Another elf leaves Middle Earth.
He left Rivendell, sure, but maybe he's just moving to Lothlórien.
James Gosling leaves Oracle
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apart from seeing the beautiful elegant hardware running a second-rate port of a second-rate OS and the patents Sun owns ending up on being auctioned to patent trolls so they could have a field day destroying every competition for Windows without implying Microsoft, nothing. Apart from that, it would be a good thing.
Guys... Even if you disagree (and you don't want to debate the issue and prefer to down-vote the comment) with Windows being a second-rate OS and that a SPARC port would not be a priority for Microsoft, you you have to agree that having all those shiny patents covering all kinds of stuff being auctioned off to trolls would impact everybody. Not me, at least directly, because I live in Brazil and we have no such softw…
I tend to downvote posts if the author complains about being downvoted.
Also, not only were you "long on slogans and short on insight" but your argument doesn't fly. (IBM usually keeps the patents of the companies that it buys.)
Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle
#43Where would somebody like Gosling go to find a home? In other words, what Sun-like industry Research and Development centers (not just research shops or application software vendors) remain? Microsoft the software company has a competing technology to sell you. Microsoft Research does not ship code. IBM and HP are professional services, not technology R&D companies. RedHat's JBoss division had been (very positively)…
IBM does do research, and plenty of it. Quantum Computing anyone? http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/
Does the result of this research end up as products?
Microsoft Research is excellent as a research organization, but it seems that it's goal isn't to develop new products based on this research but rather to make sure that the scientists aren't developing products based on their research elsewhere.
Note: there's also lots of research work that needs to be done that isn't going to be applied immediately. That's certainly fine -- but there's been research that has went on at Sun that has been turned into industry changing products (from NFS to Java).
Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle
#44Where would somebody like Gosling go to find a home? In other words, what Sun-like industry Research and Development centers (not just research shops or application software vendors) remain? Microsoft the software company has a competing technology to sell you. Microsoft Research does not ship code. IBM and HP are professional services, not technology R&D companies. RedHat's JBoss division had been (very positively)…
you could say they're the modern day Bell Labs I think this comparison is unduly favorable to Google. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_devel...
Certainly agreed. I could say "a modern day runner-up to Bell Labs". Nonetheless they employ actual Bell labs people (Rob Pike, Kernighan, etc...).
Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle
#45No surprise here. It's too bad the IBM/Sun talks broke down, I think it would have been a much better marriage.
Talks didn't break down, there were big anti-trust issues.
Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guys... Even if you disagree (and you don't want to debate the issue and prefer to down-vote the comment) with Windows being a second-rate OS and that a SPARC port would not be a priority for Microsoft, you you have to agree that having all those shiny patents covering all kinds of stuff being auctioned off to trolls would impact everybody. Not me, at least directly, because I live in Brazil and we have no such softw…
I tend to downvote posts if the author complains about being downvoted. Also, not only were you "long on slogans and short on insight" but your argument doesn't fly. (IBM usually keeps the patents of the companies that it buys.)
I was speculating on what would happen if Microsoft bought Sun and decided to port Windows to SPARC.
IBM would want to keep the patents for itself, but Microsoft would probably wrap them in a do-not-hit-us term and sell them to trolls. This way they could undermine the competition while staying completely out of it.
Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle
#47Another elf leaves Middle Earth.
In case that didn't make sense to you, it's a reference to: http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...
Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
IBM does do research, and plenty of it. Quantum Computing anyone? http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/
Does the result of this research end up as products? Microsoft Research is excellent as a research organization, but it seems that it's goal isn't to develop new products based on this research but rather to make sure that the scientists aren't developing products based on their research elsewhere . Note: there's also lots of research work that needs to be done that isn't going to be applied immediately. That's certa…
Yes. Off the top of my head, IBM invented hard disks, relational databases and RISC. They definitely aren't as innovative now as they were thirty years ago, but at least they have more to show than Oracle does.
Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it funny how you can be too expensive to code. I wonder when was the last time billionaires like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin coded for a large project just for the love of coding.
Has Steve Jobs ever coded?, I know Gates and Brin did at some point. A quick search revealed a quote from Wozniak: "Steve jobs never programmed in his life." http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2006/10/5672.ars
He used to do all the coding demos at NeXT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A (his little database app starts at 23:10)
Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle
#50Where would somebody like Gosling go to find a home? In other words, what Sun-like industry Research and Development centers (not just research shops or application software vendors) remain? Microsoft the software company has a competing technology to sell you. Microsoft Research does not ship code. IBM and HP are professional services, not technology R&D companies. RedHat's JBoss division had been (very positively)…
Microsoft funds a lot of fairly pure research with some of it slipping out into the real world, e.g. Simon Peyton-Jones http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ of Glasgow Haskell Compiler fame (and perhaps the most interesting interview in Coders at Work, although that has a lot to do with my familiarity of the work of others in the Lisp and PARC worlds).
One of the biggest complaints about Microsoft Research (or whatever it's called) was how little gets out of the lab into the "real world", with things like F# being recent exceptions, and their funding of the GHC is another example of how they indirectly ship code. Although this mostly legit complaint is precisely your complaint about "not just research shops".
I'm pretty sure IBM is still doing some tech R&D, how much in the coding area I'm not sure, let alone for how long.
Hmmm, has such a beast other than Sun for a brief time ever existed? Obviously Bell Labs, and the UCB Unix project (and some other DARPA projects that had useful code as a required deliverable, e.g. their general VLSI infrastructure push: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project). MIT's exokernel project found itself reified in the real world as Xen, through yet another university lab.
Plus today there are other business models, e.g. look at Clojure (admittedly a one man project for the first few years), the cost of doing a R&D project that ships real world code is fantastically lower than it used to be when e.g. XEROX PARC was doing most? of its work on bit slice (i.e. not too fast) 16 bit Altos with 1-4 banks of 64KB RAM.
I came to the conclusion in the early '80s that some of the differences in the granularity of traditional Lisp and Smalltalk objects (the latter are larger) is in part due to the machines these people did their work on. Lisp has always gone for a big flat address space, Smalltalk had bank switching to contend with an I think that encouraged larger objects (larger than a cons cell, atom, numeric immediate, etc.
The architecture of X has a lot more to do with GAO "most preferred customer" rules/law than anything else.