Many of us use those expansion slots about halfway through the life of the machine in order to upgrade them inexpensively (like adding SATA 3.0 to a machine purchased when SATA 1.0 was still new)
Yeah, because not having SATA 3 makes a machine ununsable...
repair them when a specific component goes tits up (The NIC died? Thats a $15 card for full-on b/g/n wireless)
Yeah, because if a NIC dies then it doesn't matter that it's probably part of the motherboard chipset and all of a sudden you have an expensive repair bill. Not to mention that wireless cards *are* plug-in PCIe cards on these mini form factor PCs...
or to add specific functionality that only comes standard on much more expensive machines..
I think you might be havign problems understandnig/empathising with what a 'normal' person is going to want out of a PC. Not only that, but even us geeks get bored of the PC treadmill after a while. The last desktop I bought was an iMac in 2007. It's old, it's tired and it just stopped working reliably this past week or so. I cant' easily fix it, but you know what, I got five solid years out of that workhorse. I don't care that I couldn't upgrade it -- despite being a programmer, and therefore as much of a 'power user' as anybody, 2GHz of Core2 Duo has been plenty fast enough -- and, if repairibility had been an issue, I'd have bought 3 years of Applecare and retired it when the warranty expired.
The MacMini is an excellent computer if you want a small, silent machine that keeps out of your way. If you want a toy to upgrade and play with, it's not so great.
While I'm no expert on Android, I am a developer and I have worked on a pretty major Android app. We found that Android 2.2 and earlier had some bugs in the version of HTTPClient that Android uses, and this bug caused certs from one particular root authority (Verisign, IIRC) to fail. It was a major problem. It was a while ago now, but I think the work-around we went for was to effectively enable untrusted CAs on 2.2 clients. I can happily believe that the apps being talked about here, those with weak SSL, were all modified in this way to work around the Android bug -- the authors probably just made the 'weak-ssl-is-better-than-no-ssl' trade-off and shipped their apps. What else are you realistically going to do?
As it becomes less important to target Android pre-2.3, this particular bug will hopefully become a thing of the past. According to Google, 2.2 is now on 13% of devices, so we're almost at that point. 13% is still a lot though...
I had indeed forgotten about these. Probably because they never affected me. Or anyone that I knew.
Because they got blocked by Anti Virus software on windows well before they became epidemic in scope. And of course none of them bothered linux.
Maybe you have poor memory? These were big news.
I worked on a second-level support desk during the iloveyou outbreak, and a great many companies that we supported were affected. Likewise blaster and codered. I was a programmer by then, but I saw the damage on several servers that weren't firewalled.
Business users, that are locked to a certain platform that only support IE6.
I hear this a lot, and in some (but very few) circumstances it's certainly true. However, mostly it's not. Most internal web apps run just fine on IE7, 8 and 9 too. My feeling is that these businesses don't want to upgrade because the current tool (usually a Dell Pentium 4 with XP) is working just fine. Why would any sane businesses want to spend money replacing something that works perfectly well? Well, you and I know a few good answers to that, but we're not the decision makers here.
BTW, I'm a developer, and I wrote a lot of those apps that originally ran on IE, so I've seen this all the way through. There aren't truly that many apps that are genuinely IE6 only. Most run just fine on newer versions of IE, and often times FF and Chrome too. As a developer, even though I was targeting IE only back in the early 2000s, I actually used Firebird (which then became Firefox) to do most of my testing -- and I don't think I was alone.
I hope that Slashdot aren't getting paid for that, because if it truly is an advert, it's one of the crummiest adverts I've ever seen.
I mean, I'm pretty up on 'cloud' stuff. I use EC2 extensively. I'm up on Java, I write quite a bit of that stuff. I recognise many of the buzzwords in the post but I don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about or what exactly HP are offering. And I don't care enough about this gap in my knowledge to click any of the links and find out, because I suspect it'll be a waste of time.
