Which is fine, Vista isn't the unusable brain-dead pile of steaming poop some would have you beleve, and it has some benefits over XP. I think you've named them all except for 1 (when you try to delete a load of files, any that are locked will show a prompt with 'skip' option).
Vista however....
hogs memory - you've seen this already. hogs disk space (check your WinSxS directory, it isn't small. this is more of a big deal in this age of VMs and smaller, power-efficient machines)
Explorer will occasionally start to delete everything when you delete a few files, I think its user error but its not obvious how I end up with Vista trying to delete the containing directory. File delete still takes ages - Vista will happily wait to tell you how long it'll take to delete a file before actually deleting the f*cker.
Driver support can be... limited, especially for older hardware and you're SOL if you don't want to buy a new device.
Explorer cannot keep the display configuration per folder that I set it - not if I edit a parent folder (with the 'inherit' checkbox cleared, obviously).
The indexer service never seems to stop, and if you do stop it, you'll find you don't get a complete start menu list after time.
Also, for some reason, when I close any app that has used a lot of RAM, Vista starts a mega disk thrashing session. This lasts for minutes, though the system is usable, I wouldn't like to be running my box on a SSD!
Oh, but the biggest issue is things that have just broken, but you don't realise until you come to use them. eg, I had a problem with the Task Scheduler - it couldn't create new tasks. I forget the exact problem (or the solution) but it was pretty wierd with a mis-install of some system component. Also, I had problems installing SQL Server - I got a 'failed to compile MOF files xyz'. Turns out, this is because the WMI is corrupted! I'd only just installed Vista and it was broken in subtle ways. I think its just too complex, and I reckon you will too once you really get going with it.
So, after using it for a while I think its ok, but if I had to buy a copy I just wouldn't bother. Incidentally, my work PC runs XP and will do so until I have to change.
a power user is defined as someone who wants to achieve more than the general system readily allows for. So, in this case the OP is a power user - a normal user would accept that root-user triggers are not available, as he wants that power, he's a power user. (in a shared hosting environment that is, I wouldn't call him that if he wanted to add triggers to his own Oracle DB!)
... rather than release it and leave it untouched for 3 years while still claiming "full Linux support*", where the * means "except for features less than 3 years old".
Speaking like that tells me you don't work in marketing...
A lot of people forget that C has very strong typing (that you can get round it with a cast doesn't detract from that fact that *you* have to perform that cast, you cannot accidently pass the wrong type in)
Some 'safer' features, such a GC to name a fashionable one, only shift the source of errors to a different place - GCs happily use up lots of memory, happily hang the system while they collect, and often you end up (like the Princeton DARPA team) assuming things are dealt with when they get 'stuck' in memory because there's a reference hanging around somewhere). I mean, a GC is fine for most things, but I'd still want a better form of memory management to be used first, and I certainly wouldn't want a GC used in a nuclear bomber. At least Sun's Java licence knows to make that explicitly clear.
The biggest problem with C is dynamic memory allocation. The way to fix it is, simply, not to use dynamic memory allocations! You can easily write C/C++ code where everything is on the stack, everything is a local variable. Ok, the other problem with C is array bounds checking - especially C-style strings, but you can still use fixed-length types and your own non null-terminated copy functions.
Modern, easy-to-use languages give you the illusion of safety - but really they just sweep the problems under the rug so you don't notice. Even some things that are designed to make your code safer, often require as much care as before
In short, it doesn't matter what you use, you have to think about it and you should never, ever assume someone else has fixed all your problems for you.
Are you sure? Software tends to be written by developers, and its the quality of them, their ability to work to quality standards and basically take their time to get it done right that matters. All that C code you've seen crash - it'll be because someone hacked it together, no-one tested it thoroughly enough, and no-one took the time to do it right. C is even easy to code reliably if you impose some restrictions on yourself (or use some libraries/routines that you can't easily take shortcuts with - eg if you can pass a pointer to a routine, you're going to pass a bad one one day, do some wrong arithmentic on it, etc. If you pass a strict fixed-size buffer, then you're much less likely to get an error. Just a simple example).
