Complete with a link to a short interview with Sam Ramji (no, unfortunately not he of Evil Dead fame)
he says: "It is not a move away from IIS as Microsoft's strategic web server technology. We have invested significantly in refactoring and adding new, state-of-the-art features to IIS, including support for PHP. We will continue to invest in IIS for the long term and are currently under way with development of IIS 8.
It is a strong endorsement of The Apache Way, and opens a new chapter in our relationship with the ASF. We have worked with Apache POI, Apache Axis2, Jakarta, and other projects in the last year, and we will continue our technical support and interoperability testing work for this open source software."
Oh no, they're sucking up to developers all right... "hey kids, come and have a play with this cool new toy, yes the Express version is totally free... and you can do so much stuff with it, just look how it does most of it for you, no you don't have to think too hard about your programming, just let the nice IDE suck your bra... um, help you work smarter, not harder. Yes, you'll need to buy more RAM, but its cheap nowadays. Now, look at the nice client tools included too, yes, you can have animated icons on your buttons isn't that cool, yes so you'll work with Uncle MS's technology now, and you won't be able to leave ever again... mouhahahahahahaha".
Managed code, pah. Managing to break all the old stuff more like.
1. believe me, PHP by itself runs on more webservers and sites than all the.NET languages put together. Probably more than.NET languages and ASP/classic too!
Netcraft stats for PHP - over 20 million sites a year ago. According to the same Netcraft survey, IIS itself only runs 20 million sites, so unless *every* IIS site ran ASP (note: these stats are from Aug 2007, so they'd all be classic ASP) PHP would *still* be running on more active sites. There's more stats available for the current month.
2. Silverlight is a client-side technology. IIS/apache doesn't come into it. A silverlight discussion would be MS supporting it on Firefox on Linux.
3. MS is the market leader only in certain segments of the IT marketplace. For webserving, Apache has been dominant for, well, since forever. MS is catchign up as they provide 'incentives' for some providers - eg Myspace, GoDaddy etc, which you'll see on the netcraft stats.
4. The problem is that you'd never get.NET on Linux, which is Apache's native platform. Though Apache runs on Windows I guess MS may be trying to get developers to program in.NET using Apache and they be as locked in to Windows server platform as if they had stuck with IIS. I think this is the goal for this sponsorship.
To answer your question - should MS drop Silverlight because you can do the same in Javascript and Flash (Flex), then the answer is no. Should *you* drop Silverlight because you can do the same in a free technology on any platform you choose, then the pragmatic answer is probably yes. Simply, if you stick with C# then you're stuck with Windows. If you choose PHP then you can choose any platform you like.
Fuck, He is luck he ain't in the UK.. Not giving up your password is automatic Gaol Time here..
dear sir,
I write to inform you that I have fixed that for you using the general form contained within the Oxford English dictionary, for the reason of correct spelling as inferred by your use of the phrase "in the UK".
nothing stops you from getting several openid accounts - one for all your social networking sites (so if one gets hacked, so do the others - its still not that much of a big deal once you're older than 12).
For my bank, I don't use openID. For my email, I might be persuaded to use 1 openID for several email accounts. For crappy websites/forums that need a login but are really not that important, I'd like to use a single openID account for them all.
This would be a lot better than using the same username and password combo on all sites, as some people do.
And worse the summary tries to blast MS for not supporting it. For all the many things to bitch about MS..."They won't sign on and support one of the dumbest security ideas on the internet" seems pretty counter to the normal complaints that they do stupid things when it comes to security.
You mean like Passport (or Windows Live ID) is a good idea?
At least OpenID is a standard, not an implementation so you are free to authenticate anyway you like, and run your own OpenID provider if you prefer.
They do, Passpoor or maybe its Windows Livid, or something like that I think its called:-)
The scary (and probably most likely) outcome is that MS embraces OpenID, adds a couple of you know, essential additions to it to support missing features that it absolutely requires for, say MSN Live Messenger, and then releases "OpenIDLive" which it touts as a completely standards-based* implementation of OpenID, just like it did with Kerberos.
