picoJava and 970 chipset

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  • Reply 21 of 28
    vinney57vinney57 Posts: 1,162member
    The problem with many of Microsnot's 'initiatives' in the past is that they weren't actually that good and were either quietly abandoned or force fed to the public (consumer and professional) using the usual 800lb Gorrilla tactics that MS have so successfully developed over the years. The difference with .net is that it has actually been rather well engineered and the MS-centric programmers that I know are pretty 'pumped' about it. (I love using US vernacular). Now they don't know how to market it!



    For Apple the strategy should be clear: remove all the barriers and friction to adoption that exist in the enterprise market. XServe, XRaid are sexy products of good value in that market. IBM 970's, OSX, X11, Java, and, absolutely, .net will remove any excuse for non-adoption because of inertia or prejudice.



    Apple's enterprise division seem to understand their position very well and have an Xtremely pragmatic attitude. I'm sure we will see .net operability in some form at the appropriate time.
  • Reply 22 of 28
    synpsynp Posts: 248member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by occam

    Synp, this assertion could use some support. Please provide references to your studies. I find it odd that a new language (Java) could be responsible for so many old projects. Also, even if all Java projects were old projects, the original assertion of Java's popularity could still be true.



    The news I've read about recently suggest that Java has supplanted C++ in popularity (#programmers). I doubt Cobol is most popular language up there with Java or even C++. Perhaps you're referring to lines of code (Cobol's strength) which is different than popularity and far different than new projects?




    I have said nothing about old projects. New ones are still written all the time. Most projects are not the shrink-wrap stuff like Apple or Microsoft make, but internal projects. Large companies and organizations have an IT department that writes their business software even in these days of ERP and CRM.

    With these projects, the leading languages are still the old ones: COBOL or PL/I. There has been some transition to C, probably also to C++, but Java is still an oddity.



    The statistics are from a Gartner Group study that I read at a former job (in such an IT department). I don't have a reference to it on the web.
  • Reply 23 of 28
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Programmer

    Well frankly, I'm a technologist and looking at the .Net technology I have to admit (rather against my will) that MS has finally done a pretty solid job of the design groundwork on something. The problem they are having with .Net that you are refering to is a marketing problem -- how do they tell people about it, and how do they sell it. The important thing is that technology exists and looks surprisingly solid. If they have to try a dozen different marketing approaches and rename it ten times it doesn't really matter... they'll figure it out eventually. That's how Microsoft works.



    I'm over generalizing... .Net is made up of many many technologies. That's probably why they haven't figured out how to tell people what it is yet. The important bits at the base level are what I'm primarily talking about. At that level there really isn't a distinction between client and server. I'm sure there are server support services that they aren't porting to MacOS X, but that's why Apple ought to be involved -- perhaps Apple could provide that server support and/or make it interoperable with things like WebObjects and Cocoa.




    LOL ! this is so typical of .NET ! You just spend 2 paragrpahs, 30 lines of text about .NET but haven't said a thing !!!!!

    I can sum up your text as ".NET is something new. It's great. It's got something to do with clientserver. We still gotta market it down your throat."



    but I STILL don't have a clue what it's about and why I need it. Probably another MS fix for something that isn't broken.
  • Reply 24 of 28
    >but I STILL don't have a clue what it's about and why I need it.

    >Probably another MS fix for something that isn't broken.



    Like Programmer, I've cannot easily say that I like a M$ technology. I've seen WIN32 API, MFC, ActiveX (the first objet architecture where you cannot derive a class !), the DLL hell, and I readlly donc like that.



    In fact, .NET is really well done. It offer you a lot of thing. A VM and some basic classes which consitute the CLR. The CLR is the part that M$ has made available on the Mac.



    And then there is the .NET framework comprise of 3500 classes (collection, i/o, Internet protocols, XML management, GUI through .NET Forms (this will be the difficult part to port to the mac), etc...).



    And on top of that there is the dev tool (the compilers (which are free and the commercial one: Visual Studio .NET).



    There is also Windows Server 2003 which integrate .NET and try to take advantage of it.



    So it's a lot of stuff.



    In the past years we have see Apple integrate as much technology as they can to ease the use of the Mac in a PC network (support of SMB, CUPS, etc...), or a Unix network (improvement to the BSD layer, X11, etc...).