The point is you can write bad software in any language, the new C# stuff at work crashes all over the place and is slow. The old C code from 1984 is still working fine. Its not these languages that had anything to do with their relative quality.
The only reason I brought that up is because one of my editors said, Oh look, they have Java on this thing.
Oh, Java. Well, we have Java in the ground system not onboard the spacecraft.
Right. That's what it's starting to sound like.
That's right. Yeah. The spacecraft software is entirely in C.
C? Really? That surprises me a little bit.
Yes. It's entirely in C.
I thought Lockheed Martin was a big ADA shop for this sort of thing.
ADA is used largely in military applications, but JPL at any rate has moved away from ADA. Cassini, I believe, would be the last JPL mission that used ADA. And that was largely due to the success of the Mars Pathfinder in the mid-nineties. And as I said, these missions are to a large extent all derived from Mars Pathfinder.
After that successful mission, you say, Hey, we could do it in C now. That's not as scary as everybody thought?
No, I don't think Windows will stop being the dominant desktop for some years but....
Vista hasn't been too much of a success amongst businesses, probably due to cost rather than 'innovative' new ideas causing problems. Businesses will eventually upgrade (MS will make sure they have to by taking away their XP licences), and then business will see UAC, WinSxS, disk thrashing, memory consumption (I know, most of it is the way it allocates memory now, but a lot of it is down to Windows actually using the RAM - try running Vista on 512Mb to see).
What happens then is anyone's guess. I think its more down to timing of a Linux desktop that business takes seriously.
The DoJ are taking an active role in Windows 7 development. Got to make sure MS doesn't hide anything this time.. and that surely means a bureaucratic nightmare that would make Confucious weep. Vista was slow to come to market, probably due to Management and Process within Microsoft, Windows 7 may be many years late and ship with a lot of rough edges or missing features.
I think its a possibilty that Windows will become a niche player in the mobile and internet device marketplace quite quickly though. Its an exciting time for Linux as a replacement, if it can rise to the challenge.
It *used* to have a standard UI. The Windows Interface Guidelines was the bible of user interface work. Once upon a time, that is.
Programming Windows used to be fine - you had Windows Controls and the standard message passing architecture. It worked, and you could write apps that all looked the same and reused the same set of windows. I think it helped Windows adoption in a time when UI development had a 'whatever you wanted' approach.
However, that was then. Now Windows is a mish-mash of Win32 controls, embedded HTML, Vista-alike pretend-browser windows, WPF, Windows Forms, Silverlight, and I'm sure there are more. Its a huge mess, and I'm not surprised considering their push for "more new stuff" to keep developers from going elsewhere.
So, yes, if Linux could point to a fast development system that provided a better user experience... businesses would have a good reason to migrate. Something about standard UI = lower TCO if I recall the Microsoft marketing machine's reasons why Windows is better (oh the irony).
oh dear. I remember the issues around Solaris v Windows (as the other *nix vendors had lost the battle at the time, due entirely to overprice). You're on of them aren't you.
the Sparc you mention was a lot more underpowered than an equivalent NT machine, and I'm not sure if was 'available for less'. I do recall buying a Solaris pedestal server and an IBM pedestal. The IBM was significantly less (half price?) and was significantly more powerful (4 CPUs v 1 for the Sparc, though I could always buy more upgrades for the sparc, the IBM came fully kitted out). The spare didn't get much use.
As for Linux, its good now but are you really trying to say that 12 years ago, that Linux was on a par for NT workstations? Really? 12 years ago. I suppose we could have tried RedHat 3. Nobody knew it existed, but NT hit the ground running - the buildup had been done with Windows, and businesses saw it as a serious replacement. There was no way anything else would have achieved such a market share.