Also note that Microsoft provided a special tool (VSP1CLN.exe) to remove the files replaced by SP1, its part of your SP1 install and will clean up about 2 Gb. (yep, 2GB). There are plenty of instructions on its use on the web
Unfortunately, this time its true. We all know how SSDs will wear out over time, we all know how they'll last for 10+ years in normal usage too so its not much of an issue.
However, I run Vista at home, and I find that even with searching turned off, the HDD light is pretty much on all the time, except when I close an app that's used a lot of RAM whereupon it starts thrashing away for a good minute. I expect its readyboost kicking in and re-organising my drive so that app will start up faster next time, but that kind of usage will destroy a SSD in short order.
If the access times for SSDs aren't as good as expected for HDDs, then I expect performance woudl suffer dramatically too.
In this case, SSDs have a certain niche where they provide benefits, but Vista doesn't lend itself to that niche. The trouble the/. crowd has (besides, the usual MS antipathy) is that you'd expect an OS not to thrash the disc quite so much. If the promise of SSD persuades OS manufacturers to improve the way they use the disc (which would give benefits in energy use and overall performance) then it can only be a good thing so I welcome the Vista bashing this time.
Oh, but no-one is attacking MS here - you'll see lots of comments that its all fine on XP - the problem lies with Vista.
Oh, believe me its not just Windows Update that goes in WinSxS (mine is currently at 6 Gig) - every app you install ends up there, and I guess never gets un-installed.
I have Vista's C partition on 25Gig and that seems enough, if you install apps into a different partition, and have the swap file elsewhere too.
Windows Update works for Firefox now? gosh, I never knew....:)
FF is a major market share, so if MS wants silverlight to dominate, they have to get FF users to install it. They'll do that by making some sites use it - perhaps a Youtube clone that only uses Silverlight, or Yahoo front page or Yahoo chat.
True, but disasters only occur occasionally, "Huge IT support staffs were a consequence of poor products, badly implemented systems" happen all the time.
That's why your DR is you and 40 servers, imagine how many people work in Microsoft's support department:-)
Well.... nowadays you need to buy Biztalk and do exactly the same thing (except first you have to convert your piped output stream to XML)(and convert it back again afterwards).
I think the pipes architecture is still a good thing, but thats not what I was referring to. I meant that on Windows there is a common development platform that everyone knows, even if its MFC, you can hire a new MFC dev and they'll recognise all the old code and how it works, especially because of the Win32 api.
The level of homogeneity on linux isn't as great, so linux can be seen as more difficult to work with, more disparate in ways to develop for it. I think this isn't the case for web development, as you have pretty much a single dev platform there - Apache plus PHP or Perl or Python (or Puh-Ruby;) ) so that is seen as a safe bet, but the same kind of development is not present for Linux desktop apps.
At least, that's how I see it, I could be wrong and everyone uses the CRT and Gnome or KDE toolkits.
once you have a binary package, installing it is as easy as typing "yum install xyz". If you don't have a repository for that package and you've downloaded it, installing is as eay as typing "rpm -i xyz.rpm"
really, it is a doddle. Its very rare to need to compile from sources anymore (unless you want to).
Perhaps by the distos taking a more active part into the apps they include. Eg. hw many CD burners do you need? The answer obviously is just 1. If the distro only supported a single cd-burner (hopefully after testing them all and choosing the best one for their goals) then we'd have an incentive to make different things, or to make your thing better to become the new default.
Different distros would probably use different CD burning software, so its not like we'd be trashing everything in favour of a monopoly (not unless that particular package was truly the best)
That would bring the benefits of competition into the Linux marketplace without bringing anything like money into the equation.
From my experience, implementations never change. In the big world of large software projects, changing the implementation would introduce so much regression testing its not worth it. Instead, a ImplementationEx gets written and used in the places where its needed.
So direct access of member variables isn't so bad a thing as you may think, though the reasons for using them aren't as important as their proponents think either!
