Quite simple it doesn't provide better services to the licence fee payer (not the taxpayer). See, I already paid for content from the BBC, I don't expect to have to pay for it over again once the DRM-restriction expires.
And Ofcom (the regulator) agrees. This isn't so much a non-story, as a very old non-story.
+1 to Documentation. A lot of Open Source projects are created by programmers to do some task, unfortunately that means the rest of the development ecosystem (project management, testing, documentation, installation, support etc) don't get enough attention *
If you're not comfortable coding, that's good, you can help out by making the project better quality by helping out with those areas.
It has similar benefits to using OO programming over procedural
you mean bulky abstraction, awkward readability, considerable bloat and generally very very slow.
They say you should use the right tool for the job, unfortunately XML has become the only tool to use for every job. XML has its place, but only in a fraction of the places its currently used.
I guess that they think the price difference would be for those companies who would otherwise have bought the customXML addon instead of having it bundled. Most consumers would not use the feature anway, let alone buy it. So the extra price is entirely down to those corporate customers who would have shelled out for the extra feature.
Personally, I think that's a very small number. If the addon was bundled with Office Premium Plus Extra Ultimate edition, then a lot of corporates buy it regardless. I know we had to buy the next version up becuase we wanted InfoPath (no, I don't think we actually used it in anger).
But you don't take the compile time away, just like you don't take the time it takes the developer to copy the files to the webserver or set the php config options.
PHP has plenty of benefits to a coder, easy to use, lots of examples out there, and easy to deploy. I tried to install Python-based ReviewBoard recently and it was a nightmare (shame really), but all the PHP-based sites I deply (eg mantis, dotProject, MediaWiki) just work without any hassle at all. If only all website deployments were as easy in other languages they'd probably be more popular.
However, once you've written your site, and its become really popular, you owe it to your balance sheet to recode it in something somewhat more efficient (not Java, k) so you don't have to buy 30,000 servers in the first place. Now you know the code, its well documented, and has good interfaces, then recoding it in C++ should be easy. Bear in mind those extra coders required to write it in C++ are going to be employed one way or another, so they don;t get to be included in your site's carbon footprint. Also, those extra coders will not be needed once the infrastructure is written, and they're still going to be a fraction of the energy cost of running Facebook for a few more years.
Er, sorry. I consider dual-socket desktops with 64GB of RAM and 8 cores attached to a 30" monitor... a "niche" item.
Sorry, but I don't. there again, I am running Office 2007 and I need Outlook, 2 Word documents and an Excel document open *at the same time* on a daily basis.:)
I totally agree. The '100% pure java' movement was a total detriment to software as a whole, and made Microsoft lock-in look amateurish:)
However, the.NET platform is similar to this in one way - you're writing.NET code, for the.NET platform. Integration with non-.NET stuff is difficult, to the point where a WCF socket cannot talk to a non-WCF one (you need a web service, using Microsoft interpretation of the standards for interoperability) which is just as bad, at least you do get to write your.NET-only code in in a choice of languages, even if nearly every employer think that means C#.
I'm not sure the competition has done Java much good, they didn't catch up quickly enough. I would be happy if Java went away, as a lesson to others about not being open and flexible enough with your community. Mind you, I think.NET should go away too:)
but I thought this was for ending the contract early, so they're not exactly obscure charges - most people enter into a phone contract for a fixed amount of time and expect to have to honour that for that time. If they want to leave early, they should expect to either not be allowed at all (ie have to continue to pay the contracted-into bills), or pay a fee to agree to break the contract.
As long as there are no fees to pay once the contract term is up, this is still a somewhat non-story.
Once we have VMs - thinks of old pascal compiler that produces bytecode rather than native instructions, sure its not a full VM with memory management but its not far off. And then there was mainframes that did this kind of thing all the time.
I'd say its one of those fashion things, one day we had VMs, then we didn't, now we do again. Perhaps we'll go back to native code sometime in the future (maybe running in mini-OS VMs, for efficiency and reduce power usage or something). Then one day in the far future, we'll have VMs again as our apps run part locally, part virtualized on the mobile cloud, and so on.
I think people unnecessarily mock Ballmer for "Developers, developers, developers!" He was right.
That's not just Ballmer's slogan, Microsoft has focussed on that for the past 15+ years. The trick is to get developers writing code for your platform, and then you'll sell loads of platforms. No manager will buy an alternative because they won't be able to get devs who know alternatives, while there will be plenty of Microsoft developers. That reduces the risk of deploying a platform... and so we see where we are today, an ecosystem built around Windows.
