That just hasn't been my experience at all. For trivial stuff, maybe it only takes twice as long, but there is no comparison between custom user controls on the desktop and custom user controls on the web. Dealing with stuff like recreating your controls on each postback, getting naming right so that the controls correctly get their postback information, worrying about authentication, etc. All the stateless protocol nonsense takes forver.
Atempting to make it stateful through AJAX might work were it not for the J part. Javascript that your users can read and modify themselves. This is worse than the appelet model where at least you were sending Java bytecode. If it didn't work with Java why sould it work now?
Even the database stuff is an order of magnitude more difficult to implement on the web than on the desktop. Sure you *can* make a screen that allows you to edit orders (or whatever) add stuff, pop up calendars, automatically restrict drop down lists to appropriate responses (say lists of provinces), or whatever, but with AJAX it takes your programmers ten times as long to do as it does in Java or VB or C# or whatever. So you can use a web app, but at ten times the cost. Deployment certainly is a factor, but if you work in the.NET world, you have xcopy deployment so long as you don't mess with the GAC.
Better AJAX tools will help this, but still, the web is an unbelievable PITA to program. It is hard to imagine the vast universe of cheesy VB apps out there going to AJAX just because you might someday be able to be the first major company to jump away from the windows monopoly and thereby cut your software choices by 90%.
But isn't dedication different from being a great programmer? Hiring rock stars and making them do the 80% of programming that doesn't call for rock stars usually results in sloppy code written by people who can't be bothered to get excited by it. I'd rather have the the slightly underqualified but highly motivated do it. The difference is the level of dedication to the non rockstar stuff.
Indeed. What I find frustrating about todays world is that employees(especially technology employees) want to have their cake and eat it also. They want a to be able to take better offers when economic situations change but they also want lifetime employment. They want you to pay them when they are learning to do their jobs, then once they are good at it, they want to jump to a competitor. Don't leave, just stay working to compensate for your low productivity before.
Absolutely, you can fire up telnet and examine the badly designed stream of text that is causing the trouble in the first place and devise appropriate hacks to get it to parse.
It is the classic good enough today vs. great next week. Their market niche is good enough today and they know that. I wouldn't use it to run hospital heart monitors, but it is fine to run the hospital finance guy's pc.
Mabye, just maybe, the don't recognize OSS as a viable business alternative becuase it isn't a viable business alternative.
OSS makes a lot of sense if you are a company selling consulting services. They want you to spend your money on consultants, not software. Ideally, there wouldn't be any software. You would just hire these guys to write custom software for you at enormous cost. Like hiring stonemasons to carve your house out of local limestone.
But for everyone who won't buy that expertise, there is a lot to be said for something that you buy or license that just works out of the box. Fire the stone masons and buy bricks instead. The brick factory churns these things out by the millions, so they are cheap. (Of course the analogy doesn't fit exactly because the second copy of a software program costs close to nothing.)
For a publisher, one can spend a bunch of dough bulding the software, then press a hundred million copies and divide those costs among all the boxes. So you and I can plunk down $179 and get something like five million lines of code representing some insane number of man hours. This is a pretty compelling business model.
None of this says that a all of MS's software fulfils all the promises it makes, but then again, has anyone seen a consultant meet all his promises?
I would question the wisdom of trusting IBM, ORACLE, and Sun, over MSFT. While by no means infallible, those graphs tend to favor MSFT over the others.
Of course IBM wants OSS, they sell the consulting services. Of course Oracle wants OSS (except postgres), becuase what you don't spend on a UNIX license you can spend on an Oracle license. Sun likes OSS because...well they *are* the platform company that championed a platform agnostic programming language. I wouldn't put much stock in their advice.
" war of occupation as many Iraqis are right now,"
Give me a break. The country has had a democratic election in the face of unbelievable terror carried out by people who regard the rightful winners of those elections as nothing more than heretics. The elections were boycotted by 20% of the population because they knew that their candidates would lose and lose badly.
If say, German Americans boycotted the 2006 congressional elections becuase "their" candidates stood to lose and started blowing up restaurants in Mexican neighborhoods no liberal would leap to their defence. What is different here?
To call the jihadis anything but terrorists is to deny their frequently stated agenda to prevent democracy in Iraq at all costs, ideally causing a destructive civil war in the process.
These people aren't the French resistance. Their goal is to undermine democracy, equality before the law, and impose, at best a form of religious fascism under an unelected Amir such as the illiterate(?) thug Mulla Umar. These people really think that an Amirate is the only acceptable form of governance.
