It doesn't matter much anymore what the RIAA or MPAA or radio stations or television stations or cable do anymore. Either, they make their content available easily, or they will be replaced by people and companies who do, as podcasts, live streams, and in other formats.
LINQ is basically list comprehensions over arbitrary objects with a sequence interface. That's actually not new either--both CommonLisp and Python have had similar constructs.
Nope, there isn't, in fact the Harmony project is building an implementation of J2SE 5.
There were plenty of GIF implementations, both open source and proprietary, before Unisys asserted their intellectual property. So, the existence and toleration by Sun of attempts to implement J2SE is not evidence at all that Java is open or can be freely implemented; quite to the contrary, it is suspicious.
While I totally agree with you that MS has screwed up royally during the years, it just kinda annoys me to see something this good (because, quite frankly, it IS good) get beaten down with the auto-hammer just because there's a Microsoft logo on the packaging box.
It gets "beaten down" because it's the usual Microsoft thing: they are taking other people's ideas, creating an implementation with proprietary aspects, marketing the hell out of it, and making you pay for it all.
You may fume about this, or think that other platforms are better or that MS sucks for not making all this available 10 years ago. I really don't care. This will make my life as a developer more fun.
Ignorance is bliss.
Your life as a developer will become a whole lot less fun when the rest of the world will finally force you to let go of your Microsoft security blanket, because while you may not be unhappy about paying Microsoft for poor implementations of regurgitated ideas, other people increasingly are.
No, what sucks is that they ship broken things in the first place and have done so for 20 years, even though better technology was available then.
Are you just pissed off because Microsoft has improved themselves?
No. I'm pissed off that we have to pay the dues for Bill Gates and his employees learning computer science on the job. I'm also pissed off that Microsoft has killed off most of the technically superior competitors through illegal and unfair monopolistic practices.
What I know is that things suddenly got better on the Windows platform.
Well, you'll be able to repeat that experience many more times: Microsoft still has a long time to go until they will have caught up even with the state of the art of a decade ago.
You know you've been there, programmatically moving a button two pixels to the right to align with some text label or somesuch, worrying about how the size of the button text will look in german, etc. That's just plain dumb
Yes, it is. So, why did Microsoft start doing it in the first place?
These tools, as far as I saw them presented at the PDC, seem like a good help in that direction. XAML seems very sweet, Avalon looks awesome. I tell you, my friends, this stuff does not suck.
What sucks is that Microsoft created the problem in the first place, then made the world suffer with it for more than a decade, and now finally gets around to fixing it, after we pay them another cool several billions of dollars for upgrades. What also sucks is that people like you don't even know what's going on.
Deliver Superior UX Create dynamic, interactive pages and sites that leverage the power of the Web to deliver compelling user experiences. Easily design to standards and optimize your sites for accessibility and cross-browser compatibility with built-in support and validation for Web standards.
Let me guess: in 1999, some Microsoft marketing employee fell into Bill Gates's cryogenic tube and they finally found him and thawed him out?
Microsoft has included open source software in lots of their releases. Some key functionality in Windows is derived from open source software. Often, they like to take the software, modify it to make it incompatible with the rest of the world, and then release the result as a product; they instantly get the open source functionality while at the same time threatening to replace the open standard.
That's why Microsoft (and Sun and Apple, for that matter) love BSD and MIT licenses so much: it gives them complete freedom to take advantage of other people's work.
"I don't know about RedHat or Mandrake, but Java does not run "fine" on Debian. You may or may not be able to install Sun Java on it right now, but you can't rely on it: any "apt-get upgrade" can end up breaking it, and it does."
I don't know what you are saying here.
Obviously, you don't, which just goes to show that you simply aren't qualified to make statements about running Java on Debian.
Ah this makes it all clear now. You should avoid anything used by fortune 500 companies. Say it once again so I can get another chuckle. Say "java does not scale but mono is proven to scale". Go ahead I dare ya.