Apple use Microsoft's CDN quite extensively, along with theother usual suspects (particularly Akami). It makes sense -- between iTunes and their software downloads/updates they need to transfer a truly vast amount of data every day, and Apple aren't shy about using another service if someone else can do it better. I'm not aware of Apple using any other part of Microsoft's cloud (or any other cloud for that matter) -- e.g., servers, but maybe they do now days. Just as a side note/question, are CDN's considered cloud? Certainly akami pre-dates what we now call clouds, IIRC.
I know you won't like it, and I agree with everything you say and more -- in fact, I'm a programmer, and when I see a problem (especially involving a CSV file) I'll quite often go so far as to write a one-off bespoke program to solve it. But we're at the very edge of the edge cases.
But we're different. Most people want their data to remain in the app they used to create it, because that makes most sense. That means they can find it again. Want to re-print that letter you wrote last year to your electricity company? Great! Just open the app you used to write it and boom, there it is. That's about as complicated as computers need to be for most people, and to be honest, they'll actually get more out of their computers as a result.
Thankfully, complicated desktop operating systems aren't going anywhere soon, so we'll still have our way (Linux and BSD will see to that, thankfully). It just won't be how most people do it.
It's pretty simple really: You open an app, you get a list of your documents that have been created in or imported in to that app. If you get an attachment you want to open, it offers apps that are registered for that file type. There's no browsing of disks or folders. It's up to the individual apps to let you group and sort documents by metadata (which will be tailored to the type of data the app deals in, of course). It works pretty well, even if there are some frustrating limitations.
The cloud part is (or should be) transparent -- you open Pages on one device and create a document. Next time you open Pages on another device, it should be there as if by magic. It's still early days, and they haven't got it right yet, but they're working pretty hard on this stuff.
You can very easily see what they're doing. As geeks, we probably won't like it as much as the way things currently work, but it makes sense for an awful lot of use-cases, and it'll probably help them earn boatloads more money in the next decade or so. It'll also create a good deal of vendor lock-in, if they're successful.
It wasn't the way they 'included a browser', it was they way they attempted (and succeeded) to entirely destroy a competitive market by using the thermo-nuclear option of abusing their Windows monopoly.
And it wasn't the way they did it with the web browser, it was the way they did it time and time again (Dr-Dos, OS/2, DiskStacker, WordPerfect, Netware, Netscape, DirectX) and certainly more than that. They even tried to create a proprietary internet (and thankfully failed).
They don't seem so evil these days, but I'm sure they would if they could. Or maybe Ballmer's just a big softy compared to Gates? I don't know, I suspect that the competition in mobile and from Google has really dented their ability to be really evil.
Why not? It's not friction that'll turn a 1 in to a 0, but simple entropy or cosmic rays (seriously). ECC RAM is designed specifically to guard against that kind of problem.
Friction can kill anything that moves -- fans and hard-disks. If a fan dies, either in the PSU, the case or on the CPU, you could end up with a server that crashes and has all kinds of problems. That's why real servers beep incessantly to let you know if a fan is dying.
And software can crash over time. I write software for a living, and a few months ago I had to change a bit of code I wrote in 2005 -- it was broken by a security update Microsoft released in November last year.
Anyway, OP is asking about cheap-skate ways to emulate Microsoft's expensive fail-over clustering options. The only real answer (I can think of) is replication/log shipping and something in the software that detects the fault and enables the fail-over without any on-site technical expertise. But he's going to need to talk to the ISV about that, not us.
Firebird is an open-source embedded database project that was already quite mature when they renamed Pheonix. They didn't threaten to sue, they just asked nicely.
I think I read somewhere that the $100M Microsoft injected would have made little difference to Apple's bottom line/survival, but was an important show of confidance. More important for Apple was the Office deal (and in return Microsoft got IE5 bundled as the default Mac web browser).
Out of that period came my favourite Steve Jobs quote of all time, when he told the Apple faithful at WWDC "for Apple to win, Microsoft don't have to lose". The same is still true today -- even more so -- there's plenty of room for a huge ecosystem of competing products. The constant arguments in blogs and on sites like this about whether Andoid or iOS is winning are futile -- there doesn't need to be one clear winner.
