Objective-C was effectively an Apple thing only, as is Swift now. Technically they could be used on other platforms but nobody but a few academics did. Java and the API tied into Android are pretty locked down there. Microsoft tried and tried to make.net the defacto Windows language. But I just code mostly in C++ and use various SDKs to get around everything OS specific. Mostly works for me. Occasionally I have do dive in and do an Objective-C or Java thing and then wrap it in C++.
But as long as I can keep coding in C++ on any given platform I am not trapped on that platform. If Apple screws the pooch in the long term, then all my Android portable code is perfectly happy. Or if Tizen takes off then, again, I am still good.
So while I sit here on my desktop that I configured exactly as I wanted I only have a minor concern that I will someday end up cut off. To me the simple fallback position is Linux. But for now Microsoft has put on a major effort to make Windows the center of a cross platform universe, thus I am completely safe. I think that MS sees what it tried to do and realizes that if it keeps things cross platform they can lock out companies like Apple or Google from trapping people in their little ecosystems. Microsoft won't "Win" but they will prevent the others from forcing them to lose.
No more C++ and all those silly libraries, no more Python and the way too convenient coding there and its crazy tie-ins with stats and ML libraries. I want something that is poorly documented, celebrated only in a small academic circle, and makes me do everything from scratch and have little access to the underlying OS.
Screw productivity and ever finishing a damn thing.
In Canada we have a similar and much worse program called the Temporary Foreign worker program. I want these assholes gone. They are nasty to deal with as their cultures and training are complete shit. They are working like slaves, driving wages down, and generally are giving unethical companies that hire them a leg up over good solid companies. Maybe some of them are nice people but I would send them all home tonight.
Luckily they are mostly in places like Tim Hortons, but the drag is that they are pretty much ending the ability for students to get even crap jobs and quadrupling the competition among students for those jobs that can't seem to get TFWs. This is great, a whole generation of young people who can't get even onto the bottom rung of the ladder of life.
Trudeau is a huge disappointment as I had a vague hope that he might erase this policy since it was a conservative one. My one hope with Trudeau is that he pisses people off so much that we elect our own Trump who won't feel one bit bad sending these people back to the third world hellholes they came from to suck the vitality out of our country.
People keep crapping on Trump over and over, and he certainly seems to be the human version of a botched boob job, but if he identifies a whole bunch of places where the emperor has no clothes and ends these monstrous policies then good for him. Silicon valley hated that they actually had to pay competitive wages while raking in obscene amounts of money. You have top companies with billions in profits not paying the people who make it happen enough to live in SF, WTF?
I love that Silicon Valley supported Hillary and now have been completely shut out of the White House. Best day in a very long time. I hope he burns the lot of them. Forces them to pay taxes, forces them to pay good salaries, and maybe figures out that the bunch of them are violating our privacy in ways that make 1984 look like a peeping Tom.
There is something wrong with so many C level executives when it comes to giving people other than C level executives money. Not that the thieves deserve it in this case, but quite simply those laptops must be worth at least a million or more to get back.
Even when crime isn't involved I have seen companies self destruct rather than pay engineers what they are worth. I can name specifically two companies where they had a person with 3D skills that were in the top 1% of the top 1%. They were paying him something under 50K while the execs at the company took around 200k each (4 of them). So he goes off to a conference (that when they found out what he was doing on his vacation they pretty much told him that there would be no job waiting if he went) and gets a crap tonne of job offers. The one he took had a damn good salary plus bonuses for performance that were measurable and could easily double his salary. The company he worked for offered to come close to the salary but said no way to the bonus. Needless to say they were losing him even if they matched the salary as he was so pissed off for being underpaid. Company died less than a year later as they couldn't meet the quality and other requirements in a few contracts that he had been doing.
Another case resulted in an engineering company having to have an engineer with a very specific qualification. The engineer went and got the qualification on his own. Then the engineer left the company with a small group of other "junior" engineers and bid against their old company on the contract that had been coming up that required they have an engineer with that qualification. The old company lost their shit when they realized that they were losing a crazy critical contract to someone they had felt they could abuse and barely pay. The key was that he had tried and tried to get the company to pay for the training for the certification but instead chose to send one of the partner engineers instead along with his wife in first class style months before his retirement. But then medical issues prevented him from going. This junior engineer just took vacation, stayed in crap hotels, and got certified. Again to massive layoffs at the old company because that contract had been a "sure thing".
