If you're facing the real variety, give up--you can't win. They regenerate and reincarnate infinitely often. Well, unless you transmutate yourself into one of them, in which case you lose twice: not only do you have to wear pointy hair, you now have to do battle with a dozen of them simultaneously at the interdepartmental meetings.
Advertising-infested Olympic Games go well with advertising-infested PCs, and the "olympic movement" is a commercial sham. It's not surprising that the same unscrupulous people participate and win in both.
If you want to help international understanding, participating in commercialized mega-events is not the way to do it. Instead, go travel on your own and get to know people by talking to them. And if you like sports, go running, skiing, or play soccer with the friends you make that way.
Also, Apple marketshare, unit sales, profits, and revenues are at their highest ever
People often overestimate Apple's marketshare. Even at their peak, they were at less than 20%. My guess is that they will still have less than 5% of the personal computer market in 2006 (they were at less than 3% a couple of years ago).
Any kind of new, unproven software is doomed in the enterprise, whether it's a new (version of an) open source package, Windows Vista, or anything else. It doesn't matter whether it works well, it doesn't matter whether it is almost certain to save money, people tend to stick with what they know when the going gets tough. That's why so many enterprises and even small businesses still run mainframes, Windows 95, DOS, AS/400, etc.
So, this is nothing open source specific. You can bet that companies will stick tenatiously to their open source solutions once they have been adopted. And, once adopted, getting open source out of the enterprise will be even harder than getting commercial solutions out: companies like IBM and Microsoft can simply discontinue products, but open source can't be "discontinued". And that's, not coincidentally, one of the reasons companies like open source.
Don't forget, the first Palms were released in 1996.
That's why I said "3-5 years ago", not "10 years ago". The original PalmOS was a reasonable business decision
But as soon as they switched to ARM, they should have moved to Linux or BSD. They could have done so with less effort than it took them to produce PalmOS 5, and they could have preserved full backwards compatibility. They missed the boat again (and wasted even more money) when they developed Cobalt. PalmOS 5 and Cobalt were both big business blunders.
PalmOS was designed around its hardware limitations to offer acceptable to superior performance,
Frankly, even the first Palm Pilot hardware would have been perfectly capable of running a multitasking POSIX-compliant operating system. But there's no point complaining about that because the first Palm Pilot was commercially successful and did what it was supposed to do. But around PalmOS 3, it became clear that PalmOS was in deep trouble, and the failure to act decisively back then is what will have killed Palm. Palm screwed up and they only have themselves to blame for their predicament.
They could have done this 3-5 years ago (using a Linux, BSD, or other POSIX-like kernel).
One might ask why they didn't do that. Well, for the answer look to the article on Shuttleworth: Palm's engineers had so much more fun designing a new operating system from scratch that the obvious answer eluded them, and because Palm was flying high, they had the money and resources to waste on their hare-brained project of developing their own new operating system.
Unfortunately, Palm's idiocy probably condemns us all to using PocketPC or Qt/Embedded at some point.
Right now, if you travel abroad, you already have to have internationally recognized identification. Furthermore, if you want to engage in any kind of significant business transaction, you must identify yourself as well.
A national ID card just makes it easier for you to identify yourself and harder for others to steal your identity. I'm all for it.
What I'm against is using a national ID card as an excuse to create a national ID database containing detailed information about every citizen.
I suspect that the UK government is actually trying to use the national ID debate as a smokescreen for creating additional databases, and that's wrong.
Well, given that current cell phones already can be set on "silent", "vibrate", or "quiet between the hours of...", the problem is obviously not going to be fixed by adding more user configurable or flaky features to the phone.
What is needed is a simple "quiet zone" standard that locally broadcasts (RFID, Bluetooth, cell site,...) that a zone is to be quiet. But such a solution isn't a question of technology, it's a question of politics and business.
Using IMAP IDLE, you get push capabilities with a lot of mail readers. On Palm, for example, there's Chatter E-mail.
I have never understood why Blackberry has become so popular--I find the device, the user interface, and the service to be just awful compared to the alternatives.
Tabletop fusion has been in use for quite some time. This device looks like it's a little bit simpler than the Farnsworth fusor, but it's an incremental improvement, not a radical breakthrough.
The breakthrough would come should anybody ever figure out how to break even energetically in a tabletop fusion device, and I think it's quite possible that that will happen sooner or later.
