What .NET going Open Source really means

Microsoft and Open Source are two terms that are almost never seen in the same headline, unless it’s a negative one.

And yet today Scott Gu’s blog announced that .NET 3.5 is going open-source … kind of.

First of all, it won’t be fully open-source. At least, not at first. The move to open up .NET will be gradual, but eventually all class libraries will be open. Eventually.

Second of all, it is released under MS-RL, Microsoft Reference License. This is the most restrictive of all of the Microsoft shared source licenses. Essentially this means you can look, but not touch. The license is for reference only, accordig to Redmond.

This news will be disappointing to the many of Open Source gurus out there hoping Microsoft will jump on the open source bandwagon. It’s not really in the spirit of open source to release something that cannot be changed or touched at all.

So what does this news really mean?

For .NET developers this means that the code they are running their programs on can be debugged. An integrated debugger for .NET built into Visual Studio 2008 will allow devs to step into the .NET code and view the stack calls there.

Useful in some situations. Definitely a good PR move for Microsoft as well. The appearance of embracing open source without actually having to go through with it.

In all seriousness, what harm would it do to allow users to alter and redistribute their own additions to .NET? Microsoft releases the framework for free anyway, it’s not like it is a product in and of itself. You would think that they would appreciate the extra hands that would work on .NET for free.

Ultimately though, another added benefit is that more eyes can now look at the source and identify bugs. Right now it is somewhat difficult to report obscure bugs, as you need to get a tech support agent to reproduce the error. Then you generally get the message that your problem will be relayed to a developer, and that’s the end of it.

Now, with all eyes on Microsoft, hopefully they will see that people appreciate the gesture, but ultimately crave more.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to contact me, James Martin.
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Why Microsoft Silverlight can succeed

So by now, many people are familiar with the term Microsoft Silverlight. It is Microsoft’s attempt at a Rich Internet Application platform, similar to Flash. That’s enough for the average nontechnical person to know, really.

Why can Microsoft stand any chance? There are a few reasons.

Market saturation

Flash currently has a large market share. The latest version alone has 93% exposure online. That means 93% of all internet users have Flash 9 capable browsers already.

How can Microsoft possibly penetrate this humongous market?

Easy, if you ask me. Windows Update. With the power of Windows Update, any Windows user can automatically have Silverlight integrated into IE. In theory, this would spread Silverlight - instantly - to a majority of web users. The best (or worst, depending on your stance on Microsoft) part is that most users wouldn’t even know there was a transition, it would just be taken care of for them.

Annoying IE “feature”

Many people might voluntarily choose to develop in Silverlight merely because of the annoying Flash IE “feature”. This feature is that Flash does not embed correctly in IE. In fact, I don’t believe any third-party apps can be embedded in IE without the annoying “Click to use this application” message. You have to click to activate and use any Flash control.

I assume this will not be the case with Silverlight. Sure, there are javascript workarounds for Flash, but there are so many non-standardized methods it’s hard to know where to start (I recommend SWFObject).

Aggressive Marketing

Silverlight is getting aggressively marketed by Microsoft. I have never seen a Flash advertisement (to clarify, I mean an advertisement for Flash. I see Flash ads all the damn time).

While Flash has become “a part” of the internet, I don’t doubt that Microsoft can create the same kind of brand awareness that Flash shares.

Integration into Visual Studio/.NET

With Release 1.1 of Silverlight, it is possible to write application code for Silverlight in C#/VB instead of javascript. This opens up developmet to many more developers, and bridges the gap nicely between the idea of Flash being a designers tool and a developers tool.

With Visual Studio being one of the development platforms, many people will be familiar with the tool already as well. This makes development just that much easier.

Conclusion

Overall, Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight are, on the surface, very similar. In the end, I think it’s the small differences that will really matter.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to email me, James Martin.
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RIAA caught lying?

Today the Washington Post has an article about the recent music file-sharing lawsuit.

From the article:

Music sales have slumped in recent years as more people have turned to file-sharing.

What I’m wondering is, is this information from the RIAA themselves, or a case of journalistic slant? Information on the internet is easy to obtain, so looking at the RIAA’s own website, I’m brought to this page: Key statistics and year-end reports.

The statistics here for the last few years show some interesting trends. The first bit of interest is that yes, the total value of units is lower than it has been. Not by very much, but lower value. For those too lazy to click, in 1996 total value of all “digital and physical units” was $12,533,800,000 (12,533 in millions). In 2006, the total value was $11,510,200,000. So yes, there was a drop.

 The wording is the odd choice, though. Music sales. Does this refer to money made by music sales, or the actual number of music sales?

