apparently there was abit of a battle inside Microsoft - where you had 2 camps, one in support of backwards-compatibility (the Raymond Chens), and another in favour of throwing out the old cruft (the MSDN guys)
It seems the 'MSDN guys' won, and then went too far so a lot of simple migration options were ignored in favour of the 'total rewrite'. We all know how well those turn out for most companies, but in this case, it was Microsoft's customers who took the hit, not Microsoft. MS didn't suffer at all, Office remained written in C++, Windows remained written in C++ (see the threats made to Richard Grimes when he publicised the lack on.NET in Vista)
in many respects the same decision was taken with (traditional) Visual Basic. There'a a lot of old VB devs to whom even VB.NET is a strange new land.
I'm surrpised MS is even keeping that around, anyone who migrated from VB is learning C# instead as that seems to be the de-facto supported language of all the.NET ones. I don't say they will ever stop supporting it, but the risk is there.
Frankly, I'm surpised Google built on top of a "honest its not Java, but it is really, wink wink" platform. As phone development is the future of computing (probably) then I'm not surprised at every manufacturer to come out with proprietary languages/interfaces/toolsets. eg Apple you need objC, for Microsoft you need.NET, for Google... oh, Java. Good for them to try, but I think their core interfaces should have been C (maybe C++ with C interfaces) all along and then let you build in whatever you liked (eg Python).
I think its foolish to use any language controlled by a company. Stick to the standard ones that have no controlling, protectionist, entity.
After ASP.NET was released, they were soon joined by C# and VB.NET developers. These applications, being written by professional developers, are often significantly better than what was produced by the amateurish PHP/Perl community.
got to disagree with this bit. ASP was released and the sloppy web programmers who used to slap something together were joined by a legion of Visual Basic programmers who used to throw something together, but thought they were uber-developers because they were employed to write this kind of code.
Sure, ASP.NET is better, and all the old VB devs have faded away somewhere, but I don't think the number of C#/VB.NET devs working on ASP.NET apps is that much better the the old lot.
There is a technical argument in favour of dynamic languages - and that's RAD. You can fiddle with the language as you go, "develop in the debugger" kind of programming. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but if you don't have the discipline to do it properly (like the old C/C++ dev would) then this provides you with an easy entry to programming. Hopefully you'll learn and become a professional dev from that.
Have you ever used a PC for gaming. It sucks. you need a dedicated keyboard *and* mouse to play anything:)
sure, phones aren't designed for gaming controls (erm, except the upcoming Playstation phone) so I doubt anyone would expect great things from it. If gaming is to take off on the phone, then I expect to see accessories to become available - like a keyboard and mouse - and a hdmi connector to the TV so your gaming experience on your new small PC...erm phone... is as good as the experience on your large PC.
Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?
on
KDE 4.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I disagree about the 'waah, it uses too many resources' as there's plenty of times code is written as cheaply as possible (for the developer, that is) leaving the users to pick up the tab. The cost-basis of coding *should* be the other way round, but I guess that's just my ideal.
However, in this case it looks like Akonadi has used a DB to store its cache instead of a simpler, internal, construct. Or a sqlite DB, which is very suited for this task. Whether the developer didn't know about serialising a key-value collection, didn't know about sqlite, needs something in MySQL that no other app provides, or just didn't care remains to be determined. Either way, MySQL is probably an inefficient use of resources that could be better dealt with. Let me put it another way, the developer could have mandated Oracle instead of MySQL, you wouldn't be happy then!
The problem with 'you have so many resources, so who cares' gives you the Windows syndrome - fine, your 1 app works (once its loaded all its bulk into memory), but once you start doing more than one thing, possibly at the same time, you start to realise why you want each of those fat apps to be a bit leaner and efficient.
The goal of more efficient use of resources, rather than whatever happens to be easiest, is something that needs to be kept at the forefront of developer's minds. It won't always be used, won;t always be appropriate, but we need to keep reminding ourselves to try harder.
review board isn't about code styles and formatting. Its about seeing what the changes were to the code. Sure, you can use reviewboard for style-based code reviews, but its trivial to also use it for potential code issues. Its really there for an experienced developer to cast his eyes over the changes, and to make sure it doesn't do anything he knows is wrong.
