A lot of people don't realize that Excel is sometimes a political choice for software development.
The very fact that Excel is considered a desktop application allows departments to get away (not necessarily rightly so) with creating applications in Excel without having to go through as many approval channels.
The fact that Excel has an IDE that lets you do many of the things you can do in VB allows you to do sophisticated application programming that can slip under the nose of some bureaucrats.
I spent a couple of years doing Excel programming after doing "Enterprise" development. It paid the same as my previous work, and for my client, Excel was the platform of choice, simply because the development effort didn't require the involvement of the IT department and its associated red tape. Once I got accustomed to the fact that I could do anything that I could do in a normal development platform, I quickly got over the fact that I was doing Excel work. I used to snicker at the thought of doing Excel and Access work before. But business logic is business logic, so I guess it doesn't really matter what platform you're working on.
Obviously Excel isn't the programmer's first choice, but it is a capable platform. The business reasons for using Excel as a development platform may be misguided, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't use the same practices that you would use to write anything in any other dev platform. I would think that the goal of the reviewed book is to ensure that.
Sure the G5 has only gotten a 35% increase, but that's still better than Intel.
Yeah, but x86 dual chip/cores are here. Now. AMD dual cores are just about here. The fact that Apple can get away with murder on the CPU front is somewhat amusing. At least I can get a desktop CPU that will burn a hole in my crotch in Windoze. I don't even have that option with a PowerBook.
From my experience with my Mac Mini, Macs need every ounce of speed increase they can get just to be usable. I don't actually think my Mac mini is that slow from a CPU perspective, but damn, those software engineers at Apple know how to make a pig out of it. iPhoto is a huge pig, and the OS just doesn't feel as snappy as my Win2k box running on an older P4. Heck, even my P3 felt faster when I was clicking around. The odd thing is that processing (i.e. running a filter on an image) seems to be about the same speed as my wintel box. That leaves me wondering if the Mac only feels slow because it's optimized for ease of use instead of speed.
IIRC, when the G5 was released, The Steve said that 3GHZ chips would be available within 12 months. It's been almost 24 months, and we're still < 3.0 GHz. Close, but I don't get why the Mac Faithful are defending this modest speed jump, when we should have been there last year.
Yeah, try using iPhoto on a Mac Mini with a library of over 2000 images and make a photo book with about 175 images, and you'll know the definition of pain.
Before any Mac advocates flame me to kingdom come, my Mac Mini has a gig of ram, and still, iPhoto runs like a pig and crashes every 15 minutes while I try to create my book. I bought the Mac Mini to avoid having to use a Windows-esque hack or workaround, and here I am, having to consider a workaround (i.e., segmenting the library size or using some other app) to make iPhoto workable.
It's amazing how something with such great usability (iPhoto) can totally suck ass in terms of performance. In all fairness, I don't blame the Mac Mini - it actually doesn't strike me as a slow machine - I blame the iPhoto development team.
Will this be the case? I've always been under the impression that Adobe's relationship with Apple has been a bit chilly of late. What I wonder is if things will get any better with the buyout.
This project sounds like it will need a screen like Sony's upcoming black screen that allows for viewing of projected images with lots of ambient light. Of course, the Sony screen might be a bit bigger than what this little projector can handle.
I have the Leadtek Winfast TV Tuner with FM. While it may not have AM like the shark does, the UI is more than satisfactory for scheduling the recording of FM broadcasts. Can't say the same about Hauppage's product, as I've never tried it.
For management, the reasons I give are 1) that it's expensive, and 2) it'll have poorer performance than our custom solution, and 3) it requires specialized knowledge, whereas our in-house product is written in C/C++ which it's a lot easier to find people with expertise in.
Without knowing details about your particular situation (your argument could very well be justified), the boilerplate management arguments against your position are:
What are the costs of the app versus the fully realized burn of in-house development. What about the elapsed time to deploy for each? Sometimes it's worth spending money on something I can have now as opposed to six months from now.
