yes, but that's not quite what we're talking about - you're describing what I'd call a 'module', not an OO framework library. (yeah, I know, hardly any difference).
If you could get text from a file by writing (say)
then we're all be very happy, even if you had 3 methods for reading chunks of the file. That'd be a good library, and everyone would be glad to use it. The trick is, as you said, "little more than a few lines of code".
Yeah, because right clicking on the code and selecting "Go to definition" from the pop-up menu is so difficult and takes so long to do. No, that's fine and dandy (assuming you are using a bloated IDE to code in), the problem comes when you want to go back where you came from.
Context switching is a bad thing for human brains, we're not good at it and developers who hold a lot of current-contextual data in their heads find having to stop and go look elsewhere ruins the train of concentration required. Once you see that the really good devs don't use tools like that, you'll understand the way they're coding.
In a few months when Microsoft deprecates.NET in favor of the new Longhorn approved architecture (ca-ching or whatever it is) Firstly, can I say that the guy who came up with the new MS technology, C$ (pronounced Ca-ching) is a genius.
MS has already done some deprecating in a big way - look at windowing technologies - want to do cutting edge GUI dev, use Winforms. No. Use Windows Presentation Foundation. No, use MFC. (yes, MS is already deprecating C# in favour of old-fashioned native C++ - see the Ribbon control that is MFC only, not C# nor going to be C# for a while. The program managers for Visual Studio have said in their blogs that they've concentrated on the managed world enough, its time to return to native code again - probably because all their big customers still use their old/legacy code and want support)
The takeaway is this: each cortex does not just do more of the same thing. Instead, it does a refinement of the level below it. This type of hierarchical processing is how multicore processors should be built. Oh no! you're saying my brain works like the OSI networking stack?!
data stream from the eyeballs:
Level 1: look at the pretty flashy lights Level 2: hey, some of those lights seem to be moving Level 3: and that chunk of light moves together Level 4: which is a recognizable object Level 5: I remember that object, its my mate Dave. Level 6: Dave owes me a beer.
It works like that for business users, sometimes, but for retail its a different story.
Home users buy kit and expect it to work. They have gotten used to the idea of patches for their OS which are free and are conditioned to think of other upgrades as the same - eg, free fixes.
So, to get IPv6 to the home user, you either have to issue a freely downloadable firmware upgrade, or sell a brand new router "now with IPv6 support for a faster internet experience". I think there is a case for both scenarios, and I imagine that when they start supporting IPv6, newer models will get firmware upgrades but you'll have to buy a replacement for the old, discontinued ones.
I think the first thing that needs to happen is Ipv6 enabled home routers. Without that, no-one can (transparently) access the net.
The servers are ready (linux has IPv6 on by default on most distros), Windows is now ready, I think most ISPs have it even if they're not turned it on for you. Its just the routers that need to catch up.
yeah, but that website is not exactly, well, "consumer friendly". IPv6 is obviously coming, but in tiny little steps.
If Netgear and Belkin supported it on their routers, and your ISP supported it in theirs (which they probably do today), and you can have AAAA records, then that day, IPv6 will suddenly just start working. We'll be IPv6 enabled in next to no time once it all falls into place.
And once you get enough websites appearing on IPv6 only, then the router manufacturers will fall over themselves to support it, after all, why stick with IPv4 when they have an excuse to sell you a new router....
yep, that'll do too. What I was not advovating was anything based on technical merit - just 'business' factors that matter more, as the OP has found out.
on the other hand, we can make some inferences from this. We know its not ASP on IIS.
I think that tells you something about why people choose Microsoft no matter what. Quite often the decision to go with a cool, new technology is not a good one simply because it is new and cool. Old and boring generally always wins in this industry.
lol. I understand sarcasm, possibly because I'm not an American:-)
My boss, just doesn't like OSS at all, if you can't buy it, it must be worthless and too risky to use is his attitude. Unfortunately, this attitude is too common in the business community, possibly ever since the adage "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM" was around.
