The software repositories are nice in Linux, but I'd wonder how many people would realize they were there, assuming they were new, inexperienced users. Its really difficult to answer that question seeing as I'm an experienced user who has a massive amount of experience with using systems, I wouldn't know what I know that a newbie user doesn't. Like, I know which mouse button does what - a new user would maybe press one and expect something else to happen.
so, the best way to think about this is to read the 'new user' computer magazines. See what they tell users who are new to Windows to do, and sure enough just as they say "click windows update", you'd have the same magazines saying "type yum update" (or click whatever).
Users who don't get such tuition are just as incapable with Windows no matter how much usability MS has put into the interface.
One thing that is really good with Linux though, is that if you want something, you just need to type the name in and it downloads. You don't (generally) have to hunt the web for a download page, read the EULA, agree to the cookies, find the right version for your OS/platform/chipset, unzip, run the installer, agree to the EULA, wonder what its done, search the web for updates, reboot.:)
PS. I've never had to compile anything under Linux that I didn't care to. IMHO the linux community should be offering binary packages for everything obtainable from a repository and let those that know recompile from source if they want to.
I worked on a large-scale system a few years back and the performance was atrocious. Truly the directors were concerned the company would go bust if they couldn't sell the product, and the product was unsellable. A long story shortens to: it was MTS. We had out comms working through DCOM objects, only those objects were placed in MS Transaction Server, you know the nice green spinning globes. This made it easy to implement and MS told us it was the bee's knees.
Unfortunately, removing those objects and running the comms through plain DCOM made an astounding difference. (the other things we found were XML is slow as treacle, and context switches are bad).
Now, we find the same thing: MS wraps lower level technology with more and more "feature-added", "easy to use" stuff and forgets to tell us that its slower, sometimes dramatically so. What they do tell you deserves a marketing-person health warning.
So, I'm looking at WCF now. Its 'cool' apparently, but I find it to be more wrappers on top of the already slow ones. And you can't even connect a WCF tcp/ip socket to a non-WCF socket. (you want interop, you should use SOAP apparently, tcp/ip connections are 'optimised' for WCF-only apps).
I can see why you'd want to use it all, its easy (though maybe its me, its not much better that anything else), but on large-scale systems you should avoid.NET and for small-scale systems (where resources are a premium) again avoid.NET. For systems that you need to be resource-efficient (because you're going to run it in a VM alongside several others - popular in today's green world), you should avoid.NET too.
Hmm.. not much left really, when will the world realise this?
I think any language that doesn't support managed code is going to die out over the next 10 years You'll still be a Windows-only shop then? In ten years Microsoft may have changed its mind again about a programming platform. they seem to do so every ten years or so. Hell, in 10 years Microsoft might not even exist.
And I suppose your shop used to say "COM only", and now says "ugh, COM, who'd want to code those things up". You seem to have swallowed the Microsoft marketing man's sales spiel wholesale.
When you find out how slow some parts of.NET is (eg DB access), or how much memory it uses when you don't want it to, or how to find the object you expected to be GCd but hasn't been.. then you'll think about writing a chunk of your code in old C++.
MS did do a lot of work (pretty poor IMHO though) with C++/CLI to get some interop going between C++ and C#/VB. Poor because of the somewhat contrived bodges to the language they put in that they could have hidden behind the compiler, and also because there isn't any real interop with old unmanaged C++ except by wrapping it with a managed dll (or recompiling with the/clr flag set). Its also a poor implementation - eg STL/CLR is a lot slower than the.NET containers surprisingly.
I have C++ code from 20 years ago that is still used in the products my company sells. I imagine most C++ will work, unless some relatively obscure (for the time) features were used. Most of the language hasn't changed at all.
OK, it is somewhat "better C" than a full-on templated metaprogram.
but the intent was (and is) that a competent programmer should be able to express just about any idea directly and have it executed with minimal overheads (zero overheads compared to a C version). Possibly the most important part of the article. non-competent programmers, go find a language more suited to your skills, preferably one with an IDE that does it all for you.