I'm hardly a religious nut. I am a Windows developer - have been since NT4 supplanted OS/2. But that was then, I've grown disillusioned with Microsoft's corruption of what was a good platform. I'd like to see Linux take hold more - I have introduced Centos servers at my current company (that is a definite pro-MS shop) and linux desktops would be great. But it won't happen unless you give businesses what they want and also give them a reason to change. Just saying "cos its better" isn't enough, saying "you're a religious nut" turns them off completely.
See, your opinion is that Sparc was good enough to take on MS a decade ago. It wasn't, it mostly failed. Keep the same opinion today and Linux will be just as successful.
nononono. The reason we have DOS, Windows and MS Office is because the alternatives (at the time) were IBM with a lock-in policy that would get Ballmer to happily moan in his dreams.
Windows NT was a breth of fresh air back in the day of £10k per unix workstation, its no wonder companies migrated in droves (yep, I was there, I even today work on a product that has lots of 'port to NT' comments in it).
Now I see Windows being the big, bad boy of software, and I'm sure that it will soon give way to Linux just like AIX/HP-UX/etc gave way to NT. the trouble is, it has to serve the user. If Linux can supply a convincing case for migration (and I believe it is almost ready - really, I know non-geek people who have installed Ubuntu at home and use it daily) means its only a little while before collective mind-set of corporate IT gets the message. Then we will see developer migrations like we did back 12+ years ago.
If Linux can provide the better solution. If it gets stuck in a "thats not free you can't use it" religious battle, expect it remain a niche solution. Use Skype if there is no alternative, but work on that alternative never tell anyone not to use it until that day. (look at firefox for inspiration - everyone and his dog used IE, until something free and better arrived).
And not just that, its a shortage of web developers with the skills you want.
I mean, you can know PHP, Perl, C#, ASP, Java, javascript, Silverlight, Flash... whoever is hiring will only want 2 of those, everyone else can pack up and go home - you've just lost a large number of candidates.
Sure, you can offer training, but my experience shows that you can be expert in 1 thing, good in 2, and adequate in all of them. (roughly). You get to know the tweaks and tricks for a given technology, if you have to start doing it with another one there will always be a long ramp-up time while you get your brain rewired with the new ways.
Companies hiring will always either want: a junior to train in the tech of their choice, or an experience dev who will "hit the ground running". There's not much in between.
So the fragmentation of the developer marketplace is hurting businesses, and this doesn't just apply to web devs but all devs. All that "cool new stuff" might help microsoft developer lock-in, but really doesn't help work in the real world.
However, it looks like you're right - the Yorktown sank any chance of getting Windows on any warship, the COTS concept of making advanced software cheap enough to be ubiquitous on all warships turned out to be a poor idea. (though, maybe it was the contractor selling it at fault)
The navy still wants (and perhaps needs?) a better technology in their ships, so maybe they'll get it, but I think that it won't be running Windows after all.
This report says Potential candidates for the basis of an eventual common open-architecture combat system for Navy surface ships include (but are not necessarily limited to) a modularized version of Lockheed's Aegis system, Raytheon's Total Ship Computing Environment Infrastructure, or TSCEI (the core of the combat system being developed for the DDG- 1000 destroyers), and the Core Mission System developed by General Dynamics and Northrop for the General Dynamics version of the LCS.
Note: the Raytheon system runs Red Hat and a 'custom' real-time Linux, General Dynamics system runs Concurrent Corp.'s RedHawk Linux. source
That's not the case in most cases. Putting a dozen old windows boxes onto a single super-powerful VM host just makes that single host draw more juice as it has so much more to do and it has a super-powerful processor etc. Unfortunately, people then start adding more servers - and so we get into the situation we have now, where datacentres that used to hold 100 servers now hold 1000 blade servers in 100 chassis, each one drawing 10 times the power of the old servers and wonder why we have energy problems.
In the embedded case, where you have a full PC running to display the green arrow, you can't really virtualise that. The best thing you can do is install a more appropriate tech, and if that tech is still a simple PC, then get a low power one - like an Atom-based processor (which seems to be in vopue at the mo). If people realised that Windows PC running the green arrow was killing the environment, they'd think about changing it. If they knew things other than Windows PCs existed, they'd used them.
