If I recall correctly, the TradElect platform was pushed by MS as a showcase for its new.NET 1.0 platform, and was written by a whole team (or two) of outsourced developers in this brand new, shiny technology. They ported it to.NET 1.1 but I'm not sure they ever tried to port it to.NET 2.0.
Did I mention it was developed in conjunction with Accenture? Oh, and it was developed by Microsoft itself by all the news reports (though I bet the development was done by cheapest devs Accenture could hire, with a few MS consultants discussing architecture and collecting big fees - it didn't cost $40m in hardware alone!)
So, yes, it could have been poorly written code, but as you say, you can write poor.NET code. It always seemed to me that the project was akin to an 'enterprise java' one of yesteryear - big, slow, over-engineered, poorly developed, resource intensive and generally 'too big to fail'. Seems also that the LSE knows better than to hang on to the worst kind of crappy software and try to make it better.
As for MS bashing, they're the big boy, so they always take the hit. If all software written for MS was great and worked perfectly, we'd worship them as gods. As it is, we continually see problems and give them no slack. If they were a small company trying hard to make a difference, we'd be more forgiving.
I can;t answer for movies, music or books but.... software is different. My boss has decided (ie read on managerial/executive/business opinion pieces) that in 5-10 years all software will be free, the competition from open source will be too great for proprietary software to effectively exist. Instead, all business models will revolve around maintenance and support.
Now, I think that because I like open source software, but for him to understand it too (without even caring about F/OSS) is quite another matter. Now the MBAs have cottoned on to this idea, they'll start changing their businesses to cope, and software really will become free all over.
not just that but it affects the services provided. For example, I know of a police force that was infected by conficker. It got everywhere. The consensus is that the company providing the mobile data interfaces was the original source of infection (but you cannot prove where conficker came from, its pervasive), and for a long while the officers on the beat had to use their handsets as mobile phones - no data, so no event updates and no communication with the CAD system.
I don't know the cost there, but they had con-sultants in from Microsoft to help clear the mess up and they weren't cheap. The infection lasted for 2 weeks, and they had reduced service for several weeks after that.
That's just for Conficker. Remember storm, sql slammer, I love you?
That part of the 'cowboy' insult is quite valid, a cowboy coder can get things done that a more regimented,unimaginative coder will not be able to do. However, after hacking together a fix, does the cowboy sit down and document it? update the readmes, change logs, even update the bug ticket or put in lots of relevant comments?
No. And that's the insult - not the technical skill, the enthusiasm, the keenness to fix things. Its the lack of polish that is the true problem with the cowboys. Fix that and you become a professional programmer, and that is when you've learnt to be a true master.
2 or 3 linux magazines, that's more than I expected. Magazine publishers are very aware of their markets, and considering the number of magazines that make no money, this does suggest that there are more Linux users out there than I thought (unless Shuttleworth is buying them all up). Monthly sales run to 28k according to ABC figures.
Linux Format is looking for people to write articles for it, so if any geeks want to spread the word, go for it - you'll get paid too!
like your maths education 30% growth on initial sales of 0(%) is still 0%.:-)
BTW percentages do not lie, not when they're audited and used as offical accounts in the stock market. RHT is currently trading at $19.69 making it worth $3.7 billion. Hardly 0% sales, not quite a tiny, insignificant player at all.
Growth is what matters to investors and the markets - no-one cares about how big or how much something has today, they only care about tomorrow. sure RedHat is a minnow in comparison to Microsoft, but that doesn't matter if MS loses 10% a year revenue and RedHat gains 10% a year from now one. If that were to happen you'll see restructuring (and its costs) at Microsoft, renewed marketing and advertising pushes, more products being discontinued, all the while investors would pull their money from MS to the up-and-comer.
Remember Google started with next to nothing, a business model based on a few crappy ads that no-one really thought would bring any real revenue, and DEC was once so big that they hired cruise liners for the staff christmas parties. In the software industry things can change so quickly, that those growth figures actually mean more than you think they do.
The joy of C# is windows. If you are a Windows developer, using Visual Studio, then you pretty much have the ideal coding environment. Its like VB with curly-braces, its easy to use (as the IDE help you out a lot), its quick to compile (apparently that's a big plus), and it has a huge library full of useful functions. I think the last one is the killer app - you don't need to do anything yourself, MS provides a library function for you.
On Linux, I'm not sure its quite as good as it is on Windows. It beats me why they couldn't implement the big library using C exported functions instead and expose that to all languages. I know why MS did it that way - lock in to C#/VB/Windows/.NET (a bit like 'pure java'), but I'd have hoped Linux development would be more open.
