As I look here at my Handspring Visor, the Java Runtime is 585K....just so I can get my apps started?
Then there is the issue of speed. Java is slow on my Visor Prism.
From a development point of view, its nice that I can program a button click and it will work OK on a bunch of different devices....but from a users point of view
1) It takes up alot of space 2) It is noticeably slower than all the other non-java apps.
Umm...didn't Sun sign an agreement that stipulated that Microsoft would not license any new Java technology?
They are now suing because they want Java included?
Guys....I am a Microsft programmer, and we all know that programming in java is a dead end on Windows. It has been a dead end on Windows for the last 5 years.
This lawsuit will never change the attitude among Microsoft programmers....and that attitude is this. Sun sells hardware to make money. MS sells software. Who do you trust when it comes to software? A hardware?! manufacturer! Nope.
I think that when you really look at the situation, the world around us changes so frequently, that the stuff we create rarely lasts more than a couple of years. So by the time you are finished thinking about a problem, the question has changed.
So hack away. The chances of any one of us writing something that will actually make a difference for any significant period of time is practically zero.
That might sound pessimistic, but I look at the software projects I've been on over the last seven years, and while all of them were the rage for about a year or two, something better came along and that was that.
I think this has more to do with the fact that the real players in this world (MS, Sun, IBM, Oracle etc...) neeed things to change often so they can continue the revenue stream. We are stuck following and never really leading.
Worse off is the fact that even if you wanted your stuff to work for more than a couple of years, the chances of support if soemthing is wrong with the infrastructure you depend on is not that good.
For example, I have in my office Installshield 2000. I upgraded my work PC to Windows 2000 about six months ago....I needed to load a Installshield project and guess what...Installshield 2000, purchased just 18 months ago, no longer works. I call support and they say it will cost me $250 for custom support because...and here is the kicker....my version of Installshield is sooo old! Its only 18 months old!!!
You guys are now ranting about MS taking a month to clean house? The bitter reality is, at least they have something to clean.
While the Linux crowd is still fighting over Gnome vs. KDE, or who should do the patches for the latest and greatest Linux Kernel.....MS is moving forward. For example, MS has looked way beyond the desktop (they have built a common Windowing library into the.NET Framework callable from any.NET enabled language) to providing tools that allow for the easy creation of web services, which is where the action will be for the forseeable future. Now they are suring up their code base as well.
Whether you guys will admit to it or not, there are some smart folks at Microsoft. They have a plan, they have a map to get from A to B, and they execute that plan. Microsoft has real history of coming from behind. They came late to desktop aopplication software (Wordperfect/Lotus 123) and they now own it (Office). They came late to Internet browsing and they now own that as well. Nothing, and I mean nothing, approaches the stability and conformance to standards of IE on Windows in the Linux mix.
So if Microsoft says they are going to make security and software reliability an issue, this is likely to cause alot of angst among the Linux crowd. Why? My gosh, what if they actually do it?! Then they have usability AND more reliability than you will ever give them credit for.
I wish that Chinese Gov't would educate themselves, have culture and manners...in particlular when it comes to gross human rights violations.
this is why i am glad that i understand why so many people are glad with what happened some months ago
If you are talking about how your stupid, arrogant pilot flew a super sonic jet into a prop plane, and then your government duped you into thinking that somehow a prop plane could run into a jet for some malicious reason, and you *believed* it.....
They write software. Thats what they know they do. They do not consider themselves anything other than a software company.
Time Warner is not a technology company. Ultimately they do not understand software.
If this merger rumoe is true, this is the kiss of death for RedHat, like it was for Netscape, like it was for @Home. Content and technology seem to not mix well when merged but thrive when left in their own respective worlds.
The odd thing about open source is that the few who get paid doing it can be just as unreliable as a corporation. Its amazing to me watching how people fall over guys like Mosfet, in gratitude, after he basically walked out on the project a few months earlier saying "its my ball and i'm going home."
The ACLU will fight to keep porn in and any concept of God out of any part of our society.
Sure they will fight for free speech for all, except those who disagree with the liberal ideology in which case they are obviously racist right wing fundamentalist anti-choice homophobes!
So if he thinks it will be bad next year then I say it will be a banner year for the rest of us normal folks.
Remember, the planes did not bring down the Twin Towers, it was the burning oil that did. I think there is a powerful metaphor there.
As long as oil is cheap there is no economic incentive to move towards alternative sources of energy.
After 9/11, though, you have to ask yourself is that 1.00 a gallon gas price really that cheap when you take into consideration that:
1) the money we spend on oil is used to fund militant Islamic agendas
2) those same Islamic militants have an idea to destabilize democratic values throughout the world and replace them with Islamic fundamentalism?!