Their will be a lot of snarky "too late" comments today for this news, but it's a sad day when you have to step down from the company you worked so hard to build -- a company that must feel an extension of yourself -- and it must have been a really tough decision for these guys. No doubt they still wanted to prove themselves (and who wouldn't, given their situation?). I feel sorry for them. It's easy to be an armchair CEO, especially when you have hindsight.
They could have sold 10,000 early access/ developer boards at $50 a piece, maybe even doing a 'buy one give one' promotion like the OLPC project. It does kind of defeat the purpose of computers for all, but it'd also helped them guarantee future production...
I suspect that it's actually far cheaper and easier to ship you an assembled board than an unassembled board. Shipping stuff like this over from China in a container is really cheap. Also, to disrupt the manufacturing process and ship a bag of bits would add extra cost because that's actually harder to automate.
If you get the Gert board that they mention (a break-out board that gives you lots of IO options for hardware projects) you do get to assemble that yourself:)
I really do know what you're saying -- I feel the same myself, but I'm not convinced correlation is causation -- I don't see any sites that have less 'trolly' comments than Slashdot, and I'm starting to think it's just me getting older and not actually feeling the same way as the younger generation. Don't forget that a lot of the Slashdot readership started visiting the site in the late 90's, when we were teens ourselves, and our tastes/opinions/priorities have changed so much in that time -- I know that I'm barely the same person I was back then. What I thought was a great discussion 10 years ago might not impress me so much today.
There are definitely always improvements to be made to the comments system, but I've yet to see anything better on the internet. Disqus haven't even tried to fix the problem, nor have Facebook comments, and anything phpBB doesn't stand a chance.
Anyway, I feel for you if you're genuinely being harassed by somebody, that sounds really not much fun. It's also very odd that somebody would do that over such a prolonged period of time. It's a funny old world.
Actually i matured 5 years or so ago, after spending some 10 years in the delusion of thinking that the fields i was in were more 'elite' than the others
Commendable.
human resources......... they constitute a total fantasy land in themselves.
Oh, so there are still/some/ people who aren't quite as elite as us;)
because too many discussions here become giant fanboi circle jerks with everyone that parrots groupthink going up
Every time I see the word 'fanboi' or the phrase 'circle jerk' I lose a bit of faith in the site I'm on. Stop it. Learn to use grown up words and make your point more rationally. I know you're annoyed that you have a stalker, but surely they'll get bored soon enough -- maybe now the school holidays are over. I also suspect it's a personal grudge, rather than a FOSS thing.
As for your other point, you must understand that we all miss the good old days -- but that has been the case for thousands (if not millions) of years. Not only that, but group think is something you have to learn to accept, no matter how annoyed it makes you. Maybe those mod-rules you point out exist purely because that's how the majority of people feel? That's the basis of democracy. Slashdot still, after all these years, somehow manages to see discussions with contrary views and actual debate. For that we should be thankful (though obviously not too thankful -- especially with the ever increasingly 'sensational' stories that seem to be appearing).
If somebody gave you a detailed spec for software that they found useful, you'd be surprised at just what you can achieve already. Useful software doesn't have to be highly complicated, it might just be a console app for fetching data from a remote feed and storing it in a database. Useful software is useful. You clearly have the right aspirations, you just need to find the purpose. Once you complete your first project it kind of just snowballs as you grow in confidence and ability.
And there are plenty of entry level jobs. If you speak to those companies looking for 3-5 years and say you're willing to work on a trial basis to prove yourself, you'd be amazed at how willing they are to give you a job. They will value your eagerness/ambition just as highly as they value 3-5 years experience (which everyone knows actually means nothing anyway).
If you have a developer doing that, at least it shows they are thinking about the problem. In my experience, that self awareness is a good sign -- they are likely to continue improving the code they write, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that in another 12 months to find that they were writing compact AND maintainable code.