If you're using reviewboard solely for style reviews, its because your development processes havn't yet been printed out, rolled up and shoved into your development manager.
the obvious lesson here is: if you must download a song, scam thousands of business out of hundreds of dollar each, buy all the songs there are, and save just enough for the fine the courts will slap on you.
obviously the government wants this - must be something to do with keeping money sloshing around boosting the economy or something, so go knock yourselves out. I believe the Domain Registrars Association of America business is still available.
to be honest, I'm not so worried about this - its only a browser, and I install all those security updates anyway. What I'm not so keen on is the "silent, in the background, don't bother the user" implementation. I'd like to know that it is doing it, pop a little UI element on the status bar that says "updating latest version now" and then gets on with it, and then puts a little version marker somewhere so I know its been done.
Be polite to your users, be open in your communication, inform us. (and a link to the things that were fixed if you click the version number would be a nice to have)
When was Microsoft profiting from selling online ads?
soon, real soon. I think they see the decline of Microsoft themselves and are desperately casting around for ways to make money. They will be the next DEC if they can;t get some growth going soon, and they know no-one wants to buy Windows 8, not if they're still (happily) running XP, and not buying Office 2010 or any of the other cash-cows they have come to rely on to get them out of the black holes their other development projects quickly turn into.
So they went for... ads! Not content with copying other companies successful products, they now want to copy other company's successful business models:)
This is where it starts to gather pace. Although the presentation was to marketers, it still shows their intent: who cares about consumers, they care about the corporates who will buy this stuff to force down the throats of consumers. (I'm sure that makes many an executive weep with joy at the thought - inconvenient reality aside).
Pretty soon, I wouldn't be surprised to see Windows 8 with integrated Bing desktop search that'll search your PC, and the internet at the same time. The results will be displayed to you, with a nice little sidebox (where that dog used to be) with "helpful suggestions and links" (ie ads) all bundled together as an impossible-to-remove feature.
Incidentally Windows Live has been in the business of selling ads for some time. Live Messenger has an ad box at the bottom of the main window and another on the message window. Neither removable.... unless you run the excellent on it;)
Its true though, we're a full-on microsoft shop and even though we use some poor products that are shown to be failing us, when I migrated some things to OSS (Visual source safe to Subversion comes immediately to mind), my bosses all insisted we evaluate all the commercial offerings first. They equate 'free' to 'crap'.
As it is, even though we migrated successfully and used it for nearly 2 years, they still went and bought the worst (IMHO) SCM I've ever had the misfortune to use (Serena Dimensions). It cost us well over £100k and we're considering moving back to SVN as soon as we can.
The problem is one of attitude and 'marketing'. Even though they were slapped in the face, then built themselves a wall and quickly walked right into it, they *still* think 'free' equals 'crap'. I don't think this is too unusual amongst the majority of business managers either.
the Wiki article says it is designed for fast compiling. That is not really something I have ever had much concern about even when working on extremely large code bases
This is not the first disaster for BP that ended in the loss of life.
What's it got to do with BP? The rig was owned and operated by a company called Transocean. BP (and others) just leased it off them to do the drilling (and no BP employee was involved in the actual work).
Incidentally, the company working on the well head was a company called Halliburton. They were pumping cement into the well to prepare it when things went bad.
and at the end, its a group of companies, all blaming each other and each one trying desperately to avoid paying out. BP, to its credit, has accepted responsibility even though its almost certainly not to blame. Perhaps the US government won't be able to blame the Swiss-located Transocean (for tax reasons, 50 Transocean people work in the Swiss HQ, whereas the rest work in the USA - all 26,000 of them).
Well, it will be. once someone's gathered the venture capital finance to acquire a company set up specifically to purchase, import, sell for $200, and (most important) squirrel the profits away in a tax-efficient, highly-leveraged off-shore subsidiary.
remember the clause in the Q Public Licence that says "if you want to initiate legal procedings, you have to do it in a Norwegian court", well I have an amendment for the other OSS licences:)
Slashdot Mirror
but I shudder at the thought of a petroleum cracking plant running real-time systems on C#/.NET.
or, say, a trading platform
apparently there was abit of a battle inside Microsoft - where you had 2 camps, one in support of backwards-compatibility (the Raymond Chens), and another in favour of throwing out the old cruft (the MSDN guys)
It seems the 'MSDN guys' won, and then went too far so a lot of simple migration options were ignored in favour of the 'total rewrite'. We all know how well those turn out for most companies, but in this case, it was Microsoft's customers who took the hit, not Microsoft. MS didn't suffer at all, Office remained written in C++, Windows remained written in C++ (see the threats made to Richard Grimes when he publicised the lack on .NET in Vista)
in many respects the same decision was taken with (traditional) Visual Basic. There'a a lot of old VB devs to whom even VB.NET is a strange new land.