There is a patent covenant for anyone that downloads [Moonlight] from Novell
there you go. There is a big, nasty patent waiting to bite your ass, unless you have the special tame one you get from Novell. Getting it from Debian means you aren't covered.
so what if they did. See, GCC is an open-source program, go ahead and download the source code. There you go, you now own that. It doesn't matter if Stallman turns into a recluse, forbids use of it or whatever, its out, you have it, the licence says you can do pretty much what you like with it (the only stipulation upon you is to release any change you make to it - so others get the benefits you got when you downloaded it).
Mono, on the other hand, already has a patent-licencing agreement in place with Novell. That means that you do not have that same agreement, and that there is an axe hanging over it, should Microsoft ever decide that its patent licence needs to be enforced. That enforcement will probably happen when Mono apps become popular enough that Linux 'sales' increase to the detriment of Windows marketshare.
Now, if you want to talk about what would happen in California ripped Mono off, perhaps so it could save billions on Windows licences and run everything on Linux, then things would be interesting!
throwing proportionally faster CPUs at *good* code should make it proportionally faster.
Crap code.... probably not. For example, I once had to improve the performance of an app. The app spent most of its time context switching from one thread to another, more time was taken up stopping a thread, switching to another, refilling the cache lines, and so on that was spent processing the data! Think what a faster processor would do here - the CPU would process the little bit of data it was given faster thus providing much more CPU time for context switching.
Similarly with other aspects of modern code - relatively little of it is spent spinning CPU cycles. I'd say more was spent dealing with memory IO (as there is a lot of RAM used nowadays, getting that data to and from the CPU is, relatively speaking, slow as treacle) so it wouldn't matter if you could crunch the data faster if you still had to wait for it to be delivered to you.
Then we put more stuff on the network, and connect to it via Web services and the like, and the amount of CPU power required gets less and less relevant.
I'd say the single best thing you can do to get good performance, and therefore energy efficiency, and cheapness of resources is to write efficient code that requires little resources itself. Even if it takes you longer to do the job, tough on you - there's just you as a programmer but millions of users, the extra time spent developing at a lower level (instead of pointy-clicking in the IDE) is time well spent.
If Facebook's code could be made 10% more efficient, they'd require 10% less servers with all the reduced energy bill that entails. But the Facebook chap doesn't care about that - that'd cost him programmer time, and that costs short-term money! Far better for him to whinge that Intel and AMD aren't fixing his shit for him instead.
Nope, nobody gives a shit about what comes on their PC as long as its "free".
Once you show them the bill for the Windows OS, they'll ask "but what about that other option you have there?"
Some people will want Windows because its Windows. Most people want whatever just works. As you can see by netbook sales which (despite the dubious claims by MS) show at least reasonable numbers of Linux installs.
Which is why someone needs to start one of those anti-trust lawsuits Microsoft loves so much. How can any marketplace be competitive when an expensive product is sold cheaper than a free product. Really, the only way to stop Windows marketshare is to ensure that when you buy a Dell, you have to pay the retail price (ok, or a discounted price - but you have to pay extra) for the OS too.
If Dell had to be more transparent in its pricing, you might have the situation where you bought the hardware for X, the software for Y and a Dell-engineer installation (ie the disk duplication step) fee of Z. For Windows Y might be $100 and the installation $10, and Linux Y might be $0 but Z $200, but you'd see those prices and could decide to buy just the hardware and install your own OS. With the current situation, you just see that Windows is the cheapest option, which would be impossible in any other non-monopoly-based industry.
This beta is available only to customers in the United States, Israel (English only), People's Republic of China (Simplified Chinese only) and Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese only).
Isn't that list of countries the ones bot-spamming the most crap out of their PCs?
The trouble with web pages is that they are source and 'released binary' all in one file, so if you put comments in (as you always should), and meaningful tag and variable names, then your download gets quite bigger.
What you really need is a system to 'compile' the source pages to something less readable, but significantly smaller - removing comments, replacing the unneeded end tags, shortening the variable names. If that was automated - so your source files were deployed to the server via this translator, then you'd never even know the difference, except your users on low-bandwidth (ie mobile) devices would love you more.
We used a primitive one many years ago, but I don't know if there's any improvements to the state of web-page optimisers today.
the trouble with wind micro-generation is that the wind doesn't flow smoothly (or fast) near the ground. This is why commercial windmills are huge. Also, its very easy to get bursts of wind that are just too much for the windmill - the good ones have clutches - or not to get enough wind. So wind may sound really nice, but it's not something you could stick on your chimney and get lots of power. If you have a turbine on a tall pole in the bottom of your garden, you'll get more from it.