It is amazing to see people who regard with horror an alliance between evangelical christianity and state power cheer on people who's stated agenda is a military theocracy.
Well it strikes me that the motivation is different: killing lots of folks vs. scaring lots of folks by showing that you could have killed them if you wanted to. The latter is an attempt to recklessly threaten to kill rather than killing.
Most of the time, the warnings did mean that few people were hurt. If I had to be targeted by a terrorist group, I'd pick the IRA over al-Qa'ida, although I wouldn't invite either to dinner.
Except it was carried out by a transnational, non governmental group fighting without a fixed chain of command or in uniform, the standard for being a legitimate combatant under the Geneva Conventions.
These guys are more like pirates than legitmate combatants.
Not that it mattered to those blown up, but wasn't the warning botched at Omagh and moved people actually towards the target?
If I was rating shades of badness, not warning people is worse than warning them or warning them incompetently.
Re:this is just a patch to a kludge
on
Cubicle Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Trouble is, Joel's company 1) was well past larval stage, thanks to free digs in a relative's townhouse for years earlier and 2) his landlord was insanely cooperative.
Mine was kind enough not to laugh at me when I asked for a buildout, but wasn't going to help me on this. So offices are out, prfab translucent partitions run about $150 per linear foot. Solid cube walls are about a quarter that.
So we are balancing visual separation vs natural light, soundproofing vs. natural light, collaborative workspace vs. privacy for "flow state" time.
Re:this is just a patch to a kludge
on
Cubicle Privacy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
and what landlords want are LARGE OPEN ROOMS with NO BUILDOUT expenses at all.
So, any suggestions on how to reconcile the two? I'm opening an office in a couple of weeks and could use all the advice I can get. It is a big box with nice windows, but that's it.
The best we can do on our startup budget is partitions and white noise. I'd like better, but one buildout quote I got was twice our annual rent. For the first year, that just isn't an option.
The U of C uses 6 digit student ids for routine stuff. No doubt SSNs are somewhere, but the UCID number seems to be the most commonly used id, so it isn't a case of the Univeristy using SSNs willy nilly.
But who cares if someone steals your SSN? Your library card # is what really matters to U of C students. I don't think they can survive long without access to the Reg.
The GIMP has an interface that is equivalent or better than closed source alternatives.
Evidently, you have not actually used the closed source alternatives and compared them. GIMP is nice, but it is nowhere near as easy to use as Adobe's stuff. Maybe 80% of the quality, but that remaining 20% is worth every penny.
Firefox is nice, but the configuration interface is an abomination. "Just edit this.js file" is nowhere near as easy as clicking a control panel. (Some of this is remidied by add ons, but still not enough.)
Outlook 2003 blocks images as well. Thunderbird is every bit as nice as Eudora was ten years ago, which is nice, but it isn't a clear winner over Outlook in the UI department.
Are you ignorant? Because I think you are. You are ignorant and I know you are. Your auto block html comment clearly proves this.
In a universe where programmers cost at least $50 an hour, there are still people who think a $300 IDE is expensive. A good tool saves you that much in labor costs in the first week of use.
Why do we need two methods of "show me the hidden window" just because some of our windows are in firefox and some in the explorer? What do we gain again from tabbed browsing?
Consider this scenario: I need that price off the web and plug it into a memo for the boss.
alt+tab Outlook - no. alt+tab Word - no. alt+tab Excel - no. alt+tab Firefox -yes but wrong tab. alt+tab Outlook again. ??? Oh, yeah, our user cues change when we need to switch windows in Firefox. Shift alt+tab back to firefox ctl+tab Firefox, tab 1 Slashdot ctl+tab Firefox, tab 2 gmail ctl+tab Firefox, tab 3 price quote in question.
Why change user interface cues in the middle just because some of our windows are firefox and some are other programs? Switching windows should be automatic lizard brain stuff. I use FF all day and never use the tabbed browsing because it breaks the switch window paradigm.
Slashdot Mirror
ASP.NET time = .NET desktop time??
That just hasn't been my experience at all. For trivial stuff, maybe it only takes twice as long, but there is no comparison between custom user controls on the desktop and custom user controls on the web. Dealing with stuff like recreating your controls on each postback, getting naming right so that the controls correctly get their postback information, worrying about authentication, etc. All the stateless protocol nonsense takes forver.
Atempting to make it stateful through AJAX might work were it not for the J part. Javascript that your users can read and modify themselves. This is worse than the appelet model where at least you were sending Java bytecode. If it didn't work with Java why sould it work now?
