hmm - well, seeing as the iCloud is still in beta and the service appears to only run iMessage on Azure, it could be that Apple is still deciding which host platform to run on - in which cash, if MS started shouting 'look Apple uses MS tech' then Apple could so easily shift everything to Amazon and make MS look really stupid.
IT's not really taught anymore, so you have to fins someone who wants to do it and train them. That means when a person with 20 years experience in applications and DB development shows up and want to learn embedded work, you not only need to train them, you have to pay what they are currently getting.
yup that's the thing - your company prefers to hire a youngster who has no practical clue about computers, or how they really work, and has to train him anyway. Sure, he's cheaper but 9/10 he's going to miss out on the wealth of 'un-taught' knowledge that is still present in the older guy.
You see this all the time - new guy shows up, knows nothing much, and writes code in whatever framework in flavour-du-jour, making a bit of a mess but getting it done quite quickly. Then the company makes him redundant and outsources it all to India where the coders are even cheaper. (or framework x stops being the latest coolest thing, and you have to re-train him again).
I think the issue is that usability studies focussed entirely on users who were new to computers, or new to the interface (obviously). They take automated test results of command usage and then utilise these results badly.
For example, they say that 'paste' is the #1 command, fair enough, I believe them. So then they say we must put a big 'paste' icon on the GUI so people can access it easier. the thing they forgot is that nearly everyone access the paste command via the keyboard. So they've just gone and restricted the UI with a huge icon that no-one ever uses.
This is where it all goes wrong, and then they compounded the problem by refusing to let the ribbon be customised, thus making the 'one size fit all' problem come true. Now explorer will have the ribbon.. and guess what, it won't be customisable again (I can't see the same kind of move icons around solution working for explorer as it has so few in the first place, its not like Word with its 10000 commands).
However, add-ins will not be able to plug into the ribbon UI. This was a difficult engineering choice for us and we expect that many of you will read this and suggest we add the capability--of course if we could get it right this time around we would have done that
so I think the Ribbon is a great thing - for new users who've never seen a computer before. For the rest of us, it's a bit of a retrograde step.
don't forget most of the ribbon commands are hidden behind little v symbols that pop up menus anyway, so it's no less efficient than the menus used to be.
The biggest argument against the ribbon: its fine for new users, power users want something faster to navigate (ie where the command aren't hidden under different tabs or in obscure places). They say its a great toolbar replacement, but a poor menu replacement. That sounds about right.
actually, I complain about the snap-to-border feature. If I want to see a lot of the app I'm working in, I maximise it. Simple. What the snap-to thing did for me was the half-maximise an app when I was moving it out of the way of something else.
I didn't see much need for it all in all, so I disabled it under the 'accessibility' options. (on W7, Ease of access centre, 'make the mouse easier to use', 'prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to edge of screen' checkbox).
I find the Ribbon to be a mixed bag. If I use an app that I hardly use, then it makes sense - big icons I can browse through to find what I'm looking for. For apps that i know how to use, then its a bit of a retrograde thing. I guess MS is all for the 'n00b' users nowadays - of at least that's probably who their HCI teams are looking at.
I don't know where you get that idea - it has hdmi for video output, and it has usb for everything else. My work Dell has usb for all inputs, so I can't see why you think its not a full-blown computer like all the big black boxes we use today.
It even has full software support as it runs Linux.
disagree - anything a decent engineer can come up with to solve a problem can be patentable as long as he shows a full working system (even if not installed or directly implemented yet), and describes what it does.
what should not be patentable is the vague idea of something that someone might implement later.
In other words, if you actually do things, they should be patentable. If you just dream about them, they should not.
considering the poor choice of a response, you should have checked your links. first one is "why quicksort sucks" that goes on to explain why a *modified* quicksort algorithm posted on wikipedia is not better than the original quicksort algorithm.
3rd link is "why java sucks", and down on the first page is "why.net sucks".
If you want to explain issues with an algorithm like that - say what it is, rather than posting a snide lmgtfy link that is wrong for the problem at hand.