Convincing the systems programming community of the value of type checking was surprisingly hard. The idea of checking function arguments against a function declaration was fiercely resisted by many - at least until C adopted the idea from C with Classes And today, we have script languages like this. Just shows things never change, they just go quiet before returning to fashion. (unlike bell-bottom flares which really should never return)(ask your dad)
then you're going to have a hard time of programming, perhaps you'd be happier being the Boss.
All languages have "implementation details" and various gotchas. Look on any programming forum for any language and you'll see tips and tricks in using it. I think you're in the wrong job.
I take it that "Works great because it's not "Web 2.0" " means its fast and dynamic, whereas Web 2.0 generally means slow and dynamic.
The technology behind it is irrelevant, if content is provided by users then its web 2.0 (as I understan the term), so Wikipedia definitely is web 2.0, its just that they have some fancy caching mechanism to get the best of both worlds. If only more systems were built in a pragmatic way instead of worrying about what its "supposed" to be.
I'm not so sure - dev tools should not be part of the OS. I'm sure MS execs would argue against that, but then, I reckon they'd argue that IIS is an integral part of Windows Server too:)
The tools division being separate makes sense, then we might start to see Visual Studio competing directly with Eclipse and producing code for other OS targets - eg Linux and Mac. that would be a good thing. I'm sure the.net framework would have to move with the tools division too, otherwise it'd be so horribly crippled,.net would die and they'd only be practically able to produce native code compilers. (or, ironically, Java IDEs and compilers:) )
Probably the easiest way to carve them up would be to do it to MS's own internal divisions. The ones that currently get reported on their accounts (they realigned to the 3 they'd like to be)
Microsoft Platform Products and Services Division; Microsoft Business Division; Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division
Its not what they did, but how they did it. If they hadn't entered a new market by subsidising their product like this there wouldn't have been a problem. If they had sold IE separately, no issue. They sell plenty of other software that isn't bundled, why would IE be so different all of a sudden? Remember - there was no integration back then, it was not an embedded part of the OS and wouldn't be for ages.
Your analogy is not valid - Coke has its secret recipe that no-one else is allowed to use, everyone has their patents and copyrights. This is not about that, its about destroying a market so you become the only player.
its not unfair to our modern eye, but back then there was no browser. Then Netscape made one and started selling it. MS suddenly decided they wanted this internet thing for themselves, so they produced IE and gave it away with the OS. Note: not part of the OS back then, no integration at all, that came later with IE4.
So, they crushed the other companies chance of success by giving away something, that they developed with money from other parts of MS. They didn't play fair, they abused their market dominance to ensure people stopped buying Netscape.
Think of it like this - take something you like, coffee? Now imagine Coca-cola (or a.n.other seriously successful company) decides to capture the coffee market, they produce something similar and give it away for free, paid for by Coke sales. Pretty soon nobody buys coffee, the coffee shops and importers give up and go trade something else. You're still happy, right?
Redhat has done very well in the server marketplace. Ubuntu is beginning to do very well in the desktop marketplace (if anecdotal accounts from colleagues who've "downloaded and tried it out" are anything to go by).
If Linux takes off in the mobile marketplace, then the world will have changed by about as much as when IBM or DEC fell from their thrones.
"it becomes clear to me that the Java OS will try to conquer the embedded marketplace lol, its ironic that Java has conquered MS's markets with the version called C#.
The developer tools are very good, however would they be profitable enough to continue? Quality costs often enough, and if they end up sacking half their engineers leaving enough to make C#-only tools, they'd probably go the way of Borland.
If they kept all their engineers, would the costs be too great to support all the variations they currently support?
I'd also say the Server division (if its not part of Office) would fail, nobody really cares about BizTalk server, Sharepoint, and so on. IIS would disappear quickly once people started having to pay for it, the only one left would be Exchange.