Researchers at Motorola and Carnegie Mellon University are developing more polite cell phones. Strategies include programming the ringer to turn on and off according to the time of day,
Maybe "researchers at Motorola and Carnegie Mellon University" should make the effort and head down to their local electronics store to see which of the features they are so busily researching are already available in shipping phones.
As for the rest of the scenarios, leaving your phone on "buzz" works just fine. In particular, if it's in your pocket, it's silent, when it's on a hard surface, it makes a lot of noise--just what you want.
I think a well-designed system for running apps remotely would be great, but all attempts so far have had serious problems. AJAX's problems are that its component technologies were designed for completely different purposes (web document display), that it lacks many UI components, that it lacks a programming model on the display side that supports good GUI development, and that it lacks desktop integration (drag-and-drop, menu bars, window closing, etc.).
The previous attempts at this haven't been much better; X11 got everything right on the application side but screwed up on security and compression, Display Postscript and NeWS had serious technical problems and never really pushed remote usage, etc.
The closest to a good web applications delivery language might be XUL or Microsoft's proprietary clone. Or, maybe, just maybe, people will finally clean up the HTML/Javascript mess and fill in the missing bits and pieces; the standards for that are on the drawing board, but whether they get adopted is anybody's guess. Until they are, AJAX applications are going to remain painful to develop and limited in functionality.
Financing public television through a tax on PC equipment is better than the bureaucracy built around the current fee structure.
The real question, however, is why the BBC (and other public broadcasting stations) shouldn't just be paid out of general tax revenues--why single out a population, in particular one that is likely to view less television than other people?
China is a sovereign nation, and ultimately, they decide how business is conducted there. And that includes what kind of content Chinese citizens can obtain on the Internet.
If we want China to democratize, if we consider their restrictions on speech to be unreasonable, we can try to persuade and negotiate. But unless we're willing to go to war (trade, economic, military) over this, that's the extent to which we can influence China.
In no case is this the responsibility of non-Chinese companies. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are neither justified nor have the power to push non-Chinese ideals on China unless US law requires them to. But if US law requires them to, then those companies would probably simply split into a US and a non-US branch, or they might choose not to do business in either China or the US.
Frankly, I think the current deal really isn't bad: censorship or not, any access the Chinese population has to the Internet is likely democratizing. And I think even the biggest Chinese political hardliners are viewing these kinds of restrictions more as a temporary measure that merely delays the inevitable.
After all Aero Glass is mostly based on developments seen quite a while ago in OS X.
Repeating this again and again doesn't make it true. In fact, there are no significant features in Aqua that weren't known and used previously in UIs. In particular, Apple invented neither animation, nor hardware acceleration, nor transparency as part of the UI.
If anything, Apple deserves a good deal of criticism for misrepresenting the Aqua style of GUI as the result of Apple research.
if ya gotta buy a new box to run Vista, then why not just simply make the switch
Indeed, why not maketheswitch? After all, if it is cutting edge GUI features you desire, Gnome has both Vista and Aqua beat.
You are wrong if you think standards in languages are a Sun-propagated myth. Most languages (LISP, Pascal, C, C++, etc) are governed by standards.
I don't think language standards are a myth. Quite to the contrary, language standards are very important. It is a disgrace that Sun first promised, and then failed to deliver, a language standard for Java.
Sun's myth is that language standards require enforcement, and/or that language standards should prohibit proprietary extensions.
The problem is that there is a standard called C++. It is an international, ISO standard, and is well documented. Microsoft are creating a new standard with a name suspiciously similar to C++. This could easily lead to confusion about which C++ a product claims to support.
I don't see a problem calling a standard "C++ / CLI", but if it bothers people, maybe Microsoft could call it "C++ bindings and extensions for the CLI runtime environment".
Sun produce an implementation based on this specification. Anyone else is free to implement this specification.
That's a lie; the official specifications are available only under license, a license that requires the recipient to agree to onerous licensing conditions with Sun. You are not "free to implement" the specs unless you give Sun extraordinary rights, rights that almost no previous language standards has required you to assign to a single company. Even if you do all that, there is still no guarantee that you won't be sued for patent infringement.
Several groups have successfully implemented the JVM specification, while at least two are currently in process of implementing the (larger) class library specifications.
And those implementations are at constant risk of being shut down by Sun at Sun's liberty and choosing, for license violations, for coypright violations, and for patent violations. Sun simply has chosen not to do so for now to keep alive the myth that Java is somehow "open".
