I think you are living on another planet. Some corrections:
They don't provider any infrastructure. Neither does UNIX/Linux. Most of the infrastructure is dedicated hardware still. People like F5, Juniper, Cisco, Alcatel, Lucent etc. Most of this stuff runs on custom platforms and kernels and occasionally something esoteric like Erlang. Hardly any of it sits on *NIX platforms, bar mail relays.
As for servers running UNIX/Linux - yes there are lots. I mean look at Google, Facebook and most of the hosting companies out there. However you miss one important point: none of these are supporting critical business functions. Even if you look a the mainframe and big iron side of things (ex Sun/Unisys territory), it's all moving to Windows as the value proposition is better. The only thing that remains is mass market web hosting, cloud providers and the odd obscure installation of specialist systems (supercomputers, trading platforms, big finance, people stuck with Oracle).
As for the comment about most offices using a browser to access a centralised application: that is utter crap. Most people are still using Office and mailing documents to each other cluelessly - and that's not a problem because it works for them. The next upscaling option for them is to use a Windows fileserver. The option after that is Sharepoint. As for dedicated applications, it's all desktop still. The uptake of "HTML5 wah wah" is purely a consumer market and very small business thing. From medium to large enterprises and a lot of industry sectors, it's actually pretty much illegal to throw your stuff in the cloud or push it out. Internal web applications (which I will say that I architect for a living) are literally at the cutting edge in business - there is virtually no market penetration and businesses still don't trust them.
Internet Explorer: it's a component. It's a flipping COM server that sits in MSHTML.dll. It's called code reuse. It's a good thing. It's like having a shared library on UNIX. As a counterpoint "Ubuntu default install ships with XPI.so - get the EU to ban it". It's also hardly embedded into the OS if you've ever looked. You can unregister it and remove IE completely and it functions fine still (bar some MMC plugins).
You don't have to buy Windows. We buy stuff without windows because we've got a volume license so it makes no sense. We get stuff without Windows from HP, Dell, DNUK. That is bollocks. Consumers don't care - they want something that they can turn on and get warez and pr0n on. It's only a minority that give a crap.
Now I'm a fan of UNIX based operating systems. I like the design of them, I have used them for 25 years, I have a Sun Ultra 30 sitting next to me with OpenBSD on it which does some of my specialist donkey work and runs crap I write 15-20 years ago so I don't have to port it, but the Lenovo T61 with Windows 7 that sits next to it does the stuff that pays the bills and talks to the things that other people talk to.
Getting shit done is orders of magnitude more important than politics and being the finest zealot.
It did show to the users - all our laptops popped up with it causing much confusion to our users. Our desktop machines, it didn't as we didn't apply the patch. So both the positive and negative cases are confirmed.
Linux doesn't have a chance. I've tried it on and off for desktop use since 1997 and TBH, it will never get there.
And there is no mass shift to Mac - it's stable at around 5-6% market share of browser users and I'm not sure that is correct as there are a shit load of Windows machines that aren't connected to the Internet. One of our clients has 40,000 workstations which are not connected to the Internet. Pretty much noone uses MacOS in the scale of things believe it or not.. The people who do are noisier than everyone else. That's all it is.
People really need to understand exactly how important Microsoft is to the world if you like that concept or not. They provide the computing infrastructure for all your utilities and all your jobs. Everything is machine driven these days and they are the first choice vendor because to be honest, their shit works, is cheap and there are plenty of skilled people out there.
If this was to happend, first the importers will fall, then the resellers, then the e-commerce outlets, then the businesses, then the consumers, then the food chain. I don't really want to be in that world.
I don't understand why they're doing this. There has been a browser choice screen shipped with it and via windows update for ages now. It stinks of profitteering on the part of the EU. You don't hear them suing the crap out of pharmaceutical companies for a monopoly either.
Literally all of the apps in the windows 8 store suck terribly. I've tried a good portion of them. I don't see how wooing 200k apps out of people who've never built something significant is going to change this fact. I think this is a way of desensitizing future developers with respect to a walled garden app store and closed platform with proprietary tools. nothing good can come of this. For ref i sit in front of visual studio for 5 hours a day at the moment so I'm not some crazy zealot. Crazy perhaps.