If you were to go back and look at the code you wrote years ago, when you were just starting out, would it be easily maintainable now? I doubt it. My early code certainly wouldn't. It makes me cringe just thinking about some of the hacks I did to compact my code down (often times involving bit fields...). Ugh.
Your problem with CSS appears to be that you aren't familiar enough with it to use it effectively. That's expected, and the same would be true for any sufficiently complicated system. Of course CSS has its faults, and of course there are alternative options that might have worked better, but it doesn't matter, because CSS works and is good enough. That is all that was required of it, and it is why it is used. As it happens, I'm not aware of any other layout system that gives you the power of CSS and HTML yet remains simple.
Maybe it's easier for me, because I started programming web-centric software at about the time CSS arrived, so I've lived through the evolution and it seems perfectly natural to me. That said, I have the same problem moving to any new language -- it takes me at least a few months of messing around on little side projects before I'm comfortable enough to take on a real project, and then at least another 6 months before I feel I am truly proficient. You seem to want to skip all of that and go straight to mastery, and are blaming the system/technology because you can't.
Thanks -- somebody else also pointed out the link that gets shown next to the search results (and it points to the same page you linked). I should have seen that.
I agree with your sentiment, they do deserve time to grow in to something bigger -- I wonder if they will ever have the resources to build their own index though. It looks like the decision to use Bing is purely technical/engineering (they need cheap search results and there aren't many places to get them -- I know from experience that the Google API is very restrictive) so I can understand that, even if Bing results are very poor versus Google.
Re-reading my original comment, I think I was a bit harsh. I guess I was just surprised at the association with Microsoft. When you're talking about a company built entirely on privacy, open-ness and trust, Microsoft aren't the first people that spring to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I see you saying
No, you don't.
need SATA 3
Need?
I see you also saying that you blow reams of money on Apple hardware.
No, you don't. I buy them as tools and carefully measure their return over the years. I use these machines in my business.
needlessly wasting money like a complete retard thats stupid.
Keep it classy.
Many of us use those expansion slots about halfway through the life of the machine in order to upgrade them inexpensively (like adding SATA 3.0 to a machine purchased when SATA 1.0 was still new)
Yeah, because not having SATA 3 makes a machine ununsable...
repair them when a specific component goes tits up (The NIC died? Thats a $15 card for full-on b/g/n wireless)
Yeah, because if a NIC dies then it doesn't matter that it's probably part of the motherboard chipset and all of a sudden you have an expensive repair bill. Not to mention that wireless cards *are* plug-in PCIe cards on these mini form factor PCs...
or to add specific functionality that only comes standard on much more expensive machines..
I think you might be havign problems understandnig/empathising with what a 'normal' person is going to want out of a PC. Not only that, but even us geeks get bored of the PC treadmill after a while. The last desktop I bought was an iMac in 2007. It's old, it's tired and it just stopped working reliably this past week or so. I cant' easily fix it, but you know what, I got five solid years out of that workhorse. I don't care that I couldn't upgrade it -- despite being a programmer, and therefore as much of a 'power user' as anybody, 2GHz of Core2 Duo has been plenty fast enough -- and, if repairibility had been an issue, I'd have bought 3 years of Applecare and retired it when the warranty expired.
The MacMini is an excellent computer if you want a small, silent machine that keeps out of your way. If you want a toy to upgrade and play with, it's not so great.
While I'm no expert on Android, I am a developer and I have worked on a pretty major Android app. We found that Android 2.2 and earlier had some bugs in the version of HTTPClient that Android uses, and this bug caused certs from one particular root authority (Verisign, IIRC) to fail. It was a major problem. It was a while ago now, but I think the work-around we went for was to effectively enable untrusted CAs on 2.2 clients. I can happily believe that the apps being talked about here, those with weak SSL, were all modified in this way to work around the Android bug -- the authors probably just made the 'weak-ssl-is-better-than-no-ssl' trade-off and shipped their apps. What else are you realistically going to do?