Furthermore, those implementations aren't anywhere near compatible, for several reasons: Sun's so-called specification is poor quality and incomplete and the Java platform is bloated. There is currently no usable third party implementation of the Java Standard Edition other than Sun's and its derivatives. Furthermore, for a healthy programming language market, there would have to be independent interoperable commercial third party implementations of Java, and there are none of the standard or EE platforms (the ones that there are are all licensed derivatives).
MPEG4 is already heavily patented. In fact, the whole point of MPEG has been to create a patented standard that the MPEG licencing authority cartell can use to extract money from device makers. One more patent doesn't make a difference--it just screws up their greedy business plan.
ncluding the potential for Microsoft to add proprietary extensions after ISO finally adopts the new standard under a different name.
I fully expect them to "add proprietary extension". Why shouldn't they? Almost every language in existence has had "proprietary extensions" added to it after its standardization. That's a good thing. It's the way languages evolve. Eventually, some of those proprietary extensions themselves become standardized.
Even when Microsoft is the company doing the extending, it doesn't seem to matter; all those proprietary extensions Microsoft has added to C and C++ haven't hurt C or C++ one bit.
The notion that there is a single, enforceable standard that everybody adheres to is some bizarre, self-serving meme created by Sun (made even worse by the fact that Sun's so-called "standard" is actually a proprietary system whose actual behavior is defined by Sun's proprietary implementation).
The only question that hovers over the ECMA CLI-related standards is whether Microsoft can later assert proprietary rights (mostly patents) against implementors of the standards. I think there is still a theoretical possibility, but from my point of view, it's not serious enough to worry about. If someone comes up with a decent alternative to C# that's not linked to either Microsoft or Sun, I'll consider it, though.
Did you see the Xgl stuff just released? Oh my GOD it must suck ass, because it's written on Novell's dime, right?
First of all, Novell runs its open source projects differently from Sun. Second, a strong correlation isn't the same as a logical implication. So, I reserve judgement on Xgl until I have seen it. I don't need to reserve judgement on OOo: it is in need of a serious overhaul.
Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Codewarrior, plenty of other compiler vendors manage it just the same:)
None of those vendors come even close in terms of platform, CPU, and language support to gcc. Furthermore, we're discussing source code quality and bloat here, not whether people "manage" to produce a product. I have seen some of those compilers, and the ones I've seen were worse in terms of source code quality and bloat than gcc.
I think it's because they are BIG projects, not because they have BIG contributions from corporate sponsors.
Of course it's because they are "BIG projects". Open source projects don't usually get that big because they usually don't have the resources; open source projects, by necessity, are split up into many small projects, and that itself improves the quality of the overall system greatly.
I think what spoils most major projects in Open Source is that there are way too many TRANSIENT engineers who do not contribute regularly to the code,
Yes, and that's a good thing. While "most" open source projects indeed die from that, the few that survive in that kind of environment are the ones that both work for end users and also are structured so that it is possible for "transient engineers" to hack them and not make a mess. Open source breeds good code through natural selection and market forces, while commercial software development tries to do it through central planning.
A software project where I can't go in and add a small piece of functionality or fix a bug within, say, 30 minutes, is a bad software project, and those kinds of projects are the norm in industry. If you think that kind of software can't be written, then you've been in commercial software development for too long.
It's not about talent (I assume everyone who contributes has some talent) but you have your lovely gourmet soup, and someone comes in and adds salt.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds salt.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds chili powder.. and another adds more carrots.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds chili powder.. once they're in, what you have is a bowl of spicy carrot water and not edible soup. The Chef looking after it was too busy tending to the other courses.
Actually, open source is more like a pot-luck dinner, where everybody brings their favorite food. In contrast, commercial software keeps promising us a gourmet dinner at McDonald's prices, and it predictably isn't working. Between a pot-luck dinner with friends and a discount gourmet dinner, I prefer the former.
Halo 2 the game that redefined first-person combat and multiplayer action for millions of gamers worldwide,
Yeah, I have to say it did that for me: I found it to be dull and weak; the kind of derivative mediocrity a big company produces after looking at the success of games like Doom and HL and wanting their share, too.
Of course, sadly, for many other gamers, the original statement is probably true as intended: for many people, Halo was indeed the first contact with FPS and they must think of it as one of the top representatives of the genre.
Honestly, if the software "just works", doesn't force DRM on you, and has the features you need, why spend the time making a product that just attempts to do the same thing?