So, probably the best thing you can do to help out is spread the word on such things as eeePCs and more efficient software on low-energy computers.
That's just fine, in the double standards of today sex and drugs are bad, but violence is practically state-sponsored. Thank god politicians forget all they knew about rock n roll when they get elected.
It reminds me a little of gSoap (only without having to piddle about with XML documents), in that it creates c++ classes to parse the data for you.
I think that's the least of the benefits though, the serialisation format would give it speed, the data format gives it smaller payloads. Both are benefits over XML, so this should be superior even if you read the data using a generic parser that worked through metadata at runtime only.
ah, quite true. I sort of forget about other browsers:)
the plugin for the 'other' browser is no longer supported ("Please note that Adobe has announced that it will discontinue support for Adobe SVG Viewer on January 1, 2009") which means companies that rely on it are dropping support for it in favour of alternatives.
True, SVG should be a standard available on all browsers, but only FF supports it. Such a pity.
Perhaps we could do with OpenGL on the web instead. If we can now run C apps in the browser (:) ) then surely it'd be really easy to get going. Then you'd get some developers jumping ship and a whole new range of interactive web-based applications.
and I think you'll find its not that well designed, unless you call "steal all of Java's stuff and run the old J++ libraries through a converter". Read some of the blogs by the guys who implemented it, especailly Chris Brumme's. Its an eye-opener when he starts talking about how he wishes they'd made different decisions that's made supporting it a real pain, not to mention the good bits where he contradicts MS's hype (eg. think exceptions are free in C#? Seriously think again)
Don't believe the marketing hype from MS, C# isn't the best thing ever (I remember the heated discussions about determinstic finalisation in its early days, that was a joke where MS told us what we really needed, and we told MS that wasn't good enough. Shame it only produced the cocked-up compromise of IDisposable).
So far my experiences with C# have been beset by poor performance and code bloat. I don't think anyone would willingly code in C# without Visual Studio... another lock-in.
But for most people, who simply need a web browser, an email client, and a text editor, Windows works fine for them-- most of the time
Actually, I'm seeing a different story beginning to appear (and I mean beginning, its very early days). I chat to my friends, and obviously they know I do computers, and the phrase "I downloaded ubuntu and tried that, its not bad and its really good 'cos its free' is cropping up amongst people a year or two ago would simply have installed Windows without thinking there were alternatives. I think the fact that people's needs are limited to the items you mentioned and that Linux does very well at them has made them think about trying it when they come to a new PC (when $$$ are hard to come by nowadays).
I see Linux magazines on the newsagents' shelves, I hear Firefox mentioned as a "free linux type thing" (ie marketing linux simply by being available for free).
I also see companies using Linux - even though we're a Microsoft shop, and our American colleagues VERY strongly pro-MS, even they are running "unbreakable" linux for the Oracle DBs.
The way I see it - if you mentioned Linux to someone 5 years ago, they'd say "really?". 4 years ago, they'd say "we've heard about Linux servers, what do you think about them?", 3 years ago, "oh yes, we run a couple of Linux servers, they're very good for us"; Now we're seeing people talk about Linux desktops. What's it going to be like in 5 years time?
MS knows this - that's why they're trying to get developer lock-in with the mountain of.NET stuff they've released almost over the last year. That's why they're desperate for long-term revenue from a neutral product (ie Yahoo's adverts).
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Which is fine, Vista isn't the unusable brain-dead pile of steaming poop some would have you beleve, and it has some benefits over XP. I think you've named them all except for 1 (when you try to delete a load of files, any that are locked will show a prompt with 'skip' option).
Vista however....
hogs memory - you've seen this already.
hogs disk space (check your WinSxS directory, it isn't small. this is more of a big deal in this age of VMs and smaller, power-efficient machines)
Explorer will occasionally start to delete everything when you delete a few files, I think its user error but its not obvious how I end up with Vista trying to delete the containing directory.