My point is simply this: given that fools like you were using Sun Java for "scalable enterprise apps" even back when (not so long ago) Sun Java was full of horrendous memory leaks and other bugs, it obviously doesn't matter for scalability what people do in the runtime.
In fact, it turns out that in this day, you can write scalable apps in Java, Mono, Perl, Python, PHP,.NET, Tcl, or any of the other incompetently thrown together languages and runtimes people are so fond of. But between those incompetently thrown together languages and runtimes, you might at least choose the more convenient ones and the less proprietary ones, and that places Java at the very bottom of the pile.
I'm actually far more concerned about the lack of conceptual integrity, lack of professionalism, and lack of innovation with proprietary software, because it's evident that the major commercial software lack all of those. I'm equally concerned about the issue of ownership of commercial software developed under the current ownership laws because, as a customer, I'm screwed by them, no matter what.
Fortunately, there is a solution to most of those concerns: open source software. It's not perfect, but in the areas of integrity, professionalism, innovation, and clear ownership, it is way ahead of proprietary software.
How is recommending that people drop Java and go back to C++ or use Mono with Gtk+ "astroturfing"?
The "astroturfers" in Java vs. the World debates are the Java proponents, who are arguing that we all should use a proprietary platform that can only be implemented under license from Sun.
Certified, compatible implementations are available for just about any relevant platform you can imagine (yes, probably not for BSD's but that's because they are not relevant).
Thank you very much, but I want to decide for myself which platforms are relevant.
I don't know if there is something in Sun's licensing policies which prevent a fully GPL'ed SDK being done by someone, but I really couldn't care less about "open source" Java SDK or runtime environment.
There are no third party Java implementations at all, whether commercial or open source or free. Java isn't a language or a platform, it's a proprietary implementation from Sun that's been ported to a few platforms by various licensees.
SDK's are essentially free anyway and they work well; whether they are open source or closed source is totally irrelevant.
I've been through this cycle several times before: whether platforms are proprietary or open does matter a lot. You'll eventually figure it out for yourself when you have to stop shipping a product or pay inflated licensing fees.
Kaffe 1.1.6 will have 90%+ of 1.4 APIs implemented. Two years ago the number was around 50%. Never may come soon enough.
How is implementing a set of core APIs that are several years out of date "catching up"? We are up to Java 1.5, with 1.6 on the drawing board, and that doesn't even include all the important JCP APIs. Besides, Kaffe is at best a mediocre implementation.
Mono is already further along implementing the core.NET APIs than any open source Java implementation has implemented Sun's core APIs. And unlike Sun, Mono actually also implements a lot of widely used open source APIs, foremost, Gtk+ and Gnome.
In any case, I don't care whether you use Mono. Just stop trying to tell people that Java is a high-quality, open cross-platform environment; it is none of those things. After nearly a decade of developing in Java, I rather program in C++ than Java.
I work on Redhat, CentOS, Debian and Mandrake boxes and each and every one of those runs Java just fine.
I don't know about RedHat or Mandrake, but Java does not run "fine" on Debian. You may or may not be able to install Sun Java on it right now, but you can't rely on it: any "apt-get upgrade" can end up breaking it, and it does.
Right, all the Fortune 500 companies use Mono for their enterprise apps instead of Java. (Yes, that is sarcasm.)
In case you hadn't noticed, Forture 500 companies use lots of garbage.
Yeah, version 1.1 was buggy, but that was ages ago. Early linux versions were not so great either. Software can improve, you know.
Java 1.3 still had serious bugs, but most so-called "enterprise developers" didn't even know about it.
Have you even looked at Java 5? The list of improvements is enormous.
The list is enormous, but insubstantial; Sun has been unwilling to make substantial changes to the runtime or the language, and as a result, serious problems remain.
Come on. There are plenty of real reasons to praise Mono. Don't try to make up false ones.
This isn't Java vs. Mono issue. I'm back to developing in C++ right now. I hope Mono will be a way out, but I already know that Java isn't. Java has failed to deliver on its promises.