Because iTunes has numerous problems. For example, the way it organizes MP3s into directories is broken. Its interface for adding metadata to MP3s has problems. Its handling of classical music is deficient. It has used weird versions of id3. It doesn't interface well with many non-Apple media players. It doesn't handle moving iPods between different machines well. It doesn't integrate well with music stores other than Apple. And on and on.
iTunes is a decent application, but it is also an application that is optimized for generating revenue for Apple; it is not optimized for user convenience and choice. Open source applications are.
Yeah, that will be interesting, given that Apple has ripped off the interface as well. But, of course, their pockets are deep enough to get away with that kind of behavior.
I take issue with the submission's "DRM ridden" phrase. iTunes is not "ridden" with DRM; you don't even have to buy any music from iTunes and have a completely DRM-free experience.
Almost all media players have the ability to play free music. But iTunes has solid support for DRM and it has solid tie-ins with Apple's on-line business. And it's pretty evident that Apple has been designing iTunes and iPod such as to drive traffic to their store and exclude others.
The developers should probably expect a response from Apple's lawyers shortly. The iTunes interface is patented, and this is just blatant! Get an original idea, guys.
The iTunes browser interface is a nearly widget for widget copy of Smalltalk object browsers.
I don't even mind Apple copying other people--they have done that for nearly as long as they exist. The problem with Apple is that they copy other people and then turn around and claim that they themselves invented it.
I suppose compared to Microsoft, Apple is still evil-light, but it's evidently not for lack of trying.
See, the thing is: these days, real-world programming skill is partly about both the languages and the libraries, in the sense that you need some basic familiarity to find your way around each
Languages in use in industry are so similar that if you are reasonably skilled in one, it should be trivial to switch to a different one. The only thing that differs significantly is the libraries.
There are languages that are genuinely different and require a different approach to programming, but real-world programmers know that they are so much out of their depth that they tend to avoid them.
Most of the jobs out there require you to use.NET.
That is clearly false: there is no majority platform or majority language out there. C# is a significant platform and.NET is as well, but so are Java (which is just as proprietary), C, C++, and PHP. You can make a good living with any of them, and if you're reasonably good, you'll know all of the languages and most of their standard APIs.
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If you're facing the real variety, give up--you can't win. They regenerate and reincarnate infinitely often. Well, unless you transmutate yourself into one of them, in which case you lose twice: not only do you have to wear pointy hair, you now have to do battle with a dozen of them simultaneously at the interdepartmental meetings.
Advertising-infested Olympic Games go well with advertising-infested PCs, and the "olympic movement" is a commercial sham. It's not surprising that the same unscrupulous people participate and win in both.
If you want to help international understanding, participating in commercialized mega-events is not the way to do it. Instead, go travel on your own and get to know people by talking to them. And if you like sports, go running, skiing, or play soccer with the friends you make that way.
Also, Apple marketshare, unit sales, profits, and revenues are at their highest ever
People often overestimate Apple's marketshare. Even at their peak, they were at less than 20%. My guess is that they will still have less than 5% of the personal computer market in 2006 (they were at less than 3% a couple of years ago).
Any kind of new, unproven software is doomed in the enterprise, whether it's a new (version of an) open source package, Windows Vista, or anything else. It doesn't matter whether it works well, it doesn't matter whether it is almost certain to save money, people tend to stick with what they know when the going gets tough. That's why so many enterprises and even small businesses still run mainframes, Windows 95, DOS, AS/400, etc.
So, this is nothing open source specific. You can bet that companies will stick tenatiously to their open source solutions once they have been adopted. And, once adopted, getting open source out of the enterprise will be even harder than getting commercial solutions out: companies like IBM and Microsoft can simply discontinue products, but open source can't be "discontinued". And that's, not coincidentally, one of the reasons companies like open source.
Don't forget, the first Palms were released in 1996.
That's why I said "3-5 years ago", not "10 years ago". The original PalmOS was a reasonable business decision
But as soon as they switched to ARM, they should have moved to Linux or BSD. They could have done so with less effort than it took them to produce PalmOS 5, and they could have preserved full backwards compatibility. They missed the boat again (and wasted even more money) when they developed Cobalt. PalmOS 5 and Cobalt were both big business blunders.