File delete still takes ages - Vista will happily wait to tell you how long it'll take to delete a file before actually deleting the f*cker.
Driver support can be ... limited, especially for older hardware and you're SOL if you don't want to buy a new device.
Explorer cannot keep the display configuration per folder that I set it - not if I edit a parent folder (with the 'inherit' checkbox cleared, obviously).
The indexer service never seems to stop, and if you do stop it, you'll find you don't get a complete start menu list after time.
Also, for some reason, when I close any app that has used a lot of RAM, Vista starts a mega disk thrashing session. This lasts for minutes, though the system is usable, I wouldn't like to be running my box on a SSD!
Oh, but the biggest issue is things that have just broken, but you don't realise until you come to use them. eg, I had a problem with the Task Scheduler - it couldn't create new tasks. I forget the exact problem (or the solution) but it was pretty wierd with a mis-install of some system component. Also, I had problems installing SQL Server - I got a 'failed to compile MOF files xyz'. Turns out, this is because the WMI is corrupted! I'd only just installed Vista and it was broken in subtle ways. I think its just too complex, and I reckon you will too once you really get going with it.
So, after using it for a while I think its ok, but if I had to buy a copy I just wouldn't bother. Incidentally, my work PC runs XP and will do so until I have to change.
a power user is defined as someone who wants to achieve more than the general system readily allows for. So, in this case the OP is a power user - a normal user would accept that root-user triggers are not available, as he wants that power, he's a power user. (in a shared hosting environment that is, I wouldn't call him that if he wanted to add triggers to his own Oracle DB!)
In life, you have choices:
a. get what you're given
b. get what you pay for.
choose one, and never complain because you can't mix and match.
If you're that much of a "power user", you might just get yourself a virtual or dedicated server and do whatever you want without the hassle.
So version 20080716170700BST would be newer than 20080215162552GMT ?
(actually, we use that date scheme at work, you'd be surprised how easy it is to work with, and how quickly you get to understand it)
... rather than release it and leave it untouched for 3 years while still claiming "full Linux support*", where the * means "except for features less than 3 years old".
Speaking like that tells me you don't work in marketing...
A lot of people forget that C has very strong typing (that you can get round it with a cast doesn't detract from that fact that *you* have to perform that cast, you cannot accidently pass the wrong type in)
Some 'safer' features, such a GC to name a fashionable one, only shift the source of errors to a different place - GCs happily use up lots of memory, happily hang the system while they collect, and often you end up (like the Princeton DARPA team) assuming things are dealt with when they get 'stuck' in memory because there's a reference hanging around somewhere). I mean, a GC is fine for most things, but I'd still want a better form of memory management to be used first, and I certainly wouldn't want a GC used in a nuclear bomber. At least Sun's Java licence knows to make that explicitly clear.
The biggest problem with C is dynamic memory allocation. The way to fix it is, simply, not to use dynamic memory allocations! You can easily write C/C++ code where everything is on the stack, everything is a local variable. Ok, the other problem with C is array bounds checking - especially C-style strings, but you can still use fixed-length types and your own non null-terminated copy functions.
Modern, easy-to-use languages give you the illusion of safety - but really they just sweep the problems under the rug so you don't notice. Even some things that are designed to make your code safer, often require as much care as before
In short, it doesn't matter what you use, you have to think about it and you should never, ever assume someone else has fixed all your problems for you.
Dude, its on Mars. Everythings infrared.
Are you sure? Software tends to be written by developers, and its the quality of them, their ability to work to quality standards and basically take their time to get it done right that matters. All that C code you've seen crash - it'll be because someone hacked it together, no-one tested it thoroughly enough, and no-one took the time to do it right. C is even easy to code reliably if you impose some restrictions on yourself (or use some libraries/routines that you can't easily take shortcuts with - eg if you can pass a pointer to a routine, you're going to pass a bad one one day, do some wrong arithmentic on it, etc. If you pass a strict fixed-size buffer, then you're much less likely to get an error. Just a simple example).