I have had the good fortune to be able to write coding standards, and I totally agree with you. All the standard standards don't really help write better code, and I think they're just there to boost the ego of someone who thinks he's somehow better than the serfs who have to follow them.
My standards... . Keep your code the same style as whatever you're work on. . Ensure it gets checked in in the correct place in source control. . Make sure there is a (standard-format) readme file in the release directory, and a paramater xml, and binary. . Make sure you have put some comments in there (that's really to stop the cowboys just hacking out code withotu thinking)
I find the rest falls into place anyway, even APIs as developers tend to keep to the existing styles anyway. If someone did start to do things differently just to be different, he'd have to have a talking to.
Don't ever underestimate the value of 'easy to find'. I maintain code that generally has the same structure, so when I look at someone else's code, I know roughly where something will be. If (as happens with older stuff), they place the usual bits in other places, it can be nightmare to find.
I think this doubly applies to OO languages, if you have an object full of static variables, you can have difficulty finding them. I'm sure if people had to write such code without an IDE to 'goto definition' then they'd revert to good, old fashioned styles like you complain about.
It doesn't hurt to place constants in 1 place, even if they're declared globally. I'd say you coudl wrap them in a namespace, but they still remain in the same place so they're easy to find.
I think the point is that indentation is easier to understand from first glances than any syntactic statement delimiters. Once you start using indentation, bringing code together so its closer to the rest of the logical block makes it even easier to read.
Something the rest of us should keep in mind even if we use non-K&R style, lots of vertical whitespace is bad, indentation is still good.
amen. The one true rule is - never change coding styles.
Even if you hate them, if you're presented with a chunk of code that put sthe braces in the 'wrong' position, it is your holy duty to keep them there and write any new code in the same style.
That should be the only coding standard anyone needs; the rest are just arrogant posturings, usually written by people who don't bother to follow their own standards anyway.
true, I've found instaling apps in Linux to be easier than Windows once you have a binary distribution that is packaged.
I think perhaps the problem isn't the apps that are out there, but the development of them. Microsoft produces more development tools than there are days to figure out how to use them, and they produce documentation that is really good (assuming you want to be a WinCE or.NET developer nowadays). If I could develop my apps for Linux with the ease I could develop for Linux, there would be more apps and more uptake for Linux.
The mass of boring, specific-solution apps out there dwwarf everything you can get commercially. Windows is built on the premise that it is easy to create apps, and that supporting them is easy even if the original developer leave, you'll be able to find another who can take up their code because they will be familiar with the technology used to produce it.
This, I feel is one of the reasons for Java having so much uptake - it was well documented, and if you wrote a Swing app, you knew your investment in it would be safe.
Of course, momentum and installed base helps a lot, but Windows cannot ever compete with free.
in other words, we need a 3 tier certificate system. You can get certs that a) secure communications, b) secure communications with a particular website, and c) secure communications with a website that is verified as being a valid and trusted organisation.
Colour the bar appropriately, display the name in the bar, flash a padlock, popup a seal icon, whatever - as long as its obvious, it would be the perfect solution and it wouldn't be much different from the status quo.
except that you only need to tell people that this site really corresponds with this certificate.
Sure, it won't stop phishers running "ebuy.com" as they can then get a valid certificate (I'm sure they can anyway), but it will prevent the certificate not being owned by the same people who own the site.
There are ways to make sure the cert = the site when you request one, I did it recently with my myopenid id - check out their ssl options, they make you add a cname to your dns that they verify - if you can alter your dns, you own the site.
So, considering the hoops I had to jump through to get my certificate last time I applied (ie none at all besides having a credit card), this would be *more* secure than my current root-CA certified one.
Slashdot Mirror
Ars Technica do for you?
Complete with a link to a short interview with Sam Ramji (no, unfortunately not he of Evil Dead fame)
he says: "It is not a move away from IIS as Microsoft's strategic web server technology. We have invested significantly in refactoring and adding new, state-of-the-art features to IIS, including support for PHP. We will continue to invest in IIS for the long term and are currently under way with development of IIS 8.
