You can't actually get Windows 10 Enterprise unless you're an enterprise. Windows 10 Pro was supposed to be the slightly less braindead version for small business or power users. Subscription Windows-as-a-Service crap doesn't count, no one buys that without drinking a few gallons of koolaid first.
The problem is that few people realize the cost of their healthcare while employed, because they don't have to pay any of it. It's when unemployed, or underemployed with someone who doens't cover medical, that you notice the costs.
Overall, health care costs could go down if the insurance covered the minor stuff. The $5K deductible causes many people to avoid the doctor's visit for the small stuff. But if you keep the small stuff fixed you can often avoid the major stuff. Ie, my provider has no deductible, though you have to use their facilities, and they're very proactive about getting you into programs to manage, control, and prevent problems without any additional cost. Many other plans seem setup to only deal with what happens _after_ you get the heart condition, breathing problems, cancer, etc, and many insurance companies seem to be all about denying coverage if the condition isn't not serious enough.
"Everything" requires a responsive design pattern or needs to be mobile? I've never done web or mobile development and I'm still working and get way too many emails and phone calls from recruiters.
I guess that's true, these days knowing Java is irrelevant since no one actually programs in Java, instead they use frameworks to glue together other people's frameworks.
I never really learned Java, since every time I tried to pick it up again, the language style had changed so much it felt like I was learning from scratch.
Yes, but it gets this 5 seconds to boot because it does not actually shutdown. Instead Windows 8 and up do a system hibernation instead (stops the applications and then hibernates what's left). If you crash or do an upgrade you can see how long a real boot takes. I have had to do a full boot a few times to clear up system issues.
VMs are painful at times. How do you back them up? A lot of backup programs are stupid and want to backup the entire VM image. Also the VMs are huge, taking up much more disk space than the equivalent WSL or Cygwin, and they suck up RAM so that having several VM images actively running will noticeably affect your computer's performance. If you can run things natively then that works better; save the VM for when you can't run things natively.
In engineering usually you get to choose the best tools. The whole company doesn't get these tools though as they're expensive, but if a company can't make an exception to allow someone a matlab license then it's not really an engineering company. Sure, they may want a site license if more than one user wants the same application, but that's no reason to force a department to be unproductive just because Microsoft isn't the publisher of application they want.
This isn't even about regulations. I've worked in highly regulated medical equipment companies, and we could download applications we needed. The problem usually starts with IT staff wanting to have cookie cutter Windows PCs everywhere with only basic office applications. Especially in large corporations where all the IT staff are cookie cutter certificate holders.
Ok, the first one is easy - "It's not a problem, use Windows like everyone else", back to square 1.
Then you're back to being inefficient again.
WSL is good, but not everyone is on Windows 10, and WSL is still very new and needs a lot of work. It's a good step though. Meanwhile Cygwin does the job. Cygwin is imperfect certainly, but so is WSL.
I use Cygwin for some very basic stuff, not even development. Ie, I unzipped some files and now I want to explore them and see what's in them. Windows Explorer is ok for basic browsing, but inevitably the window pops up and says I need to find an application to open an unknown type of file, and the searching in Explorer is terrible.
And if you're on a previous version of Windows? Many people are not on Windows 10. Also WSL is new whereas Cygwin has been around for a long time. Is everyone supposed to upend all their work and switch over immediately when there's something new?
Cygwin is nice. The goal of it was nice to: using plain old unix source code to make programs that work on Windows. It wasn't always true, because unix tends to be so diverse you inevitably have to use an #ifdef somewhere to find the right headers. But it was a huge step towards getting a usable unix environment on Windows.
One snag is that you just can't easily create processes willy-nilly on Windows and expect to get good performance. Unix has a model where process creation and deletion is cheap; but on Windows (and many other operating systems) process creation is a relatively expensive operation. Cygwin tries to work around this. But inevitably the shell script that runs like a jackrabbit ona unix box runs a like an armadillo on Windows under Cygwin.
Still, it's vastly better than trying to use raw Windows as a development or command line environment.
Some unix software has abandoned this, but quite a lot has not. Sure the big name distributions want to go to a single sysadmin tool that does everything, but the real benefit from unix comes from have the small tools that do one or few jobs that are easily composable. Ie, I'm using rep every day, and I use find at least once a week for something, and things like "find . -name \*.xyz | xargs grep mystring" aren't uncommon.
I had always been dubious of this, not being a Microsoft fan, but if this works then that's a good thing.
In the past, the POSIX layer in the Windows kernel was highly dubious, it had basic file support but no access to anything in Win32 where all the UI, services, networking, etc. It seems like it existed solely to get past some DoD contract requirements (even mainframe MVS had some POSIX just get some deals).
If there's a standard tool to easily convert to/from Unix filenames then that is very useful also. That's a headache I have with Cygwin trying to work with some Windows command line tools, and it's always been painful with makefiles.
