what could go wrong? I mean, you can stand up at a press conference and say "mr president, you told the guard to kill civilian woman and children and say they were terrorists", and watch as you are never heard from again.
Or, in a more civilised democracy, say "mr president, you had the CIA install listening devices in the Democratic National Committee offices" and see how far that gets you.
Sometimes anonymity is a good thing. I know the argument that says "if you have nothing to hide", but its usually those in a position of power who have something to hide that you need to be anonymous from.
Ok, so I don't have any inside information about our political overlords, but I do want to keep some aspects of my private life secret from my boss or colleagues, which are none of their business, but wouldn't stop them from being critical. (and no, its not nice comments about Justin Bieber on his new video, but you can imagine what would happen at work if I did, and they found out!)
Linux always succeeded - only not anywhere you can see it.
Linux still runs 80%+ of the world's internet, Linux runs a vast majority of embedded devices. This is the reason Google got into it - it already was there when Google appeared and started to think "what web OS do we use for our HPC system" - it was pretty obvious to them to use the market leader in those arenas - Linux - and when they decided to go for an embedded phone device, they again chose the market leader in that area - Linux.
I suppose they could stick with stable HTML5 that W3C supports and properly defines (and clarifies, obviously, like its not clear enough as it stands) while WHATSIT (never heard of them TBH) starts work on HTML6 that remains bleeding edge/unstable until ratified by W3C.
I guess that's too simple for a standards committee though.
yes, but swipe to unlock is just 1 of several hundred thousand software patents. Can you build a cell phone without infringing a few of them? Do you even know what they are that you'll be infringing?
for example - did you know that showing larger letters on a keyboard is patented?
Elop: You know on an iPhone, you touch on the digital keyboard and you know how the letter pops up and shows up bigger so youâ(TM)re making sure youâ(TM)re touching the correct letter? Thatâ(TM)s Nokia innovation
also don't forget - you hear about tiny pcb linux boards all the time *now*.
Go back to before the RaspPi was announced and see how many stories about such things were coming out. RPF has done a lot just be existing, now I hope they'll come up with a C model with more processing power, but that's for another day.
true... swipe to unlock is nothing like, say, GSM radio communications.
that's why the GSM patent is licensed at 1p per device and swipe to unlock licensed at $1m (if not an entire country's worth of imports of that device).
The reason we have so many shite patents is because of the financial shakedown they attract. Making them 'de facto' and thus next-to-worthless would be a start in fixing the software patent problem.
no worries mate. You'd be surprised at how many companies have degree-only policies even for people who have 20 years in the industry, I know excellent programmers who have been turned down for a job only because they didn't get a degree. Its not so prevalent anymore, but still happens here and there!
I must have cut the coding rant down badly... I was saying that today's best practice will be tomorrow's poor (or obsolete) practice, obviously stuff I learned 20 years ago at university will be considered poor practice today, but because you consider degree education as worth something in itself, my poor practices must therefore be good things.
The point is that coding practices can be learned quite well from youtube or other online places, so there's no need to think a self-taught programmer is any less capable than someone taught formally. In fact, most programmers I know have taught themselves anyway during work or their personal time.
to be fair some places have been doing "online" trainign for a long time - the Open University in the UK has been around since the 60s, using late-night TV broadcast to deliver content (obviously this was the days before constant re-runs of crappy cop dramas)
If you want to know what it was like, check out this parody of it by the great Fry and Laurie, or this one that's a little more accurate.
Hey, so you'll be all for someone with a degree certificate like this one
And before you say "what a fake", I'd rather employ someone with that than a 3 year social media degree from some real universities!
Your comment about programming is totally wrong though, I learned C coding way back, so I guess that means all the modern 'best' practices I should now be using is obsolete and my coding habits are full of poor practices? I doubt it - and before you think my OO skills are fully updated, I'm just having to learn about javascript coding that requires more of a functional approach. But none of that's a problem, because I got a degree 20 years ago that taught me all about C coding best practices that I can apply to my OO or Functional code!
In short, a degree helps you to know that a graduate is able to be trained to a certain high standard (well, once was). It does not tell you anything about their skill levels.