And by 2019, all the browsers on the market may actually support it consistently, just like they did with HTML2, HTML3, HTML4! (that was sarcastic for the sarcasm challenged).
Seriously, the world wide web and HTML itself are just a series of horrible bits of sticky tape which no longer stick to anything and string that is very frayed. It's like a train in India (most of the passengers on the outside). It only works by some remarkable coincidence of the same order of magnitude of how life managed to evolve on this planet. Every client interprets it differently. Every client displays it differently. Every server serves it differently. Security was an afterthought. HTML5 suddenly being ratified and published isn't going to make these problems go away.
For ref, this is not because I don't get it. I've been kicking out web applications on and off for 16 years. Even desktop development with Swing is beautiful compared to this crapfest.
Someone just needs to fix it (no XKCD 927 here please:).
What has happened is that there is a singularity on "good enough" PCs.
Most of the people I know have PCs that are 4-5 years old because they are absolutely fine with what they have and it still works. They rarely go out and buy new stuff. The same is true of the company I work for. We bought decent quality dev workstations 4 years ago and they are still spot on now. Same for standard desktops.
People aren't buying stuff as much because what they have works fine.
I live in an expensive bit of London, UK and you'd expect it to be Apple everything. It's not. It's 5 year old ThinkPads everywhere.
Windows 7, Windows 8 will run perfectly fine on a machine designed for Windows Vista.
They don't need their own computer yet. Probably at 12 years old, but no sooner. They need to learn the fundamentals of what they are doing before they abstract it away with a computer.
I myself was slapped in front of a computer at the age of 5. I'm now sitting here on a sunday night, posting on Slashdot rather than doing something useful. Do you want that to be your kids?
API docs and open standards are available for Microsoft stuff and they always have been. There have been 100% free dev tools since 2002. The C# compiler ships with the OS still (check inside c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v3.5\csc.exe )
No I'm 100% right. Apple developers pay for the privilege to develop on the platform, then get screwed, apps pulled etc. Apple has never been about developers. I dumped the platform in 2008 as it was a risky bet. Microsoft are copying this model.
I'm not talking about SDK distribution. The Windows Phone SDK is pay to deploy as well (even on your own device).
Microsoft learned this from Apple i.e by treating their developers like crap.
People are bailing out of Microsoft's development ecosystem quite rapidly at the moment. If you beat 'em with a stick like this, they ain't crawling back this time for the next VS release as they'll have Eclipse down and writing Android apps before you can burp the alphabet.
The problem is that they don't match reality in some cases (peripheral support mainly from experience) and most of the time you're having to develop kernel drivers for hardware which you can't emulate which means JTAG, reference manuals, red bull and much frustration.
The beebs were free to us (schools had to pay to take tech waste away) and we had 30 or 40ish. If we blew the VIA or PSU up, there was no point in repairing it. We gave the 6-7 that we blew up a dignified funeral: we took a couple out to the car park and I drove my Land Rover Defender over them until they were mush. The remainder went in various garages and probably on ebay later on (I got £175 for a Master Turbo in 2000 which was nice).
Regarding systems programming, a cheap ARM board that runs linux (nothing stupidly powerful) with JTAG and a host adapter to plug into your cheap X86 would probably do. I really wouldn't want students exposed to x86 architecture to be honest - it's a flipping mess.
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I think you are living on another planet. Some corrections:
They don't provider any infrastructure. Neither does UNIX/Linux. Most of the infrastructure is dedicated hardware still. People like F5, Juniper, Cisco, Alcatel, Lucent etc. Most of this stuff runs on custom platforms and kernels and occasionally something esoteric like Erlang. Hardly any of it sits on *NIX platforms, bar mail relays.
As for servers running UNIX/Linux - yes there are lots. I mean look at Google, Facebook and most of the hosting companies out there. However you miss one important point: none of these are supporting critical business functions. Even if you look a the mainframe and big iron side of things (ex Sun/Unisys territory), it's all moving to Windows as the value proposition is better. The only thing that remains is mass market web hosting, cloud providers and the odd obscure installation of specialist systems (supercomputers, trading platforms, big finance, people stuck with Oracle).