As it becomes less important to target Android pre-2.3, this particular bug will hopefully become a thing of the past. According to Google, 2.2 is now on 13% of devices, so we're almost at that point. 13% is still a lot though...
I had indeed forgotten about these.
Probably because they never affected me.
Or anyone that I knew.
Because they got blocked by Anti Virus software on windows well before they became epidemic in scope.
And of course none of them bothered linux.
Maybe you have poor memory? These were big news.
I worked on a second-level support desk during the iloveyou outbreak, and a great many companies that we supported were affected. Likewise blaster and codered. I was a programmer by then, but I saw the damage on several servers that weren't firewalled.
Business users, that are locked to a certain platform that only support IE6.
I hear this a lot, and in some (but very few) circumstances it's certainly true. However, mostly it's not. Most internal web apps run just fine on IE7, 8 and 9 too. My feeling is that these businesses don't want to upgrade because the current tool (usually a Dell Pentium 4 with XP) is working just fine. Why would any sane businesses want to spend money replacing something that works perfectly well? Well, you and I know a few good answers to that, but we're not the decision makers here.
BTW, I'm a developer, and I wrote a lot of those apps that originally ran on IE, so I've seen this all the way through. There aren't truly that many apps that are genuinely IE6 only. Most run just fine on newer versions of IE, and often times FF and Chrome too. As a developer, even though I was targeting IE only back in the early 2000s, I actually used Firebird (which then became Firefox) to do most of my testing -- and I don't think I was alone.
Spoken like someone who has never paired a bluetooth keyboard with their tablet/smartphone. If you're typing and you need a keyboard, use a keyboard.
I hope that Slashdot aren't getting paid for that, because if it truly is an advert, it's one of the crummiest adverts I've ever seen.
I mean, I'm pretty up on 'cloud' stuff. I use EC2 extensively. I'm up on Java, I write quite a bit of that stuff. I recognise many of the buzzwords in the post but I don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about or what exactly HP are offering. And I don't care enough about this gap in my knowledge to click any of the links and find out, because I suspect it'll be a waste of time.
Apple use Microsoft's CDN quite extensively, along with theother usual suspects (particularly Akami). It makes sense -- between iTunes and their software downloads/updates they need to transfer a truly vast amount of data every day, and Apple aren't shy about using another service if someone else can do it better. I'm not aware of Apple using any other part of Microsoft's cloud (or any other cloud for that matter) -- e.g., servers, but maybe they do now days. Just as a side note/question, are CDN's considered cloud? Certainly akami pre-dates what we now call clouds, IIRC.
I know you won't like it, and I agree with everything you say and more -- in fact, I'm a programmer, and when I see a problem (especially involving a CSV file) I'll quite often go so far as to write a one-off bespoke program to solve it. But we're at the very edge of the edge cases.
But we're different. Most people want their data to remain in the app they used to create it, because that makes most sense. That means they can find it again. Want to re-print that letter you wrote last year to your electricity company? Great! Just open the app you used to write it and boom, there it is. That's about as complicated as computers need to be for most people, and to be honest, they'll actually get more out of their computers as a result.
Thankfully, complicated desktop operating systems aren't going anywhere soon, so we'll still have our way (Linux and BSD will see to that, thankfully). It just won't be how most people do it.
It's pretty simple really: You open an app, you get a list of your documents that have been created in or imported in to that app. If you get an attachment you want to open, it offers apps that are registered for that file type. There's no browsing of disks or folders. It's up to the individual apps to let you group and sort documents by metadata (which will be tailored to the type of data the app deals in, of course). It works pretty well, even if there are some frustrating limitations.
The cloud part is (or should be) transparent -- you open Pages on one device and create a document. Next time you open Pages on another device, it should be there as if by magic. It's still early days, and they haven't got it right yet, but they're working pretty hard on this stuff.
You can very easily see what they're doing. As geeks, we probably won't like it as much as the way things currently work, but it makes sense for an awful lot of use-cases, and it'll probably help them earn boatloads more money in the next decade or so. It'll also create a good deal of vendor lock-in, if they're successful.