It was no big surprise that C# became popular, all those Windows devs suddenly thought they needed to learn it or be shut out of the Windows job market, and so they all demanded C# skills, and so managers started to find that they could only recruit C# devs. It helped that the language was such that you could only poke fun at it in relatively minor ways (unlike, say VB that never caught on in such a massive way amongst 'professional' developers)
Java, I'd say has lost the war, even if there are a few more battles to be fought and C++ seems to be hanging on in there. However, I think I see a glimmer of hope (for the not-more-blinking-MS-stuff view) in scripting languages. MS hasn't targeted that yet, IronPython is still a 'toy' to MS. Maybe soon it'll start to battle cross-platform scripting languages too.
... for several webapps, quite a lot are PHP but that's not a problem. We have used dotProject for our task management before buying into something 'better'. It worked well, produces gantt charts, but will not do any kind of resource allocation for you. Still, its nice and easy to use.
There are alternatives on sf.net, ganttchart, phpproject etc. Go have a look.
You forgot that KFCs secret recipe is protected in order to keep them competitive against their, uh, competitors. Microsoft forfeited that right when they stopped having competitors, that's why the DoJ got involved in the first place.
They depend on the developing countries' markets for growth.
No, they depend on developing countries for cheap-ass workers that they treat like slaves whilst reducing relatively expensive workers in the home country at the expense of quality of work.
(not that the developing countries workers couldn't do the work properly, just that the work demanded of them is designed to be cheap and correspondingly focused on cost, not quality)
You know you've got reliability when its measured in careers.
Modern 'enterprise' PC app: "when did you last reboot?", "we keep rebooting it every 6 hours to free up memory, the guy who implemented it was sacked months ago".
Mainframe app: "when did you last reboot?", "dunno, the guy who did it last retired back in 2002".
Not really, governmental organizations are not so much interested in helping you clean up your malware-PC, but in funding the internet cops to trace and bring the perpetrators to justice.
The callcentre script drones will probably be fine - they'll tell everyone to run spybot, install an AV system, run windows updates and then take it to a repair centre or reinstall if symptoms persist.
It might not be in the article, but the snap-to-side feature Windows 7 proudly boasts of is present in KDE 4.4 as well. As well as the ability to combine windows into a single tabbed window (like firefox).
So how does it help productivity? Ask a Firefox (or IE) user whether tabbed browsing has helped their productivity, or if its just a gimmick. I can see the same productivity benefits from tabbed explorer windows, or shell prompts that browsers have. I wouldn't have to play "find the right explorer" window anymore from a set of similar yellow icons, as there'd only be one - and then find which directory you want in the tabs immediately.
its novel in terms of usability. The taskbar is down the bottom, far away from whatever it is you're working on. Like tabbed browsing, you could have opened multiple instances of your browser and switched between sites using the taskbar, but it was awkward. So they moved them to tabs, really near your addressbar and suddenly it was a lot easier to use multiple sessions.
Same with windows, even though we've had tabbed windows for years (MDI apps anyone?), the taskbar is a 'last choice' for swapping between related apps. Tabbed windows (eg filesystem windows), or command shells, etc make a heap of sense - just like the browser.
I kinda agree, I hate the coding styles documents (usually written by people who no longer, or never, wrote code according to the same documents!) that tell you how to program. Unfortunately, beautifiers have 1 problem in that they reformat your code and that can (in some cases) make reviewing differences between checked-in revisions difficult (so make sure you format your code to a single config before checkin).
The best coding standards are:
1. keep your style in keeping with the code you're changing. 2. If writing new code, make the style the same as the majority of the existing codebase.
The rest is just frippery, its pointless telling someone that they SHALL put 2 spaces between every if statement and the loop variable, or 3 blank lines WILL be placed between functions except when the function is a supporting helper that is closely associated with the next function, etc etc.
Unfortunately the above standard doesn't come in 40-page documents, so management will consider it to be inferior. Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
Ars tells it better though:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/public-pressure-stops-bbcs-hdtv-drm-drive-for-now.ars
Its a little late to complain, or otherwise tell Ofcom what you think, but the link to the initial consultation letter is here: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/tvlicensing/enquiry/
You can still write to ofcom concerning this matter, but bear in mind there will (probably) be a further consultation when the BBC responds.
Open consultations can be found: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/?open=Yes§or=Broadcasting%20-%20TV
Quite simple it doesn't provide better services to the licence fee payer (not the taxpayer). See, I already paid for content from the BBC, I don't expect to have to pay for it over again once the DRM-restriction expires.