What is the quantitative performance difference between the two solutions? If the effectiveness of the two solutions is equal (since you did say the commercial app would do the same thing), other time/cost factors may lower the importance of the efficiency criteria, especially if the performance difference is deemed acceptable.
Sure, it's easy to find someone with expertise, but there is still ramp-up time to learn what was developed. That time has both tangible and intangible costs.
But my big reason for not wanting to get involved with that commercial product? I don't want to pigeonhole my career into becoming an expert in some special proprietary product. By doing work in C/C++/Perl/Verilog, it'll be much easier to find another job if the need arises. If I become an expert in this commercial product and its proprietary language, my career is basically over. No thanks.
While I hear your perspective, your wording sounds like you're more worried about what you need than what your employer needs, so is the rationale that you're presenting to your employer truly objective?
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with developing in-house (who hasn't been burned by a vendor who overpromised and underdelivered?), but all factors need to be considered. Yes, it's important to consider your employees' skill set marketability (you don't want your best people to leave), but you've also got to consider the timeliness and business impact of getting a mission-critical solution deployed.
In the software development companies that I've worked in, the problem was that developers just wanted to play with the newest technologies so that they wouldn't get bored. The reality, however, was that the business solutions we needed to solve were actually quite mundane and could easily be solved with less exciting techniques and platforms.
While I understand the desire (and need)to play with the latest bleeding edge platforms, techniques and technologies, there is a time and place for that.
More often than not, my experience with the so-called visionary genius programmers has always been to drive a thumbtack into a wall with a triphammer. The rationale was "Sure, everyone has a thumb, but not everyone has a triphammer!" Not a problem... until the triphammer drives itself into the wall along with the thumbtack.
Do you really think that the competition for the Mac Mini is based on perforamnce, technical specifications or even appearance?
The important things to the average Mac Mini buyer (real ones, not those of you who start by saying "I'd buy one if..." but would never buy one anyways) are, in no particular order:
1. Mac OS X 2. iLife 3. Can run the equivalent of MS Office at an acceptable speed 4. Can surf the web at an acceptable speed 5. Can read e-mail at an acceptable speed 6. Price relative to other Macs
The non-techies won't care about the specs. They just want the Mini Mac because it's a Mac they can afford.
The techies and switchers know that a Mac Mini is what it is -- a cheap Mac. They just want it as a second computer, or as a "foot in the door" to help them decide on whether they should get a REAL Mac.
Yes, it's quite possible that you can get a faster and spankier PC for less money, but guess what? That PC still isn't going to be a Mac.
And that's all that the real Mac Mini buyers care about.
I'm not sure that we can speculate on the difficulty of cracking open a Mac Mini until someone actually gets their hands on one of these babies, dissects it and then posts the gory details online.
If, for example, the white top of the MacMini comes off as part of the unscrewing of the unit, unlatching those hooks won't be too much of an issue, since you would then be able to easily unhook them from above.
While I'm sure Apple doesn't want us poking around in one of these Macs, it is inevitable that more than a few will break down (i.e., hd, optical) and will require service. The more time it takes an Apple tech to crack open a case, the more $ it costs Apple for the warranty work.
While I'm sure much of the debate has eroded into a "apple is a hardware company first", "macs are indeed price competitive", "g5s are faster" type of debate, I only ask people to think about this -- as a consumer (and a Windows user planning on augmenting my pc network with a Mac) - the thing that pisses me off about Apple is that it took over a year to add a G5 product to the consumer line, and that there still aren't any G5s to be seen in the notebook lines. Apple Otaku must be the most patient people in the world to tolerate this.
Sure, G5s are sweet processors, but if you're going to introduce chips into your product line, you could at least make sure that all of your market segments will use the chip within 6 months. At least with x86, you can expect to see the latest chips in professional and consumer machines as desktops and notebooks within a much shorter time frame. Yeah, an Athlon 64 notebook might burn a hole in your crotch, but at least you didn't have to wait two years to be able to buy one.