Total number of retail units in 1996 was 1,137 (in millions) or 1,137,000,000. Total number of retail units in 2006 was 1,583,200,000. It went up. By a lot.

This seems to imply that the number of music sales is actually UP since 1996, not down. What is down is the money that was earned with these sales. My guess is that this could be in part due to the fact that people don’t always want to buy albums, and now it is much easier to buy any single we want.

Online, we don’t have to put up with crappy “filler” songs by bands, we can pick and choose what we want to hear. And it sounds like the RIAA does not like this.

 It is important to note that the RIAA says, on that page, that if you consider a digital single as 1/10 of a unit instead of a full unit, units shipped in 2005 were only 8.6% greater than in 2005. But still, that still means that the units are increasing.

 Other interesting facts from this page are that music video sales are up in physical form, CDs are down but still significant. “Other” albums are a mere fraction of what they used to be (most likely due to the fact that it includes Cassettes, LPs, DVD Audio, and SACD, which accurately reflect an extreme minority right now). Physical singles are way down, while digital are way up (obviously).

“Units” as a, well, unit, does not include subscriptions, either.

I’m no business expert, but if these stats mean anything, it seems to indicate that the RIAA’s business model is what’s failing them, not the evil P2P networks stealing all of their business.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to contact me, James Martin.
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Top 5 reasons the desktop is dead

The desktop computer is a dying beast. Sure we still have them, but in the near future, the desktop will be phased out. Here’s why.

1. Rapidly declining cost of laptops

Laptops are getting cheaper and cheaper. I’m not even talking about the OLPC program, but cost in general. The new ASUS EEE machine is going to cost very little for an internet-enabled machine. Flash memory is getting cheaper all the time, and is more stable in portable devices. With laptops getting so inexpensive, most people will begin to make their next home computer purchase a portable one.

2. Portable power

Portable devices such as laptops are getting more and more powerful every day. They are actually beginning to catch up to desktops in terms of raw power. Combined with the convenience of portability and having all your data in one place, wherever you are, whenever you want, then there’s really not much of a reason to buy a desktop.

One of the biggest reasons to buy a desktop in the past was gaming. High-requirement games come out all the time, requiring the latest and greatest machines to run them at peak efficiency. This is still true today, but with the gap between desktops and laptops closing quickly, pretty soon laptops like the Acer Ferrari and outrageously overpriced Alienware laptops won’t be the only powerhouses suitable for hardcore gaming.

3. Internet-enabled gadgets

PocketPCs, PDAs, Blackberries, iPhones, Smartphones, Internet tablets - these devices are here and they are here hard. Spreading through the world like a zombie infestation, it’s only a matter of time until everyone is infected. Sure there will be a lone group of survivors camped out on the roof of a nearby shopping complex, but eventually, they will fall. It is inevitable. One of the survivors will make a mistake and it will doom them all. Then there will be nothing left except a zombie wasteland with a surprisingly decent network.

More technology needs to be compared with zombie infestations. I am making my stand here.

4. Thin clients

Definitely NOT a new concept, thin clients have been around almost as long as computing has. Originally called terminals, thin clients are basically stripped down PCs that communicate with a server. Most of the time there is no harddrive at all, save for a small bit of flash memory for an OS. Sometimes this is also absent. Processing is mostly done on a server.

These are becoming more and more popular as well, since more and more data is being stored on the internet. With a thin client you can easily and affordable do most computing tasks in a company and access as much data as the server can handle. Wikipedia lists the advantages and disadvantages of thin clients, and they say it better than I ever could. Needless to say, there is a large list of pros and not many cons.

5. Free wifi

The abundance of free wifi everywhere is a strong argument for portable devices. Everywhere from cities and coffeeshops to airplanes and airports, you can access the internet from almost anywhere these days. Using PCAnywhere, or logmein, you can access another PC from anywhere in the world. While this may seem like an argument for desktop PCs, I beleive that it is more of a transitionary effect that will help us seque off of desktops entirely.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to contact me, James Martin.
Email me, or leave a comment below!

Apple Macbook - from a Windows point of view

I recently found myself with an extra thousand dollars, the money just fell into my lap. I wanted a new laptop, as the Acer I had, to put it as frankly as possible, sucked. The battery lasted 45 minutes, it was scratch-prone, it was humongous and underpowered.

I would never have considered buying an Apple Macbook if not for the fact that I had this money unexpectedly. And as it turns out, the “entry-level” Macbook cost almost exactly $1000 after rebates!