Man, when you put it like that, it that sounds so dull and realistic. Can't you rephrase it to make it more exciting and inflammatory?
It wasn't the way they 'included a browser', it was they way they attempted (and succeeded) to entirely destroy a competitive market by using the thermo-nuclear option of abusing their Windows monopoly.
And it wasn't the way they did it with the web browser, it was the way they did it time and time again (Dr-Dos, OS/2, DiskStacker, WordPerfect, Netware, Netscape, DirectX) and certainly more than that. They even tried to create a proprietary internet (and thankfully failed).
They don't seem so evil these days, but I'm sure they would if they could. Or maybe Ballmer's just a big softy compared to Gates? I don't know, I suspect that the competition in mobile and from Google has really dented their ability to be really evil.
Why not? It's not friction that'll turn a 1 in to a 0, but simple entropy or cosmic rays (seriously). ECC RAM is designed specifically to guard against that kind of problem.
Friction can kill anything that moves -- fans and hard-disks. If a fan dies, either in the PSU, the case or on the CPU, you could end up with a server that crashes and has all kinds of problems. That's why real servers beep incessantly to let you know if a fan is dying.
And software can crash over time. I write software for a living, and a few months ago I had to change a bit of code I wrote in 2005 -- it was broken by a security update Microsoft released in November last year.
Anyway, OP is asking about cheap-skate ways to emulate Microsoft's expensive fail-over clustering options. The only real answer (I can think of) is replication/log shipping and something in the software that detects the fault and enables the fail-over without any on-site technical expertise. But he's going to need to talk to the ISV about that, not us.
Firebird is an open-source embedded database project that was already quite mature when they renamed Pheonix. They didn't threaten to sue, they just asked nicely.
I think I read somewhere that the $100M Microsoft injected would have made little difference to Apple's bottom line/survival, but was an important show of confidance. More important for Apple was the Office deal (and in return Microsoft got IE5 bundled as the default Mac web browser).
Out of that period came my favourite Steve Jobs quote of all time, when he told the Apple faithful at WWDC "for Apple to win, Microsoft don't have to lose". The same is still true today -- even more so -- there's plenty of room for a huge ecosystem of competing products. The constant arguments in blogs and on sites like this about whether Andoid or iOS is winning are futile -- there doesn't need to be one clear winner.
Their will be a lot of snarky "too late" comments today for this news, but it's a sad day when you have to step down from the company you worked so hard to build -- a company that must feel an extension of yourself -- and it must have been a really tough decision for these guys. No doubt they still wanted to prove themselves (and who wouldn't, given their situation?). I feel sorry for them. It's easy to be an armchair CEO, especially when you have hindsight.
They could have sold 10,000 early access/ developer boards at $50 a piece, maybe even doing a 'buy one give one' promotion like the OLPC project. It does kind of defeat the purpose of computers for all, but it'd also helped them guarantee future production...
I suspect that it's actually far cheaper and easier to ship you an assembled board than an unassembled board. Shipping stuff like this over from China in a container is really cheap. Also, to disrupt the manufacturing process and ship a bag of bits would add extra cost because that's actually harder to automate.
If you get the Gert board that they mention (a break-out board that gives you lots of IO options for hardware projects) you do get to assemble that yourself :)
I really do know what you're saying -- I feel the same myself, but I'm not convinced correlation is causation -- I don't see any sites that have less 'trolly' comments than Slashdot, and I'm starting to think it's just me getting older and not actually feeling the same way as the younger generation. Don't forget that a lot of the Slashdot readership started visiting the site in the late 90's, when we were teens ourselves, and our tastes/opinions/priorities have changed so much in that time -- I know that I'm barely the same person I was back then. What I thought was a great discussion 10 years ago might not impress me so much today.
There are definitely always improvements to be made to the comments system, but I've yet to see anything better on the internet. Disqus haven't even tried to fix the problem, nor have Facebook comments, and anything phpBB doesn't stand a chance.