I think it shows a real decline though - not for accounting purposes, but in terms of "future stuff".
MS makes money from 3 areas: Windows, Office and (since Bob Muglia worked some magic before Ballmer kicked him out for being too good) Server/Tools.
They have never made money from anything else, even though they try and try and try. Meanwhile Apple comes along and makes more then them on a new product, you've got to think that one day people will no longer want to buy the new Windows version, or they will be happy with Google Docs or they'll use OSS tools. That day is when 'unsinkable' MS hits the iceberg they're currently sailing towards. It'll take a long while for anyone to really notice, but I think it's already taking place. Windows 8 is not getting a good reception, if it wasn't for software assurance licencing terms, no-one would bother upgrading to the latest Office. One day Apple will release "iOffice" and it'll be very powerful, yet very easy to use, and allow content creation on an iPad... you can imagine what happens next.
Strangely I was reading this yesterday that has the same sentiment. When even business people are shunning Microsoft and not just the techies, you know they're turning that corner.
kinda makes sense really - Microsoft's latest GUI system uses XML formatted markup with some source "code behind" the controls to provide interaction. Sounds a lot like HTML markup with javascript behind to provide interaction.
At least with HTML+JS you can take the majority of your code and run it on a website. Now if only it could all be compiled down to native code, we'd have a great system for programmer productivity (as we wouldn't have to code everything twice - once for the web side of things, once for the desktop). Of course, we could use a different GUI mechanism, but we're stuck with HTML for the web.
What is client side ASPX? How could it be anything but html, css and javascript?
well, it could be html, that renders correctly on IE, with css and javascript that contain only 1 or 2 additional features that MS deemed essential enough to put into their browser, plus a heap of microsoft-only javascript modules that, for efficiency reasons, are binary encoded into the IE js engine. And a C# based scripting engine as well, just for that 'developer friendly' productivity boost, if you want to use it, completely optionally.
hmm, so if their key get compromised, you have to boot into your OS to download the latest Windows update before it'll let you boot your OS to... oh, wait a minute.
is that the case though? As CPUs get faster, they require tricks such as cache throughput to keep them running at top speed. Putting code that stops that (eg security code) in there will kill performance.
Also, more security code has a tendency to grow rather large with various side-effects on perf (eg reading from file all the time if you're virus checking everything, so its no longer a write to disk, its a write + read).
This is one of the reasons modern OSs with their super-computer CPUs perform about as fast as the old computers we used to use. Too many layers of stuff. Now sure, we get more features out of it, so its understandable what we've traded off, but don't assume that faster system lets you get away with adding more code, even security code, for free.
absolutely, a dumbphone needs to text at most (lots of african farmers, for example, use texts to fulfil their admittedly limited data needs). But a phone like the old Nokias that would last for a week - with use - is more important.
Mind you, I think Nokia *had* the experience and dev staff. most of the good ones will have quit.
I agree with increasing dev productivity with the mapping of the recordsets to language in a more natural way, but I disagree with the whole concept of trying to replace the entire query system with language constructs too. That said, I dislike the whole mapping of data that's already described in the DB to classes in your application - it too feels like you're trying to force the systems to work for you, rather than working with them (but I know, you'd have to do that mapping somewhere. Maybe I just don't like big layers added to systems)(mind you Ruby seems to get this right).
You and I may have come to ORMS from SQL, but I read a lot on various blogs/qa sites/etc where people are not getting that benefit. Give it a few years (if ORMs become too popular) and you'll have a bunch of coders who don't know what happens under the 'magic' of the ORM. We are already at this stage with a lot of code - they point, they click, it works... until it doesn't, or performs dreadfully, or is impossible to maintain. The DailyWTF is full of such things. I just want the ORM layers we're adding to be more transparent to what happens underneath rather than a black box.
Unfortunately, we are a Microsoft shop, so NHibernate is not a 'preferred solution'. This is also part of the problem:)
ok, but you still have days where a word processor is for editing formatted text, a spreadsheet for mathematical calculations, even if your mail client is a "groupware application"
Outlook was always a bit shit at HTML messages though, especially when replying without that stupid blue indent bar on the left, and failed at formatting mails with internet-standard > markers. Pity that. And how bullet formatting can be a bit wonky at times with almost impossible ways to fix them without deleting and starting again, not to mention the odd table formatting craziness that can quickly spiral out of control.