So where this company is offering 25K to get their product back, it just tells me that they don't understand the value that other people have (even if it is extortionate) and probably pay their engineers shit pay. Thus I hope their product is ripped off 100 ways from Sunday.
Have spent, am spending, and probably will spend a good chunk of my career: trying to convince people not to use silver bullets, to stop using the silver bullet, or cleaning up after their silver bullet has given everyone lead poisoning.
My present fight: Sencha. What a bleak pile of silver coated excrement that product is. You will be 60% in the first 10% of your project. But you will never ever get past about 70% done unless you allow your definition of done to become very fuzzy. The key to their success is that if you look at any given problem that a team might encounter with Sencha there is a Sencha solution that looks good on the surface; except that in the context it was a Sencha workaround that required the creation of the problem in the first place; thus solving it becomes impossible without breaking something else. Thus the solution to any given problem soon becomes mutually exclusive to actual forward progress.
It becomes the scenario you are stuck in the mud and after spinning your tires for a while forward, some "expert" will suggest reverse. Except that the only real result will be spraying mud in another direction.
I just give up arguing with Sencha religious zealots who then defend many of its major defects as virtues. For instance there is only one real look and feel and that is from Windows circa 1995. Zealots will say that this is what most customers are comfortable with and it saves development teams from having to make design decisions. Or if you point out that it is slow as crap running uphill, they will say, "Any enterprise user will have new hardware."
I wish there was a place where I could place long term bets on the internet. I would be willing to make a 20 year bet that this thing will be a useless cracked pile of garbage in 20 years.
I pretty much put the same ratio of queries into google to the time I am using it. The question would be how well my queries can be connected to my language. If I am using Python for the first time in a while my query will be something like "Connect to mysql with Python" but with C++ it will typically be a copy and paste of some strange linking error. Can that copy and paste be connected to C++?
If my later query isn't being connected to C++ then the typically more experienced programmers aren't being properly counted and they are the ones doing the "real" programming of things that make the world go around. I love parts of python, I love parts of PHP, I use them for some small things. But for my "real" work that if not done would have a measurable economic impact it is C++ all the way.
When I hear someone blah blahing about either of those languages in a serious way, I just think, "Good luck finishing any project bigger than a year end university project." Then good luck when both of those languages slip into obscurity. And good luck finding experienced programmers in either of those languages. And good luck finding commodity tools for either of those languages like Coverity.
I really hope that Java continues to thrive. There is a certain type of pedantic bureaucratic programmer that finds a happy home in Java. I really don't want them leaving that steaming rathole and bringing their stink into other languages. Someone mentioned that they would go to C# but that is more of a language for those who have no souls and are willing to let MS do their thinking for them. Java allows them to be all self-righteous while the rest of us can completely ignore them. When I see the words JVM I just walk away in the same way that I wouldn't buy a car made in Russia.
C is by far not the worst of them but there are languages that just seem to be asshole magnets. Pretty much no matter what your coding/commenting style is, any mostly C programmer will not only try to tell you that you are wrong but will try to get you fired along the way. This is the sort of thing that really puts off new programmers.
Just to make C people feel a little better, they are saints compared to anyone who claims to be a CSS programmer (are they seriously claiming to be programmers) or the worst of the worst of the worst, PHP framework evangelists. That portion of the PHP language world attracts assholes like black holes attract light.
So while many of the comments here mention the technical virtues of this or that language, I find that culture is something that can make or break a language. For instance C++ is just now getting over the hump that was the pile of assholes who wanted to template the shit out of everything. I am literally talking about people who thought was rational that ints be turned into objects and never use the "primitive" datatypes. That whole generation of assholes must have been hunted down and boiled in acid as they seemed to have largely vanished from popular C++ culture. Hence C++ is now having a resurgence with their vanishing.
Here is the simple reason. I had a Mac Pro (the garbage can) and it was pretty kick ass. But it had a few issues. One is that I couldn't really upgrade it, another is that it had ATI video cards (I now need CUDA), and three was that if anything broke in it the whole thing was going to be a financial nightmare to fix.