I agree, furthermore it will never catch up. MS will make sure of that. If by some miracle mono does close the gap they will be sued and that will stop them in their tracks.
Of course, Mono will not catch up with Microsoft on.NET APIs, just like no open source Java implementation will ever catch up with Sun on Java APIs.
The difference is that with Mono, it doesn't matter. Open source software development and cross platform development in Mono is not primarily done in.NET, it's done in Gtk+ and other toolkits.
Not when you java already exists, runs on every platform mono runs on, has proven to scale to massive proportions, can run on the tiniest of devices, had great IDEs, and is already mature and baked.
Repeating a lie often enough doesn't make it true. Java does not run on my Linux box, for example, while Mono does. Java has not "proven to scale" any more than Mono has; and while Sun was pushing Java for enterprise apps, their runtime had horrendous memory leaks. Finally, Java is not mature, it's frozen; there is a difference.
Imagine if Miguel put all that work into a better JVM for linux.
Then we would be stuck with yet another incomplete implementation of Java, a language and a set of APIs, many people have already decided not to use.
After years of programming Java, I have gone back to C++; Java simply isn't working out. Unlike Java, however, C# is worth another try.
Why you wouldn't use an existing and mature cross platform language that is non-microsoft is beyond me.
For the obvious reasons:
There is effectively only a single compatible implementation of Java SE (Sun's, plus its licensed derivatives), so the way Java achieves cross platform capabilities is the same way Microsoft or Delphi does: through the implementation, not through the standard.
Compatible Java implementations do not run on many platforms; they don't run on my Linux distribution, for example.
The core Java standard is controlled by Sun and third parties are not free to implement it any way they choose.
The evolution of the Java standard is heading in the wrong direction; whether the process is "fair and open" or not, it isn't working as far as I'm concerned.
There are horrendous version dependencies in Java: while I know how to write Java software that works across most existing versions of Java, a lot of commercial software fails when used with the wrong Java runtime version.
Java has serious technical limitations compared to C# in the areas of generic types, value classes, and numerical programming.
C#'s interface with native code is much simpler, much safer, and much more efficient than Java's. One consequence of this is that I can continue to use the native libraries I need without having to rewrite them or wrap them up in JNI.
I've been using Java for many years, and it has failed to mature as a general purpose programming language. For my work, it's either back to C++ or C#; Java is not an option anymore.
Actually, he was simply incompetent and didn't pay attention in math class; this stuff is being taught.
If this book encourages people to use trig less it might be a good thing.
This isn't a question of "encouraging" or "less". Any computer programmer dealing with geometry should know how to use the minimum number of trigonometric expressions, error and roundoff properties, argument ranges, etc.
It only takes a single viable microbial spore from space to start life on a planet. A single impact could have delivered it. Or it could have drived through space without any impact at all. Therefore, where most of the objects impacting on earth originated is pretty much not relevant to panspermia.
It seems that what that article is talking about is not panspermia, but the composition of the atmosphere and how that was determined by impacts.
I think I've figured out the/. crowd. If you keep repeating it over and over and over, maybe one day it'll come true.
And your point is what exactly? That's the way marketing works: you repeat your message so that people get it. It seems to be working for Microsoft's and Macromedia's marketing departments, who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on repeating messages with the express goal of making them come true one day. Do you only get to get your message across if you are a billion dollar company with an agenda and receive a big pay check for spreading information about your products?
Unlike Microsoft's and Macromedia's message, who are misleading people when they are saying that we need to commit to their proprietary standards, this message is true: we need an open standard for vector graphics and vector animation, and it is being created as we speak.
Once the dream workplace of tech's highest achievers,
I think everybody used to like the stock options.
Microsoft research started being a hot place in the late 90's and has a lot of good people, but they usually ended up going when their current employer had to close down their research labs after being driven out of business by Microsoft.
I suspect all the non-technical people, marketing, HR, PR, finance, administration, shipping, writers, etc., must love Microsoft: great benefits, great work environment, lots of power, great stock options, young workforce, etc., although they have good jobs available to them in some non-high-tech companies as well.