WRT Java, I know it is 'enterprise', but I have never even heard of a company that managed to get an enterprise Java system set up without half a dozen servers, or a mainframe running it. Enterprise Java has EJBs and the like, that doesn't make it good at all. I don't know whether its the memory usage model, or the 'lazy' programmer model that makes it suck, but it does even though it should work perfectly. (its a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger - he's tall, strong, rich, powerful. He *should* be a babe magnet but.. somehow it doesn't pan out like that when implemented in the real world)(sorry for the mixed metaphor)
MS has gone C# in a big way over the last few years, they have concentrated on it to the exclusion of all else to drive it to market, yet the program manager for Visual Studio has said that they're done with that now and the next big push for them is unmanaged C++; Vista for all its modernness has a tiny amount of managed code in it (and the bit that is managed - Aero - is the bit that requires 2Gig to run acceptably, its not a issue with fancy graphics, its an issue with managed-ness). Has Robert Grimes done a more up-to-date analysis of Vista's use of managed code - the last one he did showed Vista is made of only 3% managed code.
(note: to see what I mean, read the comments on here where they describe the new Office controls like the Ribbon being made available for MFC developers. Someone asks, "but will they be available for us C# devs?" and is told "we plan to make this available but we don't have a date we can announce" - ie not for some time).
This is why I think the MS-friend is right,.NET is not a tool for every job, but MS likes to hype stuff up way past a sensible level so everyone thinks you cannot program anymore unless you're using Windows Workflow Foundation to drive a Best-Practice Application Block through Windows Presentation Foundation gui all written in C#. Now they're moving on to something else, expect more hype but in a different direction.
This is the guy who criticised people who pointed out Bitkeeper was, erm.. less than optimal in the 'play nice' category and who wanted to keep it 'for pragmatic, non-religious' reasons.
To quote the Register,
In a post on the Real World Technologies discussion board appropriately titled "Hypocrisy the worst of human traits", Torvalds takes advantage of Tridgell's vow of silence on the matter. For the first third of his response, Torvalds gently tries to persuade us that ethics doesn't belong in the software business, taking a strictly utilitarian view. Or, as he puts it,
"So I think open source tends to become technically better over time (but it does take time), but I don't think it's a moral imperative." he writes. What a pity the people involved in Open Source give my boss another reason to distrust the community and all their projects.
Run ncpa.cpl to instantly access the list of network connections like in XP. cheers. I still find it strange that considering they've put things like 'iSCSI Initiator' and 'Windows Cardspace' in control panel, they didn't think 'Network Connections' was going to be useful enough. (you can get to it via the mouse - open Network and Sharing Centre, and then one of the links at the side is to open ncpa.cpl)
Its shoddy usability, apparently they've hired the person who worked on Office's Ribbon to fix this (general usability) issue in the next OS.
OK. I am a Windows developer, and have been for ages - Windows suddenly became good with NT4 when everyone I knew and worked for decided to migrate from proprietary unix systems to NT.
I've run every Windows OS since then really.
So, I installed Vista a few months after it became available. It looks nice, I have aero and the sidebar going with a couple of gadgets and I've even grown used to the 'search instead of start menu'.
Things I havn't got used to: the changed Control Panel, it *still* confuses me that 'Add/Remove programs' is now 'Programs and Features' - why do they still do this?! The ones that I use a lot change too - want to change networking... there's 3 dialogs now: Network and Sharing Centre, Network and Device Manager (there doesn't seem to be an easy way to alter settings, start in one, wait for it to 'discover' networks near me (sigh) and then I get to change things).
The same applies to display options - right click on the desktop, you used to choose Properties (or display options) and there you had a dialog to change your settings. Now you only have the 'Personalise' option, with a futher list of options, none of which are intuitive enough to me for what I want to do.
So yes, the 'knobs' have moved.... and been renamed and hidden behind another dialog!
The same applies to Explorer, the 'copy files' minidialog is a nuisance - sometimes it sits there for some time deciding how long it'll take to delete or copy a file, and it occasionally gets it wrong - I have on a couple of times selected a few files in temp, pressed delete and saw it telling me its going to delete everything on my C drive!
I had explorer hang the other day when I renamed a partition label. Annoys me a lot, the amount of time Explorer flakes out on me (its not that often, just enough)
LSASS can go crazy quite often too - why does it need to thrash the disk for half an hour is beyond me. The task scheduler is phenomenally overengineered (as is the new event viewer) taking 5 panes with 2 treeviews to show me the 38 tasks Vista set up. Oh, and when I initially installed Vista the Task Scheduler MMC crashed everytime I tried to edit a task, turns out it had a corrupted system security object (I forget exactly what it was, but this was a fresh install on a clean HDD)
I have turned off UAC and the indexing service so I can't comment on them.