So I spent 2.5k on a Windows desktop where no one part is terribly expensive, I get a 1TB SSD plus massive HD, I get a crazy nVidia card, I get a damn good processor, and most importantly I get Visual Studio which is hands down the best C++ IDE out there and getting better by the day.
Everything isn't smelling of roses. The machine is Ugly, installing development bits such as Qt is just that little bit harder than in a BSD based system, and I have to put up with some stupid windows/microsoft shit. (WTF was candy crush doing on a Windows Pro default installation?)
But nearly every issue that Windows had a decade ago has been dealt with; things such as speed and reliability are pretty well on par with Apple's OS. But then there are the little things that make me so much happier with my new machine. When I first got my MP 2013 I could hook up 3 HDMI monitors with no issue. Then an OS upgrade came along and limited this to 2 monitors. So I got a USB hdmi thing which got my 3rd monitor back but that little bastard uses 17% CPU much of the time and is a little weird. With my new Windows machine, I can have 4 HDMI monitors no problem and maybe 6. Plus I could always tuck in a special video card or two and get this up to 16 or more monitors if I so needed. But 3 is enough for now and thus is better than my MP 2013 with its 2.
Now I could have gone up to 6 monitors on the apple if I were able to get thunderbolt monitors but one look at the sticker price puts that idea away.
So I am not crapping on Apple and saying that Windows is the best, but for my purposes of developing apps on iOS, android, windows desktop, and Linux servers; windows completely rocks and just doesn't get in my way. Apple was getting in my way more and more. XCode is OK, but I was fighting with it more and more to get things to work such as certain libraries and whatnot. It wasn't that I couldn't get things done but that I was wasting a whole lot of time on non-productive configuration.
Once in a while I will look at someone's macbook pro with envy, but there is a good chance I will never go back to apple again. They will really need to step up their game for developers if they want me back. Telling me to choose the Swift language is not one of them.
This edifice to corruption and terrible engineering could better be called a poor quality concrete, low quality steel, leaky, pretend solution to a problem that will last for millennia.
My bank outsourced to an indian call center and the next time I called them for something I asked where I was calling. The guy evaded my questions so I dropped my account of 20+ years to a bank that uses local people. I have to wait a tiny bit longer for them to answer but they actually answer my questions. So long CIBC.
This makes no sense. I would be royally ticked as a defrauded investor that they were spending one more cent. I would demand my money back. The woman running it had better not be getting one of the pennies left over.
One of the key changes that took place in some version of windows since I stopped using windows was that I can use the / for a directory path separator. With this change a huge amount of what I develop for linux can now be first made on Windows and then ported. It is so so so much easier to develop C++ for windows first, then fight with linux after.
I use Linux for servers extensively, and Windows server doesn't stand a chance. But I am sick of everything on Linux being a fight. Visual Studio just works. Intelisense, just works, compiling, just works. Apps install and work.
yum and apt-get made installing libraries quite a bit easier, but a huge difference is that while the OS in linux often depended upon certain libraries being certain versions. Windows usually doesn't give a crap as to what Qt I have installed. Thus I install the one that I want and not worry about breaking the OS itself.
Wow, ExtJS brought all development to a complete multi year halt. In the first few months ExtJS development is way way way faster than any other framework out there. But after about 6 months all you are doing is fighting with the framework. Just an endless knifefight. Any single problem could be solved against the base instlall of ExtJS but what happens is that you have to develop workaround after workaround to make the system snap into place for any given need. Those workarounds then make future "easy" changes impossibly hard.
So you might have something as simple as wanting to put the focus on a login username. If you had just done the page as your first round and thought of that then, like everything with ExtJS, a little weird but fairly easy. If you already have fought with sencha to make other things happen on the login page (say a filtered twitter feed) then ExtJS is probably broken 8 ways from sunday and you can't set a focus worth a damn.
Save yourself a world of pain and just use basic javascript combined with either simple single function libraries, or worst case scenario use a framework that won't blow up your company like react or polymer. Yes, you won't be a showoff in the first few weeks of development like you could with ExtJS, but you won't blow up your company when you can't finish the project until you realize that it can only be done by throwing out ExtJS.And if you get 5 or 6 people in the company who get training by ExtJS, good luck cutting through her bullshit about how ExtJS is the best thing ever even though the project is now 18 months late.
