its a true comment, and Elop made incredibly huge mistakes - particularly dissing his existing product base, that killed off all market share that could have kept the company thriving (even if long-term those products were going nowhere).
Instead, he comes out and says how crap it all is, buy Windows Phone (and Microsoft says "no, not this one, the next one of course") and you have a total disaster.
This blog says a lot of sense, Elop is a terrible terrible CEO.
I think they would have done well with Maemo, but they chose not to work with it. Although most product groups end up with 2 dominant players (and a lot of nerdrage over which is better), there is always profitable space for several more. Nokia could have completely cleaned up in Asia without doing much of anything, even updating Symbian would have been a better choice than going with Windows. Android would have been a better choice than Windows in the worldwide marketplace.
So what can they do now? Being a Windows Phone manufacturer when Microsoft has shown they are perfectly capable of making surface tablets, and by implication, small tablets with the phone software on them.... so putting all your eggs in a basket owned by Microsoft is just stupid, so they have to fire Elop and try something else - go back to featurephones and maybe put Android on those Lumias, ditch Windows Phone now before they get dumped, its the only sensible option left.
but this is normal - EE is the first to introduce 4G, so naturally their offerings are priced in the "early adopter" bracket where anyone who really, really wants it can have it, if they really must. The rest of us can drool over the speeds and get by with our slower service. Its no different to the latest iPhone or a Ferrari.
In time, competitors will arrive with lower priced, or greater capped offerings and the market will find a good equilibrium level.
The only par I'm worried about is the trend for the mobile ISPs to band together - EE is Orange and T-Mobile together, so we've lost 1 ISP already. I would be much happier if we could have all the ISPs who buy mast and network capacity from a jointly-owned infrastructure company, but I think the government nixed that idea.
yeah, there are always exceptions to the rule. Good for you though, most places don't have such practices from sysadmins. Hell, some places don't have such practices from developers. Some places don't even have sysadmins!
I think the point was - you don't get the sysadmin to write the script to do things, you get a developer to do it for the sysadmin.
Sysadmins don't have the same rigour of software configuration management as developers, as they don't work with code in the same way, nearly all sysadmin code I've ever seen was practically "for personal use" stored somewhere (a shared folder if they're enlightened, home folder if not).
But anyway, the point is that you get a professional developer to do the development, from the requirements of the sysadmin. If you're lucky enough to work in an environment where management allows this kind of work to happen then you'll appreciate it - I imagine most sysadmins just want to do their admin jobs, and not spend all day knocking out scripts. Better to write up a specification and let someone who knows how to program computers do it.
Ah, but bear in mind that you only see the the message sent to potential clients, not to internal techs. Inside Salesforce, it could be buzzing with the most erudite and advanced technical discussions possible, but you'll never see that because you're not part of that, instead you only see the marketing bull...
Of course, it could be complete uselessness inside SF.com too, but we can't really make an informed judgement on that.
until the person scammed makes the complaint and the card company has to refund the losses, sure they make good on the charges to the merchant and its this that allows them to make the payouts but its still a loss to them.
Better for them to stop the scammers, make people feel safer about buying things with the cards, and rake in the profits for those little fees they charge.
nope, but I've been beaten up before - I was more concerned with stopping my head getting kicked in, arms up to protect my head from more blows, and I still came away seriously bruised and bloody.
A smack around the head isn't like in the movies you see, you don;t roll away, take time to snap out a quick witticism, pull your gun and put several shots in the bad guy while your hair stays in place.
Being on the ground with an attacker actively slamming your head into the concrete pavement is reason enough for using deadly force to stop and attack.
being in such a situation isn't going to give you much opportunity to draw a weapon and fire it, let alone do much else.
I guess the facts of the case are too tied up in partisan opinion and vested interest to make a good verdict happen.
I guess that means you don;t think of yourself in this category: "Quite frankly, there are a lot of f*cking morons on the internet."... unfortunately, it depends on what category Linus thinks you're in... I wouldn't hold out much hope if you choose the wrong sort of pint!