The point is you can write bad software in any language, the new C# stuff at work crashes all over the place and is slow. The old C code from 1984 is still working fine. Its not these languages that had anything to do with their relative quality.
eg. Spacecraft are written in C, and they've worked better than anyone expected:
The only reason I brought that up is because one of my editors said, Oh look, they have Java on this thing.
Oh, Java. Well, we have Java in the ground system not onboard the spacecraft.
Right. That's what it's starting to sound like.
That's right. Yeah. The spacecraft software is entirely in C.
C? Really? That surprises me a little bit.
Yes. It's entirely in C.
I thought Lockheed Martin was a big ADA shop for this sort of thing.
ADA is used largely in military applications, but JPL at any rate has moved away from ADA. Cassini, I believe, would be the last JPL mission that used ADA. And that was largely due to the success of the Mars Pathfinder in the mid-nineties. And as I said, these missions are to a large extent all derived from Mars Pathfinder.
After that successful mission, you say, Hey, we could do it in C now. That's not as scary as everybody thought?
Yeah. Right.
No, I don't think Windows will stop being the dominant desktop for some years but....
Vista hasn't been too much of a success amongst businesses, probably due to cost rather than 'innovative' new ideas causing problems. Businesses will eventually upgrade (MS will make sure they have to by taking away their XP licences), and then business will see UAC, WinSxS, disk thrashing, memory consumption (I know, most of it is the way it allocates memory now, but a lot of it is down to Windows actually using the RAM - try running Vista on 512Mb to see).
What happens then is anyone's guess. I think its more down to timing of a Linux desktop that business takes seriously.
The DoJ are taking an active role in Windows 7 development. Got to make sure MS doesn't hide anything this time.. and that surely means a bureaucratic nightmare that would make Confucious weep. Vista was slow to come to market, probably due to Management and Process within Microsoft, Windows 7 may be many years late and ship with a lot of rough edges or missing features.
I think its a possibilty that Windows will become a niche player in the mobile and internet device marketplace quite quickly though. Its an exciting time for Linux as a replacement, if it can rise to the challenge.
First thing to do is fix windows then. If you want backups to work, firstly make the install use less disk space.
Yes, I know disk space is cheap nowadays, but Vista happily hogs 6+Gig in its 'uninstall' WinSxS directory. Fancy backing that lot up every time.
It *used* to have a standard UI. The Windows Interface Guidelines was the bible of user interface work. Once upon a time, that is.
Programming Windows used to be fine - you had Windows Controls and the standard message passing architecture. It worked, and you could write apps that all looked the same and reused the same set of windows. I think it helped Windows adoption in a time when UI development had a 'whatever you wanted' approach.
However, that was then. Now Windows is a mish-mash of Win32 controls, embedded HTML, Vista-alike pretend-browser windows, WPF, Windows Forms, Silverlight, and I'm sure there are more. Its a huge mess, and I'm not surprised considering their push for "more new stuff" to keep developers from going elsewhere.
So, yes, if Linux could point to a fast development system that provided a better user experience... businesses would have a good reason to migrate. Something about standard UI = lower TCO if I recall the Microsoft marketing machine's reasons why Windows is better (oh the irony).
oh dear. I remember the issues around Solaris v Windows (as the other *nix vendors had lost the battle at the time, due entirely to overprice). You're on of them aren't you.
the Sparc you mention was a lot more underpowered than an equivalent NT machine, and I'm not sure if was 'available for less'. I do recall buying a Solaris pedestal server and an IBM pedestal. The IBM was significantly less (half price?) and was significantly more powerful (4 CPUs v 1 for the Sparc, though I could always buy more upgrades for the sparc, the IBM came fully kitted out). The spare didn't get much use.
As for Linux, its good now but are you really trying to say that 12 years ago, that Linux was on a par for NT workstations? Really? 12 years ago. I suppose we could have tried RedHat 3. Nobody knew it existed, but NT hit the ground running - the buildup had been done with Windows, and businesses saw it as a serious replacement. There was no way anything else would have achieved such a market share.