Whenever I see a "battery" that is the size of a postage stamp, I scream BULLSHIT at the screen. Not once have I seen a postage stamp sized battery technology announcement turn into a real battery. I want a battery that does something "measurable". This is very very very easy to do an experiment that any observer can do some mental math and say, "whoa".
For instance. Heat 1 liter of water from room temperature to boiling. Then we can look at the battery in question and know pretty much its energy density. Then charge it in short order, and heat up another liter.
Short of out an out fraud there is no way to really mistake what energy it takes to raise one liter from 20 to say 99 degrees. Converting electricity into heat is quite efficient. Unless it is very very slow, heating up the water won't lose much of the energy along the way. Thus we can look at something and say, Ohhh it has over X Watt Hours of capacity. Cool. Then we can look at the volume and even approximate the energy density. So if it takes a battery the size of a coin cell to heat up 1 liter of water by 80 degrees then WOW. If it takes a battery the size of a car battery to do it, then not very good.
I would bump that up to 100%. The only times I have used Oracle in my career (which would be about 50 times) was when a client said something stupid like, "We are an Oracle House, do you use Oracle?" Then after I would swallow my vomit, I would show them a list of all the clients where I used Oracle.
Not once in my entire life have I even thought, "Oracle would be best for this." It would be like looking at my flowers in the garden and thinking, "They would grow better if I threw butter at them."
If you look at leading companies at every level of the spectrum with various data needs, none of the leaders use Oracle. Visa, Facebook, Google, etc. I don't know of any of the profitable airlines. I don't know of any of the leading banks. I have never seen Oracle in a viable finance company.
The pattern of Oracle buyers seems to be companies that want to pretend they are big. So small chains of financial advisers, franchises that are desperate to grow, small time phone companies, stupid governments. It like those fools who think that by having the fanciest Visa card that they are somebodies. No you are just a fool who paid too much for what everyone else gets for far far far less.
Piling up is not the half of dealing with Oracle. I would have my local used car dealership blindly handle my personal finances before I would deal with an Oracle sales person again.
This is like the old BS about "Nobody was ever fired for using IBM" well Oracle is about the same as all the rest. The only time any of the major DBs lose data is during some crazy edge case. Server A was on fire, Server B had a HD failure on the raid and a bug in the raid slowed the whole system to a crawl, and C it was superbowl night and this was a NFL score keeping site.
When I do mission critical data storage, I don't just kind of throw it into any DB and hope for the best. There are logs, logs, and more logs that can be used to rebuild the datastore. There are checksums, hashes, etc. that verify that things have remained as they should be, and as truly mission critical gets reached, there are whole other systems, using whole other architectures that do the same thing and then verify the results of the primary system.
I have literally seen no realiablity difference between Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, and even SQLite. Data goes in, and data comes out. If you work near the edges of any of them, then prepare to get burned. If you stay in the happy zone then things just work. To use your example of a bank, it isn't a problem to use hardware and specifications that are multiples of what is needed, keeping everything boring and safe.
If I were trying to run my banking DB from a beaglebone storing on an SD card, then I would recommend everyone switch banks regardless of DB.
I can't say just how much I hate MongoDB. I love NoSQL but MongoDB is made up of the most arrogant assholes to have walked the internet. Maybe Twitter was more Arrogant but I dealt with twitter less. Oracle will rip you wallet out through your asshole but at least the DB is all about just shoving data in, and taking data out. Not telling you that you should alphabetize your fields or some OCD shit that is all about telling me how to do my job.
MongoDB makes all this noise about how it is about freedom. It is like some kind of North Korean version of Freedom. Freedom to do things exactly as they have specified, and if you stray from the holy path then you are wrong and will be told you are wrong by everyone from MongoDB on every forum ever combined with the DB saying that you are wrong wrong wrong.
My dream is that MongoDB is on the ropes and that is why they are pulling this MBA shit. With any luck two things will happen. First is that the organization behind MongoDB goes completely under. But that some of the actual developers fork it, fix it, and make what was fundamentally a good idea, actually become a product that I or any developer with a modicum of talent would use.