PalmOS was designed around its hardware limitations to offer acceptable to superior performance,
Frankly, even the first Palm Pilot hardware would have been perfectly capable of running a multitasking POSIX-compliant operating system. But there's no point complaining about that because the first Palm Pilot was commercially successful and did what it was supposed to do. But around PalmOS 3, it became clear that PalmOS was in deep trouble, and the failure to act decisively back then is what will have killed Palm. Palm screwed up and they only have themselves to blame for their predicament.
They could have done this 3-5 years ago (using a Linux, BSD, or other POSIX-like kernel).
One might ask why they didn't do that. Well, for the answer look to the article on Shuttleworth: Palm's engineers had so much more fun designing a new operating system from scratch that the obvious answer eluded them, and because Palm was flying high, they had the money and resources to waste on their hare-brained project of developing their own new operating system.
Unfortunately, Palm's idiocy probably condemns us all to using PocketPC or Qt/Embedded at some point.
Right now, if you travel abroad, you already have to have internationally recognized identification. Furthermore, if you want to engage in any kind of significant business transaction, you must identify yourself as well.
A national ID card just makes it easier for you to identify yourself and harder for others to steal your identity. I'm all for it.
What I'm against is using a national ID card as an excuse to create a national ID database containing detailed information about every citizen.
I suspect that the UK government is actually trying to use the national ID debate as a smokescreen for creating additional databases, and that's wrong.
Well, given that current cell phones already can be set on "silent", "vibrate", or "quiet between the hours of...", the problem is obviously not going to be fixed by adding more user configurable or flaky features to the phone.
...) that a zone is to be quiet. But such a solution isn't a question of technology, it's a question of politics and business.
What is needed is a simple "quiet zone" standard that locally broadcasts (RFID, Bluetooth, cell site,
Using IMAP IDLE, you get push capabilities with a lot of mail readers. On Palm, for example, there's Chatter E-mail.
I have never understood why Blackberry has become so popular--I find the device, the user interface, and the service to be just awful compared to the alternatives.
Tabletop fusion has been in use for quite some time. This device looks like it's a little bit simpler than the Farnsworth fusor, but it's an incremental improvement, not a radical breakthrough.
The breakthrough would come should anybody ever figure out how to break even energetically in a tabletop fusion device, and I think it's quite possible that that will happen sooner or later.
Researchers at Motorola and Carnegie Mellon University are developing more polite cell phones. Strategies include programming the ringer to turn on and off according to the time of day,
Maybe "researchers at Motorola and Carnegie Mellon University" should make the effort and head down to their local electronics store to see which of the features they are so busily researching are already available in shipping phones.
As for the rest of the scenarios, leaving your phone on "buzz" works just fine. In particular, if it's in your pocket, it's silent, when it's on a hard surface, it makes a lot of noise--just what you want.
I think a well-designed system for running apps remotely would be great, but all attempts so far have had serious problems. AJAX's problems are that its component technologies were designed for completely different purposes (web document display), that it lacks many UI components, that it lacks a programming model on the display side that supports good GUI development, and that it lacks desktop integration (drag-and-drop, menu bars, window closing, etc.).
The previous attempts at this haven't been much better; X11 got everything right on the application side but screwed up on security and compression, Display Postscript and NeWS had serious technical problems and never really pushed remote usage, etc.
The closest to a good web applications delivery language might be XUL or Microsoft's proprietary clone. Or, maybe, just maybe, people will finally clean up the HTML/Javascript mess and fill in the missing bits and pieces; the standards for that are on the drawing board, but whether they get adopted is anybody's guess. Until they are, AJAX applications are going to remain painful to develop and limited in functionality.
Financing public television through a tax on PC equipment is better than the bureaucracy built around the current fee structure.
The real question, however, is why the BBC (and other public broadcasting stations) shouldn't just be paid out of general tax revenues--why single out a population, in particular one that is likely to view less television than other people?
China is a sovereign nation, and ultimately, they decide how business is conducted there. And that includes what kind of content Chinese citizens can obtain on the Internet.
If we want China to democratize, if we consider their restrictions on speech to be unreasonable, we can try to persuade and negotiate. But unless we're willing to go to war (trade, economic, military) over this, that's the extent to which we can influence China.
In no case is this the responsibility of non-Chinese companies. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are neither justified nor have the power to push non-Chinese ideals on China unless US law requires them to. But if US law requires them to, then those companies would probably simply split into a US and a non-US branch, or they might choose not to do business in either China or the US.