Unfortunately that's all businesses care about nowadays - you're more likely to get a job because you know how to use Visual Studio than you are if you know how to program effectively. Today much of the technical expertise is being eroded in 2 ways:
Developers being given RAD tools where coding is more "if you do this it just works, don't think how it works, just trust it does". This is particularly relevant in the.NET world where Visual Studio isn't a tool to help you code, its a tool that defines your environment and tries to envelop you in wizards and properties (its the only tool I know that has 2 property sections that refer to different types of properties!). Sure, you can use it as a glorified text editor, but you can also use it as a giant configuration machine.
The other is obviously the continual chasing of new technologies. Nobody becomes an expert in anything anymore, they;re too busy catching up with the latest, and once there.. its time to drop that old cruft in favour of something shiny and new. Sometimes this is peer/industry pressure, sometimes its forced upon you by the tool manufacturer (Windows Phone anyone?)
Now I exaggerate slightly, but only so much. There are people who get to code the old-fashioned way, but I think they get called system engineers now, rather than application engineers, and I know a lot of support guys prefer "plain-speaking" files to "magic" packages, but in the whole, the industry of app engineers is definitely moving towards treating programmers as plug-and-configure resources.
Still, Microsoft will sell you more tools that do more stuff "for you", the Architects will adopt them as they want to play with the new shiny and the PHBs will buy them to keep up with 'latest standards' and the cycle repeats forever.
ok, C# 5.0 then, not.net 5.0 - its easy to get them all confused nowadays.
but anyway, I understand it isn't *all* config, of course not, but it is a significant amount (especially in the stuff I'm doing). So putting your ServiceHost entry in config instead of code is what I'm talking about - and all your logging settings, and all the Endpoints and bindings and everything else - its a bit of magic that does stuff that you used to do in code. Similarly, putting an OperationContract attribute ontop of your methods, magically makes it generate a whole heap of code that exposes that method as a SOAP call.
My place they're also investigating BizTalk... yup, so soon we'll be coding by drag and dropping pre-built components onto a workflow and hook up parameters via XML. Its the kind of thing a business analyst used to do at previous places, and maybe that's the problem - we say we're coders, but we're turning into business process configurators.
Still, if you don't understand that not everything written is to be taken completely literally, or you like missing the point, then you'll never be safe from trolls, not that I was trolling - the way we're using these tools is a hell of a lot like I described.
unfortunately, I don;t work in a vacuum - I have colleagues, some of whom are younger, some from different backgrounds and some in different departments. Some of them read the marketing hype from certain technology companies and actually believe it!
So quite often we have a company standard to use, and I have to follow it (as I' work well in a team).
I do have a lot of experience with stuff (alas, not so much with fancy websites), as I've done lots of low level, high-level, enterprise and all kinds of stuff. People's lives depend on my old software so I think I can manage the future... if I want to.
I'd think like to be the old man doing C++ in the distant future, away from the continual keeping up with the latest crap, just coming in to work, quietly being effective, probably on the old company systems that bring in the majority of the revenue so the kids can play with the latest TypeScript framework, this year, and whatever comes along next year. At that age, you just don't want the hassle of the changing crap.. at least that's what I'm beginning to find.
Just consider it yourself, when you're 60, do you want to be spending your evenings and weekends reading up on the latest tooling to do the stuff you used to do decades ago? You probably won't.
hehe, I find a lot of those "hammer" folks are the ones who say "you must keep learning", and when I say, "you're going to do some Linux then" their response is "no, I meant learn a different C# framework".
step away from your comfort zone, you never know what gems you'll find.
To be honest, I always hated Java - can't really think why, but maybe it was the whole inefficiency of it (back in the day when a Java GUI with a button and a tree uses up 50Mb RAM.. the days when you only had 256Mb RAM to start with) and possibly the whole "its a new bandwagon" thing that made people think they could just ignore their old problems... in favour of re-creating those problems in a new shiny tech.
So I'm pretty much like you, only a C/C++ arena.
In the C/C++ place, we don;t tend to go for frameworks that "do stuff by magic", we tend to have libraries that solve specific problems. These blocks are then plugged together by the programmer. It may require more thought and understanding of the problem, but at least we can turn these to solve many different problems - compared with the framework approach that solves 1 problem and solves it well, as long as that problem is the one you're trying to solve too.. which it never is.
Still, we're in broad agreement.. now lets find some kids and tell them their music is horrible - not like in our day when a musician could actually play his guitar at ear-deafening loudness and scream lyrics about satan.