Slashdot Mirror
Objective-C was effectively an Apple thing only, as is Swift now. Technically they could be used on other platforms but nobody but a few academics did. Java and the API tied into Android are pretty locked down there. Microsoft tried and tried to make .net the defacto Windows language. But I just code mostly in C++ and use various SDKs to get around everything OS specific. Mostly works for me. Occasionally I have do dive in and do an Objective-C or Java thing and then wrap it in C++.
But as long as I can keep coding in C++ on any given platform I am not trapped on that platform. If Apple screws the pooch in the long term, then all my Android portable code is perfectly happy. Or if Tizen takes off then, again, I am still good.
So while I sit here on my desktop that I configured exactly as I wanted I only have a minor concern that I will someday end up cut off. To me the simple fallback position is Linux. But for now Microsoft has put on a major effort to make Windows the center of a cross platform universe, thus I am completely safe. I think that MS sees what it tried to do and realizes that if it keeps things cross platform they can lock out companies like Apple or Google from trapping people in their little ecosystems. Microsoft won't "Win" but they will prevent the others from forcing them to lose.
No more C++ and all those silly libraries, no more Python and the way too convenient coding there and its crazy tie-ins with stats and ML libraries. I want something that is poorly documented, celebrated only in a small academic circle, and makes me do everything from scratch and have little access to the underlying OS.
Screw productivity and ever finishing a damn thing.
In Canada we have a similar and much worse program called the Temporary Foreign worker program. I want these assholes gone. They are nasty to deal with as their cultures and training are complete shit. They are working like slaves, driving wages down, and generally are giving unethical companies that hire them a leg up over good solid companies. Maybe some of them are nice people but I would send them all home tonight.
Luckily they are mostly in places like Tim Hortons, but the drag is that they are pretty much ending the ability for students to get even crap jobs and quadrupling the competition among students for those jobs that can't seem to get TFWs. This is great, a whole generation of young people who can't get even onto the bottom rung of the ladder of life.
Trudeau is a huge disappointment as I had a vague hope that he might erase this policy since it was a conservative one. My one hope with Trudeau is that he pisses people off so much that we elect our own Trump who won't feel one bit bad sending these people back to the third world hellholes they came from to suck the vitality out of our country.
People keep crapping on Trump over and over, and he certainly seems to be the human version of a botched boob job, but if he identifies a whole bunch of places where the emperor has no clothes and ends these monstrous policies then good for him. Silicon valley hated that they actually had to pay competitive wages while raking in obscene amounts of money. You have top companies with billions in profits not paying the people who make it happen enough to live in SF, WTF?
I love that Silicon Valley supported Hillary and now have been completely shut out of the White House. Best day in a very long time. I hope he burns the lot of them. Forces them to pay taxes, forces them to pay good salaries, and maybe figures out that the bunch of them are violating our privacy in ways that make 1984 look like a peeping Tom.
There is something wrong with so many C level executives when it comes to giving people other than C level executives money. Not that the thieves deserve it in this case, but quite simply those laptops must be worth at least a million or more to get back.
Even when crime isn't involved I have seen companies self destruct rather than pay engineers what they are worth. I can name specifically two companies where they had a person with 3D skills that were in the top 1% of the top 1%. They were paying him something under 50K while the execs at the company took around 200k each (4 of them). So he goes off to a conference (that when they found out what he was doing on his vacation they pretty much told him that there would be no job waiting if he went) and gets a crap tonne of job offers. The one he took had a damn good salary plus bonuses for performance that were measurable and could easily double his salary. The company he worked for offered to come close to the salary but said no way to the bonus. Needless to say they were losing him even if they matched the salary as he was so pissed off for being underpaid. Company died less than a year later as they couldn't meet the quality and other requirements in a few contracts that he had been doing.
Another case resulted in an engineering company having to have an engineer with a very specific qualification. The engineer went and got the qualification on his own. Then the engineer left the company with a small group of other "junior" engineers and bid against their old company on the contract that had been coming up that required they have an engineer with that qualification. The old company lost their shit when they realized that they were losing a crazy critical contract to someone they had felt they could abuse and barely pay. The key was that he had tried and tried to get the company to pay for the training for the certification but instead chose to send one of the partner engineers instead along with his wife in first class style months before his retirement. But then medical issues prevented him from going. This junior engineer just took vacation, stayed in crap hotels, and got certified. Again to massive layoffs at the old company because that contract had been a "sure thing".