The main people who seem to have thought of Microsoft as the "dream workplace" seem to be recent college graduates with little prior industry experience: Microsoft gave many of them a lot of responsibility and power early on and often made them rich. For better or for worse, are the people that built Microsoft and Microsoft software.
What's the intellectual contribution of this research? Mapping data onto city maps is standard GIS usage. It's the kind of information companies use for deciding where to locate cell phone towers, where there are coverage problems, and where there are capacity problems.
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It doesn't matter much anymore what the RIAA or MPAA or radio stations or television stations or cable do anymore. Either, they make their content available easily, or they will be replaced by people and companies who do, as podcasts, live streams, and in other formats.
LINQ is basically list comprehensions over arbitrary objects with a sequence interface. That's actually not new either--both CommonLisp and Python have had similar constructs.
Nope, there isn't, in fact the Harmony project is building an implementation of J2SE 5.
There were plenty of GIF implementations, both open source and proprietary, before Unisys asserted their intellectual property. So, the existence and toleration by Sun of attempts to implement J2SE is not evidence at all that Java is open or can be freely implemented; quite to the contrary, it is suspicious.
While I totally agree with you that MS has screwed up royally during the years, it just kinda annoys me to see something this good (because, quite frankly, it IS good) get beaten down with the auto-hammer just because there's a Microsoft logo on the packaging box.
It gets "beaten down" because it's the usual Microsoft thing: they are taking other people's ideas, creating an implementation with proprietary aspects, marketing the hell out of it, and making you pay for it all.
You may fume about this, or think that other platforms are better or that MS sucks for not making all this available 10 years ago. I really don't care. This will make my life as a developer more fun.
Ignorance is bliss.
Your life as a developer will become a whole lot less fun when the rest of the world will finally force you to let go of your Microsoft security blanket, because while you may not be unhappy about paying Microsoft for poor implementations of regurgitated ideas, other people increasingly are.
Yeah, it sucks that they fix broken things.
No, what sucks is that they ship broken things in the first place and have done so for 20 years, even though better technology was available then.
Are you just pissed off because Microsoft has improved themselves?
No. I'm pissed off that we have to pay the dues for Bill Gates and his employees learning computer science on the job. I'm also pissed off that Microsoft has killed off most of the technically superior competitors through illegal and unfair monopolistic practices.
What I know is that things suddenly got better on the Windows platform.
Well, you'll be able to repeat that experience many more times: Microsoft still has a long time to go until they will have caught up even with the state of the art of a decade ago.
You know you've been there, programmatically moving a button two pixels to the right to align with some text label or somesuch, worrying about how the size of the button text will look in german, etc. That's just plain dumb
Yes, it is. So, why did Microsoft start doing it in the first place?
These tools, as far as I saw them presented at the PDC, seem like a good help in that direction. XAML seems very sweet, Avalon looks awesome. I tell you, my friends, this stuff does not suck.
What sucks is that Microsoft created the problem in the first place, then made the world suffer with it for more than a decade, and now finally gets around to fixing it, after we pay them another cool several billions of dollars for upgrades. What also sucks is that people like you don't even know what's going on.
Let me guess: in 1999, some Microsoft marketing employee fell into Bill Gates's cryogenic tube and they finally found him and thawed him out?
But now that they know, they plan to rename their product "Microsoft Hubris".
That's actually just a rip-off of Apple Hubris.
Microsoft Exchange/Outlook is useful only because it centralizes more than just the email.
Why does this stuff to be "centralized" more than just being on the same computer?
Scheduling and the ability to look up people in your company are both important features.
Wow, amazing, what will those guys up in Redmond reinvent next?
The thing I don't understand is, where the heck is the competition?
Sadly, there are plenty of applications that imitate Outlook and Exchange; just have a look around.