After 9/11 the economists of the world, the bean counters etc... have to look at the continued *risk* of using oil on world stability. They now have a concrete example. They have real economic numbers to work with. They can project into the future (e.g. the procurement of weapons of mass destruction using money derived from oil sales) and see what the true cost of continued use of foreign oil is to America and her allies.
As programmers you probably understand that legacy is 9/10 of the law, and that once it has been coded, you don't want to code it again. One of the main reasons we have not switched away from oil is because we as a nation have invested untold trillions of dollars in creating an infrastructure to support the distribution of oil and gas throughout this great country, and indeed the world. That system is the legacy and captitalistic forces tend to keep existing systems in place.
However, if you consider the cost of say rebuilding Washington DC or LA or New York because some Islamic fundamentalist decided to nuke it with a suitcase bomb, which was bought using the same money we spent on oil,then all of a sudden the cost of a new distribution network looks *alot* cheaper.
We sent men to the moon. We can reduce or eliminate our dependency on foreign oil. The fuel cell thing is but one example. After that we can export our technology to every other country on the planet. That will effectively turn the black gold currently found in the Arab's back yard into something that is as useful as sludge. Let them worship Allah as they smear it over their bodies for all it would be worth.
Guess what, the general public doesn't want excuses. Corporate IT folks dont want excuses.
They just want to get their work done.
The general public simply does not care that a small group of developers spends an amazing amount of time developing Abiword.
They just want it to work, and they want to call someone when it breaks. They want some hope that someone will fix it or can tell them how to fix it, or more likely, how to do the same thing in a slightly different way.
If Linux wants to be on alot of desktops then this type of memo isn't going to get it too far.
People who post here are very smart. In many ways they sort of look at the computer as something that an average person shouldn't really touch unless they know what they are doing, and if they don't know how to administer their own box then that is their problem.
And for people who devote alot of their time to making the stuff work, I don't find this unreasonable. I mean, after all there is real effort and dedication involved is it too much to ask to read a man page?
What MS gets and the Linux commnity doesn't is that most people just want the damn thing (the computer) to do something useful. They want to turn it on and have it work. They don't give a crap about the technical merits of the OS or the effort behind it and for the mass market that is how it should be.
They don't want to mess with config files.
They don't want to care about what hardware is in their box.
They do want to be able to plug stuff in (USB) and have it just work.
They don't want to compile a program to install it.
They dont want to untar things
They don't want to deal with RPM (they want something called setup.exe).
they want easy access to the internet.
they want a browser that works.
and above all they certainly do not want to have to recompile a kernel to upgrade their OS.
MS has money and time to spend on these and other usability issues. Linux does not. Linux is not easy to use unless you are steeped in Unix. There is no way around it.
I think Linux should stop wasting cycles on a mass market that will never happen.
I live in NJ, and the way it works is Comcast acts like a monopolly.
I pay $85 per month for internet, and cable service for my TV, and I do not have a single premium channel. In fact I just was notified today that rates have gone up another 6% or so.
If Comcast shuts me off tonight, and thats who effectively would be pulling the plug, I will be on the horn tomorrow to have Comcast take every cable they have out of this house ASAP.
I will then call a satellite provider and have them provide me TV service.
I will then patiently wait for DSL and keep an eye on stellite service. Perhaps I will even get a T1 and share with my neighbors.
I am up to here with Cable arrogance. They are the only technology related thing that costs more over time for less service.
I sit here in stunned amazement. I actually agree with Jon Katz!
As far as the anthrax "scare" goes, they could report on it once a day, for one minute and sum the necessary facts into a few sentences like so....
"To date, there have been xxx total exposures.
The most recent exposures have been in xxx,yyy
There have been xxxx total infections.
The most recent infections have been in xxx,yyy.
Be careful of suspicious mail.
Wash your hands after opening the mail.
If you feel ill, do not take any chances. See a Dr. immediately and ask for antibiotics as a precautionary measure.
To date only x people have died from anthrax exposure. In comparison the CDC estimates that upwards of 20,000 Americans will die from the flu.
Slashdot Mirror
So I guess this is good news!
Has New Orleans or New York been flooded yet? No?!
With enviro wackos, any change whatsoever in the status quo is gloom and doom.
Oh my goodness, something changed, it will be the end of us all!
That is...its our way or the highway.
Everyone took the highway.
As I look here at my Handspring Visor, the Java Runtime is 585K....just so I can get my apps started?
Then there is the issue of speed. Java is slow on my Visor Prism.
From a development point of view, its nice that I can program a button click and it will work OK on a bunch of different devices....but from a users point of view
1) It takes up alot of space
2) It is noticeably slower than all the other non-java apps.
yeah its a troll....mod me down :)
Umm...didn't Sun sign an agreement that stipulated that Microsoft would not license any new Java technology?
They are now suing because they want Java included?
Guys....I am a Microsft programmer, and we all know that programming in java is a dead end on Windows. It has been a dead end on Windows for the last 5 years.
