With apologies to Miguel "Everything else that was easy didn't get standardized, but the important parts did." de Icaza, Microsoft has already demonstrated that they will add and extend API's in the.NET platform that are not part of the public specification. As with Wine the Mono project will _always_ be playing catch up to MSFT. This gives MSFT first mover advantage and should invalidate the claim of.NET's cross platform capabilities.
In contrast the Java Community Process (jcp.org) publicly discloses the API specifications for Java Standard Edition, Java 2 Enterprise Edition and Java Micro Edition. Anyone can join the JCP. Any vendor who ships a product branded with any of these names has access to these open specifications. Any developer who programs to these specifications can deploy to any of these vendors. Thus Java is not only multiplatform it is also multi-vendor and open in a way that the.NET platform will never be.
Innevitably when.NET and Java are discussed there is a posting about the significance of MSFT makine C# and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) standards via ECMA. While this is true it is emphatically _not_ a reason to believe that MSFT is going to stick to that standard rather than performing their standard embrace and extend routine.
Much of the.NET "platform" is not standardized, nor is it part of Rotor (the source available implementation for FreeBSD). This includes ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Windows Froms and other API's I believe. All that is standardized and available for FreeBSD is C# and the CLR. That is equvalent to the Java language and the JVM.
The entire API of Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE)version 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 is available on Windows and Solaris in _freely_ _redistributable_ _form_. Version 1.3 of the API is available on Mac OS X. While I am not familiar with the Java imlementations available for other platforms, I am confident that some version of J2SE is available for the vast majority of computer platforms. This includes a growing number of PDAs, Cell Phones etc.
Java as a _platform_ is now and will for the far forseeable future be more cross platform than the.NET platform.
1) Java is not going away. It has a lot of momentum, a number of mature implementations and competing implementations. While.NET will be successful the two are assured of uneasy coexistance for the forseeable future.
2) The specification process for the Java platform is public, includes vendors of competing implementations and gives them an equal vote. MSFT will do all that when hell freezes over, pigs fly and user error is a thing of the past.
3) Don't believe the ECMA C# hype. That is only a small part of the.NET platform and as such is in no way comparable to the level of open specification present in the JCP.
4) Furthermore, anyone who believes that MSFT is going to play nice needs to take a refresher course on recent history. A vendor with dominent market share has nothing to benefit from high levels of interoperability. The internet alone set MSFT back substantially in continued and extended market domination.
Sun will therefore off an annual support scholarship program to suitably qualified efforts to
cover access to support services for TCKs offered by Sun. Emphasis added
This means that Sun will fund the support services required by the selected "efforts" in the course of certifying their projects via the TCKs. The note states these support services can be costly to provide and that is where the $3 million of Sun's money comes in.
The only problem with the H1-B visa program is that it unreasonably ties the visa holder to their employer in a manner that puts downward pressure on salaries. If all H1-B visa holders where allowed to easily change jobs they would not be at a competetive disadvantage regarding salaries and thus would not put a downward pressure on salaries in the industry. Immigration and immigrants are not the problem, bad public policy is.
Not to mention the obvious fact that the vast majority of US citizens are themselves descendents of immigrants who sound foolish and selfish when they rail against imigration.
This is an example of Google working!
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This does _nothing_ to undermind the relevance of Google's rankings. When you perform a search on Google and the first "hit" is one that has been juiced in this way you are getting a hit that a larger number of individual sites, all of which are respected by other sites, agree is important to the subject. That is the beauty of Google.
Yes, this effect can be choreographed, but the result is the same. All of the sites choreographed to achieve this result are voting that site A is relevant to subject B. If the sites involved consistently show bad judgment their ranking in Google are likely to decline and therefore their contribution to the Google ranking for subject B will lessen.
The fact that a large number of highly ranked blogs can drive a URL up the Google pop-chart is evidence of both the respect blogs are given and the power of Google's algorithms to find such non-corporate backed content.
Obvious troll, but I can't stop myself from responding.
You are so misguided.
Everyone at work is not your competition, they are all your network. Work well with them, have respectful professional relationships with them and keep in touch even after they/you leave the organization. There will be opportunities to help one another out throughout the years, and the more you help one another then more you all benefit.
Over years of working well with others this way you will find yourself with a million dollar rolodex. Your value to a company will be far greater than what you can individually accomplish, because you have a network which supports one another. Those relationships can lead to sales, answers to tough questions, a reference that can lead to a great hire or avoid a disasterous one.