Microsoft has included open source software in lots of their releases. Some key functionality in Windows is derived from open source software. Often, they like to take the software, modify it to make it incompatible with the rest of the world, and then release the result as a product; they instantly get the open source functionality while at the same time threatening to replace the open standard.
That's why Microsoft (and Sun and Apple, for that matter) love BSD and MIT licenses so much: it gives them complete freedom to take advantage of other people's work.
Obviously, you don't, which just goes to show that you simply aren't qualified to make statements about running Java on Debian.
My point is simply this: given that fools like you were using Sun Java for "scalable enterprise apps" even back when (not so long ago) Sun Java was full of horrendous memory leaks and other bugs, it obviously doesn't matter for scalability what people do in the runtime.
In fact, it turns out that in this day, you can write scalable apps in Java, Mono, Perl, Python, PHP,
I'm actually far more concerned about the lack of conceptual integrity, lack of professionalism, and lack of innovation with proprietary software, because it's evident that the major commercial software lack all of those. I'm equally concerned about the issue of ownership of commercial software developed under the current ownership laws because, as a customer, I'm screwed by them, no matter what.
Fortunately, there is a solution to most of those concerns: open source software. It's not perfect, but in the areas of integrity, professionalism, innovation, and clear ownership, it is way ahead of proprietary software.
How is recommending that people drop Java and go back to C++ or use Mono with Gtk+ "astroturfing"?
The "astroturfers" in Java vs. the World debates are the Java proponents, who are arguing that we all should use a proprietary platform that can only be implemented under license from Sun.
Certified, compatible implementations are available for just about any relevant platform you can imagine (yes, probably not for BSD's but that's because they are not relevant).
Thank you very much, but I want to decide for myself which platforms are relevant.
I don't know if there is something in Sun's licensing policies which prevent a fully GPL'ed SDK being done by someone, but I really couldn't care less about "open source" Java SDK or runtime environment.
There are no third party Java implementations at all, whether commercial or open source or free. Java isn't a language or a platform, it's a proprietary implementation from Sun that's been ported to a few platforms by various licensees.
SDK's are essentially free anyway and they work well; whether they are open source or closed source is totally irrelevant.
I've been through this cycle several times before: whether platforms are proprietary or open does matter a lot. You'll eventually figure it out for yourself when you have to stop shipping a product or pay inflated licensing fees.
Kaffe 1.1.6 will have 90%+ of 1.4 APIs implemented. Two years ago the number was around 50%. Never may come soon enough.
.NET APIs than any open source Java implementation has implemented Sun's core APIs. And unlike Sun, Mono actually also implements a lot of widely used open source APIs, foremost, Gtk+ and Gnome.
How is implementing a set of core APIs that are several years out of date "catching up"? We are up to Java 1.5, with 1.6 on the drawing board, and that doesn't even include all the important JCP APIs. Besides, Kaffe is at best a mediocre implementation.
Mono is already further along implementing the core
In any case, I don't care whether you use Mono. Just stop trying to tell people that Java is a high-quality, open cross-platform environment; it is none of those things. After nearly a decade of developing in Java, I rather program in C++ than Java.
I work on Redhat, CentOS, Debian and Mandrake boxes and each and every one of those runs Java just fine.
I don't know about RedHat or Mandrake, but Java does not run "fine" on Debian. You may or may not be able to install Sun Java on it right now, but you can't rely on it: any "apt-get upgrade" can end up breaking it, and it does.
Right, all the Fortune 500 companies use Mono for their enterprise apps instead of Java. (Yes, that is sarcasm.)
In case you hadn't noticed, Forture 500 companies use lots of garbage.
Yeah, version 1.1 was buggy, but that was ages ago. Early linux versions were not so great either. Software can improve, you know.
Java 1.3 still had serious bugs, but most so-called "enterprise developers" didn't even know about it.
Have you even looked at Java 5? The list of improvements is enormous.
The list is enormous, but insubstantial; Sun has been unwilling to make substantial changes to the runtime or the language, and as a result, serious problems remain.
Come on. There are plenty of real reasons to praise Mono. Don't try to make up false ones.
