on stage, because no-one was near him. So I took the opportunity to introduce
myself and ask him a few questions. He was friendly enough, and didn't seem to take affront except for one question (which is why it sticks
in my mind so well)... As you have probably already figured out, the question was whether he (Gibson) had read Vinge's story 'True Names'?
He replied - rather tartly - that, so far as could remember, he had not, but had read it since. He did acknowledge the several ways in which Vinge's story foreshadowed his own work (including the introduction of Virtual Reality among other things). He also said that lots of people ask him that question, but he did not (and he repeated "NOT" very forcefully) steal Vinge's ideas, but rather invented them in parallel.
I agree; Mozilla actually has the potential to completely replace window managers and run the entire desktop. Those who argue different probably haven't taken the time to read the XUL and XP-COM specs (or perhaps do not have the background needed to appreciate them).
This is some powerful stuff, and is reasonably well thought out. Plus, in the case of XP-COM at least, it represents someone stealing the best parts of a Microsoft design (OLE/COM) and doing an 'Embrace and Extend' to it. Delicious irony there!
Personally I would really like to see the programmer community get behind Mozilla as an interface. With a little work Mozilla could become the greatest of all Microsoft nightmares: An application development platform which makes the underlying OS irrevelant. This *really* does scare them. Why do you think Microsoft worked so hard to own the browser market share in the first place?
Jack William Bell, who likes Mozilla more than IE, but has to admit it is still pretty crashy...
Hmm... I could risk a flamebait moderation and note that this might explain classic Liberals...
But more important than a chance to poke at Lefties is the extreme implications of this: Is perceived fairness really a more important survival trait than unfair 'growth' scenarios? Clearly not, if everyone gains, even unequally, the group as a whole does better and the individuals do better as well. A win/win. Yet the study mentioned by the original poster flies in the face of this simple logic.
This means that humans may well be hard-wired with a non-survival instinct! But that cannot be the case because we have been selected for millions of years as the best possible survivors on the planet. So what gives? Is there a survival trait hidden in this kind of behavior (something not obvious to me)? If so, is it a trait that applies to small groups of humans living as hunter-gatherers or would it also be a survival trait in larger groups like tribes/cities/nations?
I think it is just an outgrowth of simple selfishness. I am reminded of a long-ago friend's ovservation that, when someone comments on how good the chocolate bar you have looks, what they really want is for you to give them a piece. And the would take the whole thing if you offered. But if you did give it to them their gratitude would never last longer than it takes to eat it.
So, perhaps, the real survivor would vote to take the $3 and then take the $4 folk's money too. Oh... Never mind... Now I am picking on Righties. Or is it Lefties? I always get those extreme positions mixed up!
Jack William Bell -- I may vote Libertarian, but I still think they are a bunch of loser idiots.
Many years ago I worked as a programmer/analyst on a very large mainframe accounting system. One set of programs that I was maintaining did a monthly reconciliation from history and posted beginning balances. The code (COBOL of course - shudder) had originally been written in the 1970's and worked quite well, but was rather obfuscated.
Suddenly we started having a problem with one particular set of accounts, the amounts being posted were coming out wrong by a significant margin. But the problem made no sense because no other accounts were affected and I couldn't find a bug in the code that would do this. After several months of this (and my boss coming down on my neck) I decided to go down to the computer center and watch the process run in person.
I know. I know. Going to the watch a program run should make no difference at all. But I was getting desparate!
So I am sitting in a room half the size of a football field, full of hulking mainframe equipment, watching while the operators fetch and load the nine-track tapes containing the accounting history for that year. About fifteen minutes into the process one of the tape drives started 'hiccuping'. It would advance, backup, advance, backup over and over. Then one of the operators went up to it, stopped it, opened the glass cover, advanced the tape by hand, closed the cover and restarted it.
I nearly fell out of my shoes. I then asked what the hell he thought he was doing? "Oh, we have problems with that tape all the time, so we just turn it past the problem!"
Turns out the tape had a bad spot. If the operator had left it alone it would have timed out and we would have gotten a console error. Instead the operator would hand-turn it past the bad spot and the way the tape blocks were written to tape allowed it to actually continue from that point.
So I created a new tape from the backup; problem solved and my boss was happy with me. No the operator wasn't fired, but they did do some 're-training'. The accountants were still pissed anyway, but they always seemed to have a bug up their butts.