It is a strong endorsement of The Apache Way, and opens a new chapter in our relationship with the ASF. We have worked with Apache POI, Apache Axis2, Jakarta, and other projects in the last year, and we will continue our technical support and interoperability testing work for this open source software."
either that or a DoJ investigator raised his eyebrows in a meeting.
Oh no, they're sucking up to developers all right... "hey kids, come and have a play with this cool new toy, yes the Express version is totally free... and you can do so much stuff with it, just look how it does most of it for you, no you don't have to think too hard about your programming, just let the nice IDE suck your bra... um, help you work smarter, not harder. Yes, you'll need to buy more RAM, but its cheap nowadays. Now, look at the nice client tools included too, yes, you can have animated icons on your buttons isn't that cool, yes so you'll work with Uncle MS's technology now, and you won't be able to leave ever again... mouhahahahahahaha".
Managed code, pah. Managing to break all the old stuff more like.
1. believe me, PHP by itself runs on more webservers and sites than all the .NET languages put together. Probably more than .NET languages and ASP/classic too!
Netcraft stats for PHP - over 20 million sites a year ago. According to the same Netcraft survey, IIS itself only runs 20 million sites, so unless *every* IIS site ran ASP (note: these stats are from Aug 2007, so they'd all be classic ASP) PHP would *still* be running on more active sites.
There's more stats available for the current month.
2. Silverlight is a client-side technology. IIS/apache doesn't come into it. A silverlight discussion would be MS supporting it on Firefox on Linux.
3. MS is the market leader only in certain segments of the IT marketplace. For webserving, Apache has been dominant for, well, since forever. MS is catchign up as they provide 'incentives' for some providers - eg Myspace, GoDaddy etc, which you'll see on the netcraft stats.
4. The problem is that you'd never get .NET on Linux, which is Apache's native platform. Though Apache runs on Windows I guess MS may be trying to get developers to program in .NET using Apache and they be as locked in to Windows server platform as if they had stuck with IIS. I think this is the goal for this sponsorship.
To answer your question - should MS drop Silverlight because you can do the same in Javascript and Flash (Flex), then the answer is no. Should *you* drop Silverlight because you can do the same in a free technology on any platform you choose, then the pragmatic answer is probably yes. Simply, if you stick with C# then you're stuck with Windows. If you choose PHP then you can choose any platform you like.
maybe Yahoo runs on Apache? :-)
Fuck, He is luck he ain't in the UK.. Not giving up your password is automatic Gaol Time here..
dear sir,
I write to inform you that I have fixed that for you using the general form contained within the Oxford English dictionary, for the reason of correct spelling as inferred by your use of the phrase "in the UK".
yours faithfully.
nothing stops you from getting several openid accounts - one for all your social networking sites (so if one gets hacked, so do the others - its still not that much of a big deal once you're older than 12).
For my bank, I don't use openID. For my email, I might be persuaded to use 1 openID for several email accounts. For crappy websites/forums that need a login but are really not that important, I'd like to use a single openID account for them all.
This would be a lot better than using the same username and password combo on all sites, as some people do.
And worse the summary tries to blast MS for not supporting it. For all the many things to bitch about MS..."They won't sign on and support one of the dumbest security ideas on the internet" seems pretty counter to the normal complaints that they do stupid things when it comes to security.
You mean like Passport (or Windows Live ID) is a good idea?
At least OpenID is a standard, not an implementation so you are free to authenticate anyway you like, and run your own OpenID provider if you prefer.
They do, Passpoor or maybe its Windows Livid, or something like that I think its called :-)
The scary (and probably most likely) outcome is that MS embraces OpenID, adds a couple of you know, essential additions to it to support missing features that it absolutely requires for, say MSN Live Messenger, and then releases "OpenIDLive" which it touts as a completely standards-based* implementation of OpenID, just like it did with Kerberos.
