> > in the realm of personal opinion, i wouldn't be at all surprised to find
> > that the Microsoft JVM has been specially tuned for marginal compatability
> > with anything NS needs.
>
> Doesn't NS use it's own VM when it's installed on a machine?
you're right.. i let my keyboard get ahead of my brain on that one. that
still leaves NS the challenge of writing a JVM which fits the Windows
treadmill as well as or better than Microsoft's, though.
also, though i admit that this is several steps down the road of conspiracy
theory (who'd ever believe that Microsoft would go out of their way to be
underhanded or sneaky? ;-), the fact exists that any major software
manufacturer knows how to reverse-engineer its competitor's product.
there are an infinite number of things Microsoft could do to (or leave out
of) the DLLs for a standard API which would result in flakiness which is
well-defined but hard to reproduce.
at the risk of sounding self-serving, it's hard to understand how much
power someone who writes low-level code has unless you've actually written
code. i heard an interview a few days ago with a gentleman in his sixties
who's been called back to do the Y2K upgrade on his former employer's COBOL
systems. he, and the rest of his team, were the programmers who had
written the systems originally, back in the fifties. he never said
anything explicitly, but he gave a very strong impression that the actual
amount of code which would have to be rewritten would be very, very small,
and that he already knows exactly where it is.
contrary to the opinion one would develop on first learning that the Y2K
problem exists, the programmers who created those systems in the first
place were *not* idiots. for the most part, they thought deeply and
carefully about the systems they created. a large part of software design
is a process of asking yourself what could possibly go wrong, and finding a
solution which fits the rest of the parameters you've set on the problem.
these guys knew that the rollover problem would occur before they ever
wrote the first line of code, and most of them built their systems
accordingly.
to quote Oscar Wilde:
The drawback of stealing a thing, Mrs. Cheveley, is that one
never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is.
that principle applies to the businessmen who assumed that once the
software had been written, the programmers were no longer necessary.
according to the gentleman in the interview, the majority of old systems
have the solution built into their bones, you just have to know how to find
it. he and his team figure it will take about a year to "remember"
exactly what needs to be done. in the meantime, they've gotten all their
insurance, retirement benefits, and back pay which somehow disappeared
during the age of downsizing.
like i said -- programming is about predicting problems, and finding a
solution which fits the given circumstances..
the same thing applies, in general, to Microsoft. they don't have to
write anything *into* the operating system to have a major advantage, it's
much more effective to leave out one or two small things which are hard to
find.
it's almost trivially simple to write an OS which is stable for programs
that do A, B, and C, and crashes anything else immediately. it's jsut as
easy to crash anything which does K, L, and M, and avoid using that
specific set of operations in your own code. if you're willing to spend
the time and effort, the alphabets can be expanded and the effects can be
tuned until you have an X% advantage in speed and a Y% advantage in
stability, and not even a panel of experts would be able to say precisely
why.
mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
been there, done that, have network, will travel.
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