Yes, a widescreen is better than a standard display, but not that much better. - myself, I find two xgas side by side works really well.
Too bad the VGA output on the iMac only does mirroring. If it could do multiple desktops, it would be a slam dunk for programming. Can you imagine an iMac and a cinema display to have double the workspace? drool.
I agree. Noise is a HUGE factor when building an HTPC. I tried using a Shuttle SFF PC which is quieter than the average PC, but I could hear the hum of the fan in an otherwise silent room.
One could argue that you could just turn the darn thing off when you're not using it, but who wants to wait for the OS to boot up, etc. every time they use the HTPC?
I could have tried a bunch of different things to build a silent HTPC, but the cost/benefit ratio didn't seem to provide any benefits. Since my primary goal for the HTPC was as a PVR, it would have been cheaper to just get a PVR from my cable company (and more convenient, since most PC TV tuners don't decode proprietary digital cable/satellite signals anyways).
Finally, finding a good front-end with a 10-foot user interface was another challenge. While there are some pretty good ones out there, I had stability problems with some of them, or found some of the functionality lacking on others.
I think iPods are dandy. But try to playback a live CD or continuous mix. There is no "geek factor" related to gapless playback. All music lovers can appreciate not hearing a second of silence between two tracks on a live CD. (Oh yeah, Karma supports crossfades too - it's like having a cheesy wedding dj in a small package!)
Yes, the iPod is stylish (and the GUI is fantastic), but it also says "steal me". As far as anyone knows, the Karma could be some cheapie 64mb flash player or fm tuner. Does not look as desirable to a thief compared to an iPod, and I like it that way.
Up to 15 hours per charge is not a geek factor issue either. You can fly on a long flight overseas and listen to music the entire trip without recharging.
I have a Karma and I don't use it for geek purposes - I encode to Mp3, not Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. I don't stream or do fancy smart playlists. I just play back my music. The GUI's not as nice as the iPod, but to me, the GUI wasn't worth an extra 150CDN.
Don't want to sound like a troll, but from everything I read about VW, you either love them or hate them. I love the way VWs look, especially those lush interiors. I'd buy one if I didn't have so many concerns about their QC issues. It's amazing that their "relative" Audi, who builds on the same platforms as VW has a much better QC reputation than VW.
Ogg is not simply better. It all depends on what you mean by "better".
If you have a portable player, better may not mean Ogg. What good is Ogg if you've got an iPod? Even if you do have a portable player that supports Ogg, like the Rio Karma, Ogg drains the battery more than MP3 would.
So in some ways, Ogg is better. Don't discount MP3 just because it isn't Ogg. Sure my Karma can play lossless FLAC and lossy Ogg, but because I also have other equipment that doesn't support Ogg, it doesn't really make much sense, does it?
FYI, Ogg is not a good thing for audiophiles. FLAC/APE are much better, since they're lossless. And whether Ogg is better than MP3 is debatable as well. There are some people who think LAME has a better psychoacoustic model than Ogg. I'm sure the LAME vs Ogg argument is enough to start a flame war between each of its proponents.
I'll stick to my LAME 224ABR encoded MP3s, thank you.
Actually, migration of Notes apps should be trivial, if the developers didn't do anything too fancy with the Notes client. Most Notes apps are instantly web-ready when accessed via a web-enabled Domino server. While Notes may be fugly, it is a very good tool for developing apps for small groups and departments.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people don't realize that Excel is sometimes a political choice for software development.
The very fact that Excel is considered a desktop application allows departments to get away (not necessarily rightly so) with creating applications in Excel without having to go through as many approval channels.
The fact that Excel has an IDE that lets you do many of the things you can do in VB allows you to do sophisticated application programming that can slip under the nose of some bureaucrats.