After reading up on this a while ago (here, different site now - tech has improved), it was apparent that solar had more potential than wind.
Incidentally, subsidy is the key - you can get 30% off the cost (limited to $4k) of turbines.
the OP did say "co-located with the wind farms", which cancels out the extra land payments and transmission wires - these are already dealt with for the windmills. They can only get a certain density of windmills, so why not put blocks of solar cells between them?
Perhaps governmental subsidy has something to do with it.
This always was the problem with BB over satellite. It was suggested here as an answer to the rural user problem. Allow downloads via satellite links that provided massive bandwidth, and provide uploads via your dial-up phone line as most people would just be uploading requests for more data, it would be feasible.
For Iran, providing satellite coverage with American-propaganda broadcasts is very feasible, you just need the satellite in the right place, unfortunately, the population cannot send back, or change channel. That said, I thought there was communication, via WoW messages for example (as reported a few days ago on/.), so really - what's the point of doing anything, nothing seems to be particularly broken apart from a wise governing regime for the benefit of the people and some free and fair elections, but its not as if we have those over here:)
I'm not sure about the project-able display (though wireless HDMI is available, you'd have issues with lugging the TV screen around with you), but a projectable keyboard is readily available. And it connects via bluetooth, so you can keep your cellphone-sized PC in your pocket.
I'd like to see this become a reality (displays projected onto spectacles for instance), but unfortunately software requires more processing power than you can shake a big stick at, so I don't expect it to happen anytime soon. It'd be a killer app if you could make it though, and would possibly destroy managed code and bloated OSs in no time if you did.
Right, but not too many people try to hire engineers for their spaghetti-gluing skills.
true, but too many software engineers carry their natural talent in that skill to the workplace. I know this from looking at some of their code I've had to review!
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If I recall correctly, the TradElect platform was pushed by MS as a showcase for its new .NET 1.0 platform, and was written by a whole team (or two) of outsourced developers in this brand new, shiny technology. They ported it to .NET 1.1 but I'm not sure they ever tried to port it to .NET 2.0.
Did I mention it was developed in conjunction with Accenture? Oh, and it was developed by Microsoft itself by all the news reports (though I bet the development was done by cheapest devs Accenture could hire, with a few MS consultants discussing architecture and collecting big fees - it didn't cost $40m in hardware alone!)
So, yes, it could have been poorly written code, but as you say, you can write poor .NET code. It always seemed to me that the project was akin to an 'enterprise java' one of yesteryear - big, slow, over-engineered, poorly developed, resource intensive and generally 'too big to fail'. Seems also that the LSE knows better than to hang on to the worst kind of crappy software and try to make it better.
As for MS bashing, they're the big boy, so they always take the hit. If all software written for MS was great and worked perfectly, we'd worship them as gods. As it is, we continually see problems and give them no slack. If they were a small company trying hard to make a difference, we'd be more forgiving.
I can;t answer for movies, music or books but.... software is different. My boss has decided (ie read on managerial/executive/business opinion pieces) that in 5-10 years all software will be free, the competition from open source will be too great for proprietary software to effectively exist. Instead, all business models will revolve around maintenance and support.
Now, I think that because I like open source software, but for him to understand it too (without even caring about F/OSS) is quite another matter. Now the MBAs have cottoned on to this idea, they'll start changing their businesses to cope, and software really will become free all over.
I do, you insensitive clod!!!
I like the ability to click the 'word search' buttons for my search. The gmail button is nice too. Don't care about the rest though.
If there aren't a bunch of Microsoft fanboys and astroturfers on this site, how did you get modded informative?
because there *are* a bunch of Microsoft fanboys and astroturfers on this site. :)
not just that but it affects the services provided. For example, I know of a police force that was infected by conficker. It got everywhere. The consensus is that the company providing the mobile data interfaces was the original source of infection (but you cannot prove where conficker came from, its pervasive), and for a long while the officers on the beat had to use their handsets as mobile phones - no data, so no event updates and no communication with the CAD system.
I don't know the cost there, but they had con-sultants in from Microsoft to help clear the mess up and they weren't cheap. The infection lasted for 2 weeks, and they had reduced service for several weeks after that.
That's just for Conficker. Remember storm, sql slammer, I love you?
Yeah, the 2nd amendment won't be anything other than a bit of paper until we get TANKS!
(apologies to Dominion:Tank Police)
That part of the 'cowboy' insult is quite valid, a cowboy coder can get things done that a more regimented,unimaginative coder will not be able to do. However, after hacking together a fix, does the cowboy sit down and document it? update the readmes, change logs, even update the bug ticket or put in lots of relevant comments?