Been a bit nervous as we were acquired by a heavily Windows and Cloud oriented mothership, and someday I expect they'll want us to start using Windows so having a unix layer would come in handy. (engineers from the mothership have expressed envy that we don't have to use VSTS)
I spent a few weeks in Germany on a German keyboard programming in C and Unix. This was a bit painful, you needed to press AltGr (right Alt key) to get a backslash, vertical bar, curly brackets, and square brackets(?). As a touch typist, this drove me nuts. Not just with hunt-and-peck but the difficulty of pushing AltGr every 3rd character. For the command line I had not set up autocomplete (not my computer) so using that backslash slowed me way down.
I'm all for computer literacy. But most kids figure that out by themselves. Parents seem to be the ones having trouble adapting to newer technology, perhaps fearing that the children will be equally inept unless they take special classes. But nevertheless, computer literacy classes are fine. But teaching CS goes a bit far, make sure that they have the appropriate levels of mathematics and science first, and writing of course, too many programmers out there who can't write or communicate effectively.
They don't really teach true CS in high schools. It's mostly just programming (or "coding"), maybe with a smattering about some high level components. There's no purpose to this except to get cheap labor, churning out poorly trained people from schools who can be snatched up for low paying jobs.
There has been a push from industry for over 30 years to teach only job related computer skills, meaning only teach that year's popular languages so that the graduates are shovel ready, and to downplay theory, breadth of knowledge, etc. Ie, "teach in C please, Pascal isn't used in the real world", then "teach in C++ please, stop with assembler and C", then "teach in Python please", "teach HTML and CSS please", etc. They seriously seemed to think that the best universities in the nation were nothing more than trade schools.
You know what else is a good career and has been for ages? Law. Do they teach the fundamentals of law in high schools? Only very very rarely. Everyone knows that's something you learn later. So why this unnatural push for programming? If college is too expensive, then fix that problem first before dumbing down an industry even more than it already has been.
There's a snag in that this is a highly conservative area. The thought that they might have to have regulations put in place probably causes a lot of bed wetting.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't actually get Windows 10 Enterprise unless you're an enterprise. Windows 10 Pro was supposed to be the slightly less braindead version for small business or power users. Subscription Windows-as-a-Service crap doesn't count, no one buys that without drinking a few gallons of koolaid first.
Don't blame the devs when the marketing department has targets on all their shirts.
The problem is that few people realize the cost of their healthcare while employed, because they don't have to pay any of it. It's when unemployed, or underemployed with someone who doens't cover medical, that you notice the costs.
Overall, health care costs could go down if the insurance covered the minor stuff. The $5K deductible causes many people to avoid the doctor's visit for the small stuff. But if you keep the small stuff fixed you can often avoid the major stuff. Ie, my provider has no deductible, though you have to use their facilities, and they're very proactive about getting you into programs to manage, control, and prevent problems without any additional cost. Many other plans seem setup to only deal with what happens _after_ you get the heart condition, breathing problems, cancer, etc, and many insurance companies seem to be all about denying coverage if the condition isn't not serious enough.
"Everything" requires a responsive design pattern or needs to be mobile? I've never done web or mobile development and I'm still working and get way too many emails and phone calls from recruiters.
I'm playing the game where no one under 40 understands how to actually program on bare metal anymore.
I guess that's true, these days knowing Java is irrelevant since no one actually programs in Java, instead they use frameworks to glue together other people's frameworks.
I never really learned Java, since every time I tried to pick it up again, the language style had changed so much it felt like I was learning from scratch.
It came from a movie according to the news reports on this.
Can you get a linux distribution installed *without* using the Microsoft store?
Yes, but it gets this 5 seconds to boot because it does not actually shutdown. Instead Windows 8 and up do a system hibernation instead (stops the applications and then hibernates what's left). If you crash or do an upgrade you can see how long a real boot takes. I have had to do a full boot a few times to clear up system issues.
Windows itself is a vector into the system!
VMs are painful at times. How do you back them up? A lot of backup programs are stupid and want to backup the entire VM image. Also the VMs are huge, taking up much more disk space than the equivalent WSL or Cygwin, and they suck up RAM so that having several VM images actively running will noticeably affect your computer's performance. If you can run things natively then that works better; save the VM for when you can't run things natively.
I thought devops was being split apart again now that experience shows that combining developers and operators was counter productive?
If you can. Most companies are the other way, because the IT staff have literally zero experience with anything other than Windows.
In engineering usually you get to choose the best tools. The whole company doesn't get these tools though as they're expensive, but if a company can't make an exception to allow someone a matlab license then it's not really an engineering company. Sure, they may want a site license if more than one user wants the same application, but that's no reason to force a department to be unproductive just because Microsoft isn't the publisher of application they want.