So where this company is offering 25K to get their product back, it just tells me that they don't understand the value that other people have (even if it is extortionate) and probably pay their engineers shit pay. Thus I hope their product is ripped off 100 ways from Sunday.
Have spent, am spending, and probably will spend a good chunk of my career: trying to convince people not to use silver bullets, to stop using the silver bullet, or cleaning up after their silver bullet has given everyone lead poisoning.
My present fight: Sencha. What a bleak pile of silver coated excrement that product is. You will be 60% in the first 10% of your project. But you will never ever get past about 70% done unless you allow your definition of done to become very fuzzy. The key to their success is that if you look at any given problem that a team might encounter with Sencha there is a Sencha solution that looks good on the surface; except that in the context it was a Sencha workaround that required the creation of the problem in the first place; thus solving it becomes impossible without breaking something else. Thus the solution to any given problem soon becomes mutually exclusive to actual forward progress.
It becomes the scenario you are stuck in the mud and after spinning your tires for a while forward, some "expert" will suggest reverse. Except that the only real result will be spraying mud in another direction.
I just give up arguing with Sencha religious zealots who then defend many of its major defects as virtues. For instance there is only one real look and feel and that is from Windows circa 1995. Zealots will say that this is what most customers are comfortable with and it saves development teams from having to make design decisions. Or if you point out that it is slow as crap running uphill, they will say, "Any enterprise user will have new hardware."
I don't.
I wish there was a place where I could place long term bets on the internet. I would be willing to make a 20 year bet that this thing will be a useless cracked pile of garbage in 20 years.
I pretty much put the same ratio of queries into google to the time I am using it. The question would be how well my queries can be connected to my language. If I am using Python for the first time in a while my query will be something like "Connect to mysql with Python" but with C++ it will typically be a copy and paste of some strange linking error. Can that copy and paste be connected to C++?
If my later query isn't being connected to C++ then the typically more experienced programmers aren't being properly counted and they are the ones doing the "real" programming of things that make the world go around. I love parts of python, I love parts of PHP, I use them for some small things. But for my "real" work that if not done would have a measurable economic impact it is C++ all the way.
When I hear someone blah blahing about either of those languages in a serious way, I just think, "Good luck finishing any project bigger than a year end university project." Then good luck when both of those languages slip into obscurity. And good luck finding experienced programmers in either of those languages. And good luck finding commodity tools for either of those languages like Coverity.
I really hope that Java continues to thrive. There is a certain type of pedantic bureaucratic programmer that finds a happy home in Java. I really don't want them leaving that steaming rathole and bringing their stink into other languages. Someone mentioned that they would go to C# but that is more of a language for those who have no souls and are willing to let MS do their thinking for them. Java allows them to be all self-righteous while the rest of us can completely ignore them. When I see the words JVM I just walk away in the same way that I wouldn't buy a car made in Russia.
C is by far not the worst of them but there are languages that just seem to be asshole magnets. Pretty much no matter what your coding/commenting style is, any mostly C programmer will not only try to tell you that you are wrong but will try to get you fired along the way. This is the sort of thing that really puts off new programmers.
Just to make C people feel a little better, they are saints compared to anyone who claims to be a CSS programmer (are they seriously claiming to be programmers) or the worst of the worst of the worst, PHP framework evangelists. That portion of the PHP language world attracts assholes like black holes attract light.
So while many of the comments here mention the technical virtues of this or that language, I find that culture is something that can make or break a language. For instance C++ is just now getting over the hump that was the pile of assholes who wanted to template the shit out of everything. I am literally talking about people who thought was rational that ints be turned into objects and never use the "primitive" datatypes. That whole generation of assholes must have been hunted down and boiled in acid as they seemed to have largely vanished from popular C++ culture. Hence C++ is now having a resurgence with their vanishing.
Here is the simple reason. I had a Mac Pro (the garbage can) and it was pretty kick ass. But it had a few issues. One is that I couldn't really upgrade it, another is that it had ATI video cards (I now need CUDA), and three was that if anything broke in it the whole thing was going to be a financial nightmare to fix.
So I spent 2.5k on a Windows desktop where no one part is terribly expensive, I get a 1TB SSD plus massive HD, I get a crazy nVidia card, I get a damn good processor, and most importantly I get Visual Studio which is hands down the best C++ IDE out there and getting better by the day.