I am getting to grips with VS2010, and the things I hate about it (its good, but still not as good as VC6 of course) is that a hell of a lot now is not about writing code but writing config files (or.proj files) that work some magic with a framework where you don't really know what its doing under its covers.
It sounds really powerful, and to a journeyman developer, I'm sure it must look like Gods own technology, but as an older sort of guy who's been there, seen it and worn out the tshirt, I know the more magical complexity you put in the more fragile it becomes. Setting up a TFS build the other day took all day to do it because Microsoft decided to change a few things, so in the end I had to install VS2008 just to get past the blockers. Not good, then the database project stuff - sounds great, auto deployment etc, but really.. you wouldn't go near a live server with such a thing (and we don't) so why bother with it - the tools should make our lives easier by working with the code and scripts we use, not by hiding them away inside funny old projects and sometimes letting us see what we want from it.
So that's my problem with VS nowadays, it tries too hard. I guess that's the problem when you have to add features to sell the next version, after a while you have to come up with all kinds of excuses because you've added all the things you needed it to do years ago. (in fact, look at 2012 - the "value add" feature they came up with was to make all the icons grey. what will they use to persuade us to buy VS2014, a command line only version?)
C#... its just VB.net but with curly brackets. No C# developer likes to be told that for some reason, can't think why:)
I imagine he's concerned that his old.NET 2.0 skills (where you programmed) are now replaced with.NET 5.0 skills (where you write config files that magically make a framework do stuff). and if you don't know how to work VS to the level his colleagues expect (as they're busy busy busy reading the latest codeplex and msdn and other MS sites to keep up) then he will find it difficult.
My new place, I'm dropped into a world where VS is king, and if there's a way to do it in VS, sure as hell a setting to reference a project is there, linking things together with some magic, that if you get wrong ever so slightly, will bollocks the whole thing up royally.
Mind, I'm coding with WCF frameworks against unit test frameworks with database frameworks all linked with VS magic, and we still have to generate an old-fashioned sql file for deployment (as the DBAs rightly expect to know exactly what's going on and would never let a generated auto-deployment project run on the live servers. Can't blame them really... it begs the question why I have to generate such crap only to do it manually all over again... but I know the answer.. VS has the bits to click, so someone has decided they absolutely must be clicked!)
So, maybe he's an old kind of guy, the one who thinks you write code by, well, coding.
Still, here's hoping MS's C++ renaissance will blow all that away and I can get back to writing performance-oriented services instead of 'generate a project for me' services.
was it not sticking, or did you get to the age where you realised you didn't give quite as much a damn over the next damn thing that's been pushed as the next big thing only to realise it was just crap?
That's what happened to me, but fortunately I had already given up bothering to learn all the new nonsense that is designed to make you buy the next version of whatever toolset they want you to buy, and concentrated my efforts on actually making stuff that works (properly, ie I no longer really cared what technology I used, the product was the thing for me).
Mind, we're now doing an "agile" system that isn't anywhere near as agile as the iterative development I used to do 15 years ago... and the tooling is auto-conf magic bits that "just work" (yeah, right, until it doesn't). So maybe it wasn't me but the dumbed down kiddie tech we're pushed to work with.
well, I can imagine why they have problems describing SCM to as non-technical audience if you use a distributed version control system.
For non-techies, you need a centralised system, its much much easier to grasp the concept of ".... and then you send it to the server that stores it and archives the old version automatically".
For online storage, you need to still consider backups - while I'd trust github, I think I can think of other services I trusted and thought would never disappear that have, well, disappeared. Running your own server (or more likely, a VM) on an internal system is much safer. You still need to do backups properly though, but maybe a nightly copy of the entire VM would be sufficient.
You can run nearly all of the VCS systems on Windows quite happily - subversion runs very nicely and, if you run VisualSVN Server, you get it nicely integrated with the Windows domain - so no user accounts to worry about, and security (eg making parts readonly) can be handled very easily in a Windows-friendly thing. Its also incredibly easy to install, your IT guys might be happy to slap it on.
