Japanese on Java

Japanese software distributor SOURCENEXT (http://sourcenext.com/) announced that they will start shipping Orcale's Java IDE, JDeveloper, for 1,980 JPY (= 18 USD). SOURCENEXT is the company well-known as a seller of the cheap software in SEVEN-ELEVEN shelves. The company also is a distributor of the IBM's web site designer software "Home Page Builder", productivity suite "Lotus SuperOffice" and Sun's "StarSuite". In its early days they sell much smaller utilities but recently, their domain is expanding to much larger pack of softwares, and still the price remains cheap. Of course, they are not selling very full right to use of the software for just 18 USD, but it is one year subscription, and you can easily imagine what will happen one year later, right? If they continue selling this next year as well, it would be the new version. If we can always get the latest full-featured, branded Java IDE for 18 USD, it will change something drastically....or, of course, you can always use eclipse or netbeans, but.... I don't know. There must be people who prefers branded IDE than free ones. They can learn (anyway) Oracle's way of having its development environment in cheap. Various merits are provided via this new pricing model. I always think variety of choice makes things better..... I would like to see what will happen after this.

In my old entry, which I had deleted when I restarted this blog, I have talked about John Carroll's article, "All about Longhorn". And today, I have found that he is attacking Mozilla Firefox browser.

In this article, his point is clear. His (non-Standard-compliant) HTML is not rendered as he intended in Firefox, so Firefox is evil and broken. A lot of people pointed out that his code is broken but Firefox is not, still he doesn't get the fact right. He continues saying his HTML is not broken, so browsers should render it as he intended.

Excuse me, but, computers never work as you intended, but they work as they are programmed, or as in the way the code is written. So, if both your code and rendering engine are broken, the page might be rendered as you intended accidentally, but still that's an accident.

If accessing opensource technologies and proprietary technologies are flip sides of the same coin, as John has said before, maybe "proprietary operating system programmers" could change the final shape of the technology in Internet Explorer, right? Why didn't you get to Microsoft to say "your browser rendering engine is not standard compliant" and try changing that situation before IE went public?

Or if you would still believe the way of IE's rendering is more righteous than W3C defined, you could say something to the open standard body before that standard is finished. The process was open, wasn't it?

Either way, people in MS-camp could have got the same result both in IE and Firefox today, if they act appropriately. People in MS-camp had had a lot of chance to make IE and Firefox far more compatible in rendering HTML pages, but they did not take them. While opensource camp paid a lot of efforts to make their browser standard compliant, proprietary OS programmers didn't care about the standard. Now they are complaining a lot about that two browsers are incompatible, so I think they themselves are responsible for that result.

John said, in his article, "few have the money to create comparable documentation that is so centralized. Microsoft does". But, then why don't they use that money to fix those bugs to make IE more standard compliant? It is easier than listing up and writing documents for all incompatibilities IE has, especially when the list is really long. It would be good for John, I also suppose, because if MSIE becomes standard compliant, he would no longer need to try figuring out such broken code for demonstrating incompatibilities in MSIE and  can save time for doing the real programming jobs. And of course, he would never need to write such stupid article.