So far it seems to me that the problem with quicksort is in the data provided to it, that in some cases can increase the complexity of the solution exponentially. But to say that means quiicksort sucks is like saying hammers suck because you might hit your thumb.
we could practice on it while its way out there. If we miss, we'd have many chances to try again.
But of course, we'll just ignore it due to budgetary concerns until its a real danger and then it'll be too late to do anything other than send Bruce Willis - and he'll be far too old by then!
this is the only part that starts to make sense (not Cameron necessarily), but think of the difference between Alien and Aliens, now imagine the difference between Blade Runner (set on dystopian Earth) and Blade Runners (set in Tannhauser gate with lots of warrior replicants as semi-heroes instead of being the bad guys).
I thought that was a staple scenario in its entirety. I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still (both of them) where the aliens come to say "yo, we've come to save the earth. From you losers".
One twist is where the aliens think they need to save the earth from us, but really we're the good guys in a galactic conspiracy (or bureaucracy), like David Brin's Uplift trilogy.
I can't answer directly about a PS3 (or xbox) as I use a Raidsonic icybox for that, but it all comes down to the video codec support on the playback device. Sure PS3MediaServer can transcode on the fly, but I never liked that too much.
You can get little boxes that sit under the TV and are networked to your PC over cabled ethernet for £20 and they work for practically all codecs (some.mkv contaners can have unusual contents). Buying a PS3 for this task is a lot of money in comparison. There's basically 2 chipsets used for these little devices, my Icybox uses the Realtek RTD1073 and it's given me no problems whatsoever. (the other is the Seasonic which I think has slightly less codec support)
As for the server software, check out tvmobili which is a lot slicker than PS3MediaServer, smaller, and has the ability to keep your PC awake while streaming. Cross platform too and lets you stream over the internet (eg to your phone while you're out, battery life and data transfer cap is on your own head:) )
some languages pretty much require an IDE, think writing a WPF application in C# without Visual Studio. In fact, why not have a go just for fun - see if you *can* write a simple c#/WPF app in notepad.
and there's more to the simplified example of developers using inefficient frameworks to create apps quicker (though the cost/performance tradeoff isn't quite as clear cut as they'd have you think - 1 dev taking twice as long to create a great app is a minor cost compared to the thousands of users using a bad app, and uncounted cost of those users stopping using the app when one better comes along. The cost of dev is pretty small all things considered).
Today its not CPU or IO performance that matters so much, its battery life.
The corollary of this is that you *need* super hardware to run the latest applications because they are so inefficient.
Instead of dumbing-down programming (which is a false economy anyway as poor devs write poor apps regardless of the ease-of-use of their programming environment), we should be increasing the skills of the developers. That means stopping from making things so easy that my manager can do it, still making a hash of it, only now thinking that any outsourced cheap developer can do my job!
XAML in C++ is something they should have done from the start, but then they should have gotten a much better way to bind a variable to an element - how many lines of code did MFC need to do this? 2, and that included the line for the variable definition. C# requires a whole object plus properties:)
The thing that struck me is that there isn't much different between XAML+c# and HTML+js. Both are xml-based declarative markups that you associate code with. The biggest difference is that you associate code in script form with HTML so you don't need to go compiling anything. This probably makes it a better choice and ultimately means that GUI development will be better then the old XAML assemblies we've had to work with before. I imagine MS will add some custom extensions to HTML before long, as is their way.
Anyway, doesn't matter what we think, what works for the WinPhone is what we'll be getting whether we like it or not:(
you'll find that critical finalisation is incredibly hard to get right. this is why Microsoft added smart pointers (safehandle) to.NET, they couldn't get it to work properly any other way. Now when you're fixing GC with a smart pointer you have to question whether RAII would have been a better system all along.
Google for 'brumme safehandle' for his long blog post detailing exactly why it was added and what it does.
Slashdot Mirror
hmm - well, seeing as the iCloud is still in beta and the service appears to only run iMessage on Azure, it could be that Apple is still deciding which host platform to run on - in which cash, if MS started shouting 'look Apple uses MS tech' then Apple could so easily shift everything to Amazon and make MS look really stupid.