My advice would be to get the IT guys on board, rather than try to bypass them. That's always the correct answer, even if its often not very easy to achieve.
nothing wrong with PHP, and if you have a small scale system, then there's little to no gain from rewriting it. However....
if you have a lot of systems then a rewrite in the most efficient system you can get will benefit you a lot. This is why Microsoft has said that 88% of their datacentre costs is in hardware and power, and is also the reason why they're migrating back to native C++ code! (yep, bye.NET, don't let the door hit your bloated ass on the way out).
I always said if you want programmer productivity then a script language, like PHP, is the way to go, but if you want performance you need to go a lot more C/C++. Java and C# are compromises that offer you neither enough performance or productivity.
So for you, if you're running multiple servers with your PHP code, then there could be a benefit for you to rewrite it in C/C++ as you'll be able to serve the same number of users using fewer servers. (worked for Facebook after all), but unless you're running 3+ servers, there's not going to be much point in it for you.
just FYI VMWare can share RAM with the VMs - its often used to provision more Windows systems than could otherwise exist on the underlying hardware, as a lot of RAM is used just to provide the same pages of static OS code - no need to have a copy for each instance if it never changes.
It's one big reason to use VMWare over HyperV, not that that stops anyone using MS stuff from using HyperV simple because it has that big M branding on it:(
it did last quite a long time, but the black death was quite a catastrophic event - they reckon 50% of the European population copped it; or 25% of *world population*
I think the important part is this bit that explains it best:
When Congress rewrote the Patent Act in 1952, it adopted a compromise position: patentees could write their claim language in functional terms, but when they did so the patent would not cover the goal itself, but only the particular means of implementing that goal
so I can patent the concept of clicking once, but if someone else comes along and implements their own way of buying shit when someone clicks a button once, Amazon cannot own them - as Amazon's patent cannot cover the goal (of 1-click buying), nor cover all implementations. So they could still sue you if you stole their code and implemented it exactly as they did, but not if you did it a slightly different way - eg, if Amazon's done it in Python with blue "buy now" button, and you did it in PHP with a big red button... you'd be fine.
I think discussing this in terms of algorithms isn't too productive as they can't be patented anyway (as I understand it) but Apple's bounce-back could not be patented as Google could implement the same effect differently. Apple cannot hold a patent on the goal of indicating to a user the end of a list, just their way of implementing it - so I couldn't write the same thing in objective-C and steal the classes and/or code that makes this bounce happen. But Google can happily implement it using an entirely different set of software code.
Its like the old mousetrap thing - if mousetraps were software, someone would have patented " a means of catching mice using a device that traps mice" (on a smartphone:-) ) and that would be it for all would-be mousetrap inventors. But the patent office currently has a thousand mousetrap patents, each one achieving the same goal - of catching mice - but each one using a different means (ie software implementation).
The medieval world failed mainly because of the black death. So many peasants died that the lords, relatively safe in their relatively clean manors, had no-one to bring food and taxes to. As the peasantry migrated away from villages that had been decimated by plague, the entire feudal "I own your ass" system could no longer be enforced.
The ancient English system failed mainly because the Normans came in an kicked arse. And the Roman system failed when the barbarian hordes came and kicked arse (and, of course, succeeded because the Roman state became too soft and corrupt to defend itself). In every case, there will be enough people defending the status quo that changing the system becomes very difficult - not always the people benefiting from being in power either, plenty of 'peasants' fear and dislike change.
The interesting thing is that practically no-one has ever overthrown a bad system themselves, its always left to external factors to make the change - plague, power vacuum, or migrating hordes of invaders due to food supply problems.
The best you can hope for is to pop up, make enough of a fuss, and after the authorities have carted away your broken body, other people rise up in your name.
+1. TFA shows an image with power consumption moving from Mainframe through mobile to "ubiquitous" computing - ie they are just working on ever smaller, energy efficient chips that are underpowered.
It does not mean your mainframe will suddenly be able to run your.NET GUI applications over the cloud using the latest SOAP protocols without using energy, but instead tiny devices will be providing tiny bits of data with limited processing capabilities. In many respects, this is exactly what we need for a huge range of computing tasks. so my spectacles could have a tiny chip in them to give me notification popups on a HUD, but I'd probably need something bigger (eg my mobile) to actually read the mail, and something bigger still to view the attached powerpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
its a true comment, and Elop made incredibly huge mistakes - particularly dissing his existing product base, that killed off all market share that could have kept the company thriving (even if long-term those products were going nowhere).