This isn't even about regulations. I've worked in highly regulated medical equipment companies, and we could download applications we needed. The problem usually starts with IT staff wanting to have cookie cutter Windows PCs everywhere with only basic office applications. Especially in large corporations where all the IT staff are cookie cutter certificate holders.
Ok, the first one is easy - "It's not a problem, use Windows like everyone else", back to square 1.
Then you're back to being inefficient again.
WSL is good, but not everyone is on Windows 10, and WSL is still very new and needs a lot of work. It's a good step though. Meanwhile Cygwin does the job. Cygwin is imperfect certainly, but so is WSL.
I use Cygwin for some very basic stuff, not even development. Ie, I unzipped some files and now I want to explore them and see what's in them. Windows Explorer is ok for basic browsing, but inevitably the window pops up and says I need to find an application to open an unknown type of file, and the searching in Explorer is terrible.
And if you're on a previous version of Windows? Many people are not on Windows 10. Also WSL is new whereas Cygwin has been around for a long time. Is everyone supposed to upend all their work and switch over immediately when there's something new?
Cygwin is nice. The goal of it was nice to: using plain old unix source code to make programs that work on Windows. It wasn't always true, because unix tends to be so diverse you inevitably have to use an #ifdef somewhere to find the right headers. But it was a huge step towards getting a usable unix environment on Windows.
One snag is that you just can't easily create processes willy-nilly on Windows and expect to get good performance. Unix has a model where process creation and deletion is cheap; but on Windows (and many other operating systems) process creation is a relatively expensive operation. Cygwin tries to work around this. But inevitably the shell script that runs like a jackrabbit ona unix box runs a like an armadillo on Windows under Cygwin.
Still, it's vastly better than trying to use raw Windows as a development or command line environment.
Some unix software has abandoned this, but quite a lot has not. Sure the big name distributions want to go to a single sysadmin tool that does everything, but the real benefit from unix comes from have the small tools that do one or few jobs that are easily composable. Ie, I'm using rep every day, and I use find at least once a week for something, and things like "find . -name \*.xyz | xargs grep mystring" aren't uncommon.
Why? The purpose of GPL is the SHARE software.
I had always been dubious of this, not being a Microsoft fan, but if this works then that's a good thing.
In the past, the POSIX layer in the Windows kernel was highly dubious, it had basic file support but no access to anything in Win32 where all the UI, services, networking, etc. It seems like it existed solely to get past some DoD contract requirements (even mainframe MVS had some POSIX just get some deals).
If there's a standard tool to easily convert to/from Unix filenames then that is very useful also. That's a headache I have with Cygwin trying to work with some Windows command line tools, and it's always been painful with makefiles.
Been a bit nervous as we were acquired by a heavily Windows and Cloud oriented mothership, and someday I expect they'll want us to start using Windows so having a unix layer would come in handy. (engineers from the mothership have expressed envy that we don't have to use VSTS)
Modern, or just failing to learn from the past?
I spent a few weeks in Germany on a German keyboard programming in C and Unix. This was a bit painful, you needed to press AltGr (right Alt key) to get a backslash, vertical bar, curly brackets, and square brackets(?). As a touch typist, this drove me nuts. Not just with hunt-and-peck but the difficulty of pushing AltGr every 3rd character. For the command line I had not set up autocomplete (not my computer) so using that backslash slowed me way down.
The extra 'e' is to get it past the watchers in Texas.
(http://www.softpanorama.org/Bulletin/Humor/bsd_logo_story.shtml)
I'm all for computer literacy. But most kids figure that out by themselves. Parents seem to be the ones having trouble adapting to newer technology, perhaps fearing that the children will be equally inept unless they take special classes. But nevertheless, computer literacy classes are fine. But teaching CS goes a bit far, make sure that they have the appropriate levels of mathematics and science first, and writing of course, too many programmers out there who can't write or communicate effectively.
They don't really teach true CS in high schools. It's mostly just programming (or "coding"), maybe with a smattering about some high level components. There's no purpose to this except to get cheap labor, churning out poorly trained people from schools who can be snatched up for low paying jobs.
There has been a push from industry for over 30 years to teach only job related computer skills, meaning only teach that year's popular languages so that the graduates are shovel ready, and to downplay theory, breadth of knowledge, etc. Ie, "teach in C please, Pascal isn't used in the real world", then "teach in C++ please, stop with assembler and C", then "teach in Python please", "teach HTML and CSS please", etc. They seriously seemed to think that the best universities in the nation were nothing more than trade schools.
You know what else is a good career and has been for ages? Law. Do they teach the fundamentals of law in high schools? Only very very rarely. Everyone knows that's something you learn later. So why this unnatural push for programming? If college is too expensive, then fix that problem first before dumbing down an industry even more than it already has been.
There's a snag in that this is a highly conservative area. The thought that they might have to have regulations put in place probably causes a lot of bed wetting.