As for the comment about most offices using a browser to access a centralised application: that is utter crap. Most people are still using Office and mailing documents to each other cluelessly - and that's not a problem because it works for them. The next upscaling option for them is to use a Windows fileserver. The option after that is Sharepoint. As for dedicated applications, it's all desktop still. The uptake of "HTML5 wah wah" is purely a consumer market and very small business thing. From medium to large enterprises and a lot of industry sectors, it's actually pretty much illegal to throw your stuff in the cloud or push it out. Internal web applications (which I will say that I architect for a living) are literally at the cutting edge in business - there is virtually no market penetration and businesses still don't trust them.
Internet Explorer: it's a component. It's a flipping COM server that sits in MSHTML.dll. It's called code reuse. It's a good thing. It's like having a shared library on UNIX. As a counterpoint "Ubuntu default install ships with XPI .so - get the EU to ban it". It's also hardly embedded into the OS if you've ever looked. You can unregister it and remove IE completely and it functions fine still (bar some MMC plugins).
You don't have to buy Windows. We buy stuff without windows because we've got a volume license so it makes no sense. We get stuff without Windows from HP, Dell, DNUK. That is bollocks. Consumers don't care - they want something that they can turn on and get warez and pr0n on. It's only a minority that give a crap.
Now I'm a fan of UNIX based operating systems. I like the design of them, I have used them for 25 years, I have a Sun Ultra 30 sitting next to me with OpenBSD on it which does some of my specialist donkey work and runs crap I write 15-20 years ago so I don't have to port it, but the Lenovo T61 with Windows 7 that sits next to it does the stuff that pays the bills and talks to the things that other people talk to.
Getting shit done is orders of magnitude more important than politics and being the finest zealot.
It did show to the users - all our laptops popped up with it causing much confusion to our users. Our desktop machines, it didn't as we didn't apply the patch. So both the positive and negative cases are confirmed.
Linux doesn't have a chance. I've tried it on and off for desktop use since 1997 and TBH, it will never get there.
And there is no mass shift to Mac - it's stable at around 5-6% market share of browser users and I'm not sure that is correct as there are a shit load of Windows machines that aren't connected to the Internet. One of our clients has 40,000 workstations which are not connected to the Internet. Pretty much noone uses MacOS in the scale of things believe it or not.. The people who do are noisier than everyone else. That's all it is.
That's a bit naive.
People really need to understand exactly how important Microsoft is to the world if you like that concept or not. They provide the computing infrastructure for all your utilities and all your jobs. Everything is machine driven these days and they are the first choice vendor because to be honest, their shit works, is cheap and there are plenty of skilled people out there.
If this was to happend, first the importers will fall, then the resellers, then the e-commerce outlets, then the businesses, then the consumers, then the food chain. I don't really want to be in that world.
I don't understand why they're doing this. There has been a browser choice screen shipped with it and via windows update for ages now. It stinks of profitteering on the part of the EU. You don't hear them suing the crap out of pharmaceutical companies for a monopoly either.
They already have Ghengis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, Simon Cowell. He'll feel right at home.
I wonder if he'll be placed in a disabled parking spot [1]
[1] http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/misc/png/jobs-car.jpg
I tried the highest rated ones. You are an asshat.
Literally all of the apps in the windows 8 store suck terribly. I've tried a good portion of them. I don't see how wooing 200k apps out of people who've never built something significant is going to change this fact. I think this is a way of desensitizing future developers with respect to a walled garden app store and closed platform with proprietary tools. nothing good can come of this. For ref i sit in front of visual studio for 5 hours a day at the moment so I'm not some crazy zealot. Crazy perhaps.
No specific browser problems. They are all as shitty as each other.
And by 2019, all the browsers on the market may actually support it consistently, just like they did with HTML2, HTML3, HTML4! (that was sarcastic for the sarcasm challenged).
Seriously, the world wide web and HTML itself are just a series of horrible bits of sticky tape which no longer stick to anything and string that is very frayed. It's like a train in India (most of the passengers on the outside). It only works by some remarkable coincidence of the same order of magnitude of how life managed to evolve on this planet. Every client interprets it differently. Every client displays it differently. Every server serves it differently. Security was an afterthought. HTML5 suddenly being ratified and published isn't going to make these problems go away.
For ref, this is not because I don't get it. I've been kicking out web applications on and off for 16 years. Even desktop development with Swing is beautiful compared to this crapfest.