Instead, he comes out and says how crap it all is, buy Windows Phone (and Microsoft says "no, not this one, the next one of course") and you have a total disaster.
This blog says a lot of sense, Elop is a terrible terrible CEO.
I think they would have done well with Maemo, but they chose not to work with it. Although most product groups end up with 2 dominant players (and a lot of nerdrage over which is better), there is always profitable space for several more. Nokia could have completely cleaned up in Asia without doing much of anything, even updating Symbian would have been a better choice than going with Windows. Android would have been a better choice than Windows in the worldwide marketplace.
So what can they do now? Being a Windows Phone manufacturer when Microsoft has shown they are perfectly capable of making surface tablets, and by implication, small tablets with the phone software on them.... so putting all your eggs in a basket owned by Microsoft is just stupid, so they have to fire Elop and try something else - go back to featurephones and maybe put Android on those Lumias, ditch Windows Phone now before they get dumped, its the only sensible option left.
but this is normal - EE is the first to introduce 4G, so naturally their offerings are priced in the "early adopter" bracket where anyone who really, really wants it can have it, if they really must. The rest of us can drool over the speeds and get by with our slower service. Its no different to the latest iPhone or a Ferrari.
In time, competitors will arrive with lower priced, or greater capped offerings and the market will find a good equilibrium level.
The only par I'm worried about is the trend for the mobile ISPs to band together - EE is Orange and T-Mobile together, so we've lost 1 ISP already. I would be much happier if we could have all the ISPs who buy mast and network capacity from a jointly-owned infrastructure company, but I think the government nixed that idea.
yeah, there are always exceptions to the rule. Good for you though, most places don't have such practices from sysadmins. Hell, some places don't have such practices from developers. Some places don't even have sysadmins!
I think the point was - you don't get the sysadmin to write the script to do things, you get a developer to do it for the sysadmin.
Sysadmins don't have the same rigour of software configuration management as developers, as they don't work with code in the same way, nearly all sysadmin code I've ever seen was practically "for personal use" stored somewhere (a shared folder if they're enlightened, home folder if not).
But anyway, the point is that you get a professional developer to do the development, from the requirements of the sysadmin. If you're lucky enough to work in an environment where management allows this kind of work to happen then you'll appreciate it - I imagine most sysadmins just want to do their admin jobs, and not spend all day knocking out scripts. Better to write up a specification and let someone who knows how to program computers do it.
Ah, but bear in mind that you only see the the message sent to potential clients, not to internal techs. Inside Salesforce, it could be buzzing with the most erudite and advanced technical discussions possible, but you'll never see that because you're not part of that, instead you only see the marketing bull...
Of course, it could be complete uselessness inside SF.com too, but we can't really make an informed judgement on that.
until the person scammed makes the complaint and the card company has to refund the losses, sure they make good on the charges to the merchant and its this that allows them to make the payouts but its still a loss to them.
Better for them to stop the scammers, make people feel safer about buying things with the cards, and rake in the profits for those little fees they charge.
nope, but I've been beaten up before - I was more concerned with stopping my head getting kicked in, arms up to protect my head from more blows, and I still came away seriously bruised and bloody.
A smack around the head isn't like in the movies you see, you don;t roll away, take time to snap out a quick witticism, pull your gun and put several shots in the bad guy while your hair stays in place.
Being on the ground with an attacker actively slamming your head into the concrete pavement is reason enough for using deadly force to stop and attack.
being in such a situation isn't going to give you much opportunity to draw a weapon and fire it, let alone do much else.
I guess the facts of the case are too tied up in partisan opinion and vested interest to make a good verdict happen.
I guess that means you don;t think of yourself in this category: "Quite frankly, there are a lot of f*cking morons on the internet."... unfortunately, it depends on what category Linus thinks you're in... I wouldn't hold out much hope if you choose the wrong sort of pint!
Unfortunately that's all businesses care about nowadays - you're more likely to get a job because you know how to use Visual Studio than you are if you know how to program effectively. Today much of the technical expertise is being eroded in 2 ways:
Developers being given RAD tools where coding is more "if you do this it just works, don't think how it works, just trust it does". This is particularly relevant in the .NET world where Visual Studio isn't a tool to help you code, its a tool that defines your environment and tries to envelop you in wizards and properties (its the only tool I know that has 2 property sections that refer to different types of properties!). Sure, you can use it as a glorified text editor, but you can also use it as a giant configuration machine.