What exactly is this supposed to mean? The link provided does nothing to explain or support this assertion. I am sure may of us would be interested to find out that one of the more well respected application frameworks (Cocoa) has a monumental flaw at it's heart.
These three points are excellent arguments for a development methodology that prioritizes known requirements by business value, emphasizes getting working code in front of the users and has a rigorously defined QA/enhancement process. My understanding of XP is that it does all of this, presumably other "Agile" methodologies do as well. Unfortunately none of the projects I have worked on for a large three letter consulting firm have approached this sort of an iterative approach. All of them have been first release and then leave it to the clients in house staff to live with type projects. I'm trying to change the place I work, but I may just end up changing the place I work. (to paraphrase Martin Fowler).
The article is actually far more informative than the postings to/. It makes it clear that the prosecution is for the sale of the software _not_ the presentation at the conference. Furthermore it makes it clear that US jurisdiction is present because sales were processed by a US company.
I am no fan of the DMCA, but this case is more along the lines of prosecuting someone for selling lock picks to criminals than presenting a paper on the use of lock picks by criminals. The/. sensationalism doesn't make this clear, and undermines meaningful discussion of complicated issues.
This question fails to understand the simple truth that descisions made by MSFT are made primarily to support a business strategy, not for technical reasons, not for consumer benefit, for _business strategy_. Once you understand that the history of MSFT is much more understandable.
Am I missing something here, or is Darwin already what xMach is trying to be? Darwin may not be ported to x86 yet, but it is the foundation for a comercial product and as such has seen a great deal of development. And if the goal was to create a free implementation of OPENSTEP why not work on porting GNUStep to Darwin?
Asking slashdot about Java and Microsoft technical/business strategy is like asking the Republicans what they think Clinton's legacy will be or the Democrats whether a right wing Christian fundamentalist should hold the highest law enforcement office in the country. You are going to get answers that are more informed by ideology than by reason. Slashdot readers are demonstrably anti MSFT and anti Java.
It would seem to me that the availability of a CarbonLib for Un*x other than MacOSX would be primarily a business strategy / marketing decision. According to Apple's MacOSX core technologies page the foundation for all other MacOSX APIs (Frameworks in Apple speak) is the marriage of a modified Mach 3.0 microkernel and a FreeBSD 3.2 derived BSD variant. This is what Darwin is. (NOTE: The Darwin page is not loading as I right this, but perhaps it is available as you read it.) Assuming that Carbon for OSX is restricted to making calls against these API's or the frameworks they support it would seem relatively straightforward to port to any of the other BSD derived Un*x variants. Non-BSD derived Un*x variants would probably be more challenging ports.
I would be interested in comments from anyone who has a more detailed knowledge of OSX and what the technical challenges of porting everything above Darwin to another Un*x would be.
Regardless it is unlikely that Apple would persue this strategy. They (Steve) seem(s) hell bent on only offering the benefits of OSX to purchasers of Apple hardware. This is a business strategy decision and I think an ultimately failed one. It is probably at least somewhat the results of Steve's scars from attempting to make NeXT a software only company. He wasn't successful in that so it seems unlikely he would try to climb that hill again.
Anecdotes missing from previous releases?
on
Catch Me If You Can
·
· Score: 1
I read an earlier release of this book at least ten years ago and I do not recall anything about a stock broker or traveling with college coeds. My memory may just be failing me, but I think him traveling with a bunch of college coeds would have made an impact on my imaginiation as I was a teenager at the time.
The most remarkable scam I remember from the book would probably still work today. He dressed as a security guard and took night deposits at a remote branch stating that the atm or drop box was on the fritz. Enough people trusted him that he got at least a few hundred dollars.
it makes no reference to "hacking" or "cracking" whatsoever
the treaty does not requirer that posession of tools capable of "hacking" and/or "cracking" be illegal, just that the use of such tools to commit an illegal act would make such posession a crime.
The above statements of FICTION and FACT are all fiction. You only need to read the article linked to in this slashdot story to find detailed rebuttals of each and everyone of these misrepresentations of Al Gore by the GOP. The linked story has references (unlike the post I am responding to) and you can follow those to get a more detailed description of the character assasination that the GOP is attempting on Al Gore.