IT's not really taught anymore, so you have to fins someone who wants to do it and train them. That means when a person with 20 years experience in applications and DB development shows up and want to learn embedded work, you not only need to train them, you have to pay what they are currently getting.
yup that's the thing - your company prefers to hire a youngster who has no practical clue about computers, or how they really work, and has to train him anyway. Sure, he's cheaper but 9/10 he's going to miss out on the wealth of 'un-taught' knowledge that is still present in the older guy.
You see this all the time - new guy shows up, knows nothing much, and writes code in whatever framework in flavour-du-jour, making a bit of a mess but getting it done quite quickly. Then the company makes him redundant and outsources it all to India where the coders are even cheaper. (or framework x stops being the latest coolest thing, and you have to re-train him again).
its true - now if only the DoJ had broken MS up way back, we'd have Visual Studio for Linux by now.
I think the issue is that usability studies focussed entirely on users who were new to computers, or new to the interface (obviously). They take automated test results of command usage and then utilise these results badly.
For example, they say that 'paste' is the #1 command, fair enough, I believe them. So then they say we must put a big 'paste' icon on the GUI so people can access it easier. the thing they forgot is that nearly everyone access the paste command via the keyboard. So they've just gone and restricted the UI with a huge icon that no-one ever uses.
This is where it all goes wrong, and then they compounded the problem by refusing to let the ribbon be customised, thus making the 'one size fit all' problem come true. Now explorer will have the ribbon.. and guess what, it won't be customisable again (I can't see the same kind of move icons around solution working for explorer as it has so few in the first place, its not like Word with its 10000 commands).
However, add-ins will not be able to plug into the ribbon UI. This was a difficult engineering choice for us and we expect that many of you will read this and suggest we add the capability--of course if we could get it right this time around we would have done that
so I think the Ribbon is a great thing - for new users who've never seen a computer before. For the rest of us, it's a bit of a retrograde step.
don't forget most of the ribbon commands are hidden behind little v symbols that pop up menus anyway, so it's no less efficient than the menus used to be.
The biggest argument against the ribbon: its fine for new users, power users want something faster to navigate (ie where the command aren't hidden under different tabs or in obscure places). They say its a great toolbar replacement, but a poor menu replacement. That sounds about right.
actually, I complain about the snap-to-border feature. If I want to see a lot of the app I'm working in, I maximise it. Simple. What the snap-to thing did for me was the half-maximise an app when I was moving it out of the way of something else.
I didn't see much need for it all in all, so I disabled it under the 'accessibility' options. (on W7, Ease of access centre, 'make the mouse easier to use', 'prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to edge of screen' checkbox).
I find the Ribbon to be a mixed bag. If I use an app that I hardly use, then it makes sense - big icons I can browse through to find what I'm looking for. For apps that i know how to use, then its a bit of a retrograde thing. I guess MS is all for the 'n00b' users nowadays - of at least that's probably who their HCI teams are looking at.
I don't know where you get that idea - it has hdmi for video output, and it has usb for everything else. My work Dell has usb for all inputs, so I can't see why you think its not a full-blown computer like all the big black boxes we use today.
It even has full software support as it runs Linux.
...does it run Elite?
Well, I'd hope some charitable foundation dedicated to education would buy a few million and give them away to high schools.
Eric Schmidt recently (rightly IMHO) criticised the UK education system for its lack of computer science - here's an answer for him.
disagree - anything a decent engineer can come up with to solve a problem can be patentable as long as he shows a full working system (even if not installed or directly implemented yet), and describes what it does.
what should not be patentable is the vague idea of something that someone might implement later.
In other words, if you actually do things, they should be patentable. If you just dream about them, they should not.
considering the poor choice of a response, you should have checked your links. first one is "why quicksort sucks" that goes on to explain why a *modified* quicksort algorithm posted on wikipedia is not better than the original quicksort algorithm.
3rd link is "why java sucks", and down on the first page is "why .net sucks".
If you want to explain issues with an algorithm like that - say what it is, rather than posting a snide lmgtfy link that is wrong for the problem at hand.