All in all, I don't see anything to make me really want to stay with Vista (though I imagine I'm too lazy to change it again - not unless I go through networking hell like on Thursday), it gives me nothing that XP didn't give me, and XP was a bit less confusing all round. XP also hung less and 'pauses' much less.
Maybe it'll be better with SP1, but I think times are changing. This is the big chance Linux has, as big as it was when the world realised 'we can get NT for £1000 a workstation that performs as well as that AIX box that costs us £10000'.
And why wouldn't he? The laptop carried the "Vista Capable" sticker, so you'd think it was capable of running Vista, and every piece of hardware comes with drivers for Windows, that's just a given.
Of course, with what we know now, he should have asked around first "Hey guys, does Vista Capable mean it can run Vista? Can I get drivers for a popular piece of commodity hardware?".
I'm sure he believed the hype from MS on this worryingly dodgy OS.
(disclaimer: I have a MSDN copy of Vista Ultimate, and even I'm thinking of going back to XP.)
I believe fines cannot be written off as tax deductible expenses, so its not right to compare the fine with revenues. Instead you should be looking at profit.
Last quarter, MS made $2.62 in the last quarter, so this fine is roughly 1/8th MS's total profit for the year.
Its worrying in that this fine is happening at a time when MS revenues are falling, what with Vista being such a good seller and lots of resources being spent on new products. If they were happy to pay it, they would have paid the original fine and not been charged with this one.
Microsoft simply announce they are ceasing all operations in the EU as of March 1, 2008. All customers will be given a copy of... ... Windows. If MS ceases all operations in EU, they cannot enforce copyright. Free softare anyone?
EU politicians *cannot* be bought and they will not be scared by threats of MS leaving Europe
Actually they can so easily be bought.. there's been quite a few cash scandals for years now. (disclaimer: I don't think this is true - I only read what they tell me in the newspapers)
I think the difference is that the EU politicians cannot be bought by an American company, there's no amount of "freedom" cash a "cheese-eating surrender" politician will accept to take Microsoft's side in anything.
Unfortunately, wildcard SSL only secures subdomains of a host - so if you were an ISP hosting 2 unrelated websites, they would both have to use a common URL for https traffic. eg if you hosted 'www.kiddietoys.com' and 'www.adulttoys.com', kiddietoys would have to use 'https://kiddietoys.myisp.com' as the secure part.
This isn't so bad for some cases, but most websites would want their own SSL certificates as they would not want anyone to confuse them with those other sites running on your certificate's domain name. (ie myisp.com).
If you had a certificate for *.com, then certificates would be useless for identity checking sites, sure it would be good enough to encrypt traffic, but you couldn't be sure the website you were talking to really was the one you intended.
The only way to fix it is for name-based SSL lookups, so the initial part of the connection is unencrypted as it detects the individual website you're surfing to. The initial part could not be encrypted unless yu had a certificate for your server and referenced it in the subsequent SSL website name lookup. Mind you, unencrypted handshaking wouldn't be much of a security risk, I think.
Hmm, well I'm rather surprised Microsoft isn't a huge supporter of forced migration to IPv6 then. If not being able to connect to the internet using XP isn't a reason to upgrade to Vista, I don't know what is!
About a third of our developer workforce has basically lost 6 months or more of time to write documentation Well, thank f**k for that. God knows you guys have written enough.NET nonsense over the last couple of years to make us poor developers' heads spin as we try to understand what the next framework technology preview might do for us and whether its any good or just some overengineered crud someone thought would be a good idea at some time.
Microsoft used to be a great company for developers - MSDN was excellent resource that actually told us what we needed to know, how to do things and what effects it would have. Last year I couldn't find anything because every index item returned a Windows CE result, now I can't do anything becuase I only get.NET references. Some of us do have to work with some "legacy" MS products, Our major customer is still running an app written with VC6, its only a few years old and yet... totally obsolete and forgotten about by MS.
Thank goodness you're stopping the mad rush to develop all kinds of stuff we'll never use and get back to the basics you should have been doing in the first place.