Everything isn't smelling of roses. The machine is Ugly, installing development bits such as Qt is just that little bit harder than in a BSD based system, and I have to put up with some stupid windows/microsoft shit. (WTF was candy crush doing on a Windows Pro default installation?)
But nearly every issue that Windows had a decade ago has been dealt with; things such as speed and reliability are pretty well on par with Apple's OS. But then there are the little things that make me so much happier with my new machine. When I first got my MP 2013 I could hook up 3 HDMI monitors with no issue. Then an OS upgrade came along and limited this to 2 monitors. So I got a USB hdmi thing which got my 3rd monitor back but that little bastard uses 17% CPU much of the time and is a little weird. With my new Windows machine, I can have 4 HDMI monitors no problem and maybe 6. Plus I could always tuck in a special video card or two and get this up to 16 or more monitors if I so needed. But 3 is enough for now and thus is better than my MP 2013 with its 2.
Now I could have gone up to 6 monitors on the apple if I were able to get thunderbolt monitors but one look at the sticker price puts that idea away.
So I am not crapping on Apple and saying that Windows is the best, but for my purposes of developing apps on iOS, android, windows desktop, and Linux servers; windows completely rocks and just doesn't get in my way. Apple was getting in my way more and more. XCode is OK, but I was fighting with it more and more to get things to work such as certain libraries and whatnot. It wasn't that I couldn't get things done but that I was wasting a whole lot of time on non-productive configuration.
Once in a while I will look at someone's macbook pro with envy, but there is a good chance I will never go back to apple again. They will really need to step up their game for developers if they want me back. Telling me to choose the Swift language is not one of them.
This edifice to corruption and terrible engineering could better be called a poor quality concrete, low quality steel, leaky, pretend solution to a problem that will last for millennia.
My bank outsourced to an indian call center and the next time I called them for something I asked where I was calling. The guy evaded my questions so I dropped my account of 20+ years to a bank that uses local people. I have to wait a tiny bit longer for them to answer but they actually answer my questions. So long CIBC.
This makes no sense. I would be royally ticked as a defrauded investor that they were spending one more cent. I would demand my money back. The woman running it had better not be getting one of the pennies left over.
Good looking? Maybe to someone who was in a coma since windows 95 was fresh.
One of the key changes that took place in some version of windows since I stopped using windows was that I can use the / for a directory path separator. With this change a huge amount of what I develop for linux can now be first made on Windows and then ported. It is so so so much easier to develop C++ for windows first, then fight with linux after.
I use Linux for servers extensively, and Windows server doesn't stand a chance. But I am sick of everything on Linux being a fight. Visual Studio just works. Intelisense, just works, compiling, just works. Apps install and work. yum and apt-get made installing libraries quite a bit easier, but a huge difference is that while the OS in linux often depended upon certain libraries being certain versions. Windows usually doesn't give a crap as to what Qt I have installed. Thus I install the one that I want and not worry about breaking the OS itself.
Wow, ExtJS brought all development to a complete multi year halt. In the first few months ExtJS development is way way way faster than any other framework out there. But after about 6 months all you are doing is fighting with the framework. Just an endless knifefight. Any single problem could be solved against the base instlall of ExtJS but what happens is that you have to develop workaround after workaround to make the system snap into place for any given need. Those workarounds then make future "easy" changes impossibly hard.
So you might have something as simple as wanting to put the focus on a login username. If you had just done the page as your first round and thought of that then, like everything with ExtJS, a little weird but fairly easy. If you already have fought with sencha to make other things happen on the login page (say a filtered twitter feed) then ExtJS is probably broken 8 ways from sunday and you can't set a focus worth a damn.
Save yourself a world of pain and just use basic javascript combined with either simple single function libraries, or worst case scenario use a framework that won't blow up your company like react or polymer. Yes, you won't be a showoff in the first few weeks of development like you could with ExtJS, but you won't blow up your company when you can't finish the project until you realize that it can only be done by throwing out ExtJS.And if you get 5 or 6 people in the company who get training by ExtJS, good luck cutting through her bullshit about how ExtJS is the best thing ever even though the project is now 18 months late.