Even the database stuff is an order of magnitude more difficult to implement on the web than on the desktop. Sure you *can* make a screen that allows you to edit orders (or whatever) add stuff, pop up calendars, automatically restrict drop down lists to appropriate responses (say lists of provinces), or whatever, but with AJAX it takes your programmers ten times as long to do as it does in Java or VB or C# or whatever. So you can use a web app, but at ten times the cost. Deployment certainly is a factor, but if you work in the .NET world, you have xcopy deployment so long as you don't mess with the GAC.
Better AJAX tools will help this, but still, the web is an unbelievable PITA to program. It is hard to imagine the vast universe of cheesy VB apps out there going to AJAX just because you might someday be able to be the first major company to jump away from the windows monopoly and thereby cut your software choices by 90%.
In other words: you wish!
But isn't dedication different from being a great programmer? Hiring rock stars and making them do the 80% of programming that doesn't call for rock stars usually results in sloppy code written by people who can't be bothered to get excited by it. I'd rather have the the slightly underqualified but highly motivated do it. The difference is the level of dedication to the non rockstar stuff.
people won't flame you for it, they'll just think their web browser is broken.
Have you ever actually met a user? It is *never* their fault.
Indeed. What I find frustrating about todays world is that employees(especially technology employees) want to have their cake and eat it also. They want a to be able to take better offers when economic situations change but they also want lifetime employment.
They want you to pay them when they are learning to do their jobs, then once they are good at it, they want to jump to a competitor. Don't leave, just stay working to compensate for your low productivity before.
> Urm, except Microsofts software has gotten consistantly less stable, slower and worse security wise as time goes on, and Apple's done the opposite.
Proof? Let's put Win98 next to XP and see which is more stable.
Then what do you do with the tape? How often do you check the tape to make sure what it says it is backing up actually gets on the tape? etc.
The online people offer to take care of all the headaches.
Absolutely, you can fire up telnet and examine the badly designed stream of text that is causing the trouble in the first place and devise appropriate hacks to get it to parse.
-1 completely useless
Of course, the Madrid bombers re-used their SIM cards between different phones, unaware that they could be traced.
These guys aren't exactly Lex Luthor. These guys are even dumber than the FBI.
It is the classic good enough today vs. great next week. Their market niche is good enough today and they know that. I wouldn't use it to run hospital heart monitors, but it is fine to run the hospital finance guy's pc.
tendentious, misleading write-up? On Slashdot??
Mabye, just maybe, the don't recognize OSS as a viable business alternative becuase it isn't a viable business alternative.
OSS makes a lot of sense if you are a company selling consulting services. They want you to spend your money on consultants, not software. Ideally, there wouldn't be any software. You would just hire these guys to write custom software for you at enormous cost. Like hiring stonemasons to carve your house out of local limestone.
But for everyone who won't buy that expertise, there is a lot to be said for something that you buy or license that just works out of the box. Fire the stone masons and buy bricks instead. The brick factory churns these things out by the millions, so they are cheap. (Of course the analogy doesn't fit exactly because the second copy of a software program costs close to nothing.)
For a publisher, one can spend a bunch of dough bulding the software, then press a hundred million copies and divide those costs among all the boxes. So you and I can plunk down $179 and get something like five million lines of code representing some insane number of man hours. This is a pretty compelling business model.
None of this says that a all of MS's software fulfils all the promises it makes, but then again, has anyone seen a consultant meet all his promises?
I would question the wisdom of trusting IBM, ORACLE, and Sun, over MSFT.
While by no means infallible, those graphs tend to favor MSFT over the others.
Of course IBM wants OSS, they sell the consulting services. Of course Oracle wants OSS (except postgres), becuase what you don't spend on a UNIX license you can spend on an Oracle license. Sun likes OSS because...well they *are* the platform company that championed a platform agnostic programming language. I wouldn't put much stock in their advice.
" war of occupation as many Iraqis are right now,"
Give me a break. The country has had a democratic election in the face of unbelievable terror carried out by people who regard the rightful winners of those elections as nothing more than heretics. The elections were boycotted by 20% of the population because they knew that their candidates would lose and lose badly.
If say, German Americans boycotted the 2006 congressional elections becuase "their" candidates stood to lose and started blowing up restaurants in Mexican neighborhoods no liberal would leap to their defence. What is different here?