Anyway, I feel for you if you're genuinely being harassed by somebody, that sounds really not much fun. It's also very odd that somebody would do that over such a prolonged period of time. It's a funny old world.
Actually i matured 5 years or so ago, after spending some 10 years in the delusion of thinking that the fields i was in were more 'elite' than the others
Commendable.
human resources ......... they constitute a total fantasy land in themselves.
Oh, so there are still /some/ people who aren't quite as elite as us ;)
because too many discussions here become giant fanboi circle jerks with everyone that parrots groupthink going up
Every time I see the word 'fanboi' or the phrase 'circle jerk' I lose a bit of faith in the site I'm on. Stop it. Learn to use grown up words and make your point more rationally. I know you're annoyed that you have a stalker, but surely they'll get bored soon enough -- maybe now the school holidays are over. I also suspect it's a personal grudge, rather than a FOSS thing.
As for your other point, you must understand that we all miss the good old days -- but that has been the case for thousands (if not millions) of years. Not only that, but group think is something you have to learn to accept, no matter how annoyed it makes you. Maybe those mod-rules you point out exist purely because that's how the majority of people feel? That's the basis of democracy. Slashdot still, after all these years, somehow manages to see discussions with contrary views and actual debate. For that we should be thankful (though obviously not too thankful -- especially with the ever increasingly 'sensational' stories that seem to be appearing).
If somebody gave you a detailed spec for software that they found useful, you'd be surprised at just what you can achieve already. Useful software doesn't have to be highly complicated, it might just be a console app for fetching data from a remote feed and storing it in a database. Useful software is useful. You clearly have the right aspirations, you just need to find the purpose. Once you complete your first project it kind of just snowballs as you grow in confidence and ability.
And there are plenty of entry level jobs. If you speak to those companies looking for 3-5 years and say you're willing to work on a trial basis to prove yourself, you'd be amazed at how willing they are to give you a job. They will value your eagerness/ambition just as highly as they value 3-5 years experience (which everyone knows actually means nothing anyway).
If you have a developer doing that, at least it shows they are thinking about the problem. In my experience, that self awareness is a good sign -- they are likely to continue improving the code they write, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that in another 12 months to find that they were writing compact AND maintainable code.
If you were to go back and look at the code you wrote years ago, when you were just starting out, would it be easily maintainable now? I doubt it. My early code certainly wouldn't. It makes me cringe just thinking about some of the hacks I did to compact my code down (often times involving bit fields...). Ugh.
Your problem with CSS appears to be that you aren't familiar enough with it to use it effectively. That's expected, and the same would be true for any sufficiently complicated system. Of course CSS has its faults, and of course there are alternative options that might have worked better, but it doesn't matter, because CSS works and is good enough. That is all that was required of it, and it is why it is used. As it happens, I'm not aware of any other layout system that gives you the power of CSS and HTML yet remains simple.
Maybe it's easier for me, because I started programming web-centric software at about the time CSS arrived, so I've lived through the evolution and it seems perfectly natural to me. That said, I have the same problem moving to any new language -- it takes me at least a few months of messing around on little side projects before I'm comfortable enough to take on a real project, and then at least another 6 months before I feel I am truly proficient. You seem to want to skip all of that and go straight to mastery, and are blaming the system/technology because you can't.
Thanks -- somebody else also pointed out the link that gets shown next to the search results (and it points to the same page you linked). I should have seen that.
I agree with your sentiment, they do deserve time to grow in to something bigger -- I wonder if they will ever have the resources to build their own index though. It looks like the decision to use Bing is purely technical/engineering (they need cheap search results and there aren't many places to get them -- I know from experience that the Google API is very restrictive) so I can understand that, even if Bing results are very poor versus Google.
Re-reading my original comment, I think I was a bit harsh. I guess I was just surprised at the association with Microsoft. When you're talking about a company built entirely on privacy, open-ness and trust, Microsoft aren't the first people that spring to mind.