No. And that's the insult - not the technical skill, the enthusiasm, the keenness to fix things. Its the lack of polish that is the true problem with the cowboys. Fix that and you become a professional programmer, and that is when you've learnt to be a true master.
2 or 3 linux magazines, that's more than I expected. Magazine publishers are very aware of their markets, and considering the number of magazines that make no money, this does suggest that there are more Linux users out there than I thought (unless Shuttleworth is buying them all up). Monthly sales run to 28k according to ABC figures.
Linux Format is looking for people to write articles for it, so if any geeks want to spread the word, go for it - you'll get paid too!
like your maths education 30% growth on initial sales of 0(%) is still 0%. :-)
BTW percentages do not lie, not when they're audited and used as offical accounts in the stock market. RHT is currently trading at $19.69 making it worth $3.7 billion. Hardly 0% sales, not quite a tiny, insignificant player at all.
Growth is what matters to investors and the markets - no-one cares about how big or how much something has today, they only care about tomorrow. sure RedHat is a minnow in comparison to Microsoft, but that doesn't matter if MS loses 10% a year revenue and RedHat gains 10% a year from now one. If that were to happen you'll see restructuring (and its costs) at Microsoft, renewed marketing and advertising pushes, more products being discontinued, all the while investors would pull their money from MS to the up-and-comer.
Remember Google started with next to nothing, a business model based on a few crappy ads that no-one really thought would bring any real revenue, and DEC was once so big that they hired cruise liners for the staff christmas parties. In the software industry things can change so quickly, that those growth figures actually mean more than you think they do.
cool. I think Mono is dangerous, regardless of how much some people think its a holy grail of software development. Maybe they work for Microsoft :)
I wonder what would happen if Novell went bankrupt?
The joy of C# is windows. If you are a Windows developer, using Visual Studio, then you pretty much have the ideal coding environment. Its like VB with curly-braces, its easy to use (as the IDE help you out a lot), its quick to compile (apparently that's a big plus), and it has a huge library full of useful functions. I think the last one is the killer app - you don't need to do anything yourself, MS provides a library function for you.
On Linux, I'm not sure its quite as good as it is on Windows. It beats me why they couldn't implement the big library using C exported functions instead and expose that to all languages. I know why MS did it that way - lock in to C#/VB/Windows/.NET (a bit like 'pure java'), but I'd have hoped Linux development would be more open.
There is a patent covenant for anyone that downloads [Moonlight] from Novell
there you go. There is a big, nasty patent waiting to bite your ass, unless you have the special tame one you get from Novell. Getting it from Debian means you aren't covered.
so what if they did. See, GCC is an open-source program, go ahead and download the source code. There you go, you now own that. It doesn't matter if Stallman turns into a recluse, forbids use of it or whatever, its out, you have it, the licence says you can do pretty much what you like with it (the only stipulation upon you is to release any change you make to it - so others get the benefits you got when you downloaded it).
Mono, on the other hand, already has a patent-licencing agreement in place with Novell. That means that you do not have that same agreement, and that there is an axe hanging over it, should Microsoft ever decide that its patent licence needs to be enforced. That enforcement will probably happen when Mono apps become popular enough that Linux 'sales' increase to the detriment of Windows marketshare.
Now, if you want to talk about what would happen in California ripped Mono off, perhaps so it could save billions on Windows licences and run everything on Linux, then things would be interesting!
throwing proportionally faster CPUs at *good* code should make it proportionally faster.
Crap code.... probably not. For example, I once had to improve the performance of an app. The app spent most of its time context switching from one thread to another, more time was taken up stopping a thread, switching to another, refilling the cache lines, and so on that was spent processing the data! Think what a faster processor would do here - the CPU would process the little bit of data it was given faster thus providing much more CPU time for context switching.
Similarly with other aspects of modern code - relatively little of it is spent spinning CPU cycles. I'd say more was spent dealing with memory IO (as there is a lot of RAM used nowadays, getting that data to and from the CPU is, relatively speaking, slow as treacle) so it wouldn't matter if you could crunch the data faster if you still had to wait for it to be delivered to you.
Then we put more stuff on the network, and connect to it via Web services and the like, and the amount of CPU power required gets less and less relevant.
I'd say the single best thing you can do to get good performance, and therefore energy efficiency, and cheapness of resources is to write efficient code that requires little resources itself. Even if it takes you longer to do the job, tough on you - there's just you as a programmer but millions of users, the extra time spent developing at a lower level (instead of pointy-clicking in the IDE) is time well spent.