Me, I felt like a gawdamn Sherlock Holmes...
Jack William Bell, who did his time in the COBOL mines and is *never* going back...
The KampKonKrew staged KampKon 0.2 as a Leonid watching trip near Ellensburgh WA. The trip went OK despite the cold. And it was damn cold. Dan Sanderson said it was 19 degrees at one point.
I have seen a lots of meteor storms before (at least 20!), but nothing like what I saw around 2:45 to 3:30 Sunday morning. It was amazing! We had mostly clear skies and little light pollution. In one part of the sky alone the meteors were falling faster than I could
count. Faster than one a second. This means that there were literally thousands of meteors an hour at the peak. Some of them were huge things that
broke into multiple bits as they streaked across sixty and more degrees of sky. Others were dim quickies that faded almost before you could focus on them. The colors ranged from orange to green to blue. Some left colored trails and others were just burning points. Spec-Farking-Tacular! The trip was totally worth the cold and distance in my mind!
For some pictures I took of the trip, go to the KampKonKrew Yahoogroups page and click on 'Photos' at the left and then on 'Leonid Outing'. You can also find a detailed report of the trip there titled 'Leonid Outing: The good,
the bad and the lessons learned'. If you live in the Pacific Northwest and are interested in both Science Fiction and Camping you might consider joining the KampKonKrew mailing list.
This reminder of halloween document more than shows us that the ONLY important remedy in the M$-DOJ case is to force open protocols and open data exchange formats. Everything else is just a bonus or bogus. Even restrictive OEM contracts would not uphold long, but proprietary protocols and data formats might have the potential to break neck to OSS development
Oh Jeez! much as I like open standards I really don't want the government enforcing them. That strikes me as a sure way to end up with bad standards and/or to put the corporations in the drivers seat (probably the same thing). Don't believe me? Look at the FDA...
I almost didn't post because there are so many answers already, but I noticed that no-one brought up the most important point: Without registry access you cannot do 'Micrsoft Component Development' with ActiveX, OLE and.NET!
Creating components using these technologies requires registry access because you have to register the components. If you cannot register them you cannot even run a simple OLE server from the Visual Basic IDE. Forget compiling. Forget C#. Forget C++ for most things. Ain't gonna happen.
So exactly what languages/component sets are you expected to use? Raw ASP? What do you do if a third party component fails to work as expected (as they *always* do) and you have to upgrade? This policy is so braindead I guarantee it will go away, at least for developers, sometime soon. In the meantime I would get my resume out were I you...
I don't know if the story is true or not, anyone know of a Washington State corporation with 7000 users that recently made the switch? I am from the area and am not aware of anything of that maginitude.
But, fairy tale nature aside, the article does show how big companies can get trapped in the licensing whirlpool. It used to be that no-on got fired for buying IBM. Now it is Microsoft that cannot do wrong. But even that is changing and companies that need to look hard at their bottom line should take note!
So I find this to be good ammunition for me as my fledgeling company starts to sell GNU/Linux-based business solutions. Of course my target market isn't companies with 7000 employees; more like 70 to 700. But I need all the bullet points I can make even with them.
You Said:
>If anything, the Industrial revolution made
>people poorer. A few people got really rich,
>but the shift to a urban v. Rural lifestyle
>ruined the lives of generationsof people.
Clearly you have had your history fed to you by spoon, or else by a Marxist. In actual fact the shift to the urban lifestyle broke the back of old aristocracy by giving people a freedom of choice they didn't have before. No longer must there choices consist of working a farm owned by a landlord or starve...
Read some books about the lifestyle of the average person in the middle ages and then compare that to the wage slaves of the Industrial Revoloution. Were they better off? You bet. Were they still exploited, treated like cattle and forced into lives of desperation. Damn right.
The point is that there was an incremental *increase* in the quality of living for the new urban working class. And the ensuing increase in literacy and the narrowing of class boundaries led to the reforms that truly made the working(man)'s life better and gave hope and upward mobility to (his) children.
The industrial revoloution was a *good thing* (tm). Don't let anyone tell you different. The fact that it also came with its own set of *bad things* (tm) is just the way things work. The pendulumn swings and over time things balance out.
Please don't post regurtitated historical pablum in the future. Do some reading and think for yourself!