Going into this, let me explain that I am an avid Windows user. I have experimented a lot with Linux and found it wholly distasteful to use. I appreciate that it’s an alternative, but it wasn’t for me. I had also experimented a little bit with Apple OSX 10.3 and found that to be terrible. At the time, it was running on a Novell network at school, and Novell screwed around with the way the Mac ran. It was upsetting to see it crash so often, and random powerups/poweroffs, and hardware crashes. 

But I decided to take the plunge. I don’t know if it was to truly be open-minded, or just to convince myself that I am. Either way, I bought a Macbook.

Unpacking the box

My initial experience was excellent. Booted right up, no initial charging necessary. Took me through a cheesy video, similar to Windows tours and PDA experiences. Once the video was over I got to set up my profile.

Really, it’s the little things that pleased me most. Seeing the i-Sight webcam work in the profile setup page to allow me to use my own picture as my profile pic was nice. The phrase “everything just works” suddenly made sense to me. The laptop was small, light, and the form factor was excellent.

Little hardware touches, like the powerbrick being modular, and the magnetic plugs, made me happy as well. The screen was nice, although I disliked the glossy screen. My Acer was also glossy, though, and this seemed somehow less glossy. They keys I am not too fond of, however. The keyboard looks damned nice. I will give it that. The keys, though, do not always work when typing fast. I find myself constantly having to fix typos where letters were not typed, even when I hit the key. I have not yet gotten used to this.

The battery

Battery life is one of the most important factors to me. My Acer sucked because it used the entire battery in 45 minutes with the screen on medium and wifi on. The Macbook, though, lasts an insanely long time. I found that with the screen on maximum brightness, wifi and bluetooth on, and average CPU use, I could easily get 4 hours of battery. 6 hours or more if the screen was turned down and the wifi/bluetooth turned off.  3 hours or so if the DVD drive was constantly being read (movies, etc).

The battery life serves this laptop really really well.

Operating System - OSX 10.4

OSX looks really nice. Nice effects, nice layout, simple to use. Almost too simple, in fact. I found learning to use a Mac to be the hardest part, simply because everything was so elementary. Installing a program means clicking and dragging one icon from the containing folder to the folder you want to install to. Sometimes the Applications folder is even shortcutted right there in the folder of the program you want to install, so all you have to do is drag an icon literally 2 inches or less.

I would not call OSX highly customizable. Definitely not compared to any Linux distribution I have used in the past. Even compared to Windows, it’s not that customizable. Background, sure. Dock position too, and size of the dock. Some small graphic effects changes and shortcut changes. Overall, though, the system preferences tool seems very limited. Lots of options, but each one has very few choices.

The Finder tool I find somewhat annoying. I am used to folder hierarchies laid out like Windows/Linux does. Instead, Finder presents you with a dumbed down version of this. Each panel on finder acts as its own level in the hierarchy. Click on the Application folder, and the next panel to the right houses all the files and folders in Applications, and then clicking on a subfolder would populate a third panel, and so on.

It’s useful to be able to change directories quickly, but I strongly prefer Vista’s method of directory changing (the contextual dropdowns in the location bar) to this.

One thing irked me right off the bat about OSX. Most things work very well, and most things work (or appear to work) very quickly and snappy. However, this is not the true for everything. Clicking on the top-right menu items can sometimes take a long long time to open the appropriate window. Clicking on the wifi icon, for example, can take up to 10 seconds to open sometimes. I would assume, based on absolutely nothing but common sense, that this is because the wifi app is researching for wireless signals every time I hit that button. If this is not the case, I can absolutely not even fathom why it would take 10 seconds to open up a little panel with a few options on it.

Spotlight is neat. It is like Vista’s new search feature, only more organized, and integrated into the desktop. It is located in the top right menu bar, as a littel magnifying glass. When you click on it, a little panel drops down with a search box in it. It works almost exactly the same, no joking. The only significant difference I found in actual use (behind the scenes it is most likely much different) is that it sorts the results on the fly into categories, and displays the first x number of results right there in the panel. If you want to see more it’s a simple matter of clicking on a “see more” option and everything opens in a new window.

Conclusion

Obviously a platform jump is a big deal, but I think with the solid hardware and a lot more public attention thanks to the iPod, the iPhone, etc., will show strong sales for Apple this quarter. My parents just bought a new Mac, even though they are solidly Windows people and are not that technically inclined. A year ago, owning a Mac would have been a joke to them, whereas now it’s a viable option.The Mac’s come a long way, and has pioneered some interesting desktop techniques, as well as borrowing good ideas from other platforms. It’s a strong machine with a lot of promise.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to contact me, James Martin.
Email me, or leave a comment!