So far it seems to me that the problem with quicksort is in the data provided to it, that in some cases can increase the complexity of the solution exponentially. But to say that means quiicksort sucks is like saying hammers suck because you might hit your thumb.
come to think of it - 250,000 webOS tablets sold means it has a larger market share than Windows Phone 7!
groan.
but of course, you're forgetting just how massive a hollywood actor's ego can be :)
we could practice on it while its way out there. If we miss, we'd have many chances to try again.
But of course, we'll just ignore it due to budgetary concerns until its a real danger and then it'll be too late to do anything other than send Bruce Willis - and he'll be far too old by then!
so call Init() inside your constructor :)
this is the only part that starts to make sense (not Cameron necessarily), but think of the difference between Alien and Aliens, now imagine the difference between Blade Runner (set on dystopian Earth) and Blade Runners (set in Tannhauser gate with lots of warrior replicants as semi-heroes instead of being the bad guys).
I thought that was a staple scenario in its entirety. I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still (both of them) where the aliens come to say "yo, we've come to save the earth. From you losers".
One twist is where the aliens think they need to save the earth from us, but really we're the good guys in a galactic conspiracy (or bureaucracy), like David Brin's Uplift trilogy.
I can't answer directly about a PS3 (or xbox) as I use a Raidsonic icybox for that, but it all comes down to the video codec support on the playback device. Sure PS3MediaServer can transcode on the fly, but I never liked that too much.
You can get little boxes that sit under the TV and are networked to your PC over cabled ethernet for £20 and they work for practically all codecs (some .mkv contaners can have unusual contents). Buying a PS3 for this task is a lot of money in comparison. There's basically 2 chipsets used for these little devices, my Icybox uses the Realtek RTD1073 and it's given me no problems whatsoever. (the other is the Seasonic which I think has slightly less codec support)
As for the server software, check out tvmobili which is a lot slicker than PS3MediaServer, smaller, and has the ability to keep your PC awake while streaming. Cross platform too and lets you stream over the internet (eg to your phone while you're out, battery life and data transfer cap is on your own head :) )
some languages pretty much require an IDE, think writing a WPF application in C# without Visual Studio. In fact, why not have a go just for fun - see if you *can* write a simple c#/WPF app in notepad.
and there's more to the simplified example of developers using inefficient frameworks to create apps quicker (though the cost/performance tradeoff isn't quite as clear cut as they'd have you think - 1 dev taking twice as long to create a great app is a minor cost compared to the thousands of users using a bad app, and uncounted cost of those users stopping using the app when one better comes along. The cost of dev is pretty small all things considered).
Today its not CPU or IO performance that matters so much, its battery life.
their guidelines specifically disallow the use of RAII
they do what? no really, what? what?!
seriously?
do you have a link, I can't even imagine such a nonsense being used by my company, let alone a supposedly technically excellent one like Google.
or reference counted smart pointers
The corollary of this is that you *need* super hardware to run the latest applications because they are so inefficient.
Instead of dumbing-down programming (which is a false economy anyway as poor devs write poor apps regardless of the ease-of-use of their programming environment), we should be increasing the skills of the developers. That means stopping from making things so easy that my manager can do it, still making a hash of it, only now thinking that any outsourced cheap developer can do my job!
XAML in C++ is something they should have done from the start, but then they should have gotten a much better way to bind a variable to an element - how many lines of code did MFC need to do this? 2, and that included the line for the variable definition. C# requires a whole object plus properties :)
The thing that struck me is that there isn't much different between XAML+c# and HTML+js. Both are xml-based declarative markups that you associate code with. The biggest difference is that you associate code in script form with HTML so you don't need to go compiling anything. This probably makes it a better choice and ultimately means that GUI development will be better then the old XAML assemblies we've had to work with before. I imagine MS will add some custom extensions to HTML before long, as is their way.
Anyway, doesn't matter what we think, what works for the WinPhone is what we'll be getting whether we like it or not :(
you'll find that critical finalisation is incredibly hard to get right. this is why Microsoft added smart pointers (safehandle) to .NET, they couldn't get it to work properly any other way. Now when you're fixing GC with a smart pointer you have to question whether RAII would have been a better system all along.
Google for 'brumme safehandle' for his long blog post detailing exactly why it was added and what it does.