Apple's insistance on developers following their guidelines is exactly why the MacOS is regarded by so many as the most user friendly system for _new users_. One of Apple's recent failings is that they themselves have strayed from some of these key guidelines in products like QT and it has made the Mac more complicated.
By the way don't bother with the obligitory comments on *nix/command line useability. The *nix command line may be far more powerful than MacOS but it takes a long time to learn how to put that power to use. All that power is wasted on new users.
I seem to remeber reading that Apple was using some (or all) of the Debian tools for package management dpkg, apt, dselect. I don't have any firm information though.
As a monopoly MSFT clearly has much to gain from poor interoperability. They control the vast majority of desktops which need to authenticate to network resources. If authentication the Microsoft way becomes the de-facto standard for many organizations MSFT benefits by being the vendor with the best interoperability with its own products. Other vendors can interoperate, but only as long as MSFT releases the specifications for their "enhancement" and only _after_ MSFT has implemented the enhancement in their own product. MSFT benefits as the "first mover" in a situation where only they can move first.
It's Not about beer (cost).
on
Free Be
·
· Score: 2
CmdrTaco's posturing aside this has far less to do with the cost of Open Source software and far more to do with the barriers to entry that Judge Jackson outlined in his findings of fact in the Microsoft/DOJ trial. The success of a platform has at least as much to do with harware and application support as it does with cost. As evidence review the success MS, Sun, IBM, RedHat, Corel and others have selling their sundrie OSes.
Where hardware and software support equal BeOS would be a strong competitor to free (as in beer) alternatives because it is higher in performance, and easier to use and administer. Unfortunately this is not the case. Free (as in speach) alternatives have better hardware and software support, and are therefore more successful even when they aren't free (as in beer). I believe Redhat sells more RH Linux than Be sells BeOS. Yes, you could argue that it is expressly because of the cost of free (beer) source that it has better hardware and software support, but I would argue that it has more to do with the free (speach) that people have invested their time and money.
It is for precisely this reason that I think Be's efforts are not likely to result in a great deal of success. Writing applications to take advantage of their platform is an investment in a limited market which is not likely to grow until more applications are written for their platform. It is a chicken and an egg issue.
I don't recall if it is the NSA or CIA but one of these organizations has a sculpture on the grounds that is covered with an encrypted message. I recall reading an article about it (probably linked to from/.) sometime last year. One of the employees had been working on a solution on his lunch hour for years.
Slashdot Mirror
With apologies to Miguel "Everything else that was easy didn't get standardized, but the important parts did." de Icaza, Microsoft has already demonstrated that they will add and extend API's in the .NET platform that are not part of the public specification. As with Wine the Mono project will _always_ be playing catch up to MSFT. This gives MSFT first mover advantage and should invalidate the claim of .NET's cross platform capabilities.
In contrast the Java Community Process (jcp.org) publicly discloses the API specifications for Java Standard Edition, Java 2 Enterprise Edition and Java Micro Edition. Anyone can join the JCP. Any vendor who ships a product branded with any of these names has access to these open specifications. Any developer who programs to these specifications can deploy to any of these vendors. Thus Java is not only multiplatform it is also multi-vendor and open in a way that the .NET platform will never be.
It is'nt that unusual, nor is it always a bad thing.
Innevitably when .NET and Java are discussed there is a posting about the significance of MSFT makine C# and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) standards via ECMA. While this is true it is emphatically _not_ a reason to believe that MSFT is going to stick to that standard rather than performing their standard embrace and extend routine.
.NET "platform" is not standardized, nor is it part of Rotor (the source available implementation for FreeBSD). This includes ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Windows Froms and other API's I believe. All that is standardized and available for FreeBSD is C# and the CLR. That is equvalent to the Java language and the JVM.
.NET platform.
Much of the
The entire API of Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE)version 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 is available on Windows and Solaris in _freely_ _redistributable_ _form_. Version 1.3 of the API is available on Mac OS X. While I am not familiar with the Java imlementations available for other platforms, I am confident that some version of J2SE is available for the vast majority of computer platforms. This includes a growing number of PDAs, Cell Phones etc.
Java as a _platform_ is now and will for the far forseeable future be more cross platform than the
Count on it.
1) Java is not going away. It has a lot of momentum, a number of mature implementations and competing implementations. While .NET will be successful the two are assured of uneasy coexistance for the forseeable future.