As for VS2005/SQLServer2005/IIS6. I've used all three of those in a corporate setting and while I agree that VS2005 is a nice IDE and SQL Server 2005 is a decent DBMS, I would hardly consider IIS6 good. Compared to Apache (and hell, even Tomcat), IIS6 is a bag of crap that is only used because it is required for ASP.NET (and other MS tech) websites. Yep, I have to agree with that. I use VS2005 and SQLServer 2005 every day, and it pays nicely thank you, but the only time we have real problems are when we're using IIS as a platform. If you looked at our 'problems' mailing list, you'll see a fair amount of "how do I..?" posts, a few "I think this doesn't work" posts, but the vast majority are the "I've done everything in the instructions but the bl**dy net version still doesn't work, can any give me some tips how to get it going" posts.
We used it successfully at a previous company, but that was setup solely to accept http requests and pass the data straight through to a stable service. That worked - if you give IIS nothing to do, it does it reasonably well. I'd still rather use Apache on Linux as a webserver though, even if it passes data to a Windows service to do the hard work.
Incidentally, SQLServer 2005 does have problems with log shipping and clustering that we've found (the hard way:( ), that MS has only just fixed (in CU4, but missed out of CU5, d'oh), so there is a case for saying MySQL is a more stable and mature platform:-)
Slashdot Mirror
yes, but that's not quite what we're talking about - you're describing what I'd call a 'module', not an OO framework library. (yeah, I know, hardly any difference).
If you could get text from a file by writing (say)
String file_contents = FileReader.Open("filename.txt");
then we're all be very happy, even if you had 3 methods for reading chunks of the file. That'd be a good library, and everyone would be glad to use it. The trick is, as you said, "little more than a few lines of code".
Context switching is a bad thing for human brains, we're not good at it and developers who hold a lot of current-contextual data in their heads find having to stop and go look elsewhere ruins the train of concentration required. Once you see that the really good devs don't use tools like that, you'll understand the way they're coding.
MS has already done some deprecating in a big way - look at windowing technologies - want to do cutting edge GUI dev, use Winforms. No. Use Windows Presentation Foundation. No, use MFC.
(yes, MS is already deprecating C# in favour of old-fashioned native C++ - see the Ribbon control that is MFC only, not C# nor going to be C# for a while. The program managers for Visual Studio have said in their blogs that they've concentrated on the managed world enough, its time to return to native code again - probably because all their big customers still use their old/legacy code and want support)
data stream from the eyeballs:
Level 1: look at the pretty flashy lights
Level 2: hey, some of those lights seem to be moving
Level 3: and that chunk of light moves together
Level 4: which is a recognizable object
Level 5: I remember that object, its my mate Dave.
Level 6: Dave owes me a beer.
It works like that for business users, sometimes, but for retail its a different story.
Home users buy kit and expect it to work. They have gotten used to the idea of patches for their OS which are free and are conditioned to think of other upgrades as the same - eg, free fixes.
So, to get IPv6 to the home user, you either have to issue a freely downloadable firmware upgrade, or sell a brand new router "now with IPv6 support for a faster internet experience". I think there is a case for both scenarios, and I imagine that when they start supporting IPv6, newer models will get firmware upgrades but you'll have to buy a replacement for the old, discontinued ones.
I think the first thing that needs to happen is Ipv6 enabled home routers. Without that, no-one can (transparently) access the net.
The servers are ready (linux has IPv6 on by default on most distros), Windows is now ready, I think most ISPs have it even if they're not turned it on for you. Its just the routers that need to catch up.
yeah, but that website is not exactly, well, "consumer friendly". IPv6 is obviously coming, but in tiny little steps.
If Netgear and Belkin supported it on their routers, and your ISP supported it in theirs (which they probably do today), and you can have AAAA records, then that day, IPv6 will suddenly just start working. We'll be IPv6 enabled in next to no time once it all falls into place.
And once you get enough websites appearing on IPv6 only, then the router manufacturers will fall over themselves to support it, after all, why stick with IPv4 when they have an excuse to sell you a new router....
so lets get this right, even spacecraft now have to use green fuels. :-)
yep, that'll do too. What I was not advovating was anything based on technical merit - just 'business' factors that matter more, as the OP has found out.
on the other hand, we can make some inferences from this. We know its not ASP on IIS.