I spent a couple of years doing Excel programming after doing "Enterprise" development. It paid the same as my previous work, and for my client, Excel was the platform of choice, simply because the development effort didn't require the involvement of the IT department and its associated red tape. Once I got accustomed to the fact that I could do anything that I could do in a normal development platform, I quickly got over the fact that I was doing Excel work. I used to snicker at the thought of doing Excel and Access work before. But business logic is business logic, so I guess it doesn't really matter what platform you're working on.
Obviously Excel isn't the programmer's first choice, but it is a capable platform. The business reasons for using Excel as a development platform may be misguided, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't use the same practices that you would use to write anything in any other dev platform. I would think that the goal of the reviewed book is to ensure that.
Sure the G5 has only gotten a 35% increase, but that's still better than Intel.
Yeah, but x86 dual chip/cores are here. Now. AMD dual cores are just about here. The fact that Apple can get away with murder on the CPU front is somewhat amusing. At least I can get a desktop CPU that will burn a hole in my crotch in Windoze. I don't even have that option with a PowerBook.
From my experience with my Mac Mini, Macs need every ounce of speed increase they can get just to be usable. I don't actually think my Mac mini is that slow from a CPU perspective, but damn, those software engineers at Apple know how to make a pig out of it. iPhoto is a huge pig, and the OS just doesn't feel as snappy as my Win2k box running on an older P4. Heck, even my P3 felt faster when I was clicking around. The odd thing is that processing (i.e. running a filter on an image) seems to be about the same speed as my wintel box. That leaves me wondering if the Mac only feels slow because it's optimized for ease of use instead of speed.
IIRC, when the G5 was released, The Steve said that 3GHZ chips would be available within 12 months. It's been almost 24 months, and we're still < 3.0 GHz. Close, but I don't get why the Mac Faithful are defending this modest speed jump, when we should have been there last year.
This is offtopic, but to rebut the parent...
The damn things were so functional
Yeah, try using iPhoto on a Mac Mini with a library of over 2000 images and make a photo book with about 175 images, and you'll know the definition of pain.
Before any Mac advocates flame me to kingdom come, my Mac Mini has a gig of ram, and still, iPhoto runs like a pig and crashes every 15 minutes while I try to create my book. I bought the Mac Mini to avoid having to use a Windows-esque hack or workaround, and here I am, having to consider a workaround (i.e., segmenting the library size or using some other app) to make iPhoto workable.
It's amazing how something with such great usability (iPhoto) can totally suck ass in terms of performance. In all fairness, I don't blame the Mac Mini - it actually doesn't strike me as a slow machine - I blame the iPhoto development team.
Will this be the case? I've always been under the impression that Adobe's relationship with Apple has been a bit chilly of late. What I wonder is if things will get any better with the buyout.
Wasn't the New York Times also the newspaper that employed Jayson Blair? More accurately, the NYT usually engages in journalism.
And let's not forget, the combined income of the "Street Smart" team on the Apprentice was something like double the income of the "Book Smart" team.
Just use your new "street smart" URL editing skills to make millions!
This project sounds like it will need a screen like Sony's upcoming black screen that allows for viewing of projected images with lots of ambient light. Of course, the Sony screen might be a bit bigger than what this little projector can handle.
I have the Leadtek Winfast TV Tuner with FM. While it may not have AM like the shark does, the UI is more than satisfactory for scheduling the recording of FM broadcasts. Can't say the same about Hauppage's product, as I've never tried it.
Without knowing details about your particular situation (your argument could very well be justified), the boilerplate management arguments against your position are:
- What are the costs of the app versus the fully realized burn of in-house development. What about the elapsed time to deploy for each? Sometimes it's worth spending money on something I can have now as opposed to six months from now.
- What is the quantitative performance difference between the two solutions? If the effectiveness of the two solutions is equal (since you did say the commercial app would do the same thing), other time/cost factors may lower the importance of the efficiency criteria, especially if the performance difference is deemed acceptable.
- Sure, it's easy to find someone with expertise, but there is still ramp-up time to learn what was developed. That time has both tangible and intangible costs.