I work in a manufacturing plant with approximately 400 PC's running NT. We get by with a staff of 3 interns on help desk, 1 help desk manager, 2 network techs, 1 webmaster and 1 support administrator (who also gets his hands dirty). We actually have as many programmers as we have support staff!
The thing is I don't work in the support group, so I can't tell you if it is enough people (although it seems to be). But I can tell you this to pass on to your boss: Not having enough support staff becomes a positive feedback loop because the users are unhappy, which makes the overworked staff unhappy so they leave to find other jobs which makes less support staff which makes...
Or to some other frame-buffer based GUI. I want to use Mozilla/XUL/XPCom as the basis for a whole set of applications. And it would help if I could use it embedded.
Everyone I know who works for SAS or is in anyway associated with SAS (which is quite a few since I live in the city where SAS is headquartered) pronounce it Sass.
Hmmm... Perhaps they were pulling my leg, or maybe it is a West Coast thing. I was told that it was like 'SAP' which, should never be pronounced like it is spelled.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny! Just got back from CompUSA and I see this /. post. Still haven't hooked it up, but I picked up a Linksys BEFW11S4 combo Wireless AP/DSL Router/Switch for $169 and a Linksys WPC11 Wireless PC Card for $79. At these prices it was barely more than I originally paid for the failing hub that I am replacing.
Jack William Bell
I wish I had some way of marking every "Wal-Mart is evil!" post as offtopic in one fell swoop. Walmart probably is evil to some extent; every large corporation is. But the author's use of Wal-Mart as an example tends to obscure his real point. The key passage in the article is the closing paragraph, quoted here with every instance of 'Wal-Mart' changed to '[Big-Biz]':
Those of you who want to focus on '[Big-Biz]' as evil are obscuring a more important question; can Open Source break into [Big-Biz]? The thing is, computers really have produced a considerable pay-off for [Big-Biz] and small-biz. That is why they use them. In the case of [Big-Biz], however, cost-effictiveness is probably the sole reason they use them. [Big-Biz] doesn't care about the cool factor.
So, if we want to see Open Source grow beyond colleges and a few small-bizs we need to seriously consider how to show [Big-Biz] they can save money by adopting Open Source Tools.
Implicit, but not mentioned explicitily, in the article is the extra question "Can we get [Big-Biz] to adopt the philosophy of Open Source as a cost saving measure as well?" By definition [Big-Biz] wants to make lots of money and to squeeze out their competitors. That kind of behavior is what made them [Big-Biz] in the first place. From their viewpoint you don't squeeze out your competitors by creating great tools and giving them away for your competitors to use against you. We need to find ways to make the argument that the win from this behavior is greater than any possible loss.
However, if you hate [Big-Biz] because you hold anti-capitalist views, then you should also be against helping them to understand Open Source. Personally I think that kind of stance is both quixotic and wrong-headed. But you should be clear in you purposes.
Jack William Bell
You see this so often here on /., an article that seems designed to get the different UI/OS/License/Programming Language camps at each other's throats. Clearly the /. editors think controversy is a good thing.
I would tend to agree with that, except that I am still stinging from the response to a recent /. post where I opined that open standards and competition are better than the the alternative.
The surprising thing for the above article? Seeing the Python people (who I tend to agree with) and the Smalltalk weenies speaking up more authoritatively than the Java contingent. Cool!
Jack William Bell
Hurray! Someone that understands my point and can make it more clear and concise than I can!
Jack William Bell, who thinks that we need to keep a gimlet eye on Microsoft anyway.
Given time I can come up with several examples, but lets go with one here: Basic is an open standard with lots of (varied) implementations. PICK is a language (among other things) that ended up looking rather like Basic after several evolutionary changes. Why did PICK evolve towards Basic? PICK was arguably better on several levels. But it was a closed, proprietary standard.
If you created your own version of PICK you couldn't call it PICK and you could not participate in the mind-share generated by PICK. But anyone (including Bill Gates) could create a version of Basic and call it 'Basic'. As a result everyone knew what it was. It was part of the idea space for Basic, even if it wasn't exactly a kosher 'Basic'. So Basic, despite being technically less powerful, ended up owning the most mind-share. In the marketplace of ideas it became something that was traded at a higher level. PICK could only keep up by following, because its mind-share was smaller.