Mind you, I'm with you on all that 1-click ease-of-use. I use Google Docs too, it's great:)
oh you have not seen what Entity Framework generates when pointed at Oracle DBs.
If I told you I've seen 10 page (of printed, A4 sheets) solid with generated sql from EF, you probably wouldn't believe me. I was stunned at how bad it was.
Still, my point is that an ORM tries hard to abstract the developer from SQL in favour of keeping things the same in the language, so the developer can play with the data as if its a simple collection. Even if that abstraction was 100% perfect (its not, there's loads of things that can go wrong, and that you need to know) it's still trying hard to tell developers not to worry their pretty little heads with that complicated and nasty SQL thing. If a dev cannot figure out some SQL (especially the simple queries most ORMs are used for) then they really shouldn't be let lose by themselves.
There's nothing really hard about SQL, so why not use it. Remember, right tool for the job, and SQL is the right tool for DB querying. I don't think we want a generation of developers to come into the industry thinking that the big DB is just an array of objects.
unfortunately, there's a lot of people who seem to want to say "use the best tool" and then try to make everything work in a single language (most commonly Java and.NET programmers).
I see this with the introduction of ORMs - its like programmers don;t want to learn SQL (the tool of choice when using databases) and instead want to make the DB look like a collection of objects. The NoSQL proponents seems also to make the same mistake - that NoSQL is somehow better because you access the data using an API that is native to your language.
Its a sad indictment of the modern programming community (well, those lesser programmers at least), but I think this is the main driving force behind it all. Blame the holy wars for all this, otherwise we'd be (correctly) talking about NoSQL as just another data storage technology along with relational databases and flat files that has specific use cases.
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what could go wrong? I mean, you can stand up at a press conference and say "mr president, you told the guard to kill civilian woman and children and say they were terrorists", and watch as you are never heard from again.
Or, in a more civilised democracy, say "mr president, you had the CIA install listening devices in the Democratic National Committee offices" and see how far that gets you.
Sometimes anonymity is a good thing. I know the argument that says "if you have nothing to hide", but its usually those in a position of power who have something to hide that you need to be anonymous from.
Ok, so I don't have any inside information about our political overlords, but I do want to keep some aspects of my private life secret from my boss or colleagues, which are none of their business, but wouldn't stop them from being critical. (and no, its not nice comments about Justin Bieber on his new video, but you can imagine what would happen at work if I did, and they found out!)
Linux always succeeded - only not anywhere you can see it.
Linux still runs 80%+ of the world's internet, Linux runs a vast majority of embedded devices. This is the reason Google got into it - it already was there when Google appeared and started to think "what web OS do we use for our HPC system" - it was pretty obvious to them to use the market leader in those arenas - Linux - and when they decided to go for an embedded phone device, they again chose the market leader in that area - Linux.
Linux made Google big, not the other way round.
I remember Microsoft tablets, there's no doubt they were first - and unusable. It was just like a PC
and now, with Windows 8, we have tablets that are just like the PC... only now its the PC that's unusable :)
I suppose they could stick with stable HTML5 that W3C supports and properly defines (and clarifies, obviously, like its not clear enough as it stands) while WHATSIT (never heard of them TBH) starts work on HTML6 that remains bleeding edge/unstable until ratified by W3C.
I guess that's too simple for a standards committee though.
yes, but swipe to unlock is just 1 of several hundred thousand software patents. Can you build a cell phone without infringing a few of them? Do you even know what they are that you'll be infringing?
for example - did you know that showing larger letters on a keyboard is patented?
Elop: You know on an iPhone, you touch on the digital keyboard and you know how the letter pops up and shows up bigger so youâ(TM)re making sure youâ(TM)re touching the correct letter? Thatâ(TM)s Nokia innovation
also don't forget - you hear about tiny pcb linux boards all the time *now*.
Go back to before the RaspPi was announced and see how many stories about such things were coming out. RPF has done a lot just be existing, now I hope they'll come up with a C model with more processing power, but that's for another day.
true... swipe to unlock is nothing like, say, GSM radio communications.
that's why the GSM patent is licensed at 1p per device and swipe to unlock licensed at $1m (if not an entire country's worth of imports of that device).