.NET platform and as such is in no way comparable to the level of open specification present in the JCP.
2) The specification process for the Java platform is public, includes vendors of competing implementations and gives them an equal vote. MSFT will do all that when hell freezes over, pigs fly and user error is a thing of the past.
3) Don't believe the ECMA C# hype. That is only a small part of the
4) Furthermore, anyone who believes that MSFT is going to play nice needs to take a refresher course on recent history. A vendor with dominent market share has nothing to benefit from high levels of interoperability. The internet alone set MSFT back substantially in continued and extended market domination.
Please explain -
The only problem with the H1-B visa program is that it unreasonably ties the visa holder to their employer in a manner that puts downward pressure on salaries. If all H1-B visa holders where allowed to easily change jobs they would not be at a competetive disadvantage regarding salaries and thus would not put a downward pressure on salaries in the industry. Immigration and immigrants are not the problem, bad public policy is.
Not to mention the obvious fact that the vast majority of US citizens are themselves descendents of immigrants who sound foolish and selfish when they rail against imigration.
This does _nothing_ to undermind the relevance of Google's rankings. When you perform a search on Google and the first "hit" is one that has been juiced in this way you are getting a hit that a larger number of individual sites, all of which are respected by other sites, agree is important to the subject. That is the beauty of Google.
Yes, this effect can be choreographed, but the result is the same. All of the sites choreographed to achieve this result are voting that site A is relevant to subject B. If the sites involved consistently show bad judgment their ranking in Google are likely to decline and therefore their contribution to the Google ranking for subject B will lessen.
The fact that a large number of highly ranked blogs can drive a URL up the Google pop-chart is evidence of both the respect blogs are given and the power of Google's algorithms to find such non-corporate backed content.
Obvious troll, but I can't stop myself from responding.
You are so misguided.
Everyone at work is not your competition, they are all your network. Work well with them, have respectful professional relationships with them and keep in touch even after they/you leave the organization. There will be opportunities to help one another out throughout the years, and the more you help one another then more you all benefit.
Over years of working well with others this way you will find yourself with a million dollar rolodex. Your value to a company will be far greater than what you can individually accomplish, because you have a network which supports one another. Those relationships can lead to sales, answers to tough questions, a reference that can lead to a great hire or avoid a disasterous one.
What exactly is this supposed to mean? The link provided does nothing to explain or support this assertion. I am sure may of us would be interested to find out that one of the more well respected application frameworks (Cocoa) has a monumental flaw at it's heart.
Please educate us all.
These three points are excellent arguments for a development methodology that prioritizes known requirements by business value, emphasizes getting working code in front of the users and has a rigorously defined QA/enhancement process. My understanding of XP is that it does all of this, presumably other "Agile" methodologies do as well. Unfortunately none of the projects I have worked on for a large three letter consulting firm have approached this sort of an iterative approach. All of them have been first release and then leave it to the clients in house staff to live with type projects. I'm trying to change the place I work, but I may just end up changing the place I work. (to paraphrase Martin Fowler).
The article is actually far more informative than the postings to /. It makes it clear that the prosecution is for the sale of the software _not_ the presentation at the conference. Furthermore it makes it clear that US jurisdiction is present because sales were processed by a US company.
I am no fan of the DMCA, but this case is more along the lines of prosecuting someone for selling lock picks to criminals than presenting a paper on the use of lock picks by criminals. The /. sensationalism doesn't make this clear, and undermines meaningful discussion of complicated issues.
This question fails to understand the simple truth that descisions made by MSFT are made primarily to support a business strategy, not for technical reasons, not for consumer benefit, for _business strategy_. Once you understand that the history of MSFT is much more understandable.
Am I missing something here, or is Darwin already what xMach is trying to be? Darwin may not be ported to x86 yet, but it is the foundation for a comercial product and as such has seen a great deal of development. And if the goal was to create a free implementation of OPENSTEP why not work on porting GNUStep to Darwin?
Asking slashdot about Java and Microsoft technical/business strategy is like asking the Republicans what they think Clinton's legacy will be or the Democrats whether a right wing Christian fundamentalist should hold the highest law enforcement office in the country. You are going to get answers that are more informed by ideology than by reason. Slashdot readers are demonstrably anti MSFT and anti Java.