This isn't Java vs. Mono issue. I'm back to developing in C++ right now. I hope Mono will be a way out, but I already know that Java isn't. Java has failed to deliver on its promises.
I agree, furthermore it will never catch up. MS will make sure of that. If by some miracle mono does close the gap they will be sued and that will stop them in their tracks.
.NET APIs, just like no open source Java implementation will ever catch up with Sun on Java APIs.
.NET, it's done in Gtk+ and other toolkits.
Of course, Mono will not catch up with Microsoft on
The difference is that with Mono, it doesn't matter. Open source software development and cross platform development in Mono is not primarily done in
Not when you java already exists, runs on every platform mono runs on, has proven to scale to massive proportions, can run on the tiniest of devices, had great IDEs, and is already mature and baked.
Repeating a lie often enough doesn't make it true. Java does not run on my Linux box, for example, while Mono does. Java has not "proven to scale" any more than Mono has; and while Sun was pushing Java for enterprise apps, their runtime had horrendous memory leaks. Finally, Java is not mature, it's frozen; there is a difference.
Imagine if Miguel put all that work into a better JVM for linux.
Then we would be stuck with yet another incomplete implementation of Java, a language and a set of APIs, many people have already decided not to use.
After years of programming Java, I have gone back to C++; Java simply isn't working out. Unlike Java, however, C# is worth another try.
For the obvious reasons:
I've been using Java for many years, and it has failed to mature as a general purpose programming language. For my work, it's either back to C++ or C#; Java is not an option anymore.
The guy who'd written it was 'trig happy'
Actually, he was simply incompetent and didn't pay attention in math class; this stuff is being taught.
If this book encourages people to use trig less it might be a good thing.
This isn't a question of "encouraging" or "less". Any computer programmer dealing with geometry should know how to use the minimum number of trigonometric expressions, error and roundoff properties, argument ranges, etc.
Nobody was keeping you from opening a book besides those rather awful textbooks.
It only takes a single viable microbial spore from space to start life on a planet. A single impact could have delivered it. Or it could have drived through space without any impact at all. Therefore, where most of the objects impacting on earth originated is pretty much not relevant to panspermia.
It seems that what that article is talking about is not panspermia, but the composition of the atmosphere and how that was determined by impacts.
I think I've figured out the /. crowd. If you keep repeating it over and over and over, maybe one day it'll come true.
And your point is what exactly? That's the way marketing works: you repeat your message so that people get it. It seems to be working for Microsoft's and Macromedia's marketing departments, who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on repeating messages with the express goal of making them come true one day. Do you only get to get your message across if you are a billion dollar company with an agenda and receive a big pay check for spreading information about your products?
Unlike Microsoft's and Macromedia's message, who are misleading people when they are saying that we need to commit to their proprietary standards, this message is true: we need an open standard for vector graphics and vector animation, and it is being created as we speak.
Once the dream workplace of tech's highest achievers,
I think everybody used to like the stock options.
Microsoft research started being a hot place in the late 90's and has a lot of good people, but they usually ended up going when their current employer had to close down their research labs after being driven out of business by Microsoft.
I suspect all the non-technical people, marketing, HR, PR, finance, administration, shipping, writers, etc., must love Microsoft: great benefits, great work environment, lots of power, great stock options, young workforce, etc., although they have good jobs available to them in some non-high-tech companies as well.
The main people who seem to have thought of Microsoft as the "dream workplace" seem to be recent college graduates with little prior industry experience: Microsoft gave many of them a lot of responsibility and power early on and often made them rich. For better or for worse, are the people that built Microsoft and Microsoft software.
All the proprietariness of Flash with all the inefficiencies of XML. What more could you ask for?
I think these are last-gasp battles; if the time is right for something like XAML, then SVG will take over.
What's the intellectual contribution of this research? Mapping data onto city maps is standard GIS usage. It's the kind of information companies use for deciding where to locate cell phone towers, where there are coverage problems, and where there are capacity problems.