The other is obviously the continual chasing of new technologies. Nobody becomes an expert in anything anymore, they;re too busy catching up with the latest, and once there.. its time to drop that old cruft in favour of something shiny and new. Sometimes this is peer/industry pressure, sometimes its forced upon you by the tool manufacturer (Windows Phone anyone?)
Now I exaggerate slightly, but only so much. There are people who get to code the old-fashioned way, but I think they get called system engineers now, rather than application engineers, and I know a lot of support guys prefer "plain-speaking" files to "magic" packages, but in the whole, the industry of app engineers is definitely moving towards treating programmers as plug-and-configure resources.
Still, Microsoft will sell you more tools that do more stuff "for you", the Architects will adopt them as they want to play with the new shiny and the PHBs will buy them to keep up with 'latest standards' and the cycle repeats forever.
ok, C# 5.0 then, not .net 5.0 - its easy to get them all confused nowadays.
but anyway, I understand it isn't *all* config, of course not, but it is a significant amount (especially in the stuff I'm doing). So putting your ServiceHost entry in config instead of code is what I'm talking about - and all your logging settings, and all the Endpoints and bindings and everything else - its a bit of magic that does stuff that you used to do in code. Similarly, putting an OperationContract attribute ontop of your methods, magically makes it generate a whole heap of code that exposes that method as a SOAP call.
My place they're also investigating BizTalk... yup, so soon we'll be coding by drag and dropping pre-built components onto a workflow and hook up parameters via XML. Its the kind of thing a business analyst used to do at previous places, and maybe that's the problem - we say we're coders, but we're turning into business process configurators.
Still, if you don't understand that not everything written is to be taken completely literally, or you like missing the point, then you'll never be safe from trolls, not that I was trolling - the way we're using these tools is a hell of a lot like I described.
unfortunately, I don;t work in a vacuum - I have colleagues, some of whom are younger, some from different backgrounds and some in different departments. Some of them read the marketing hype from certain technology companies and actually believe it!
So quite often we have a company standard to use, and I have to follow it (as I' work well in a team).
I do have a lot of experience with stuff (alas, not so much with fancy websites), as I've done lots of low level, high-level, enterprise and all kinds of stuff. People's lives depend on my old software so I think I can manage the future... if I want to.
I'd think like to be the old man doing C++ in the distant future, away from the continual keeping up with the latest crap, just coming in to work, quietly being effective, probably on the old company systems that bring in the majority of the revenue so the kids can play with the latest TypeScript framework, this year, and whatever comes along next year. At that age, you just don't want the hassle of the changing crap.. at least that's what I'm beginning to find.
Just consider it yourself, when you're 60, do you want to be spending your evenings and weekends reading up on the latest tooling to do the stuff you used to do decades ago? You probably won't.
hehe, I find a lot of those "hammer" folks are the ones who say "you must keep learning", and when I say, "you're going to do some Linux then" their response is "no, I meant learn a different C# framework".
step away from your comfort zone, you never know what gems you'll find.
To be honest, I always hated Java - can't really think why, but maybe it was the whole inefficiency of it (back in the day when a Java GUI with a button and a tree uses up 50Mb RAM.. the days when you only had 256Mb RAM to start with) and possibly the whole "its a new bandwagon" thing that made people think they could just ignore their old problems... in favour of re-creating those problems in a new shiny tech.
So I'm pretty much like you, only a C/C++ arena.
In the C/C++ place, we don;t tend to go for frameworks that "do stuff by magic", we tend to have libraries that solve specific problems. These blocks are then plugged together by the programmer. It may require more thought and understanding of the problem, but at least we can turn these to solve many different problems - compared with the framework approach that solves 1 problem and solves it well, as long as that problem is the one you're trying to solve too.. which it never is.
Still, we're in broad agreement.. now lets find some kids and tell them their music is horrible - not like in our day when a musician could actually play his guitar at ear-deafening loudness and scream lyrics about satan.
I am getting to grips with VS2010, and the things I hate about it (its good, but still not as good as VC6 of course) is that a hell of a lot now is not about writing code but writing config files (or .proj files) that work some magic with a framework where you don't really know what its doing under its covers.