Are you not running XP - its tiny on XP.
Vista.. well, read about it on Google:
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1173190&SiteID=17
http://www.vistaheads.com/forums/microsoft-public-windows-vista-general/30395-what-winsxs-folder.html
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=590216&view=getnewpost
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-general/53906-what-winsxs-folder.html
Also note that Microsoft provided a special tool (VSP1CLN.exe) to remove the files replaced by SP1, its part of your SP1 install and will clean up about 2 Gb. (yep, 2GB). There are plenty of instructions on its use on the web
Unfortunately, this time its true. We all know how SSDs will wear out over time, we all know how they'll last for 10+ years in normal usage too so its not much of an issue.
However, I run Vista at home, and I find that even with searching turned off, the HDD light is pretty much on all the time, except when I close an app that's used a lot of RAM whereupon it starts thrashing away for a good minute. I expect its readyboost kicking in and re-organising my drive so that app will start up faster next time, but that kind of usage will destroy a SSD in short order.
If the access times for SSDs aren't as good as expected for HDDs, then I expect performance woudl suffer dramatically too.
In this case, SSDs have a certain niche where they provide benefits, but Vista doesn't lend itself to that niche. The trouble the /. crowd has (besides, the usual MS antipathy) is that you'd expect an OS not to thrash the disc quite so much. If the promise of SSD persuades OS manufacturers to improve the way they use the disc (which would give benefits in energy use and overall performance) then it can only be a good thing so I welcome the Vista bashing this time.
Oh, but no-one is attacking MS here - you'll see lots of comments that its all fine on XP - the problem lies with Vista.
Oh, believe me its not just Windows Update that goes in WinSxS (mine is currently at 6 Gig) - every app you install ends up there, and I guess never gets un-installed.
I have Vista's C partition on 25Gig and that seems enough, if you install apps into a different partition, and have the swap file elsewhere too.
Nope. That's what automatic update is for.
Windows Update works for Firefox now? gosh, I never knew.... :)
FF is a major market share, so if MS wants silverlight to dominate, they have to get FF users to install it. They'll do that by making some sites use it - perhaps a Youtube clone that only uses Silverlight, or Yahoo front page or Yahoo chat.
True, but disasters only occur occasionally, "Huge IT support staffs were a consequence of poor products, badly implemented systems" happen all the time.
That's why your DR is you and 40 servers, imagine how many people work in Microsoft's support department :-)
Well.... nowadays you need to buy Biztalk and do exactly the same thing (except first you have to convert your piped output stream to XML)(and convert it back again afterwards).
I think the pipes architecture is still a good thing, but thats not what I was referring to. I meant that on Windows there is a common development platform that everyone knows, even if its MFC, you can hire a new MFC dev and they'll recognise all the old code and how it works, especially because of the Win32 api.
The level of homogeneity on linux isn't as great, so linux can be seen as more difficult to work with, more disparate in ways to develop for it. I think this isn't the case for web development, as you have pretty much a single dev platform there - Apache plus PHP or Perl or Python (or Puh-Ruby ;) ) so that is seen as a safe bet, but the same kind of development is not present for Linux desktop apps.
At least, that's how I see it, I could be wrong and everyone uses the CRT and Gnome or KDE toolkits.
once you have a binary package, installing it is as easy as typing "yum install xyz". If you don't have a repository for that package and you've downloaded it, installing is as eay as typing "rpm -i xyz.rpm"
really, it is a doddle. Its very rare to need to compile from sources anymore (unless you want to).
Perhaps by the distos taking a more active part into the apps they include. Eg. hw many CD burners do you need? The answer obviously is just 1. If the distro only supported a single cd-burner (hopefully after testing them all and choosing the best one for their goals) then we'd have an incentive to make different things, or to make your thing better to become the new default.
Different distros would probably use different CD burning software, so its not like we'd be trashing everything in favour of a monopoly (not unless that particular package was truly the best)
That would bring the benefits of competition into the Linux marketplace without bringing anything like money into the equation.