I'm surrpised MS is even keeping that around, anyone who migrated from VB is learning C# instead as that seems to be the de-facto supported language of all the .NET ones. I don't say they will ever stop supporting it, but the risk is there.
Frankly, I'm surpised Google built on top of a "honest its not Java, but it is really, wink wink" platform. As phone development is the future of computing (probably) then I'm not surprised at every manufacturer to come out with proprietary languages/interfaces/toolsets. eg Apple you need objC, for Microsoft you need .NET, for Google ... oh, Java. Good for them to try, but I think their core interfaces should have been C (maybe C++ with C interfaces) all along and then let you build in whatever you liked (eg Python).
I think its foolish to use any language controlled by a company. Stick to the standard ones that have no controlling, protectionist, entity.
After ASP.NET was released, they were soon joined by C# and VB.NET developers. These applications, being written by professional developers, are often significantly better than what was produced by the amateurish PHP/Perl community.
got to disagree with this bit. ASP was released and the sloppy web programmers who used to slap something together were joined by a legion of Visual Basic programmers who used to throw something together, but thought they were uber-developers because they were employed to write this kind of code.
Sure, ASP.NET is better, and all the old VB devs have faded away somewhere, but I don't think the number of C#/VB.NET devs working on ASP.NET apps is that much better the the old lot.
There is a technical argument in favour of dynamic languages - and that's RAD. You can fiddle with the language as you go, "develop in the debugger" kind of programming. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but if you don't have the discipline to do it properly (like the old C/C++ dev would) then this provides you with an easy entry to programming. Hopefully you'll learn and become a professional dev from that.
Apparently (almost) the entire stack is open source ... there is almost no risk.
you wrote that and yet still failed to spot the really important word, in brackets, twice! :)
Have you ever used a PC for gaming. It sucks. you need a dedicated keyboard *and* mouse to play anything :)
sure, phones aren't designed for gaming controls (erm, except the upcoming Playstation phone) so I doubt anyone would expect great things from it. If gaming is to take off on the phone, then I expect to see accessories to become available - like a keyboard and mouse - and a hdmi connector to the TV so your gaming experience on your new small PC ...erm phone... is as good as the experience on your large PC.
I disagree about the 'waah, it uses too many resources' as there's plenty of times code is written as cheaply as possible (for the developer, that is) leaving the users to pick up the tab. The cost-basis of coding *should* be the other way round, but I guess that's just my ideal.
However, in this case it looks like Akonadi has used a DB to store its cache instead of a simpler, internal, construct. Or a sqlite DB, which is very suited for this task. Whether the developer didn't know about serialising a key-value collection, didn't know about sqlite, needs something in MySQL that no other app provides, or just didn't care remains to be determined. Either way, MySQL is probably an inefficient use of resources that could be better dealt with. Let me put it another way, the developer could have mandated Oracle instead of MySQL, you wouldn't be happy then!
The problem with 'you have so many resources, so who cares' gives you the Windows syndrome - fine, your 1 app works (once its loaded all its bulk into memory), but once you start doing more than one thing, possibly at the same time, you start to realise why you want each of those fat apps to be a bit leaner and efficient.
The goal of more efficient use of resources, rather than whatever happens to be easiest, is something that needs to be kept at the forefront of developer's minds. It won't always be used, won;t always be appropriate, but we need to keep reminding ourselves to try harder.
review board isn't about code styles and formatting. Its about seeing what the changes were to the code. Sure, you can use reviewboard for style-based code reviews, but its trivial to also use it for potential code issues. Its really there for an experienced developer to cast his eyes over the changes, and to make sure it doesn't do anything he knows is wrong.
If you're using reviewboard solely for style reviews, its because your development processes havn't yet been printed out, rolled up and shoved into your development manager.
the obvious lesson here is: if you must download a song, scam thousands of business out of hundreds of dollar each, buy all the songs there are, and save just enough for the fine the courts will slap on you.
obviously the government wants this - must be something to do with keeping money sloshing around boosting the economy or something, so go knock yourselves out. I believe the Domain Registrars Association of America business is still available.
to be honest, I'm not so worried about this - its only a browser, and I install all those security updates anyway. What I'm not so keen on is the "silent, in the background, don't bother the user" implementation. I'd like to know that it is doing it, pop a little UI element on the status bar that says "updating latest version now" and then gets on with it, and then puts a little version marker somewhere so I know its been done.