It sounds really powerful, and to a journeyman developer, I'm sure it must look like Gods own technology, but as an older sort of guy who's been there, seen it and worn out the tshirt, I know the more magical complexity you put in the more fragile it becomes. Setting up a TFS build the other day took all day to do it because Microsoft decided to change a few things, so in the end I had to install VS2008 just to get past the blockers. Not good, then the database project stuff - sounds great, auto deployment etc, but really.. you wouldn't go near a live server with such a thing (and we don't) so why bother with it - the tools should make our lives easier by working with the code and scripts we use, not by hiding them away inside funny old projects and sometimes letting us see what we want from it.
So that's my problem with VS nowadays, it tries too hard. I guess that's the problem when you have to add features to sell the next version, after a while you have to come up with all kinds of excuses because you've added all the things you needed it to do years ago. (in fact, look at 2012 - the "value add" feature they came up with was to make all the icons grey. what will they use to persuade us to buy VS2014, a command line only version?)
C#... its just VB.net but with curly brackets. No C# developer likes to be told that for some reason, can't think why :)
I imagine he's concerned that his old .NET 2.0 skills (where you programmed) are now replaced with .NET 5.0 skills (where you write config files that magically make a framework do stuff). and if you don't know how to work VS to the level his colleagues expect (as they're busy busy busy reading the latest codeplex and msdn and other MS sites to keep up) then he will find it difficult.
My new place, I'm dropped into a world where VS is king, and if there's a way to do it in VS, sure as hell a setting to reference a project is there, linking things together with some magic, that if you get wrong ever so slightly, will bollocks the whole thing up royally.
Mind, I'm coding with WCF frameworks against unit test frameworks with database frameworks all linked with VS magic, and we still have to generate an old-fashioned sql file for deployment (as the DBAs rightly expect to know exactly what's going on and would never let a generated auto-deployment project run on the live servers. Can't blame them really... it begs the question why I have to generate such crap only to do it manually all over again... but I know the answer.. VS has the bits to click, so someone has decided they absolutely must be clicked!)
So, maybe he's an old kind of guy, the one who thinks you write code by, well, coding.
Still, here's hoping MS's C++ renaissance will blow all that away and I can get back to writing performance-oriented services instead of 'generate a project for me' services.
was it not sticking, or did you get to the age where you realised you didn't give quite as much a damn over the next damn thing that's been pushed as the next big thing only to realise it was just crap?
That's what happened to me, but fortunately I had already given up bothering to learn all the new nonsense that is designed to make you buy the next version of whatever toolset they want you to buy, and concentrated my efforts on actually making stuff that works (properly, ie I no longer really cared what technology I used, the product was the thing for me).
Mind, we're now doing an "agile" system that isn't anywhere near as agile as the iterative development I used to do 15 years ago... and the tooling is auto-conf magic bits that "just work" (yeah, right, until it doesn't). So maybe it wasn't me but the dumbed down kiddie tech we're pushed to work with.
well, I can imagine why they have problems describing SCM to as non-technical audience if you use a distributed version control system.
For non-techies, you need a centralised system, its much much easier to grasp the concept of ".... and then you send it to the server that stores it and archives the old version automatically".
For online storage, you need to still consider backups - while I'd trust github, I think I can think of other services I trusted and thought would never disappear that have, well, disappeared. Running your own server (or more likely, a VM) on an internal system is much safer. You still need to do backups properly though, but maybe a nightly copy of the entire VM would be sufficient.
You can run nearly all of the VCS systems on Windows quite happily - subversion runs very nicely and, if you run VisualSVN Server, you get it nicely integrated with the Windows domain - so no user accounts to worry about, and security (eg making parts readonly) can be handled very easily in a Windows-friendly thing. Its also incredibly easy to install, your IT guys might be happy to slap it on.
My advice would be to get the IT guys on board, rather than try to bypass them. That's always the correct answer, even if its often not very easy to achieve.
nothing wrong with PHP, and if you have a small scale system, then there's little to no gain from rewriting it. However....
if you have a lot of systems then a rewrite in the most efficient system you can get will benefit you a lot. This is why Microsoft has said that 88% of their datacentre costs is in hardware and power, and is also the reason why they're migrating back to native C++ code! (yep, bye .NET, don't let the door hit your bloated ass on the way out).