Make no mistake; mind-share is important. Sun knows this. Microsoft knows this. There is no way Microsoft would be playing the game the way they are if they were not playing catch-up. In this case the real winners are the programmers of five years from now when idea convergence and the natural workings of the marketplace of ideas create a better technology.
First rule of civil debate: Attack the message, not the messenger. Personally I believe that I am fully capable of making such distinctions by using a rich and approprite set of heuristic comparisons which I need not detail here. Can you accept that and choose to disagree with me solely on the basis of my ideas and opinions? If so then you are trading in that 'marketplace of ideas' I keep blathering about. Otherwise you are only trading in insult and antipathy. I have nothing to offer in exchange there.
Jack William Bell
Actually that was exactly my point! MS can do exactly that. But if they do there is nothing (except patents) to keep ECMA from adding those enhancements to the standard if the enhancements really do provide something worthwhile.
Patents are a problem here, no way around that. But they are a problem everywhere! ECMA can always argue that an enhancement that cannot be reproduced is enough to keep the implementation from being called 'C#' or whatever. I don't think this is likely though. I am sure MS is a major financial contributor to ECMA for one thing.
In any case I consider this ability of MS (or anyone else) to embrace and extend a good thing. At least so long as we can pick and choose, in the marketplace of ideas, those enhancements we think add value then we will continually improve the standard. As has been pointed out you can do this with Java too -- but you cannot call it Java. In the case of an open standard like C# you can still call it C# and make some claim of being part of the C# idea-space. That is vital to the evoloution of an open standard. If the MS extensions to Kerebos are something people like you and me want to use then they should be added to Kerebos. Simple as that (patents aside).
Jack William Bell, who thinks that (generally) software patents are evil.
Valid point, but doesn't it cut both ways?
As do I. And I already have to deal with multiple languges, backends, frontends, extension libraries, coding styles, naming standards and everything else under the sun. At least with the CLI I know that I have a better chance of things interoperating. Besides some languages do map to a particular problem space better than another. And I can split work up between expert coders (with C#) and less skilled coders (with VB or Python).
Jack William Bell, who notes that the only responses posted so far supporting his stance come from Anonymous Cowards...
Can you back that up with details? So far as I know all of the C# standard is open, all of the CLI standard is open and the all (or at least the most significant) non-platfrom specific libraries of the CLS are open.
Jack William Bell
Why? Apply that same question to Unix. Is Unix irrelevant because AT&T created a closed version of it? Or, for that matter, any number of other closed versions from any number of vendors? Or, even, an Open Source version? There is a common thread through all of those versions of Unix: Posix -- which is an open standard. Non-Posix implementations did not succeed in the long run no matter who created them.
Look, I don't trust MS either. And yes, they did try to hijack the Java standard. They did it by providing enhancements to the Java standard that were compelling enough that people used them. Sun had two choices; absorb the enhancements into the standard or take their ball and go home. They chose the latter.
So who was the winner in that little spat? MS? Sun? We programmers? I would call it losers all around.
With an open standard at least you know there is a chance some third-party enhancement that survives in the marketplace because people want to use it will get into the standard. And MS can only extend the standard with their own proprietary enhancements. They have limited control the standard as it exists now and (with the exception of patented stuff) cannot keep us from adding the enhancements to the standard if we like them.
Jack William Bell
This point has been made before, but it bears repeating. C# and the CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) are ECMA standards! As such Microsoft no longer truly controls them. There is nothing to keep Microsoft from 'embracing and extending' these standards if they do not like the direction they are going. Just as they can with any open standard. Just as you can with any open standard.
MS tried the embrace and extend strategy with Java, remember? And they ran into a huge roadblock. Namely Java is not an open standard. Despite what Sun says in the press releases the standard is not open in the same sense. Sun controls it and Sun can shut down any attempt to create a non-conforming version.
From some points of view this is a good thing. But, although I appreciate any argument that starts with 'We need to avoid incompatible versions.' I also know that Sun has not proven any better than Microsoft as a steward when it comes to keeping the commons clean and competitive. To put it simply; I just don't trust them. And I think there is an equally persuasive argument that competing products evolve faster while products without competition tend towards stagnation. This eco-system analogy appeals to me.