If Facebook's code could be made 10% more efficient, they'd require 10% less servers with all the reduced energy bill that entails. But the Facebook chap doesn't care about that - that'd cost him programmer time, and that costs short-term money! Far better for him to whinge that Intel and AMD aren't fixing his shit for him instead.
Nope, nobody gives a shit about what comes on their PC as long as its "free".
Once you show them the bill for the Windows OS, they'll ask "but what about that other option you have there?"
Some people will want Windows because its Windows. Most people want whatever just works. As you can see by netbook sales which (despite the dubious claims by MS) show at least reasonable numbers of Linux installs.
followed by Aeon Flux, Equilibrium, Brazil, Brave New World, Pleasantville and Hookers in Revolt
Ok, one of those might get cancelled (I'm guessing it'll be Brazil).
Which is why someone needs to start one of those anti-trust lawsuits Microsoft loves so much. How can any marketplace be competitive when an expensive product is sold cheaper than a free product. Really, the only way to stop Windows marketshare is to ensure that when you buy a Dell, you have to pay the retail price (ok, or a discounted price - but you have to pay extra) for the OS too.
If Dell had to be more transparent in its pricing, you might have the situation where you bought the hardware for X, the software for Y and a Dell-engineer installation (ie the disk duplication step) fee of Z. For Windows Y might be $100 and the installation $10, and Linux Y might be $0 but Z $200, but you'd see those prices and could decide to buy just the hardware and install your own OS. With the current situation, you just see that Windows is the cheapest option, which would be impossible in any other non-monopoly-based industry.
This beta is available only to customers in the United States, Israel (English only), People's Republic of China (Simplified Chinese only) and Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese only).
Isn't that list of countries the ones bot-spamming the most crap out of their PCs?
Perhaps its more targetted than conspiracy?
A game titled Arhrrrr
Let me guess...its about .. ninja monkeys?!
The trouble with web pages is that they are source and 'released binary' all in one file, so if you put comments in (as you always should), and meaningful tag and variable names, then your download gets quite bigger.
What you really need is a system to 'compile' the source pages to something less readable, but significantly smaller - removing comments, replacing the unneeded end tags, shortening the variable names. If that was automated - so your source files were deployed to the server via this translator, then you'd never even know the difference, except your users on low-bandwidth (ie mobile) devices would love you more.
We used a primitive one many years ago, but I don't know if there's any improvements to the state of web-page optimisers today.
the trouble with wind micro-generation is that the wind doesn't flow smoothly (or fast) near the ground. This is why commercial windmills are huge. Also, its very easy to get bursts of wind that are just too much for the windmill - the good ones have clutches - or not to get enough wind. So wind may sound really nice, but it's not something you could stick on your chimney and get lots of power. If you have a turbine on a tall pole in the bottom of your garden, you'll get more from it.
After reading up on this a while ago (here, different site now - tech has improved), it was apparent that solar had more potential than wind.
Incidentally, subsidy is the key - you can get 30% off the cost (limited to $4k) of turbines.
the OP did say "co-located with the wind farms", which cancels out the extra land payments and transmission wires - these are already dealt with for the windmills. They can only get a certain density of windmills, so why not put blocks of solar cells between them?
Perhaps governmental subsidy has something to do with it.
This always was the problem with BB over satellite. It was suggested here as an answer to the rural user problem. Allow downloads via satellite links that provided massive bandwidth, and provide uploads via your dial-up phone line as most people would just be uploading requests for more data, it would be feasible.
For Iran, providing satellite coverage with American-propaganda broadcasts is very feasible, you just need the satellite in the right place, unfortunately, the population cannot send back, or change channel. That said, I thought there was communication, via WoW messages for example (as reported a few days ago on /.), so really - what's the point of doing anything, nothing seems to be particularly broken apart from a wise governing regime for the benefit of the people and some free and fair elections, but its not as if we have those over here :)
I'm not sure about the project-able display (though wireless HDMI is available, you'd have issues with lugging the TV screen around with you), but a projectable keyboard is readily available. And it connects via bluetooth, so you can keep your cellphone-sized PC in your pocket.
I'd like to see this become a reality (displays projected onto spectacles for instance), but unfortunately software requires more processing power than you can shake a big stick at, so I don't expect it to happen anytime soon. It'd be a killer app if you could make it though, and would possibly destroy managed code and bloated OSs in no time if you did.
oh... hang on... you can have spectacles-projected displays!
Right, but not too many people try to hire engineers for their spaghetti-gluing skills.
true, but too many software engineers carry their natural talent in that skill to the workplace. I know this from looking at some of their code I've had to review!