And Ofcom (the regulator) agrees. This isn't so much a non-story, as a very old non-story.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8352241.stm
BBC plans to copy protect Freeview high definition (HD) data have been dealt a blow by regulator Ofcom.
+1 to Documentation. A lot of Open Source projects are created by programmers to do some task, unfortunately that means the rest of the development ecosystem (project management, testing, documentation, installation, support etc) don't get enough attention *
If you're not comfortable coding, that's good, you can help out by making the project better quality by helping out with those areas.
* except project management, of course.
It has similar benefits to using OO programming over procedural
you mean bulky abstraction, awkward readability, considerable bloat and generally very very slow.
They say you should use the right tool for the job, unfortunately XML has become the only tool to use for every job. XML has its place, but only in a fraction of the places its currently used.
I guess that they think the price difference would be for those companies who would otherwise have bought the customXML addon instead of having it bundled. Most consumers would not use the feature anway, let alone buy it. So the extra price is entirely down to those corporate customers who would have shelled out for the extra feature.
Personally, I think that's a very small number. If the addon was bundled with Office Premium Plus Extra Ultimate edition, then a lot of corporates buy it regardless. I know we had to buy the next version up becuase we wanted InfoPath (no, I don't think we actually used it in anger).
But they do talk bad about their company (at least mostly in a 'WTF is Ballmer doing this time' way)
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/
Some of the posts are intriguing, some are just dull, some are cutting.
Yep. you have 2 options:
1. Use bing as the default search engine
2. Stop using search.
and if you do like SugarCRM, you'll want to take a look at vtiger which is a 'more free' version of SugarCrm.
and tomorrow its the CRAA (Christian Religion Association of America) coming down hard on you for illegally uploading prayers.
you're assuming that Facebook is an unmaintainable, messy, poorly-defined, poorly-implemented mess of PHP code.
oh wait.... :)
But you don't take the compile time away, just like you don't take the time it takes the developer to copy the files to the webserver or set the php config options.
amen. Use the right tool for the job.
PHP has plenty of benefits to a coder, easy to use, lots of examples out there, and easy to deploy. I tried to install Python-based ReviewBoard recently and it was a nightmare (shame really), but all the PHP-based sites I deply (eg mantis, dotProject, MediaWiki) just work without any hassle at all. If only all website deployments were as easy in other languages they'd probably be more popular.
However, once you've written your site, and its become really popular, you owe it to your balance sheet to recode it in something somewhat more efficient (not Java, k) so you don't have to buy 30,000 servers in the first place. Now you know the code, its well documented, and has good interfaces, then recoding it in C++ should be easy. Bear in mind those extra coders required to write it in C++ are going to be employed one way or another, so they don;t get to be included in your site's carbon footprint. Also, those extra coders will not be needed once the infrastructure is written, and they're still going to be a fraction of the energy cost of running Facebook for a few more years.
Er, sorry. I consider dual-socket desktops with 64GB of RAM and 8 cores attached to a 30" monitor ... a "niche" item.
Sorry, but I don't. there again, I am running Office 2007 and I need Outlook, 2 Word documents and an Excel document open *at the same time* on a daily basis. :)
I totally agree. The '100% pure java' movement was a total detriment to software as a whole, and made Microsoft lock-in look amateurish :)
However, the .NET platform is similar to this in one way - you're writing .NET code, for the .NET platform. Integration with non-.NET stuff is difficult, to the point where a WCF socket cannot talk to a non-WCF one (you need a web service, using Microsoft interpretation of the standards for interoperability) which is just as bad, at least you do get to write your .NET-only code in in a choice of languages, even if nearly every employer think that means C#.
I'm not sure the competition has done Java much good, they didn't catch up quickly enough. I would be happy if Java went away, as a lesson to others about not being open and flexible enough with your community. Mind you, I think .NET should go away too :)
but I thought this was for ending the contract early, so they're not exactly obscure charges - most people enter into a phone contract for a fixed amount of time and expect to have to honour that for that time. If they want to leave early, they should expect to either not be allowed at all (ie have to continue to pay the contracted-into bills), or pay a fee to agree to break the contract.
As long as there are no fees to pay once the contract term is up, this is still a somewhat non-story.
Once we have VMs - thinks of old pascal compiler that produces bytecode rather than native instructions, sure its not a full VM with memory management but its not far off. And then there was mainframes that did this kind of thing all the time.