From this point of view let us return to 'embrace and extend'. In a closed standard a single organization controls all progress for that standard, with limited participation from the outside. In an open standard the process is, at least titually, open to outside input and you are more likely to see third-party enhancements absorbed into the standard itself. Furthermore no corporation is going to sue you if you create your own implementation of the standard. Even if it is tweaked to work best on a competing platform. (Can we all say 'Mono'?)
So, the way I look at it, C# and the CLI will drive Sun to improve Java. Third-party implementors will drive the C# and CLI specifications faster than MS would alone. In the end we get better technology. I like better technology. So I win either way.
Besides, I like the design of the CLI a lot. And C# looks like an arguably better language than Java.
Finally, many arguments in the 'One Runtime' article seem a bit weak to me. For example, "... Design-by-Contract, a fundamental strength of Eiffel that .NET does not support." Since when does 'Design By Contract' have to be baked into the underlying runtime to make it work? What is keeping you from implementing any kind of runtime you want on top of the CLS?
Jack William Bell, who likes the idea of coding with mix-n-match programming languages.
Hmm... If I was Miguel I would take a different route to avoid this problem - I would create a UIML based tool that would generate code for both Winforms (on Windows based platforms) and Mozilla XUL for everywhere else (and your little Windows too, deary!) Plus UIML is a handy intermediate form for other forms-based UI platforms, such as Java Swing and HTML. Just standardize on Javascript for the local scripting needs...
Personally I think UIML is a damn good stab at creating a standardized common syntax for cross-platform UI design. Given a couple of revisions to add scripting capability and a decent event model it would rule (if enough tools supported it). And I like this kind of general approach a lot more than I like the idea of emulating MS Winforms.
Jack William Bell
Aunt Tillie doesn't need this. But, as a computer consultant and VAR, I need the ability to easily make these kinds of changes based on what my customers need.
Sure, I can do this myself the old-fashioned way. But this is the kind of thing I prefer to delegate to someone with a lower billing rate so I can focus on the things that really bring in the bucks. It is easier to train someone to use Eric's AutoConfigurator than it is to explain make files and such...
Jack William Bell, who likes the KISS method in most things.
Most anything I can bring to this discussion has already been said. Many of the posts on Vinge's concept of the Singularity are especially good. Although one point - Vinge said 'orders of magnitude' smarter than us, not just smarter than us - an important difference.
But I do have an interesting tale about William Gibson and the origins of Gibson's 'Matrix' and Virtual Reality! Many people have noted that Vinge wrote 'True Names', with a complete description of an Internet and Virtual Reality, years before Gibson published Neuromancer. Often people wonder if Gibson had read 'True Names' and lifted the ideas wholesale from it.
I once had an opportunity bring this up with Gibson. A few years later I posted the story of this conversation to alt.cyberpunk as part of an on-going conversation there. Thanks to the wonders of Google you can read the original or you can read on here for an edited version:
Back in 1995 I had a girlfriend who was attending The Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington. One of her classes was a kind of on-going seminar thingy about 'cyberculture' and one of the seminar leaders was a teacher at that school named Tom Maddox who knew Gibson personally. Tom Maddox also wrote exactly one (not bad) cyberpunk novel, 'Halo', which is now available on the Internet.
Anyway, one of the seminars featured William Gibson as a speaker (and apparently this is something he never does). My girlfriend made sure I knew about it so I could attend (they were open to the public, but attendance was required for the students). It was a strange 'talk'. Rather than Gibson giving a speech, it was presented as the 'Tom and Bill Show' with the two of them sitting across a table from each other and having a straight ahead discussion on whatever they liked. Incredibly interesting; like being a fly on the wall at someone else's bullshit session.
During a break, right before the talk, Gibson was outside smoking a cigarette and looking about as out-of-place as you can get. I was probably the only one there that recognized him before he got on stage, because no-one was near him. So I took the opportunity to introduce myself and ask him a few questions. He was friendly enough, and didn't seem to take affront except for one question (which is why it sticks in my mind so well)... As you have probably already figured out, the question was whether he (Gibson) had read Vinge's story 'True Names'?
He replied - rather tartly - that, so far as could remember, he had not, but had read it since. He did acknowledge the several ways in which Vinge's story foreshadowed his own work (including the introduction of Virtual Reality among other things). He also said that lots of people ask him that question, but he did not (and he repeated "NOT" very forcefully) steal Vinge's ideas, but rather invented them in parallel.