I think that tells you something about why people choose Microsoft no matter what. Quite often the decision to go with a cool, new technology is not a good one simply because it is new and cool. Old and boring generally always wins in this industry.
lol. I understand sarcasm, possibly because I'm not an American :-)
My boss, just doesn't like OSS at all, if you can't buy it, it must be worthless and too risky to use is his attitude. Unfortunately, this attitude is too common in the business community, possibly ever since the adage "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM" was around.
WRT Java, I know it is 'enterprise', but I have never even heard of a company that managed to get an enterprise Java system set up without half a dozen servers, or a mainframe running it. Enterprise Java has EJBs and the like, that doesn't make it good at all. I don't know whether its the memory usage model, or the 'lazy' programmer model that makes it suck, but it does even though it should work perfectly. (its a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger - he's tall, strong, rich, powerful. He *should* be a babe magnet but .. somehow it doesn't pan out like that when implemented in the real world)(sorry for the mixed metaphor)
.NET is not a tool for every job, but MS likes to hype stuff up way past a sensible level so everyone thinks you cannot program anymore unless you're using Windows Workflow Foundation to drive a Best-Practice Application Block through Windows Presentation Foundation gui all written in C#. Now they're moving on to something else, expect more hype but in a different direction.
MS has gone C# in a big way over the last few years, they have concentrated on it to the exclusion of all else to drive it to market, yet the program manager for Visual Studio has said that they're done with that now and the next big push for them is unmanaged C++;
Vista for all its modernness has a tiny amount of managed code in it (and the bit that is managed - Aero - is the bit that requires 2Gig to run acceptably, its not a issue with fancy graphics, its an issue with managed-ness). Has Robert Grimes done a more up-to-date analysis of Vista's use of managed code - the last one he did showed Vista is made of only 3% managed code.
(note: to see what I mean, read the comments on here where they describe the new Office controls like the Ribbon being made available for MFC developers. Someone asks, "but will they be available for us C# devs?" and is told "we plan to make this available but we don't have a date we can announce" - ie not for some time).
This is why I think the MS-friend is right,
Surely Open source is one where you can see the source. Free Open source is the other, much more useful beast that you are descibing.
To quote the Register, In a post on the Real World Technologies discussion board appropriately titled "Hypocrisy the worst of human traits", Torvalds takes advantage of Tridgell's vow of silence on the matter. For the first third of his response, Torvalds gently tries to persuade us that ethics doesn't belong in the software business, taking a strictly utilitarian view. Or, as he puts it,
"So I think open source tends to become technically better over time (but it does take time), but I don't think it's a moral imperative." he writes. What a pity the people involved in Open Source give my boss another reason to distrust the community and all their projects.
Its shoddy usability, apparently they've hired the person who worked on Office's Ribbon to fix this (general usability) issue in the next OS.
OK. I am a Windows developer, and have been for ages - Windows suddenly became good with NT4 when everyone I knew and worked for decided to migrate from proprietary unix systems to NT.
.... and been renamed and hidden behind another dialog!
I've run every Windows OS since then really.
So, I installed Vista a few months after it became available. It looks nice, I have aero and the sidebar going with a couple of gadgets and I've even grown used to the 'search instead of start menu'.
Things I havn't got used to: the changed Control Panel, it *still* confuses me that 'Add/Remove programs' is now 'Programs and Features' - why do they still do this?! The ones that I use a lot change too - want to change networking... there's 3 dialogs now: Network and Sharing Centre, Network and Device Manager (there doesn't seem to be an easy way to alter settings, start in one, wait for it to 'discover' networks near me (sigh) and then I get to change things).
The same applies to display options - right click on the desktop, you used to choose Properties (or display options) and there you had a dialog to change your settings. Now you only have the 'Personalise' option, with a futher list of options, none of which are intuitive enough to me for what I want to do.
So yes, the 'knobs' have moved
The same applies to Explorer, the 'copy files' minidialog is a nuisance - sometimes it sits there for some time deciding how long it'll take to delete or copy a file, and it occasionally gets it wrong - I have on a couple of times selected a few files in temp, pressed delete and saw it telling me its going to delete everything on my C drive!