Just a thought.
From my experience, implementations never change. In the big world of large software projects, changing the implementation would introduce so much regression testing its not worth it. Instead, a ImplementationEx gets written and used in the places where its needed.
So direct access of member variables isn't so bad a thing as you may think, though the reasons for using them aren't as important as their proponents think either!
I have had the good fortune to be able to write coding standards, and I totally agree with you. All the standard standards don't really help write better code, and I think they're just there to boost the ego of someone who thinks he's somehow better than the serfs who have to follow them.
My standards ...
. Keep your code the same style as whatever you're work on.
. Ensure it gets checked in in the correct place in source control.
. Make sure there is a (standard-format) readme file in the release directory, and a paramater xml, and binary.
. Make sure you have put some comments in there (that's really to stop the cowboys just hacking out code withotu thinking)
I find the rest falls into place anyway, even APIs as developers tend to keep to the existing styles anyway. If someone did start to do things differently just to be different, he'd have to have a talking to.
Don't ever underestimate the value of 'easy to find'. I maintain code that generally has the same structure, so when I look at someone else's code, I know roughly where something will be. If (as happens with older stuff), they place the usual bits in other places, it can be nightmare to find.
I think this doubly applies to OO languages, if you have an object full of static variables, you can have difficulty finding them. I'm sure if people had to write such code without an IDE to 'goto definition' then they'd revert to good, old fashioned styles like you complain about.
It doesn't hurt to place constants in 1 place, even if they're declared globally. I'd say you coudl wrap them in a namespace, but they still remain in the same place so they're easy to find.
I think the point is that indentation is easier to understand from first glances than any syntactic statement delimiters. Once you start using indentation, bringing code together so its closer to the rest of the logical block makes it even easier to read.
Something the rest of us should keep in mind even if we use non-K&R style, lots of vertical whitespace is bad, indentation is still good.
amen. The one true rule is - never change coding styles.
Even if you hate them, if you're presented with a chunk of code that put sthe braces in the 'wrong' position, it is your holy duty to keep them there and write any new code in the same style.
That should be the only coding standard anyone needs; the rest are just arrogant posturings, usually written by people who don't bother to follow their own standards anyway.
true, I've found instaling apps in Linux to be easier than Windows once you have a binary distribution that is packaged.
I think perhaps the problem isn't the apps that are out there, but the development of them. Microsoft produces more development tools than there are days to figure out how to use them, and they produce documentation that is really good (assuming you want to be a WinCE or .NET developer nowadays). If I could develop my apps for Linux with the ease I could develop for Linux, there would be more apps and more uptake for Linux.
The mass of boring, specific-solution apps out there dwwarf everything you can get commercially. Windows is built on the premise that it is easy to create apps, and that supporting them is easy even if the original developer leave, you'll be able to find another who can take up their code because they will be familiar with the technology used to produce it.
This, I feel is one of the reasons for Java having so much uptake - it was well documented, and if you wrote a Swing app, you knew your investment in it would be safe.
Of course, momentum and installed base helps a lot, but Windows cannot ever compete with free.
in other words, we need a 3 tier certificate system. You can get certs that a) secure communications, b) secure communications with a particular website, and c) secure communications with a website that is verified as being a valid and trusted organisation.
Colour the bar appropriately, display the name in the bar, flash a padlock, popup a seal icon, whatever - as long as its obvious, it would be the perfect solution and it wouldn't be much different from the status quo.
except that you only need to tell people that this site really corresponds with this certificate.
Sure, it won't stop phishers running "ebuy.com" as they can then get a valid certificate (I'm sure they can anyway), but it will prevent the certificate not being owned by the same people who own the site.
There are ways to make sure the cert = the site when you request one, I did it recently with my myopenid id - check out their ssl options, they make you add a cname to your dns that they verify - if you can alter your dns, you own the site.
So, considering the hoops I had to jump through to get my certificate last time I applied (ie none at all besides having a credit card), this would be *more* secure than my current root-CA certified one.