At this point, if a company tried to ship a consumer operating system without a web browser, they would be laughed out of the computer business.
But back then, what was this thing called the 'browser' you talk of?
Nowadays things are different, MS killed the nascent browser marketplace to install their own. Imagine how different things would be if there was serious competition for a browser that didn't start 2 years ago with the release of Firefox. Recall how we were stuck with IE6 for so long without change? Remember how quickly IE7 was rushed out? What if that rush had happened way back in 1996 and not 2006.
And, historically, breaking up a large corporation does not work: the children of Ma Bell are now a group of even larger corporations owned by the same parent companies which "compete" against each other only in guise. See, capitalism works. Take one big company, chop it into pieces and you get several big companies. why did that **** Bush not take the opportunity to create more multinational companies bringing more tax and commerce dollars in to build up the US economy?!
Break Microsoft up, its your duty as a Republican.
Unless you think they couldn't survive without their monopolies propping each other up?:-)
possibly not, perhaps he means that software should be built without the 'make it easy for the developer' features that modern languages contain. I mean, its easy to write an app in a scripting language but it will be bigger, slower, require a VM to host the script, will use more memory (especially so if it has a garbage collector), and so on.
There is a trend of saying that programmer productivity is everything, and if it requires faster computers with more RAM, then that's just too bad. I'm sure that one day, when we're paying massively more for electricity a new 'killer app' will arrive that does what an existing one does but with much less resource usage. That day will be when everyone suddenly rediscovers lean programming systems written by professional programmers that are built to last.
The same amount of features will be there (though, perhaps in dynamically loaded modules) but the way they're written will be much more efficient.
Actually, he (with IBM's help) made a Personal Computer for businesses where other at the time for enthusiast machines. Businesses used to use mainframe type things (I recall my work experience days, where I went ot a local boiler-maker's IT department and was not allowed near The Computer. I was given this beige PC in a side room that they were evaluating).
Suddenly any busines could afford to buy a PC and run Lotus 1-2-3 on it to do their accounts. It was a paradigm change, about as innovative as putting a search form on the internet.
I recall some absurd (but probably accurate) statistic that the cost to the economy due to lost productivity from things such as blue screens of death and the untenable Word interface amounting to the same cost as the September 11th, 2001 World Trade Center attacks, every hour. (This is not to mention the lost productivity to Solitaire) Shhhhhh. you'll be mentioning the Internet next.
Nevertheless, I know that I prefer to waste my time on Slashdot Uh-oh. You've done it now. Boss, he didn't mean it really, the Internet is a productivity tool, honest.
but every single Office App, I've ever used has lived up to my expectations
Boy do you need counselling for that low self-esteem.
1) Will it do what we need it to do? Depends what you mean by 'need'. Notepad is good enough for wordprocessing (I write letters in it today)
2) Can we easily maintain it? You really need to read Raymond Chen's blog, especially the posts regarding the old hacks, bodges and assorted 'this is why we did that crap' posts.
3) Can our users learn to use it quickly and easily? If this was true, we'd still be using Windows 3.1's menus; I mean, toolbars; I mean auto-hide menus, sorry I mean floating toolbars; I mean the Ribbon toolbar.
4) Is it cost efficient? Is it hell. Office is a very expensive product. If you need 1000 copies... yoikes!
5) Does it "just work"? Mostly....
Sure, they do some good stuff, they try hard. But the whole thing is getting too bloated and being changed too much. Remember its a good idea to refactor your apps, but to scrap them and rewrite only ever produces worse code. This is like how MS operates now - they've done everything you'd need, so they are reinventing everything in the hope that you'll spend your money on it. Unfortunately, this reinvention isn't making truly better products.
I really think things are beginning to change now, with Gates gone I expect to look back in 10 years time and say "remember how Microsoft was the powerhouse of the computer industry" and have kids look at me in disbelief.