Personally I believe him. I think the early eighties was 'Steam Engine Time' for Virtual Reality and for Cyberpunk in general.
Jack William Bell
I agree; Mozilla actually has the potential to completely replace window managers and run the entire desktop. Those who argue different probably haven't taken the time to read the XUL and XP-COM specs (or perhaps do not have the background needed to appreciate them).
This is some powerful stuff, and is reasonably well thought out. Plus, in the case of XP-COM at least, it represents someone stealing the best parts of a Microsoft design (OLE/COM) and doing an 'Embrace and Extend' to it. Delicious irony there!
Personally I would really like to see the programmer community get behind Mozilla as an interface. With a little work Mozilla could become the greatest of all Microsoft nightmares: An application development platform which makes the underlying OS irrevelant. This *really* does scare them. Why do you think Microsoft worked so hard to own the browser market share in the first place?
Jack William Bell, who likes Mozilla more than IE, but has to admit it is still pretty crashy...
Hmm... I could risk a flamebait moderation and note that this might explain classic Liberals...
But more important than a chance to poke at Lefties is the extreme implications of this: Is perceived fairness really a more important survival trait than unfair 'growth' scenarios? Clearly not, if everyone gains, even unequally, the group as a whole does better and the individuals do better as well. A win/win. Yet the study mentioned by the original poster flies in the face of this simple logic.
This means that humans may well be hard-wired with a non-survival instinct! But that cannot be the case because we have been selected for millions of years as the best possible survivors on the planet. So what gives? Is there a survival trait hidden in this kind of behavior (something not obvious to me)? If so, is it a trait that applies to small groups of humans living as hunter-gatherers or would it also be a survival trait in larger groups like tribes/cities/nations?
I think it is just an outgrowth of simple selfishness. I am reminded of a long-ago friend's ovservation that, when someone comments on how good the chocolate bar you have looks, what they really want is for you to give them a piece. And the would take the whole thing if you offered. But if you did give it to them their gratitude would never last longer than it takes to eat it.
So, perhaps, the real survivor would vote to take the $3 and then take the $4 folk's money too. Oh... Never mind... Now I am picking on Righties. Or is it Lefties? I always get those extreme positions mixed up!
Jack William Bell -- I may vote Libertarian, but I still think they are a bunch of loser idiots.
Many years ago I worked as a programmer/analyst on a very large mainframe accounting system. One set of programs that I was maintaining did a monthly reconciliation from history and posted beginning balances. The code (COBOL of course - shudder) had originally been written in the 1970's and worked quite well, but was rather obfuscated.
Suddenly we started having a problem with one particular set of accounts, the amounts being posted were coming out wrong by a significant margin. But the problem made no sense because no other accounts were affected and I couldn't find a bug in the code that would do this. After several months of this (and my boss coming down on my neck) I decided to go down to the computer center and watch the process run in person.
I know. I know. Going to the watch a program run should make no difference at all. But I was getting desparate!
So I am sitting in a room half the size of a football field, full of hulking mainframe equipment, watching while the operators fetch and load the nine-track tapes containing the accounting history for that year. About fifteen minutes into the process one of the tape drives started 'hiccuping'. It would advance, backup, advance, backup over and over. Then one of the operators went up to it, stopped it, opened the glass cover, advanced the tape by hand, closed the cover and restarted it.
I nearly fell out of my shoes. I then asked what the hell he thought he was doing? "Oh, we have problems with that tape all the time, so we just turn it past the problem!"
Turns out the tape had a bad spot. If the operator had left it alone it would have timed out and we would have gotten a console error. Instead the operator would hand-turn it past the bad spot and the way the tape blocks were written to tape allowed it to actually continue from that point.
So I created a new tape from the backup; problem solved and my boss was happy with me. No the operator wasn't fired, but they did do some 're-training'. The accountants were still pissed anyway, but they always seemed to have a bug up their butts.
Me, I felt like a gawdamn Sherlock Holmes...
Jack William Bell, who did his time in the COBOL mines and is *never* going back...
The KampKonKrew staged KampKon 0.2 as a Leonid watching trip near Ellensburgh WA. The trip went OK despite the cold. And it was damn cold. Dan Sanderson said it was 19 degrees at one point.