I always said if you want programmer productivity then a script language, like PHP, is the way to go, but if you want performance you need to go a lot more C/C++. Java and C# are compromises that offer you neither enough performance or productivity.
So for you, if you're running multiple servers with your PHP code, then there could be a benefit for you to rewrite it in C/C++ as you'll be able to serve the same number of users using fewer servers. (worked for Facebook after all), but unless you're running 3+ servers, there's not going to be much point in it for you.
just FYI VMWare can share RAM with the VMs - its often used to provision more Windows systems than could otherwise exist on the underlying hardware, as a lot of RAM is used just to provide the same pages of static OS code - no need to have a copy for each instance if it never changes.
It's one big reason to use VMWare over HyperV, not that that stops anyone using MS stuff from using HyperV simple because it has that big M branding on it :(
absolutely, I'd agree - every so often you need a bit of a shake up to clear out the old, corrupt, and stagnant ways.
America... how is your debt tower coming along? I feel that will cause a similar problem to the world when it eventually falls over.
it did last quite a long time, but the black death was quite a catastrophic event - they reckon 50% of the European population copped it; or 25% of *world population*
I think the important part is this bit that explains it best:
When Congress rewrote the Patent Act in 1952, it adopted a compromise position: patentees could write their claim language in functional terms, but when they did so the patent would not cover the goal itself, but only the particular means of implementing that goal
so I can patent the concept of clicking once, but if someone else comes along and implements their own way of buying shit when someone clicks a button once, Amazon cannot own them - as Amazon's patent cannot cover the goal (of 1-click buying), nor cover all implementations. So they could still sue you if you stole their code and implemented it exactly as they did, but not if you did it a slightly different way - eg, if Amazon's done it in Python with blue "buy now" button, and you did it in PHP with a big red button... you'd be fine.
I think discussing this in terms of algorithms isn't too productive as they can't be patented anyway (as I understand it) but Apple's bounce-back could not be patented as Google could implement the same effect differently. Apple cannot hold a patent on the goal of indicating to a user the end of a list, just their way of implementing it - so I couldn't write the same thing in objective-C and steal the classes and/or code that makes this bounce happen. But Google can happily implement it using an entirely different set of software code.
Its like the old mousetrap thing - if mousetraps were software, someone would have patented " a means of catching mice using a device that traps mice" (on a smartphone :-) ) and that would be it for all would-be mousetrap inventors. But the patent office currently has a thousand mousetrap patents, each one achieving the same goal - of catching mice - but each one using a different means (ie software implementation).
The medieval world failed mainly because of the black death. So many peasants died that the lords, relatively safe in their relatively clean manors, had no-one to bring food and taxes to. As the peasantry migrated away from villages that had been decimated by plague, the entire feudal "I own your ass" system could no longer be enforced.
The ancient English system failed mainly because the Normans came in an kicked arse. And the Roman system failed when the barbarian hordes came and kicked arse (and, of course, succeeded because the Roman state became too soft and corrupt to defend itself). In every case, there will be enough people defending the status quo that changing the system becomes very difficult - not always the people benefiting from being in power either, plenty of 'peasants' fear and dislike change.
The interesting thing is that practically no-one has ever overthrown a bad system themselves, its always left to external factors to make the change - plague, power vacuum, or migrating hordes of invaders due to food supply problems.
The best you can hope for is to pop up, make enough of a fuss, and after the authorities have carted away your broken body, other people rise up in your name.
+1. TFA shows an image with power consumption moving from Mainframe through mobile to "ubiquitous" computing - ie they are just working on ever smaller, energy efficient chips that are underpowered.
It does not mean your mainframe will suddenly be able to run your .NET GUI applications over the cloud using the latest SOAP protocols without using energy, but instead tiny devices will be providing tiny bits of data with limited processing capabilities. In many respects, this is exactly what we need for a huge range of computing tasks. so my spectacles could have a tiny chip in them to give me notification popups on a HUD, but I'd probably need something bigger (eg my mobile) to actually read the mail, and something bigger still to view the attached powerpoint.
And it is significantly different compared to WP7 and it's mango update, the sdks were available well before those release dates.