I'm hardly a religious nut. I am a Windows developer - have been since NT4 supplanted OS/2. But that was then, I've grown disillusioned with Microsoft's corruption of what was a good platform. I'd like to see Linux take hold more - I have introduced Centos servers at my current company (that is a definite pro-MS shop) and linux desktops would be great. But it won't happen unless you give businesses what they want and also give them a reason to change. Just saying "cos its better" isn't enough, saying "you're a religious nut" turns them off completely.
See, your opinion is that Sparc was good enough to take on MS a decade ago. It wasn't, it mostly failed. Keep the same opinion today and Linux will be just as successful.
nononono. The reason we have DOS, Windows and MS Office is because the alternatives (at the time) were IBM with a lock-in policy that would get Ballmer to happily moan in his dreams.
Windows NT was a breth of fresh air back in the day of £10k per unix workstation, its no wonder companies migrated in droves (yep, I was there, I even today work on a product that has lots of 'port to NT' comments in it).
Now I see Windows being the big, bad boy of software, and I'm sure that it will soon give way to Linux just like AIX/HP-UX/etc gave way to NT. the trouble is, it has to serve the user. If Linux can supply a convincing case for migration (and I believe it is almost ready - really, I know non-geek people who have installed Ubuntu at home and use it daily) means its only a little while before collective mind-set of corporate IT gets the message. Then we will see developer migrations like we did back 12+ years ago.
If Linux can provide the better solution. If it gets stuck in a "thats not free you can't use it" religious battle, expect it remain a niche solution. Use Skype if there is no alternative, but work on that alternative never tell anyone not to use it until that day. (look at firefox for inspiration - everyone and his dog used IE, until something free and better arrived).
And not just that, its a shortage of web developers with the skills you want.
I mean, you can know PHP, Perl, C#, ASP, Java, javascript, Silverlight, Flash... whoever is hiring will only want 2 of those, everyone else can pack up and go home - you've just lost a large number of candidates.
Sure, you can offer training, but my experience shows that you can be expert in 1 thing, good in 2, and adequate in all of them. (roughly). You get to know the tweaks and tricks for a given technology, if you have to start doing it with another one there will always be a long ramp-up time while you get your brain rewired with the new ways.
Companies hiring will always either want: a junior to train in the tech of their choice, or an experience dev who will "hit the ground running". There's not much in between.
So the fragmentation of the developer marketplace is hurting businesses, and this doesn't just apply to web devs but all devs. All that "cool new stuff" might help microsoft developer lock-in, but really doesn't help work in the real world.
True, and after the Yorktown was such a disaster, the programme was scrapped.
However, it looks like you're right - the Yorktown sank any chance of getting Windows on any warship, the COTS concept of making advanced software cheap enough to be ubiquitous on all warships turned out to be a poor idea. (though, maybe it was the contractor selling it at fault)
The navy still wants (and perhaps needs?) a better technology in their ships, so maybe they'll get it, but I think that it won't be running Windows after all.
This report says Potential candidates for the basis of an eventual common open-architecture combat
system for Navy surface ships include (but are not necessarily limited to) a modularized
version of Lockheed's Aegis system, Raytheon's Total Ship Computing Environment
Infrastructure, or TSCEI (the core of the combat system being developed for the DDG-
1000 destroyers), and the Core Mission System developed by General Dynamics and
Northrop for the General Dynamics version of the LCS.
Note: the Raytheon system runs Red Hat and a 'custom' real-time Linux, General Dynamics system runs Concurrent Corp.'s RedHawk Linux. source
Got a cite on that?
yup, Google says much on the subject
That's not the case in most cases. Putting a dozen old windows boxes onto a single super-powerful VM host just makes that single host draw more juice as it has so much more to do and it has a super-powerful processor etc. Unfortunately, people then start adding more servers - and so we get into the situation we have now, where datacentres that used to hold 100 servers now hold 1000 blade servers in 100 chassis, each one drawing 10 times the power of the old servers and wonder why we have energy problems.