But my big reason for not wanting to get involved with that commercial product? I don't want to pigeonhole my career into becoming an expert in some special proprietary product. By doing work in C/C++/Perl/Verilog, it'll be much easier to find another job if the need arises. If I become an expert in this commercial product and its proprietary language, my career is basically over. No thanks.While I hear your perspective, your wording sounds like you're more worried about what you need than what your employer needs, so is the rationale that you're presenting to your employer truly objective?
Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with developing in-house (who hasn't been burned by a vendor who overpromised and underdelivered?), but all factors need to be considered. Yes, it's important to consider your employees' skill set marketability (you don't want your best people to leave), but you've also got to consider the timeliness and business impact of getting a mission-critical solution deployed.
In the software development companies that I've worked in, the problem was that developers just wanted to play with the newest technologies so that they wouldn't get bored. The reality, however, was that the business solutions we needed to solve were actually quite mundane and could easily be solved with less exciting techniques and platforms.
While I understand the desire (and need)to play with the latest bleeding edge platforms, techniques and technologies, there is a time and place for that.
More often than not, my experience with the so-called visionary genius programmers has always been to drive a thumbtack into a wall with a triphammer. The rationale was "Sure, everyone has a thumb, but not everyone has a triphammer!" Not a problem... until the triphammer drives itself into the wall along with the thumbtack.
Do you really think that the competition for the Mac Mini is based on perforamnce, technical specifications or even appearance?
The important things to the average Mac Mini buyer (real ones, not those of you who start by saying "I'd buy one if..." but would never buy one anyways) are, in no particular order:
1. Mac OS X
2. iLife
3. Can run the equivalent of MS Office at an acceptable speed
4. Can surf the web at an acceptable speed
5. Can read e-mail at an acceptable speed
6. Price relative to other Macs
The non-techies won't care about the specs. They just want the Mini Mac because it's a Mac they can afford.
The techies and switchers know that a Mac Mini is what it is -- a cheap Mac. They just want it as a second computer, or as a "foot in the door" to help them decide on whether they should get a REAL Mac.
Yes, it's quite possible that you can get a faster and spankier PC for less money, but guess what? That PC still isn't going to be a Mac.
And that's all that the real Mac Mini buyers care about.
It seems like a lot of people are missing the point by saying "Dude, go get a Dell."
The bottom line - the Mini Mac isn't for people looking for an affordable PC, it's for people looking for an affordable Mac.
The distinction is bigger than it sounds.
I'm not sure that we can speculate on the difficulty of cracking open a Mac Mini until someone actually gets their hands on one of these babies, dissects it and then posts the gory details online.
If, for example, the white top of the MacMini comes off as part of the unscrewing of the unit, unlatching those hooks won't be too much of an issue, since you would then be able to easily unhook them from above.
While I'm sure Apple doesn't want us poking around in one of these Macs, it is inevitable that more than a few will break down (i.e., hd, optical) and will require service. The more time it takes an Apple tech to crack open a case, the more $ it costs Apple for the warranty work.
It's great... the only gripe -- the XBOX fan is LOUD, LOUD, LOUD.
Even better is the LCD support offered by the XBOX. If you're not scared to use a dremel, you get headless operation too.
Call me crazy, but if you are a user with real performance demands for Windows, it seems like the smart thing to do is to buy a Windows machine.
While I'm sure much of the debate has eroded into a "apple is a hardware company first", "macs are indeed price competitive", "g5s are faster" type of debate, I only ask people to think about this -- as a consumer (and a Windows user planning on augmenting my pc network with a Mac) - the thing that pisses me off about Apple is that it took over a year to add a G5 product to the consumer line, and that there still aren't any G5s to be seen in the notebook lines. Apple Otaku must be the most patient people in the world to tolerate this.