Whenever I see a "battery" that is the size of a postage stamp, I scream BULLSHIT at the screen. Not once have I seen a postage stamp sized battery technology announcement turn into a real battery. I want a battery that does something "measurable". This is very very very easy to do an experiment that any observer can do some mental math and say, "whoa".
For instance. Heat 1 liter of water from room temperature to boiling. Then we can look at the battery in question and know pretty much its energy density. Then charge it in short order, and heat up another liter.
Short of out an out fraud there is no way to really mistake what energy it takes to raise one liter from 20 to say 99 degrees. Converting electricity into heat is quite efficient. Unless it is very very slow, heating up the water won't lose much of the energy along the way. Thus we can look at something and say, Ohhh it has over X Watt Hours of capacity. Cool. Then we can look at the volume and even approximate the energy density. So if it takes a battery the size of a coin cell to heat up 1 liter of water by 80 degrees then WOW. If it takes a battery the size of a car battery to do it, then not very good.
I would bump that up to 100%. The only times I have used Oracle in my career (which would be about 50 times) was when a client said something stupid like, "We are an Oracle House, do you use Oracle?" Then after I would swallow my vomit, I would show them a list of all the clients where I used Oracle.
Not once in my entire life have I even thought, "Oracle would be best for this." It would be like looking at my flowers in the garden and thinking, "They would grow better if I threw butter at them."
If you look at leading companies at every level of the spectrum with various data needs, none of the leaders use Oracle. Visa, Facebook, Google, etc. I don't know of any of the profitable airlines. I don't know of any of the leading banks. I have never seen Oracle in a viable finance company.
The pattern of Oracle buyers seems to be companies that want to pretend they are big. So small chains of financial advisers, franchises that are desperate to grow, small time phone companies, stupid governments. It like those fools who think that by having the fanciest Visa card that they are somebodies. No you are just a fool who paid too much for what everyone else gets for far far far less.
I say fu Oracle, every time I use Virtualbox. I has bugs but it does what I want. I find that VMWare molests my machine in ways that make me unhappy.
Piling up is not the half of dealing with Oracle. I would have my local used car dealership blindly handle my personal finances before I would deal with an Oracle sales person again.
MongoDB isn't challenging my team of monkeys writing the data into sand on a beach.
This is like the old BS about "Nobody was ever fired for using IBM" well Oracle is about the same as all the rest. The only time any of the major DBs lose data is during some crazy edge case. Server A was on fire, Server B had a HD failure on the raid and a bug in the raid slowed the whole system to a crawl, and C it was superbowl night and this was a NFL score keeping site.
When I do mission critical data storage, I don't just kind of throw it into any DB and hope for the best. There are logs, logs, and more logs that can be used to rebuild the datastore. There are checksums, hashes, etc. that verify that things have remained as they should be, and as truly mission critical gets reached, there are whole other systems, using whole other architectures that do the same thing and then verify the results of the primary system.
I have literally seen no realiablity difference between Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, and even SQLite. Data goes in, and data comes out. If you work near the edges of any of them, then prepare to get burned. If you stay in the happy zone then things just work. To use your example of a bank, it isn't a problem to use hardware and specifications that are multiples of what is needed, keeping everything boring and safe.
If I were trying to run my banking DB from a beaglebone storing on an SD card, then I would recommend everyone switch banks regardless of DB.
I can't say just how much I hate MongoDB. I love NoSQL but MongoDB is made up of the most arrogant assholes to have walked the internet. Maybe Twitter was more Arrogant but I dealt with twitter less. Oracle will rip you wallet out through your asshole but at least the DB is all about just shoving data in, and taking data out. Not telling you that you should alphabetize your fields or some OCD shit that is all about telling me how to do my job.
MongoDB makes all this noise about how it is about freedom. It is like some kind of North Korean version of Freedom. Freedom to do things exactly as they have specified, and if you stray from the holy path then you are wrong and will be told you are wrong by everyone from MongoDB on every forum ever combined with the DB saying that you are wrong wrong wrong.
My dream is that MongoDB is on the ropes and that is why they are pulling this MBA shit. With any luck two things will happen. First is that the organization behind MongoDB goes completely under. But that some of the actual developers fork it, fix it, and make what was fundamentally a good idea, actually become a product that I or any developer with a modicum of talent would use.