This lawsuit will never change the attitude among Microsoft programmers....and that attitude is this. Sun sells hardware to make money. MS sells software. Who do you trust when it comes to software? A hardware?! manufacturer! Nope.
Steve
Really, if you want false hope, you could believe what he wrote.
I do not know a single company standardizing on Linux for desktops.
It has not happened in the past. Its not happening now. It will not happen in the future.
Linux costs too much in terms of productivity from the secretary all the way up to programmer.
The only time I ever saw Linux on a desktop was when someone left a Redhat CD on their desk at work.
I don't know anyone who does.
So they could charge 10 times the amount they are charging now and still not make a dollar.
I think that when you really look at the situation, the world around us changes so frequently, that the stuff we create rarely lasts more than a couple of years. So by the time you are finished thinking about a problem, the question has changed.
So hack away. The chances of any one of us writing something that will actually make a difference for any significant period of time is practically zero.
That might sound pessimistic, but I look at the software projects I've been on over the last seven years, and while all of them were the rage for about a year or two, something better came along and that was that.
I think this has more to do with the fact that the real players in this world (MS, Sun, IBM, Oracle etc...) neeed things to change often so they can continue the revenue stream. We are stuck following and never really leading.
Worse off is the fact that even if you wanted your stuff to work for more than a couple of years, the chances of support if soemthing is wrong with the infrastructure you depend on is not that good.
For example, I have in my office Installshield 2000. I upgraded my work PC to Windows 2000 about six months ago....I needed to load a Installshield project and guess what...Installshield 2000, purchased just 18 months ago, no longer works. I call support and they say it will cost me $250 for custom support because...and here is the kicker....my version of Installshield is sooo old! Its only 18 months old!!!
My advice is roll with it.
Man I really feel sorry for you guys.
.NET Framework callable from any .NET enabled language) to providing tools that allow for the easy creation of web services, which is where the action will be for the forseeable future. Now they are suring up their code base as well.
You guys are now ranting about MS taking a month to clean house? The bitter reality is, at least they have something to clean.
While the Linux crowd is still fighting over Gnome vs. KDE, or who should do the patches for the latest and greatest Linux Kernel.....MS is moving forward. For example, MS has looked way beyond the desktop (they have built a common Windowing library into the
Whether you guys will admit to it or not, there are some smart folks at Microsoft. They have a plan, they have a map to get from A to B, and they execute that plan. Microsoft has real history of coming from behind. They came late to desktop aopplication software (Wordperfect/Lotus 123) and they now own it (Office). They came late to Internet browsing and they now own that as well. Nothing, and I mean nothing, approaches the stability and conformance to standards of IE on Windows in the Linux mix.
So if Microsoft says they are going to make security and software reliability an issue, this is likely to cause alot of angst among the Linux crowd. Why? My gosh, what if they actually do it?! Then they have usability AND more reliability than you will ever give them credit for.
He is such a visionary. I mean just look at all of the Network Computers around that would "inevitably" kill PC's!
Thats Close To the Capitilization of LNUX.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=lnux&d=t
But thats right, there are no real viable Linux based companies anymore, and their really never were.
I wish that Chinese Gov't would educate themselves, have culture and manners...in particlular when it comes to gross human rights violations.
this is why i am glad that i understand why so many people are glad with what happened some months ago
If you are talking about how your stupid, arrogant pilot flew a super sonic jet into a prop plane, and then your government duped you into thinking that somehow a prop plane could run into a jet for some malicious reason, and you *believed* it.....
....focus.
They write software. Thats what they know they do. They do not consider themselves anything other than a software company.
Time Warner is not a technology company. Ultimately they do not understand software.
If this merger rumoe is true, this is the kiss of death for RedHat, like it was for Netscape, like it was for @Home. Content and technology seem to not mix well when merged but thrive when left in their own respective worlds.
doesn't mean its true.
As for me, if it turns out to be true, I'm glad at least that we, the USA, are starting to push back a bit.
The odd thing about open source is that the few who get paid doing it can be just as unreliable as a corporation. Its amazing to me watching how people fall over guys like Mosfet, in gratitude, after he basically walked out on the project a few months earlier saying "its my ball and i'm going home."
Anything that he says is bad...is good.
The ACLU will fight to keep porn in and any concept of God out of any part of our society.
Sure they will fight for free speech for all, except those who disagree with the liberal ideology in which case they are obviously racist right wing fundamentalist anti-choice homophobes!
So if he thinks it will be bad next year then I say it will be a banner year for the rest of us normal folks.
Thats the @home Part of the Internet....
enough said.
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Unable to select database
Remember, the planes did not bring down the Twin Towers, it was the burning oil that did. I think there is a powerful metaphor there.
As long as oil is cheap there is no economic incentive to move towards alternative sources of energy.