Sure, G5s are sweet processors, but if you're going to introduce chips into your product line, you could at least make sure that all of your market segments will use the chip within 6 months. At least with x86, you can expect to see the latest chips in professional and consumer machines as desktops and notebooks within a much shorter time frame. Yeah, an Athlon 64 notebook might burn a hole in your crotch, but at least you didn't have to wait two years to be able to buy one.
Yes, a widescreen is better than a standard display, but not that much better. - myself, I find two xgas side by side works really well.
Too bad the VGA output on the iMac only does mirroring. If it could do multiple desktops, it would be a slam dunk for programming. Can you imagine an iMac and a cinema display to have double the workspace? drool.
But if you're saying the same thing for the billionth time, things really aren't changing, are they?
I agree. Noise is a HUGE factor when building an HTPC. I tried using a Shuttle SFF PC which is quieter than the average PC, but I could hear the hum of the fan in an otherwise silent room.
One could argue that you could just turn the darn thing off when you're not using it, but who wants to wait for the OS to boot up, etc. every time they use the HTPC?
I could have tried a bunch of different things to build a silent HTPC, but the cost/benefit ratio didn't seem to provide any benefits. Since my primary goal for the HTPC was as a PVR, it would have been cheaper to just get a PVR from my cable company (and more convenient, since most PC TV tuners don't decode proprietary digital cable/satellite signals anyways).
Finally, finding a good front-end with a 10-foot user interface was another challenge. While there are some pretty good ones out there, I had stability problems with some of them, or found some of the functionality lacking on others.
I think iPods are dandy. But try to playback a live CD or continuous mix. There is no "geek factor" related to gapless playback. All music lovers can appreciate not hearing a second of silence between two tracks on a live CD. (Oh yeah, Karma supports crossfades too - it's like having a cheesy wedding dj in a small package!)
Yes, the iPod is stylish (and the GUI is fantastic), but it also says "steal me". As far as anyone knows, the Karma could be some cheapie 64mb flash player or fm tuner. Does not look as desirable to a thief compared to an iPod, and I like it that way.
Up to 15 hours per charge is not a geek factor issue either. You can fly on a long flight overseas and listen to music the entire trip without recharging.
I have a Karma and I don't use it for geek purposes - I encode to Mp3, not Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. I don't stream or do fancy smart playlists. I just play back my music. The GUI's not as nice as the iPod, but to me, the GUI wasn't worth an extra 150CDN.
Too bad VW isn't famous for quality control.
Don't want to sound like a troll, but from everything I read about VW, you either love them or hate them. I love the way VWs look, especially those lush interiors. I'd buy one if I didn't have so many concerns about their QC issues. It's amazing that their "relative" Audi, who builds on the same platforms as VW has a much better QC reputation than VW.
So what happens if you've got the FM transmitter broadcasting at the frequency with which you're listening to the FM tuner?
As Neo would say, "whoa!"
Ogg is not simply better. It all depends on what you mean by "better".
If you have a portable player, better may not mean Ogg. What good is Ogg if you've got an iPod? Even if you do have a portable player that supports Ogg, like the Rio Karma, Ogg drains the battery more than MP3 would.
So in some ways, Ogg is better. Don't discount MP3 just because it isn't Ogg. Sure my Karma can play lossless FLAC and lossy Ogg, but because I also have other equipment that doesn't support Ogg, it doesn't really make much sense, does it?
FYI, Ogg is not a good thing for audiophiles. FLAC/APE are much better, since they're lossless. And whether Ogg is better than MP3 is debatable as well. There are some people who think LAME has a better psychoacoustic model than Ogg. I'm sure the LAME vs Ogg argument is enough to start a flame war between each of its proponents.
I'll stick to my LAME 224ABR encoded MP3s, thank you.
Actually, migration of Notes apps should be trivial, if the developers didn't do anything too fancy with the Notes client. Most Notes apps are instantly web-ready when accessed via a web-enabled Domino server. While Notes may be fugly, it is a very good tool for developing apps for small groups and departments.