I had explorer hang the other day when I renamed a partition label. Annoys me a lot, the amount of time Explorer flakes out on me (its not that often, just enough)
LSASS can go crazy quite often too - why does it need to thrash the disk for half an hour is beyond me. The task scheduler is phenomenally overengineered (as is the new event viewer) taking 5 panes with 2 treeviews to show me the 38 tasks Vista set up. Oh, and when I initially installed Vista the Task Scheduler MMC crashed everytime I tried to edit a task, turns out it had a corrupted system security object (I forget exactly what it was, but this was a fresh install on a clean HDD)
I have turned off UAC and the indexing service so I can't comment on them.
All in all, I don't see anything to make me really want to stay with Vista (though I imagine I'm too lazy to change it again - not unless I go through networking hell like on Thursday), it gives me nothing that XP didn't give me, and XP was a bit less confusing all round. XP also hung less and 'pauses' much less.
Maybe it'll be better with SP1, but I think times are changing. This is the big chance Linux has, as big as it was when the world realised 'we can get NT for £1000 a workstation that performs as well as that AIX box that costs us £10000'.
And why wouldn't he? The laptop carried the "Vista Capable" sticker, so you'd think it was capable of running Vista, and every piece of hardware comes with drivers for Windows, that's just a given.
Of course, with what we know now, he should have asked around first "Hey guys, does Vista Capable mean it can run Vista? Can I get drivers for a popular piece of commodity hardware?".
I'm sure he believed the hype from MS on this worryingly dodgy OS.
(disclaimer: I have a MSDN copy of Vista Ultimate, and even I'm thinking of going back to XP.)
I believe fines cannot be written off as tax deductible expenses, so its not right to compare the fine with revenues. Instead you should be looking at profit.
Last quarter, MS made $2.62 in the last quarter, so this fine is roughly 1/8th MS's total profit for the year.
Its worrying in that this fine is happening at a time when MS revenues are falling, what with Vista being such a good seller and lots of resources being spent on new products. If they were happy to pay it, they would have paid the original fine and not been charged with this one.
EU politicians *cannot* be bought and they will not be scared by threats of MS leaving Europe
Actually they can so easily be bought.. there's been quite a few cash scandals for years now. (disclaimer: I don't think this is true - I only read what they tell me in the newspapers)
I think the difference is that the EU politicians cannot be bought by an American company, there's no amount of "freedom" cash a "cheese-eating surrender" politician will accept to take Microsoft's side in anything.
I guess you would have mentioned your immense modesty too, if you weren't so modest :)
Unfortunately, wildcard SSL only secures subdomains of a host - so if you were an ISP hosting 2 unrelated websites, they would both have to use a common URL for https traffic. eg if you hosted 'www.kiddietoys.com' and 'www.adulttoys.com', kiddietoys would have to use 'https://kiddietoys.myisp.com' as the secure part.
This isn't so bad for some cases, but most websites would want their own SSL certificates as they would not want anyone to confuse them with those other sites running on your certificate's domain name. (ie myisp.com).
If you had a certificate for *.com, then certificates would be useless for identity checking sites, sure it would be good enough to encrypt traffic, but you couldn't be sure the website you were talking to really was the one you intended.
The only way to fix it is for name-based SSL lookups, so the initial part of the connection is unencrypted as it detects the individual website you're surfing to. The initial part could not be encrypted unless yu had a certificate for your server and referenced it in the subsequent SSL website name lookup. Mind you, unencrypted handshaking wouldn't be much of a security risk, I think.
Hmm, well I'm rather surprised Microsoft isn't a huge supporter of forced migration to IPv6 then. If not being able to connect to the internet using XP isn't a reason to upgrade to Vista, I don't know what is!
Microsoft used to be a great company for developers - MSDN was excellent resource that actually told us what we needed to know, how to do things and what effects it would have. Last year I couldn't find anything because every index item returned a Windows CE result, now I can't do anything becuase I only get
Thank goodness you're stopping the mad rush to develop all kinds of stuff we'll never use and get back to the basics you should have been doing in the first place.
We used it successfully at a previous company, but that was setup solely to accept http requests and pass the data straight through to a stable service. That worked - if you give IIS nothing to do, it does it reasonably well. I'd still rather use Apache on Linux as a webserver though, even if it passes data to a Windows service to do the hard work.
Incidentally, SQLServer 2005 does have problems with log shipping and clustering that we've found (the hard way