In the embedded case, where you have a full PC running to display the green arrow, you can't really virtualise that. The best thing you can do is install a more appropriate tech, and if that tech is still a simple PC, then get a low power one - like an Atom-based processor (which seems to be in vopue at the mo). If people realised that Windows PC running the green arrow was killing the environment, they'd think about changing it. If they knew things other than Windows PCs existed, they'd used them.
So, probably the best thing you can do to help out is spread the word on such things as eeePCs and more efficient software on low-energy computers.
That's just fine, in the double standards of today sex and drugs are bad, but violence is practically state-sponsored. Thank god politicians forget all they knew about rock n roll when they get elected.
I blame the Victorians.
It reminds me a little of gSoap (only without having to piddle about with XML documents), in that it creates c++ classes to parse the data for you.
I think that's the least of the benefits though, the serialisation format would give it speed, the data format gives it smaller payloads. Both are benefits over XML, so this should be superior even if you read the data using a generic parser that worked through metadata at runtime only.
ah, quite true. I sort of forget about other browsers :)
the plugin for the 'other' browser is no longer supported ("Please note that Adobe has announced that it will discontinue support for Adobe SVG Viewer on January 1, 2009") which means companies that rely on it are dropping support for it in favour of alternatives.
True, SVG should be a standard available on all browsers, but only FF supports it. Such a pity.
Perhaps we could do with OpenGL on the web instead. If we can now run C apps in the browser (:) ) then surely it'd be really easy to get going. Then you'd get some developers jumping ship and a whole new range of interactive web-based applications.
yeah, and look at the mess that happens when you make a language so easy to use a web designer starts to code with it :-)
Oh, and all those OS layers, networking layers, web browsers and scripting languages are written in C. It must have something going for it.
and I think you'll find its not that well designed, unless you call "steal all of Java's stuff and run the old J++ libraries through a converter". Read some of the blogs by the guys who implemented it, especailly Chris Brumme's. Its an eye-opener when he starts talking about how he wishes they'd made different decisions that's made supporting it a real pain, not to mention the good bits where he contradicts MS's hype (eg. think exceptions are free in C#? Seriously think again)
Don't believe the marketing hype from MS, C# isn't the best thing ever (I remember the heated discussions about determinstic finalisation in its early days, that was a joke where MS told us what we really needed, and we told MS that wasn't good enough. Shame it only produced the cocked-up compromise of IDisposable).
So far my experiences with C# have been beset by poor performance and code bloat. I don't think anyone would willingly code in C# without Visual Studio... another lock-in.
But for most people, who simply need a web browser, an email client, and a text editor, Windows works fine for them-- most of the time
Actually, I'm seeing a different story beginning to appear (and I mean beginning, its very early days). I chat to my friends, and obviously they know I do computers, and the phrase "I downloaded ubuntu and tried that, its not bad and its really good 'cos its free' is cropping up amongst people a year or two ago would simply have installed Windows without thinking there were alternatives. I think the fact that people's needs are limited to the items you mentioned and that Linux does very well at them has made them think about trying it when they come to a new PC (when $$$ are hard to come by nowadays).
I see Linux magazines on the newsagents' shelves, I hear Firefox mentioned as a "free linux type thing" (ie marketing linux simply by being available for free).
I also see companies using Linux - even though we're a Microsoft shop, and our American colleagues VERY strongly pro-MS, even they are running "unbreakable" linux for the Oracle DBs.
The way I see it - if you mentioned Linux to someone 5 years ago, they'd say "really?". 4 years ago, they'd say "we've heard about Linux servers, what do you think about them?", 3 years ago, "oh yes, we run a couple of Linux servers, they're very good for us"; Now we're seeing people talk about Linux desktops. What's it going to be like in 5 years time?
MS knows this - that's why they're trying to get developer lock-in with the mountain of .NET stuff they've released almost over the last year. That's why they're desperate for long-term revenue from a neutral product (ie Yahoo's adverts).