Read the bit where they talk to sir Alan Sugar - the salesman pestered him until he did agree to dump Dr-DOS and go with MS-DOS instead. That bit's fine, its the bit where Sugar *still* isn't allowed to tell you how much he paid for MS-DOS. I wouldn't be surprised if it was £1.50
If they couldn't sell it, they'd give it away on the sly. That's how you build a monopoly.
If confirmed, that's an extraordinary breakthrough. With brighter x-ray sources, the team says higher resolution images will be possible and that it's just a matter of time before they start teasing apart the 3D structures of the many proteins that have eluded biologists to date.
But seriously, when did Fahrenheit stop working? on a technology blog you should know better than to question the need for continual changes in favour of the latest system.
But browsing the librarians is another matter.... think of the tight black pencil skirts, loose white blouses, those spectacles, and lascivious use of a pencil:-)
no, I got the joke, but that joke was made many posts ago. I was referring to the zoom function replacing the old font size functionality that lesser browsers might have. That and the fact that you had to get FF3 first.
Yes, 8 million downloads is a great achievement, getting 259,000 downloads to Iran - more than Australia and Russia together - is pretty cool too!
Now we just need a few favourite themes and extensions to get updated.
Slashdot Mirror
so, the best way to think about this is to read the 'new user' computer magazines. See what they tell users who are new to Windows to do, and sure enough just as they say "click windows update", you'd have the same magazines saying "type yum update" (or click whatever).
Users who don't get such tuition are just as incapable with Windows no matter how much usability MS has put into the interface.
One thing that is really good with Linux though, is that if you want something, you just need to type the name in and it downloads. You don't (generally) have to hunt the web for a download page, read the EULA, agree to the cookies, find the right version for your OS/platform/chipset, unzip, run the installer, agree to the EULA, wonder what its done, search the web for updates, reboot. :)
PS. I've never had to compile anything under Linux that I didn't care to. IMHO the linux community should be offering binary packages for everything obtainable from a repository and let those that know recompile from source if they want to.
Sooo right.
I worked on a large-scale system a few years back and the performance was atrocious. Truly the directors were concerned the company would go bust if they couldn't sell the product, and the product was unsellable. A long story shortens to: it was MTS. We had out comms working through DCOM objects, only those objects were placed in MS Transaction Server, you know the nice green spinning globes. This made it easy to implement and MS told us it was the bee's knees.
Unfortunately, removing those objects and running the comms through plain DCOM made an astounding difference. (the other things we found were XML is slow as treacle, and context switches are bad).
Now, we find the same thing: MS wraps lower level technology with more and more "feature-added", "easy to use" stuff and forgets to tell us that its slower, sometimes dramatically so. What they do tell you deserves a marketing-person health warning.
So, I'm looking at WCF now. Its 'cool' apparently, but I find it to be more wrappers on top of the already slow ones. And you can't even connect a WCF tcp/ip socket to a non-WCF socket. (you want interop, you should use SOAP apparently, tcp/ip connections are 'optimised' for WCF-only apps).
I can see why you'd want to use it all, its easy (though maybe its me, its not much better that anything else), but on large-scale systems you should avoid .NET and for small-scale systems (where resources are a premium) again avoid .NET. For systems that you need to be resource-efficient (because you're going to run it in a VM alongside several others - popular in today's green world), you should avoid .NET too.
Hmm.. not much left really, when will the world realise this?
And I suppose your shop used to say "COM only", and now says "ugh, COM, who'd want to code those things up". You seem to have swallowed the Microsoft marketing man's sales spiel wholesale.
When you find out how slow some parts of .NET is (eg DB access), or how much memory it uses when you don't want it to, or how to find the object you expected to be GCd but hasn't been.. then you'll think about writing a chunk of your code in old C++.
MS did do a lot of work (pretty poor IMHO though) with C++/CLI to get some interop going between C++ and C#/VB. Poor because of the somewhat contrived bodges to the language they put in that they could have hidden behind the compiler, and also because there isn't any real interop with old unmanaged C++ except by wrapping it with a managed dll (or recompiling with the /clr flag set). Its also a poor implementation - eg STL/CLR is a lot slower than the .NET containers surprisingly.