The reason we have so many shite patents is because of the financial shakedown they attract. Making them 'de facto' and thus next-to-worthless would be a start in fixing the software patent problem.
no worries mate. You'd be surprised at how many companies have degree-only policies even for people who have 20 years in the industry, I know excellent programmers who have been turned down for a job only because they didn't get a degree. Its not so prevalent anymore, but still happens here and there!
I must have cut the coding rant down badly... I was saying that today's best practice will be tomorrow's poor (or obsolete) practice, obviously stuff I learned 20 years ago at university will be considered poor practice today, but because you consider degree education as worth something in itself, my poor practices must therefore be good things.
The point is that coding practices can be learned quite well from youtube or other online places, so there's no need to think a self-taught programmer is any less capable than someone taught formally. In fact, most programmers I know have taught themselves anyway during work or their personal time.
to be fair some places have been doing "online" trainign for a long time - the Open University in the UK has been around since the 60s, using late-night TV broadcast to deliver content (obviously this was the days before constant re-runs of crappy cop dramas)
If you want to know what it was like, check out this parody of it by the great Fry and Laurie, or this one that's a little more accurate.
Hey, so you'll be all for someone with a degree certificate like this one
And before you say "what a fake", I'd rather employ someone with that than a 3 year social media degree from some real universities!
Your comment about programming is totally wrong though, I learned C coding way back, so I guess that means all the modern 'best' practices I should now be using is obsolete and my coding habits are full of poor practices? I doubt it - and before you think my OO skills are fully updated, I'm just having to learn about javascript coding that requires more of a functional approach. But none of that's a problem, because I got a degree 20 years ago that taught me all about C coding best practices that I can apply to my OO or Functional code!
In short, a degree helps you to know that a graduate is able to be trained to a certain high standard (well, once was). It does not tell you anything about their skill levels.
I think it shows a real decline though - not for accounting purposes, but in terms of "future stuff".
MS makes money from 3 areas: Windows, Office and (since Bob Muglia worked some magic before Ballmer kicked him out for being too good) Server/Tools.
They have never made money from anything else, even though they try and try and try. Meanwhile Apple comes along and makes more then them on a new product, you've got to think that one day people will no longer want to buy the new Windows version, or they will be happy with Google Docs or they'll use OSS tools. That day is when 'unsinkable' MS hits the iceberg they're currently sailing towards. It'll take a long while for anyone to really notice, but I think it's already taking place. Windows 8 is not getting a good reception, if it wasn't for software assurance licencing terms, no-one would bother upgrading to the latest Office. One day Apple will release "iOffice" and it'll be very powerful, yet very easy to use, and allow content creation on an iPad... you can imagine what happens next.
Strangely I was reading this yesterday that has the same sentiment. When even business people are shunning Microsoft and not just the techies, you know they're turning that corner.
kinda makes sense really - Microsoft's latest GUI system uses XML formatted markup with some source "code behind" the controls to provide interaction. Sounds a lot like HTML markup with javascript behind to provide interaction.
At least with HTML+JS you can take the majority of your code and run it on a website. Now if only it could all be compiled down to native code, we'd have a great system for programmer productivity (as we wouldn't have to code everything twice - once for the web side of things, once for the desktop). Of course, we could use a different GUI mechanism, but we're stuck with HTML for the web.
What is client side ASPX? How could it be anything but html, css and javascript?
well, it could be html, that renders correctly on IE, with css and javascript that contain only 1 or 2 additional features that MS deemed essential enough to put into their browser, plus a heap of microsoft-only javascript modules that, for efficiency reasons, are binary encoded into the IE js engine. And a C# based scripting engine as well, just for that 'developer friendly' productivity boost, if you want to use it, completely optionally.
All completely standards "based" of course.
so with a 1ms response time, it'll only take 584,942 years to scan the pathetically small /64 my ISP has given me. Go for it hackers.