    And there also the Java thing and don't forget some workflow hints in the 10.2.4 release...



    I hope this will continue with the integration of .NET...
  • Reply 25 of 28
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    What .NET actually is is the fruit of MS realizing that middleware really can moot the operating system as a platform. So MS is now producing middleware, and doing whatever they can to make sure that they have as much control over middleware as they have over the underlying OS. Apparently, they're so desperate to get this done that they're actually taking the time to do it right the first time, which is unprecedented.



    The reason they can't market it is that, as usual, they have no vision for it. Gates is a master tactician, but a miserable strategist (not surprising, since a strategy, once embarked upon, tends to limit your strategic options), and what you are seeing is tactics: What do we need to have to supplant Java and open-source middleware off the market? But since their goal is control, they have no idea what to actually do with all this stuff. It exists to be an alternative to a very broad set of alternatives for various sorts of applications — Java, Perl, Python, PHP, XHTML/XForms, etc.



    This is one area where Programmer is wrong: Control is the driving force here, not profit (at least, not immediately). MS threw $3 billion at Internet Explorer in order to kill Netscape, so that they could control the Web as a platform. They have obviously never made a dime on IE. .NET is a similar war waged against a broader set of technologies, and as usual MS will spare no expense attempting to drive them off the market.



    In fact, one of Programmer's assertions reminded me about a developer I knew who some years ago abandoned Delphi for the first version of VB, even though Delphi was mature and far superior, because he knew VB would dominate. MS was pushing it, and he wanted to get on board early. This is the sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that MS is counting on: They're MS, they'll win anyway, why even bother? And, you know, it doesn't look so bad...
  • Reply 26 of 28
    atomichamatomicham Posts: 185member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Amorph

    What .NET actually is is the fruit of MS realizing that middleware really can moot the operating system as a platform. So MS is now producing middleware, and doing whatever they can to make sure that they have as much control over middleware as they have over the underlying OS. Apparently, they're so desperate to get this done that they're actually taking the time to do it right the first time, which is unprecedented.







    The is the most cogent summary regarding .Net I have ever read.



    Kudos.
  • Reply 27 of 28
    programmerprogrammer Posts: 3,457member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Amorph

    This is one area where Programmer is wrong: Control is the driving force here, not profit (at least, not immediately).



    Control is the means to the end. Complete control over the market allows Microsoft to maximize their profits by minimizing everybody else's. If there was no monetary motivation to have control, Microsoft wouldn't bother with it. Given lots of profits they can buy more control which gives them more profits, etc. This is why M$ is made >2 billion in a quarter.
  • Reply 28 of 28
    Microsoft has a goal for .Net, but will it work? Time and time again, it is not the superiority of a technology that wins, it is all in the marketing and sales. Though they seem to have done a good job with .Net, if it is not adopted, it fails. I am not at all sure that .Net will survive as Microsoft seems to be trying to use it as a club against Linux. With IBM promoting Linux in a big way and finally pushing their Power/PowerPC lines of processors, MS might very well lose on this one. If Linux continues to take marketshare from Windows, even if only in the server arena, .Net will gain no traction. Only if MS ports it to Linux, does .Net even have a chance to gain market dominance (the open source community seems to be skeptical of MS and might shun .Net anyway). Otherwise, more and more corporations continue the inexorable move to Linux and the .Net development environment is rendered useless. The development of the 970 and Power 5 processors along with IBM's big push for Linux cannot be good news for Microsoft, .Net aside. Linux and AIX running on high end IBM servers won't help .Net at all. Neither will OS X server running on 970s from the looks of it. Though Microsoft might be taking the time and spending the resources to see that .Net gets done right, it is too little, too late. It likely won't be anything more than a blip in the move to Unix and Unix-like operating systems like Linux and OS X. Besides, if Apple were to move to embracing .Net, I don't see them working closely with Microsoft, but working with the open source movement on this one. And that one is very much safer than working closely with Microsoft on ANY thing. Both Apple and IBM learned this one the hard way. It is ironic that both companies will be coming back to haunt MS, but that's another story. Somehow, the MS purchase of Connectix seems to take on additional significance. Perhaps they will try to introduce .Net to OS X through emulation. It matters very little, however, .Net will very likely go nowhere.
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