After 9/11, though, you have to ask yourself is that 1.00 a gallon gas price really that cheap when you take into consideration that:
1) the money we spend on oil is used to fund militant Islamic agendas
2) those same Islamic militants have an idea to destabilize democratic values throughout the world and replace them with Islamic fundamentalism?!
After 9/11 the economists of the world, the bean counters etc... have to look at the continued *risk* of using oil on world stability. They now have a concrete example. They have real economic numbers to work with. They can project into the future (e.g. the procurement of weapons of mass destruction using money derived from oil sales) and see what the true cost of continued use of foreign oil is to America and her allies.
As programmers you probably understand that legacy is 9/10 of the law, and that once it has been coded, you don't want to code it again. One of the main reasons we have not switched away from oil is because we as a nation have invested untold trillions of dollars in creating an infrastructure to support the distribution of oil and gas throughout this great country, and indeed the world. That system is the legacy and captitalistic forces tend to keep existing systems in place.
However, if you consider the cost of say rebuilding Washington DC or LA or New York because some Islamic fundamentalist decided to nuke it with a suitcase bomb, which was bought using the same money we spent on oil,then all of a sudden the cost of a new distribution network looks *alot* cheaper.
We sent men to the moon. We can reduce or eliminate our dependency on foreign oil. The fuel cell thing is but one example. After that we can export our technology to every other country on the planet. That will effectively turn the black gold currently found in the Arab's back yard into something that is as useful as sludge. Let them worship Allah as they smear it over their bodies for all it would be worth.
Screw the Arabs.
....you get what you pay for.
Guess what, the general public doesn't want excuses. Corporate IT folks dont want excuses.
They just want to get their work done.
The general public simply does not care that a small group of developers spends an amazing amount of time developing Abiword.
They just want it to work, and they want to call someone when it breaks. They want some hope that someone will fix it or can tell them how to fix it, or more likely, how to do the same thing in a slightly different way.
If Linux wants to be on alot of desktops then this type of memo isn't going to get it too far.
People who post here are very smart. In many ways they sort of look at the computer as something that an average person shouldn't really touch unless they know what they are doing, and if they don't know how to administer their own box then that is their problem.
And for people who devote alot of their time to making the stuff work, I don't find this unreasonable. I mean, after all there is real effort and dedication involved is it too much to ask to read a man page?
What MS gets and the Linux commnity doesn't is that most people just want the damn thing (the computer) to do something useful. They want to turn it on and have it work. They don't give a crap about the technical merits of the OS or the effort behind it and for the mass market that is how it should be.
They don't want to mess with config files.
They don't want to care about what hardware is in their box.
They do want to be able to plug stuff in (USB) and have it just work.
They don't want to compile a program to install it.
They dont want to untar things
They don't want to deal with RPM (they want something called setup.exe).
they want easy access to the internet.
they want a browser that works.
and above all they certainly do not want to have to recompile a kernel to upgrade their OS.
MS has money and time to spend on these and other usability issues. Linux does not. Linux is not easy to use unless you are steeped in Unix. There is no way around it.
I think Linux should stop wasting cycles on a mass market that will never happen.
I live in NJ, and the way it works is Comcast acts like a monopolly.
I pay $85 per month for internet, and cable service for my TV, and I do not have a single premium channel. In fact I just was notified today that rates have gone up another 6% or so.
If Comcast shuts me off tonight, and thats who effectively would be pulling the plug, I will be on the horn tomorrow to have Comcast take every cable they have out of this house ASAP.
I will then call a satellite provider and have them provide me TV service.
I will then patiently wait for DSL and keep an eye on stellite service. Perhaps I will even get a T1 and share with my neighbors.
I am up to here with Cable arrogance. They are the only technology related thing that costs more over time for less service.
Its to Big and Bulky
I mean if you whipped that out in a crowd they migh shoot you thinking you were going to launch the missiles.
My Karma is worth more than VA Linux err VA Software errr VA DOA.
Brush up your resumes guys. They have no money, and they dont have a clue.
It must really suck just waiting for them to pull the trigger.
Funny...Microsoft is making money hand over fist. Do you think its because they have a business model? A clue?
I sit here in stunned amazement. I actually agree with Jon Katz!
As far as the anthrax "scare" goes, they could report on it once a day, for one minute and sum the necessary facts into a few sentences like so....
"To date, there have been xxx total exposures.
The most recent exposures have been in xxx,yyy
There have been xxxx total infections.
The most recent infections have been in xxx,yyy.
Be careful of suspicious mail.
Wash your hands after opening the mail.
If you feel ill, do not take any chances. See a Dr. immediately and ask for antibiotics as a precautionary measure.
To date only x people have died from anthrax exposure. In comparison the CDC estimates that upwards of 20,000 Americans will die from the flu.
Now on to Tom with the weather...."
Would that be so hard?