Frankly, I think the current deal really isn't bad: censorship or not, any access the Chinese population has to the Internet is likely democratizing. And I think even the biggest Chinese political hardliners are viewing these kinds of restrictions more as a temporary measure that merely delays the inevitable.
After all Aero Glass is mostly based on developments seen quite a while ago in OS X.
Repeating this again and again doesn't make it true. In fact, there are no significant features in Aqua that weren't known and used previously in UIs. In particular, Apple invented neither animation, nor hardware acceleration, nor transparency as part of the UI.
If anything, Apple deserves a good deal of criticism for misrepresenting the Aqua style of GUI as the result of Apple research.
if ya gotta buy a new box to run Vista, then why not just simply make the switch
Indeed, why not make the switch? After all, if it is cutting edge GUI features you desire, Gnome has both Vista and Aqua beat.
You are wrong if you think standards in languages are a Sun-propagated myth. Most languages (LISP, Pascal, C, C++, etc) are governed by standards.
I don't think language standards are a myth. Quite to the contrary, language standards are very important. It is a disgrace that Sun first promised, and then failed to deliver, a language standard for Java.
Sun's myth is that language standards require enforcement, and/or that language standards should prohibit proprietary extensions.
The problem is that there is a standard called C++. It is an international, ISO standard, and is well documented. Microsoft are creating a new standard with a name suspiciously similar to C++. This could easily lead to confusion about which C++ a product claims to support.
I don't see a problem calling a standard "C++ / CLI", but if it bothers people, maybe Microsoft could call it "C++ bindings and extensions for the CLI runtime environment".
Sun produce an implementation based on this specification. Anyone else is free to implement this specification.
That's a lie; the official specifications are available only under license, a license that requires the recipient to agree to onerous licensing conditions with Sun. You are not "free to implement" the specs unless you give Sun extraordinary rights, rights that almost no previous language standards has required you to assign to a single company. Even if you do all that, there is still no guarantee that you won't be sued for patent infringement.
Several groups have successfully implemented the JVM specification, while at least two are currently in process of implementing the (larger) class library specifications.
And those implementations are at constant risk of being shut down by Sun at Sun's liberty and choosing, for license violations, for coypright violations, and for patent violations. Sun simply has chosen not to do so for now to keep alive the myth that Java is somehow "open".
Furthermore, those implementations aren't anywhere near compatible, for several reasons: Sun's so-called specification is poor quality and incomplete and the Java platform is bloated. There is currently no usable third party implementation of the Java Standard Edition other than Sun's and its derivatives. Furthermore, for a healthy programming language market, there would have to be independent interoperable commercial third party implementations of Java, and there are none of the standard or EE platforms (the ones that there are are all licensed derivatives).
MPEG4 is already heavily patented. In fact, the whole point of MPEG has been to create a patented standard that the MPEG licencing authority cartell can use to extract money from device makers. One more patent doesn't make a difference--it just screws up their greedy business plan.
ncluding the potential for Microsoft to add proprietary extensions after ISO finally adopts the new standard under a different name.
I fully expect them to "add proprietary extension". Why shouldn't they? Almost every language in existence has had "proprietary extensions" added to it after its standardization. That's a good thing. It's the way languages evolve. Eventually, some of those proprietary extensions themselves become standardized.
Even when Microsoft is the company doing the extending, it doesn't seem to matter; all those proprietary extensions Microsoft has added to C and C++ haven't hurt C or C++ one bit.
The notion that there is a single, enforceable standard that everybody adheres to is some bizarre, self-serving meme created by Sun (made even worse by the fact that Sun's so-called "standard" is actually a proprietary system whose actual behavior is defined by Sun's proprietary implementation).
The only question that hovers over the ECMA CLI-related standards is whether Microsoft can later assert proprietary rights (mostly patents) against implementors of the standards. I think there is still a theoretical possibility, but from my point of view, it's not serious enough to worry about. If someone comes up with a decent alternative to C# that's not linked to either Microsoft or Sun, I'll consider it, though.
Did you see the Xgl stuff just released? Oh my GOD it must suck ass, because it's written on Novell's dime, right?
:)
First of all, Novell runs its open source projects differently from Sun. Second, a strong correlation isn't the same as a logical implication. So, I reserve judgement on Xgl until I have seen it. I don't need to reserve judgement on OOo: it is in need of a serious overhaul.
Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Codewarrior, plenty of other compiler vendors manage it just the same
None of those vendors come even close in terms of platform, CPU, and language support to gcc. Furthermore, we're discussing source code quality and bloat here, not whether people "manage" to produce a product. I have seen some of those compilers, and the ones I've seen were worse in terms of source code quality and bloat than gcc.
I think it's because they are BIG projects, not because they have BIG contributions from corporate sponsors.
Of course it's because they are "BIG projects". Open source projects don't usually get that big because they usually don't have the resources; open source projects, by necessity, are split up into many small projects, and that itself improves the quality of the overall system greatly.
I think what spoils most major projects in Open Source is that there are way too many TRANSIENT engineers who do not contribute regularly to the code,
Yes, and that's a good thing. While "most" open source projects indeed die from that, the few that survive in that kind of environment are the ones that both work for end users and also are structured so that it is possible for "transient engineers" to hack them and not make a mess. Open source breeds good code through natural selection and market forces, while commercial software development tries to do it through central planning.
A software project where I can't go in and add a small piece of functionality or fix a bug within, say, 30 minutes, is a bad software project, and those kinds of projects are the norm in industry. If you think that kind of software can't be written, then you've been in commercial software development for too long.
It's not about talent (I assume everyone who contributes has some talent) but you have your lovely gourmet soup, and someone comes in and adds salt.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds salt.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds chili powder.. and another adds more carrots.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds chili powder.. once they're in, what you have is a bowl of spicy carrot water and not edible soup. The Chef looking after it was too busy tending to the other courses.
Actually, open source is more like a pot-luck dinner, where everybody brings their favorite food. In contrast, commercial software keeps promising us a gourmet dinner at McDonald's prices, and it predictably isn't working. Between a pot-luck dinner with friends and a discount gourmet dinner, I prefer the former.
Halo 2 the game that redefined first-person combat and multiplayer action for millions of gamers worldwide,
Yeah, I have to say it did that for me: I found it to be dull and weak; the kind of derivative mediocrity a big company produces after looking at the success of games like Doom and HL and wanting their share, too.
Of course, sadly, for many other gamers, the original statement is probably true as intended: for many people, Halo was indeed the first contact with FPS and they must think of it as one of the top representatives of the genre.
Honestly, if the software "just works", doesn't force DRM on you, and has the features you need, why spend the time making a product that just attempts to do the same thing?
Because iTunes has numerous problems. For example, the way it organizes MP3s into directories is broken. Its interface for adding metadata to MP3s has problems. Its handling of classical music is deficient. It has used weird versions of id3. It doesn't interface well with many non-Apple media players. It doesn't handle moving iPods between different machines well. It doesn't integrate well with music stores other than Apple. And on and on.
iTunes is a decent application, but it is also an application that is optimized for generating revenue for Apple; it is not optimized for user convenience and choice. Open source applications are.
Yeah, that will be interesting, given that Apple has ripped off the interface as well. But, of course, their pockets are deep enough to get away with that kind of behavior.
I take issue with the submission's "DRM ridden" phrase. iTunes is not "ridden" with DRM; you don't even have to buy any music from iTunes and have a completely DRM-free experience.
Almost all media players have the ability to play free music. But iTunes has solid support for DRM and it has solid tie-ins with Apple's on-line business. And it's pretty evident that Apple has been designing iTunes and iPod such as to drive traffic to their store and exclude others.
The developers should probably expect a response from Apple's lawyers shortly. The iTunes interface is patented, and this is just blatant! Get an original idea, guys.
The iTunes browser interface is a nearly widget for widget copy of Smalltalk object browsers.
I don't even mind Apple copying other people--they have done that for nearly as long as they exist. The problem with Apple is that they copy other people and then turn around and claim that they themselves invented it.
I suppose compared to Microsoft, Apple is still evil-light, but it's evidently not for lack of trying.
See, the thing is: these days, real-world programming skill is partly about both the languages and the libraries, in the sense that you need some basic familiarity to find your way around each
Languages in use in industry are so similar that if you are reasonably skilled in one, it should be trivial to switch to a different one. The only thing that differs significantly is the libraries.
There are languages that are genuinely different and require a different approach to programming, but real-world programmers know that they are so much out of their depth that they tend to avoid them.
Most of the jobs out there require you to use .NET.
.NET is as well, but so are Java (which is just as proprietary), C, C++, and PHP. You can make a good living with any of them, and if you're reasonably good, you'll know all of the languages and most of their standard APIs.
That is clearly false: there is no majority platform or majority language out there. C# is a significant platform and