It would seem to me that the availability of a CarbonLib for Un*x other than MacOSX would be primarily a business strategy / marketing decision. According to Apple's MacOSX core technologies page the foundation for all other MacOSX APIs (Frameworks in Apple speak) is the marriage of a modified Mach 3.0 microkernel and a FreeBSD 3.2 derived BSD variant. This is what Darwin is. (NOTE: The Darwin page is not loading as I right this, but perhaps it is available as you read it.) Assuming that Carbon for OSX is restricted to making calls against these API's or the frameworks they support it would seem relatively straightforward to port to any of the other BSD derived Un*x variants. Non-BSD derived Un*x variants would probably be more challenging ports.
I would be interested in comments from anyone who has a more detailed knowledge of OSX and what the technical challenges of porting everything above Darwin to another Un*x would be.
Regardless it is unlikely that Apple would persue this strategy. They (Steve) seem(s) hell bent on only offering the benefits of OSX to purchasers of Apple hardware. This is a business strategy decision and I think an ultimately failed one. It is probably at least somewhat the results of Steve's scars from attempting to make NeXT a software only company. He wasn't successful in that so it seems unlikely he would try to climb that hill again.
I read an earlier release of this book at least ten years ago and I do not recall anything about a stock
The most remarkable scam I remember from the book would probably still work today.broker or traveling with college coeds. My memory may just be failing me, but I think him traveling
with a bunch of college coeds would have made an impact on my imaginiation as I was a teenager
at the time.
He dressed as a security guard and took night deposits at a remote branch stating that
the atm or drop box was on the fritz. Enough people trusted him that he got at least
a few hundred dollars.
If you actually read the treaty it is clear that:
The above statements of FICTION and FACT are all fiction. You only need to read the article linked to in this slashdot story to find detailed rebuttals of each and everyone of these misrepresentations of Al Gore by the GOP. The linked story has references (unlike the post I am responding to) and you can follow those to get a more detailed description of the character assasination that the GOP is attempting on Al Gore.
Take a look at this site and then decide if it is important to vote.
Apple's insistance on developers following their guidelines is exactly why the MacOS is regarded by so many as the most user friendly system for _new users_. One of Apple's recent failings is that they themselves have strayed from some of these key guidelines in products like QT and it has made the Mac more complicated. By the way don't bother with the obligitory comments on *nix/command line useability. The *nix command line may be far more powerful than MacOS but it takes a long time to learn how to put that power to use. All that power is wasted on new users.
I seem to remeber reading that Apple was using some (or all) of the Debian tools for package management dpkg, apt, dselect. I don't have any firm information though.
As a monopoly MSFT clearly has much to gain from poor interoperability. They control the vast majority of desktops which need to authenticate to network resources. If authentication the Microsoft way becomes the de-facto standard for many organizations MSFT benefits by being the vendor with the best interoperability with its own products. Other vendors can interoperate, but only as long as MSFT releases the specifications for their "enhancement" and only _after_ MSFT has implemented the enhancement in their own product. MSFT benefits as the "first mover" in a situation where only they can move first.
CmdrTaco's posturing aside this has far less to do with the cost of Open Source software and far more to do with the barriers to entry that Judge Jackson outlined in his findings of fact in the Microsoft/DOJ trial. The success of a platform has at least as much to do with harware and application support as it does with cost. As evidence review the success MS, Sun, IBM, RedHat, Corel and others have selling their sundrie OSes.
Where hardware and software support equal BeOS would be a strong competitor to free (as in beer) alternatives because it is higher in performance, and easier to use and administer. Unfortunately this is not the case. Free (as in speach) alternatives have better hardware and software support, and are therefore more successful even when they aren't free (as in beer). I believe Redhat sells more RH Linux than Be sells BeOS. Yes, you could argue that it is expressly because of the cost of free (beer) source that it has better hardware and software support, but I would argue that it has more to do with the free (speach) that people have invested their time and money.
It is for precisely this reason that I think Be's efforts are not likely to result in a great deal of success. Writing applications to take advantage of their platform is an investment in a limited market which is not likely to grow until more applications are written for their platform. It is a chicken and an egg issue.
I don't recall if it is the NSA or CIA but one of these organizations has a sculpture on the grounds that is covered with an encrypted message. I recall reading an article about it (probably linked to from /.) sometime last year. One of the employees had been working on a solution on his lunch hour for years.