I have C++ code from 20 years ago that is still used in the products my company sells. I imagine most C++ will work, unless some relatively obscure (for the time) features were used. Most of the language hasn't changed at all.
OK, it is somewhat "better C" than a full-on templated metaprogram.
then you're going to have a hard time of programming, perhaps you'd be happier being the Boss.
All languages have "implementation details" and various gotchas. Look on any programming forum for any language and you'll see tips and tricks in using it. I think you're in the wrong job.
I take it that "Works great because it's not "Web 2.0" " means its fast and dynamic, whereas Web 2.0 generally means slow and dynamic.
The technology behind it is irrelevant, if content is provided by users then its web 2.0 (as I understan the term), so Wikipedia definitely is web 2.0, its just that they have some fancy caching mechanism to get the best of both worlds. If only more systems were built in a pragmatic way instead of worrying about what its "supposed" to be.
I'm not so sure - dev tools should not be part of the OS. I'm sure MS execs would argue against that, but then, I reckon they'd argue that IIS is an integral part of Windows Server too :)
The tools division being separate makes sense, then we might start to see Visual Studio competing directly with Eclipse and producing code for other OS targets - eg Linux and Mac. that would be a good thing. I'm sure the .net framework would have to move with the tools division too, otherwise it'd be so horribly crippled, .net would die and they'd only be practically able to produce native code compilers. (or, ironically, Java IDEs and compilers :) )
Probably the easiest way to carve them up would be to do it to MS's own internal divisions. The ones that currently get reported on their accounts (they realigned to the 3 they'd like to be)
Microsoft Platform Products and Services Division;
Microsoft Business Division;
Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division
Its not what they did, but how they did it. If they hadn't entered a new market by subsidising their product like this there wouldn't have been a problem. If they had sold IE separately, no issue. They sell plenty of other software that isn't bundled, why would IE be so different all of a sudden? Remember - there was no integration back then, it was not an embedded part of the OS and wouldn't be for ages.
Your analogy is not valid - Coke has its secret recipe that no-one else is allowed to use, everyone has their patents and copyrights. This is not about that, its about destroying a market so you become the only player.
its not unfair to our modern eye, but back then there was no browser. Then Netscape made one and started selling it. MS suddenly decided they wanted this internet thing for themselves, so they produced IE and gave it away with the OS. Note: not part of the OS back then, no integration at all, that came later with IE4.
So, they crushed the other companies chance of success by giving away something, that they developed with money from other parts of MS. They didn't play fair, they abused their market dominance to ensure people stopped buying Netscape.
Think of it like this - take something you like, coffee? Now imagine Coca-cola (or a.n.other seriously successful company) decides to capture the coffee market, they produce something similar and give it away for free, paid for by Coke sales. Pretty soon nobody buys coffee, the coffee shops and importers give up and go trade something else. You're still happy, right?
Redhat has done very well in the server marketplace. Ubuntu is beginning to do very well in the desktop marketplace (if anecdotal accounts from colleagues who've "downloaded and tried it out" are anything to go by).
If Linux takes off in the mobile marketplace, then the world will have changed by about as much as when IBM or DEC fell from their thrones.
The developer tools are very good, however would they be profitable enough to continue? Quality costs often enough, and if they end up sacking half their engineers leaving enough to make C#-only tools, they'd probably go the way of Borland.
If they kept all their engineers, would the costs be too great to support all the variations they currently support?
I'd also say the Server division (if its not part of Office) would fail, nobody really cares about BizTalk server, Sharepoint, and so on. IIS would disappear quickly once people started having to pay for it, the only one left would be Exchange.
At this point, if a company tried to ship a consumer operating system without a web browser, they would be laughed out of the computer business.
But back then, what was this thing called the 'browser' you talk of?