Be polite to your users, be open in your communication, inform us. (and a link to the things that were fixed if you click the version number would be a nice to have)
When was Microsoft profiting from selling online ads?
soon, real soon. I think they see the decline of Microsoft themselves and are desperately casting around for ways to make money. They will be the next DEC if they can;t get some growth going soon, and they know no-one wants to buy Windows 8, not if they're still (happily) running XP, and not buying Office 2010 or any of the other cash-cows they have come to rely on to get them out of the black holes their other development projects quickly turn into.
So they went for ... ads! Not content with copying other companies successful products, they now want to copy other company's successful business models :)
This is where it starts to gather pace. Although the presentation was to marketers, it still shows their intent: who cares about consumers, they care about the corporates who will buy this stuff to force down the throats of consumers. (I'm sure that makes many an executive weep with joy at the thought - inconvenient reality aside).
Win Phone 7 launches in October as an "ad-serving machine
Pretty soon, I wouldn't be surprised to see Windows 8 with integrated Bing desktop search that'll search your PC, and the internet at the same time. The results will be displayed to you, with a nice little sidebox (where that dog used to be) with "helpful suggestions and links" (ie ads) all bundled together as an impossible-to-remove feature.
Incidentally Windows Live has been in the business of selling ads for some time. Live Messenger has an ad box at the bottom of the main window and another on the message window. Neither removable.... unless you run the excellent on it ;)
Its true though, we're a full-on microsoft shop and even though we use some poor products that are shown to be failing us, when I migrated some things to OSS (Visual source safe to Subversion comes immediately to mind), my bosses all insisted we evaluate all the commercial offerings first. They equate 'free' to 'crap'.
As it is, even though we migrated successfully and used it for nearly 2 years, they still went and bought the worst (IMHO) SCM I've ever had the misfortune to use (Serena Dimensions). It cost us well over £100k and we're considering moving back to SVN as soon as we can.
The problem is one of attitude and 'marketing'. Even though they were slapped in the face, then built themselves a wall and quickly walked right into it, they *still* think 'free' equals 'crap'. I don't think this is too unusual amongst the majority of business managers either.
We know better, these poor dears don't.
yep. In conjunction with a consulting firm (for their obvious experience of managing, and implementing large-scale outsourced projects).
Worked out well for Accenture, their partner Microsoft, and the outsourcing company that created the software for the London Stock Exchange.
It's a pain in the ass to learn because there are too many exceptions to the rules or the rules aren't well defined.
Look, it was that or Latin. Now you understand? good. :-)
(ok, I *like* latin, the above's a joke)
the Wiki article says it is designed for fast compiling. That is not really something I have ever had much concern about even when working on extremely large code bases
Hey! lets not get rid of slow compile times, ok!!
no, but Intel has a compiler for Intel chips :)
It runs on Windows too.
This is not the first disaster for BP that ended in the loss of life.
What's it got to do with BP? The rig was owned and operated by a company called Transocean. BP (and others) just leased it off them to do the drilling (and no BP employee was involved in the actual work).
Incidentally, the company working on the well head was a company called Halliburton. They were pumping cement into the well to prepare it when things went bad.
and at the end, its a group of companies, all blaming each other and each one trying desperately to avoid paying out. BP, to its credit, has accepted responsibility even though its almost certainly not to blame. Perhaps the US government won't be able to blame the Swiss-located Transocean (for tax reasons, 50 Transocean people work in the Swiss HQ, whereas the rest work in the USA - all 26,000 of them).
This is not for Americans
Well, it will be. once someone's gathered the venture capital finance to acquire a company set up specifically to purchase, import, sell for $200, and (most important) squirrel the profits away in a tax-efficient, highly-leveraged off-shore subsidiary.
Isn't that the American Way?
that depends on how embarrassed you are to admit owning a Win7 phone, even one you're selling.
Its the new buyer who will put it in a drawer :)
Really? You're telling me that Microsoft owned up to and acknowledge its old OS wasn't working?
Yep. happens all the time. Usually immediately after they've got something new for you to buy that replaces it.
sounds like software in general.... want a working feature.. that'll be in the next version that you'll want to upgrade to.
no, I think its more down to the type of Ads that are blocked. Block Google adwords? Pointless.
Block a non-Google flash-based flashing lights and scrolling text and attention-catching beeps, you betcha.
In other words, adblocking is actually beneficial to Google as it gives Google ads more marketshare (ie by reducing the competition).
No caveats now: Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It's a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with.
Now, now that's surely not fair. After Kin, Verizon should be champing at the bit to release loads of Windows 7 phones and plans.
remember the clause in the Q Public Licence that says "if you want to initiate legal procedings, you have to do it in a Norwegian court", well I have an amendment for the other OSS licences :)