I have seen a lots of meteor storms before (at least 20!), but nothing like what I saw around 2:45 to 3:30 Sunday morning. It was amazing! We had mostly clear skies and little light pollution. In one part of the sky alone the meteors were falling faster than I could count. Faster than one a second. This means that there were literally thousands of meteors an hour at the peak. Some of them were huge things that broke into multiple bits as they streaked across sixty and more degrees of sky. Others were dim quickies that faded almost before you could focus on them. The colors ranged from orange to green to blue. Some left colored trails and others were just burning points. Spec-Farking-Tacular! The trip was totally worth the cold and distance in my mind!
For some pictures I took of the trip, go to the KampKonKrew Yahoogroups page and click on 'Photos' at the left and then on 'Leonid Outing'. You can also find a detailed report of the trip there titled 'Leonid Outing: The good, the bad and the lessons learned'. If you live in the Pacific Northwest and are interested in both Science Fiction and Camping you might consider joining the KampKonKrew mailing list.
Jack William Bell
Dude, like you gotta go into Management or something. Quick, look in the mirror and see if your hair is starting to get pointy.
Jack
Oh Jeez! much as I like open standards I really don't want the government enforcing them. That strikes me as a sure way to end up with bad standards and/or to put the corporations in the drivers seat (probably the same thing). Don't believe me? Look at the FDA...
Jack
I almost didn't post because there are so many answers already, but I noticed that no-one brought up the most important point: Without registry access you cannot do 'Micrsoft Component Development' with ActiveX, OLE and .NET!
Creating components using these technologies requires registry access because you have to register the components. If you cannot register them you cannot even run a simple OLE server from the Visual Basic IDE. Forget compiling. Forget C#. Forget C++ for most things. Ain't gonna happen.
So exactly what languages/component sets are you expected to use? Raw ASP? What do you do if a third party component fails to work as expected (as they *always* do) and you have to upgrade? This policy is so braindead I guarantee it will go away, at least for developers, sometime soon. In the meantime I would get my resume out were I you...
Jack
I don't know if the story is true or not, anyone know of a Washington State corporation with 7000 users that recently made the switch? I am from the area and am not aware of anything of that maginitude.
But, fairy tale nature aside, the article does show how big companies can get trapped in the licensing whirlpool. It used to be that no-on got fired for buying IBM. Now it is Microsoft that cannot do wrong. But even that is changing and companies that need to look hard at their bottom line should take note!
So I find this to be good ammunition for me as my fledgeling company starts to sell GNU/Linux-based business solutions. Of course my target market isn't companies with 7000 employees; more like 70 to 700. But I need all the bullet points I can make even with them.
So thanks for this posting!
Jack
You Said:
>If anything, the Industrial revolution made
>people poorer. A few people got really rich,
>but the shift to a urban v. Rural lifestyle
>ruined the lives of generationsof people.
Clearly you have had your history fed to you by spoon, or else by a Marxist. In actual fact the shift to the urban lifestyle broke the back of old aristocracy by giving people a freedom of choice they didn't have before. No longer must there choices consist of working a farm owned by a landlord or starve...
Read some books about the lifestyle of the average person in the middle ages and then compare that to the wage slaves of the Industrial Revoloution. Were they better off? You bet. Were they still exploited, treated like cattle and forced into lives of desperation. Damn right.
The point is that there was an incremental *increase* in the quality of living for the new urban working class. And the ensuing increase in literacy and the narrowing of class boundaries led to the reforms that truly made the working(man)'s life better and gave hope and upward mobility to (his) children.
The industrial revoloution was a *good thing* (tm). Don't let anyone tell you different. The fact that it also came with its own set of *bad things* (tm) is just the way things work. The pendulumn swings and over time things balance out.
Please don't post regurtitated historical pablum in the future. Do some reading and think for yourself!
Jack
The thing is I don't work in the support group, so I can't tell you if it is enough people (although it seems to be). But I can tell you this to pass on to your boss: Not having enough support staff becomes a positive feedback loop because the users are unhappy, which makes the overworked staff unhappy so they leave to find other jobs which makes less support staff which makes...
Jack William Bell
Or to some other frame-buffer based GUI. I want to use Mozilla/XUL/XPCom as the basis for a whole set of applications. And it would help if I could use it embedded.
Jack
Hmmm... Perhaps they were pulling my leg, or maybe it is a West Coast thing. I was told that it was like 'SAP' which, should never be pronounced like it is spelled.
Jack