Nowadays things are different, MS killed the nascent browser marketplace to install their own. Imagine how different things would be if there was serious competition for a browser that didn't start 2 years ago with the release of Firefox. Recall how we were stuck with IE6 for so long without change? Remember how quickly IE7 was rushed out? What if that rush had happened way back in 1996 and not 2006.
Break Microsoft up, its your duty as a Republican.
Unless you think they couldn't survive without their monopolies propping each other up? :-)
possibly not, perhaps he means that software should be built without the 'make it easy for the developer' features that modern languages contain. I mean, its easy to write an app in a scripting language but it will be bigger, slower, require a VM to host the script, will use more memory (especially so if it has a garbage collector), and so on.
There is a trend of saying that programmer productivity is everything, and if it requires faster computers with more RAM, then that's just too bad. I'm sure that one day, when we're paying massively more for electricity a new 'killer app' will arrive that does what an existing one does but with much less resource usage. That day will be when everyone suddenly rediscovers lean programming systems written by professional programmers that are built to last.
The same amount of features will be there (though, perhaps in dynamically loaded modules) but the way they're written will be much more efficient.
Actually, he (with IBM's help) made a Personal Computer for businesses where other at the time for enthusiast machines. Businesses used to use mainframe type things (I recall my work experience days, where I went ot a local boiler-maker's IT department and was not allowed near The Computer. I was given this beige PC in a side room that they were evaluating).
Suddenly any busines could afford to buy a PC and run Lotus 1-2-3 on it to do their accounts. It was a paradigm change, about as innovative as putting a search form on the internet.
The software was just a side effect.
but every single Office App, I've ever used has lived up to my expectations
Boy do you need counselling for that low self-esteem.
1) Will it do what we need it to do?
Depends what you mean by 'need'. Notepad is good enough for wordprocessing (I write letters in it today)
2) Can we easily maintain it?
You really need to read Raymond Chen's blog, especially the posts regarding the old hacks, bodges and assorted 'this is why we did that crap' posts.
3) Can our users learn to use it quickly and easily?
If this was true, we'd still be using Windows 3.1's menus; I mean, toolbars; I mean auto-hide menus, sorry I mean floating toolbars; I mean the Ribbon toolbar.
4) Is it cost efficient?
Is it hell. Office is a very expensive product. If you need 1000 copies... yoikes!
5) Does it "just work"?
Mostly....
Sure, they do some good stuff, they try hard. But the whole thing is getting too bloated and being changed too much. Remember its a good idea to refactor your apps, but to scrap them and rewrite only ever produces worse code. This is like how MS operates now - they've done everything you'd need, so they are reinventing everything in the hope that you'll spend your money on it. Unfortunately, this reinvention isn't making truly better products.
I really think things are beginning to change now, with Gates gone I expect to look back in 10 years time and say "remember how Microsoft was the powerhouse of the computer industry" and have kids look at me in disbelief.
"Selling"?
Read the bit where they talk to sir Alan Sugar - the salesman pestered him until he did agree to dump Dr-DOS and go with MS-DOS instead. That bit's fine, its the bit where Sugar *still* isn't allowed to tell you how much he paid for MS-DOS. I wouldn't be surprised if it was £1.50
If they couldn't sell it, they'd give it away on the sly. That's how you build a monopoly.
from TFA:
If confirmed, that's an extraordinary breakthrough. With brighter x-ray sources, the team says higher resolution images will be possible and that it's just a matter of time before they start teasing apart the 3D structures of the many proteins that have eluded biologists to date.But browsing the librarians is another matter.... think of the tight black pencil skirts, loose white blouses, those spectacles, and lascivious use of a pencil :-)
no, I got the joke, but that joke was made many posts ago. I was referring to the zoom function replacing the old font size functionality that lesser browsers might have. That and the fact that you had to get FF3 first.
Yes, 8 million downloads is a great achievement, getting 259,000 downloads to Iran - more than Australia and Russia together - is pretty cool too!
Now we just need a few favourite themes and extensions to get updated.