Interesting ... I wonder if you'll still be able to install Windows in Parallels or Boot Camp.
hmm, so if their key get compromised, you have to boot into your OS to download the latest Windows update before it'll let you boot your OS to... oh, wait a minute.
nobody but Microsoft is going to have Microsoft's private signing key
not at first, at least.
is that the case though? As CPUs get faster, they require tricks such as cache throughput to keep them running at top speed. Putting code that stops that (eg security code) in there will kill performance.
Also, more security code has a tendency to grow rather large with various side-effects on perf (eg reading from file all the time if you're virus checking everything, so its no longer a write to disk, its a write + read).
This is one of the reasons modern OSs with their super-computer CPUs perform about as fast as the old computers we used to use. Too many layers of stuff. Now sure, we get more features out of it, so its understandable what we've traded off, but don't assume that faster system lets you get away with adding more code, even security code, for free.
absolutely, a dumbphone needs to text at most (lots of african farmers, for example, use texts to fulfil their admittedly limited data needs). But a phone like the old Nokias that would last for a week - with use - is more important.
Mind you, I think Nokia *had* the experience and dev staff. most of the good ones will have quit.
I agree with increasing dev productivity with the mapping of the recordsets to language in a more natural way, but I disagree with the whole concept of trying to replace the entire query system with language constructs too. That said, I dislike the whole mapping of data that's already described in the DB to classes in your application - it too feels like you're trying to force the systems to work for you, rather than working with them (but I know, you'd have to do that mapping somewhere. Maybe I just don't like big layers added to systems)(mind you Ruby seems to get this right).
You and I may have come to ORMS from SQL, but I read a lot on various blogs/qa sites/etc where people are not getting that benefit. Give it a few years (if ORMs become too popular) and you'll have a bunch of coders who don't know what happens under the 'magic' of the ORM. We are already at this stage with a lot of code - they point, they click, it works... until it doesn't, or performs dreadfully, or is impossible to maintain. The DailyWTF is full of such things. I just want the ORM layers we're adding to be more transparent to what happens underneath rather than a black box.
Unfortunately, we are a Microsoft shop, so NHibernate is not a 'preferred solution'. This is also part of the problem :)
ok, but you still have days where a word processor is for editing formatted text, a spreadsheet for mathematical calculations, even if your mail client is a "groupware application"
Outlook was always a bit shit at HTML messages though, especially when replying without that stupid blue indent bar on the left, and failed at formatting mails with internet-standard > markers. Pity that. And how bullet formatting can be a bit wonky at times with almost impossible ways to fix them without deleting and starting again, not to mention the odd table formatting craziness that can quickly spiral out of control.
Mind you, I'm with you on all that 1-click ease-of-use. I use Google Docs too, it's great :)
oh you have not seen what Entity Framework generates when pointed at Oracle DBs.
If I told you I've seen 10 page (of printed, A4 sheets) solid with generated sql from EF, you probably wouldn't believe me. I was stunned at how bad it was.
Still, my point is that an ORM tries hard to abstract the developer from SQL in favour of keeping things the same in the language, so the developer can play with the data as if its a simple collection. Even if that abstraction was 100% perfect (its not, there's loads of things that can go wrong, and that you need to know) it's still trying hard to tell developers not to worry their pretty little heads with that complicated and nasty SQL thing. If a dev cannot figure out some SQL (especially the simple queries most ORMs are used for) then they really shouldn't be let lose by themselves.
There's nothing really hard about SQL, so why not use it. Remember, right tool for the job, and SQL is the right tool for DB querying. I don't think we want a generation of developers to come into the industry thinking that the big DB is just an array of objects.
unfortunately, there's a lot of people who seem to want to say "use the best tool" and then try to make everything work in a single language (most commonly Java and .NET programmers).
I see this with the introduction of ORMs - its like programmers don;t want to learn SQL (the tool of choice when using databases) and instead want to make the DB look like a collection of objects. The NoSQL proponents seems also to make the same mistake - that NoSQL is somehow better because you access the data using an API that is native to your language.
Its a sad indictment of the modern programming community (well, those lesser programmers at least), but I think this is the main driving force behind it all. Blame the holy wars for all this, otherwise we'd be (correctly) talking about NoSQL as just another data storage technology along with relational databases and flat files that has specific use cases.