Someone just needs to fix it (no XKCD 927 here please :).
To be honest they have shipped more boxes than anyone in history.
WebKit has had its fair share of exploits over the years. I first worked with it when it was known as KHTML and have followed it over the years.
I work for a corporation that has source access for IE (MS shared source) and it's a remarkably well put together product which equals WebKit.
Spot on :)
I haven't had a Windows virus since I started using it 24 years ago and I've used IE all that time.
Then again, I don't go surfing pr0n, cracks, warez, torrents, rapidshare, mp3 sites etc.
Intimacy with the wrong people is only going to end in an STD regardless of which prophylactic device you or they wear.
It still can't be patched via WSUS though which means uncontrolled updates.
You speak with authority but do not understand the principles and abstractions.
It's called COM. Windows is based on COM. It allows components to be reused, which is good design and good practice.
This is the same concept as WebKit being a shared library on Linux and gnome help, gnome file manager and Epiphany importing it.
I they discovered a WebKit hole: waah waah whinge whinge there is a hole in Gnome Help - save us all from the 0-day
That complaining never happens but if Microsoft fall to the same thing, they get slated. Hardly fair is it?
Our CEO calles Linux "linex". Not bad for a technology company which has approximately 200 Linux servers...
What a load of rubbish.
What has happened is that there is a singularity on "good enough" PCs.
Most of the people I know have PCs that are 4-5 years old because they are absolutely fine with what they have and it still works. They rarely go out and buy new stuff. The same is true of the company I work for. We bought decent quality dev workstations 4 years ago and they are still spot on now. Same for standard desktops.
People aren't buying stuff as much because what they have works fine.
I live in an expensive bit of London, UK and you'd expect it to be Apple everything. It's not. It's 5 year old ThinkPads everywhere.
Windows 7, Windows 8 will run perfectly fine on a machine designed for Windows Vista.
They don't need their own computer yet. Probably at 12 years old, but no sooner. They need to learn the fundamentals of what they are doing before they abstract it away with a computer.
I myself was slapped in front of a computer at the age of 5. I'm now sitting here on a sunday night, posting on Slashdot rather than doing something useful. Do you want that to be your kids?
API docs and open standards are available for Microsoft stuff and they always have been. There have been 100% free dev tools since 2002. The C# compiler ships with the OS still (check inside c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v3.5\csc.exe )
MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms123401.aspx
Standards: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104(PROT.10).aspx
The problem is that they're closing the tooling and making it subscription based.
This is abusing the trust they have created.
No I'm 100% right. Apple developers pay for the privilege to develop on the platform, then get screwed, apps pulled etc. Apple has never been about developers. I dumped the platform in 2008 as it was a risky bet. Microsoft are copying this model.
I'm not talking about SDK distribution. The Windows Phone SDK is pay to deploy as well (even on your own device).
Yes. I own one and am currently working at a Microsoft consultancy and am MS cert, yet I doubt I'll poke it with a stick or buy another one.
Android next time...
Microsoft learned this from Apple i.e by treating their developers like crap.
People are bailing out of Microsoft's development ecosystem quite rapidly at the moment. If you beat 'em with a stick like this, they ain't crawling back this time for the next VS release as they'll have Eclipse down and writing Android apps before you can burp the alphabet.
But we can afford spirits down here so that doesn't count.
Yes there is: Eclipse CDT (for C/C++) and JDT for Java.
The problem is that they don't match reality in some cases (peripheral support mainly from experience) and most of the time you're having to develop kernel drivers for hardware which you can't emulate which means JTAG, reference manuals, red bull and much frustration.
The beebs were free to us (schools had to pay to take tech waste away) and we had 30 or 40ish. If we blew the VIA or PSU up, there was no point in repairing it. We gave the 6-7 that we blew up a dignified funeral: we took a couple out to the car park and I drove my Land Rover Defender over them until they were mush. The remainder went in various garages and probably on ebay later on (I got £175 for a Master Turbo in 2000 which was nice).
Regarding systems programming, a cheap ARM board that runs linux (nothing stupidly powerful) with JTAG and a host adapter to plug into your cheap X86 would probably do. I really wouldn't want students exposed to x86 architecture to be honest - it's a flipping mess.