Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: damniseedemons who wrote (14214)	11/18/1997 11:34:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 24154

There was a little bit of news in the last month or so about somebody shipping ActiveX/DCOM for Solaris I think, also some stuff about Corba/DCOM bridging. Plus, there's this COM+ thing that I haven't figured out yet. If somebody can point me to something technical on COM+, I'd take a look. A year ago, when I was rooting around www.microsoft.com looking for hard info on ActiveX, the marketing to technical ratio was just too high. To tell the truth, for the Microsoft "Windows Everywhere" vision, moving forward into NT everywhere, ActiveX makes perfect sense, and I've said as much in the past. The security problems with ActiveX come from the unsecure nature of Windows95 and the FAT file system, where there seems to be no file protection/ownership privileges available for local files. Of course, I'm not sure what this JDK 1.2 is going to do on Windows95 either. From the link you posted: With JDK 1.2, developers can assign different permissions for different files, or even small portions of files, on a temporary or permanent basis. They can also govern whether Java code has read or write privileges. This is more or less the kind of thing you would routinely do with ntfs or a Unix system. I guess for JDK1.2 it's all part of the "bloated middleware OS". Cheers, Dan.

To: damniseedemons who wrote (14214)	11/18/1997 2:39:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Respond to of 24154

Well, it's pretty obvious that ActiveX has been a failure on the internet (considering that I haven't heard a peep from Microsoft on that front for many months). In intranets it's still going strong, though, judging from the number of reqs for contractors doing active-x work. Probably all-MS shops. Also some dedicated pay services on the internet use Active-X, like Mindscape game sites, I believe. Still a pig, but so many of their most faithful developers are using it I can't imagine them dropping it. Of course, we've gotten the shaft from them before, so who knows. I personally chose not to go that way, and have regretted that decision all the last year, when there were plenty of contracting projects on intranets and the internet doing Active-x. I knew it was a close thing (I bought the active-x books and the Java books, and concentrated on the Java, even though I had Direct-3D and other partial Active-X background.) Whether those people will come out with working product is another matter, of course. There seemed to be a lot of Active-X Internet projects in development during the last year, but few are actually online. Problems? So anyway, can we call JDK 1.2 a cross-platform version of ActiveX? The security model is sort of similar to how ActiveX can be given varying levels permission based on if it comes from the internet, intranet, etc. No, they are pretty unrelated. Actually, the Active-X security features borrowed (but not enough) from Java design concerns, if anything. And all the other bits look completely unlike each other, particularly at the design and API levels, not to mention the very different philosophies behind them. Chaz