I'd say its one of those fashion things, one day we had VMs, then we didn't, now we do again. Perhaps we'll go back to native code sometime in the future (maybe running in mini-OS VMs, for efficiency and reduce power usage or something). Then one day in the far future, we'll have VMs again as our apps run part locally, part virtualized on the mobile cloud, and so on.
I think people unnecessarily mock Ballmer for "Developers, developers, developers!" He was right.
That's not just Ballmer's slogan, Microsoft has focussed on that for the past 15+ years. The trick is to get developers writing code for your platform, and then you'll sell loads of platforms. No manager will buy an alternative because they won't be able to get devs who know alternatives, while there will be plenty of Microsoft developers. That reduces the risk of deploying a platform... and so we see where we are today, an ecosystem built around Windows.
It was no big surprise that C# became popular, all those Windows devs suddenly thought they needed to learn it or be shut out of the Windows job market, and so they all demanded C# skills, and so managers started to find that they could only recruit C# devs. It helped that the language was such that you could only poke fun at it in relatively minor ways (unlike, say VB that never caught on in such a massive way amongst 'professional' developers)
Java, I'd say has lost the war, even if there are a few more battles to be fought and C++ seems to be hanging on in there. However, I think I see a glimmer of hope (for the not-more-blinking-MS-stuff view) in scripting languages. MS hasn't targeted that yet, IronPython is still a 'toy' to MS. Maybe soon it'll start to battle cross-platform scripting languages too.
... for several webapps, quite a lot are PHP but that's not a problem. We have used dotProject for our task management before buying into something 'better'. It worked well, produces gantt charts, but will not do any kind of resource allocation for you. Still, its nice and easy to use.
There are alternatives on sf.net, ganttchart, phpproject etc. Go have a look.
You forgot that KFCs secret recipe is protected in order to keep them competitive against their, uh, competitors. Microsoft forfeited that right when they stopped having competitors, that's why the DoJ got involved in the first place.
They depend on the developing countries' markets for growth.
No, they depend on developing countries for cheap-ass workers that they treat like slaves whilst reducing relatively expensive workers in the home country at the expense of quality of work.
(not that the developing countries workers couldn't do the work properly, just that the work demanded of them is designed to be cheap and correspondingly focused on cost, not quality)
You know you've got reliability when its measured in careers.
Modern 'enterprise' PC app: "when did you last reboot?", "we keep rebooting it every 6 hours to free up memory, the guy who implemented it was sacked months ago".
Mainframe app: "when did you last reboot?", "dunno, the guy who did it last retired back in 2002".
Not really, governmental organizations are not so much interested in helping you clean up your malware-PC, but in funding the internet cops to trace and bring the perpetrators to justice.
The callcentre script drones will probably be fine - they'll tell everyone to run spybot, install an AV system, run windows updates and then take it to a repair centre or reinstall if symptoms persist.
It might not be in the article, but the snap-to-side feature Windows 7 proudly boasts of is present in KDE 4.4 as well. As well as the ability to combine windows into a single tabbed window (like firefox).
So how does it help productivity? Ask a Firefox (or IE) user whether tabbed browsing has helped their productivity, or if its just a gimmick. I can see the same productivity benefits from tabbed explorer windows, or shell prompts that browsers have. I wouldn't have to play "find the right explorer" window anymore from a set of similar yellow icons, as there'd only be one - and then find which directory you want in the tabs immediately.
its novel in terms of usability. The taskbar is down the bottom, far away from whatever it is you're working on. Like tabbed browsing, you could have opened multiple instances of your browser and switched between sites using the taskbar, but it was awkward. So they moved them to tabs, really near your addressbar and suddenly it was a lot easier to use multiple sessions.
Same with windows, even though we've had tabbed windows for years (MDI apps anyone?), the taskbar is a 'last choice' for swapping between related apps. Tabbed windows (eg filesystem windows), or command shells, etc make a heap of sense - just like the browser.
I kinda agree, I hate the coding styles documents (usually written by people who no longer, or never, wrote code according to the same documents!) that tell you how to program. Unfortunately, beautifiers have 1 problem in that they reformat your code and that can (in some cases) make reviewing differences between checked-in revisions difficult (so make sure you format your code to a single config before checkin).
The best coding standards are:
1. keep your style in keeping with the code you're changing.
2. If writing new code, make the style the same as the majority of the existing codebase.
The rest is just frippery, its pointless telling someone that they SHALL put 2 spaces between every if statement and the loop variable, or 3 blank lines WILL be placed between functions except when the function is a supporting helper that is closely associated with the next function, etc etc.
Unfortunately the above standard doesn't come in 40-page documents, so management will consider it to be inferior. Sigh.