To call the jihadis anything but terrorists is to deny their frequently stated agenda to prevent democracy in Iraq at all costs, ideally causing a destructive civil war in the process.
These people aren't the French resistance. Their goal is to undermine democracy, equality before the law, and impose, at best a form of religious fascism under an unelected Amir such as the illiterate(?) thug Mulla Umar. These people really think that an Amirate is the only acceptable form of governance.
It is amazing to see people who regard with horror an alliance between evangelical christianity and state power cheer on people who's stated agenda is a military theocracy.
Well it strikes me that the motivation is different: killing lots of folks vs. scaring lots of folks by showing that you could have killed them if you wanted to. The latter is an attempt to recklessly threaten to kill rather than killing.
Most of the time, the warnings did mean that few people were hurt. If I had to be targeted by a terrorist group, I'd pick the IRA over al-Qa'ida, although I wouldn't invite either to dinner.
Except it was carried out by a transnational, non governmental group fighting without a fixed chain of command or in uniform, the standard for being a legitimate combatant under the Geneva Conventions.
These guys are more like pirates than legitmate combatants.
Of course, their version of the self-hating left would ask:
"Why do those lunatic Christian fundamentalist wackjobs hate us and how can we change to accomodate their demands?"
At least that's what a significant chunk of Western opinon bleats out every time something like this happens...
Not that it mattered to those blown up, but wasn't the warning botched at Omagh and moved people actually towards the target?
If I was rating shades of badness, not warning people is worse than warning them or warning them incompetently.
Trouble is, Joel's company 1) was well past larval stage, thanks to free digs in a relative's townhouse for years earlier and 2) his landlord was insanely cooperative.
Mine was kind enough not to laugh at me when I asked for a buildout, but wasn't going to help me on this. So offices are out, prfab translucent partitions run about $150 per linear foot. Solid cube walls are about a quarter that.
So we are balancing visual separation vs natural light, soundproofing vs. natural light, collaborative workspace vs. privacy for "flow state" time.
and what landlords want are LARGE OPEN ROOMS with NO BUILDOUT expenses at all.
So, any suggestions on how to reconcile the two? I'm opening an office in a couple of weeks and could use all the advice I can get. It is a big box with nice windows, but that's it.
The best we can do on our startup budget is partitions and white noise. I'd like better, but one buildout quote I got was twice our annual rent. For the first year, that just isn't an option.
In other news, screwdrivers make bad hammers.
Why should all software be written in one or another language/platform?
The U of C uses 6 digit student ids for routine stuff. No doubt SSNs are somewhere, but the UCID number seems to be the most commonly used id, so it isn't a case of the Univeristy using SSNs willy nilly.
But who cares if someone steals your SSN? Your library card # is what really matters to U of C students. I don't think they can survive long without access to the Reg.
The GIMP has an interface that is equivalent or better than closed source alternatives.
.js file" is nowhere near as easy as clicking a control panel. (Some of this is remidied by add ons, but still not enough.)
Evidently, you have not actually used the closed source alternatives and compared them. GIMP is nice, but it is nowhere near as easy to use as Adobe's stuff. Maybe 80% of the quality, but that remaining 20% is worth every penny.
Firefox is nice, but the configuration interface is an abomination. "Just edit this
Outlook 2003 blocks images as well. Thunderbird is every bit as nice as Eudora was ten years ago, which is nice, but it isn't a clear winner over Outlook in the UI department.
Are you ignorant? Because I think you are.
You are ignorant and I know you are. Your auto block html comment clearly proves this.
In a universe where programmers cost at least $50 an hour, there are still people who think a $300 IDE is expensive. A good tool saves you that much in labor costs in the first week of use.
Why do we need two methods of "show me the hidden window" just because some of our windows are in firefox and some in the explorer? What do we gain again from tabbed browsing?
Consider this scenario:
I need that price off the web and plug it into a memo for the boss.
alt+tab Outlook - no.
alt+tab Word - no.
alt+tab Excel - no.
alt+tab Firefox -yes but wrong tab.
alt+tab Outlook again. ??? Oh, yeah, our user cues change when we need to switch windows in Firefox.
Shift alt+tab back to firefox
ctl+tab Firefox, tab 1 Slashdot
ctl+tab Firefox, tab 2 gmail
ctl+tab Firefox, tab 3 price quote in question.
Why change user interface cues in the middle just because some of our windows are firefox and some are other programs? Switching windows should be automatic lizard brain stuff. I use FF all day and never use the tabbed browsing because it breaks the switch window paradigm.