Holy crap, I don't even know where to begin. Let's do this:
See point that it was an example. Read into that, if you may, that it is a single element of a set. Therefore conclude, that I have a list of items "that depends on VS" but as oppose to getting into an exhaustive list of that set, I have merely stated a single element from the list.
Uh huh, How's this for logic: If you were attempting to make an argument, and you had a "list" of evidence, you'd pick the best piece of evidence from your list to present. When that piece of evidence turns out to not be evidence at all, it bodes poorly for your entire list. You keep going on about EF. You seem to not like it at all. Why not simply not use it (as I have chosen to do)?
Then, you go on about XAML. Your argument there is, "VS is the best/only viable XAML editor, therefore VS and.NET are inextricably tied together". Again, you've taken something built on top of.NET that has strong VS tooling (yet could be used via notepad and the command line, if one were persistent enough), and presented it as evidence. It's not.
Why do we have static typing? Why is type safety important? It exists to help break programmers of bad habits.
There's a lot of language designers that would disagree with you there. Static typing isn't a programmer training tool. It's not my place to educate you on that, however. This particular argument boils down to, "VS is bad, so.NET is bad, so VS is bad (because it's built on.NET)". Does that mean that VS2001 (the first version with.NET support) wasn't bad, since it wasn't built on.NET?
Anyway, you seem to be a very angry person, and I wish you peace and luck in your endeavors.
Phones have hardware, therefore there are drivers. Users don't "muck" with them, but that doesn't mean they're not there. Because drivers are software, they can (and often do) have bugs. This is true for every phone platform from the old WM, to Android, iOS, BB, WP7, you name it. If hardware and software are interacting, a driver is necessarily involved, because that's what we call the bits of software that interact with hardware.
If you didn't know, AT&T has WiFi APs in various areas. The software on my stock Galaxy S II (AT&T version, i-777) has some sort of weird built-in extra support for these access points. It connects to them automatically whenever they're in range.
This is AT&T's software (at least on Android, I don't know how it works on WP7), so on my phone at least, I'd blame AT&T if it didn't work, not the underlying Android OS.
In case you need an example of how absolutely dependent.NET and Visual Studio are to each other look no further than the Entity Framework
The Entity Framework isn't integral at all to.NET. I program in.NET every day (have for about 10 years, since 1.0), and I've never used it. I don't understand how something that is built on top of.NET and has strong tooling in VS proves "how absolutely dependent".NET and VS are on each other. EF may be dependent on VS (I wouldn't know, and don't care), but that's a whole other thing entirely.
Other than that, I'm only going to address a few of your points:
2. Auto-generated boiler plates *usually* makes it to production and *usually* remains until version three or four.... Visual Studio coders tend to not even realize that this is going on behind the GUI.
So, incompetent coders are incompetent. Great. VS didn't make them that way, it just made coding easy enough for incompetents to be able to do a passable job at it. I don't think that "it's not hard enough to use" is really a valid criticism, sorry. Not in my world, anyway. Most of your arguments boil down to this. "I worked with bad programmers, and they used VS, so VS is therefore bad". Doesn't cut it, sorry. Correlation, causation, you know the drill.
I like Visual Studio but the most frustrating thing is it always seems to get in my way, it always wants to think for me (usually doing a pretty bad job at it), and it really does so many things behind the scene that it tends to breed a "ignorance is bliss" attitude that carries over into actual user written code.
Aha, so now we're at the real problem. You don't know how to use the tool well, so it must be a bad tool, in your estimation. In mine, you don't know how to use the tool, so that makes YOU bad.
Also, IntelliJ IDEA is ten times the IDE that Eclipse is.
Except what's across the street isn't a restaurant, it's a DVD warehouse, and you're not buying a "torrent steak", you're breaking in and making a copy.
There's a big difference. If the "torrent restaurant" existed, it would be legal. It doesn't, however, and it's not. So, if you want to be legal, then you've got no choice but to pay for steaming piles of crap.
That, or stop watching. Or buy DVDs. Or get them from the library.
Also (for me & the wife): the local public library has a reasonable selection of TV show seasons on DVD. Advertisement-free, watch-at-your-leisure, and no waiting for the next week to resolve the cliffhanger episodes!
A good rack will last you 10 years. A bad rack will last you 20 years
Personally, my racks don't have expiration dates. It was free (rescued it when the building I work in was being demolished), and I plan to use it for roughly the next fourty years or so. It's probably twenty or more old already.
Checked it out: first link was directly to a video (I think?) that didn't play, second link was dead, no summaries, no context. Nothing to see here, move along.
are we to expect crap headlines, spelling mistakes, extreme bias, opinions in the summary, and how could I forget everyone's/. favourite; dup articles that are always 3 days behind the actual news?
No, I don't think you'll need to worry about that. All the "stories" will be written by PR and marketing departments of "Big Data" vendors.
Re:This will go down well...lulz
on
Introducing SlashBI
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've been following Slashdot since the 90s and it just seems to be evolving into another unfocused blog.
See, that's where you're mistaken. It USED to be an unfocused blog (well, focused on interesting stuff, but otherwise unfocused). Now, it's focused laser-sharp at generating page views and getting us to swallow sponsored content. The focus that was missing has now been found, and it's money.
Also interested. Maybe it would help if everyone simply started submitting alternatives to slashdot as slashdot articles. Now THAT would be news for nerds.
Do you have a better suggestion than SpiderOak? My requirements are simple: I want to be able to sync files from arbitrary folders on multiple computers to the "cloud", and then sync other arbitrary folders between different machines.
JungleDisk does what I want (using a combination of the backup functionality and the sync functionality), but it seems to have been abandoned by Rackspace.
SpiderOak does what I want, but it has at least one bug where only one drive is available for syncing on one of my machines. SO doesn't seem to be able to help me.
SkyDrive doesn't do what I want, because even if I wrote my own software (the API is documented and powerful), file types that are outside their list of "known" types aren't uploadable through the API.
DropBox doesn't do what I want (only one folder).
Google Drive doesn't do what I want (only one folder, and Google owns everything).
Absolutely agree re: Jungle Disk, except that since the Rackspace acquisition, there's been very little activity, and even less communication from them. My guess is that everyone that mattered over there took their newfound riches and left.
There's a thread over at the JD support forums that's been active for months (since last November) titled "No updates in 7 months... is JD alive??". There have been no responses from JD yet. Does not inspire confidence.
Maybe it's just me and my family/friend/acquaintance circle. We grew up, and decided to either use something that didn't cost money, or pay the legitimate license fees.
Also, many in my circle nowdays just buys surplus computers from the local uni (for $45-65) and use the licenses that come with them.
Why not just say "we think that x86 computers cannot run Win8 acceptably so we are removing this as an option to prevent people from even trying"
Probably because they don't think that. I haven't tried, myself, but the general feeling I've gotten from those I've talked to who HAVE run it is that it runs as well or better than 7 did on the same hardware.
No reason to reduce your potential market arbitrarily. I wouldn't expect x86 to last super long, though. Win8 could be the final x86 operating system from Microsoft.
It's been a long time since I was "in the know", but it seems to me that the hassle involved in running illegitimate copies of recent versions of Windows was sufficient to make it less common than it was in the past. Pretty much everyone I know is running legitimately licensed copies. There are times in the past when that wasn't the case, for me, at least.
You could do that today, in some programming environments, anyway. Some programming languages / compiler combinations allow classes to be split among files, into individual methods, if desired.
The writing has been on the wall for XP for a long, long time. That Microsoft would end support should be a surprise to exactly nobody.
That SCADA systems were (and are) built in such a fragile way, on operating systems that may or may not be security risks (and Windows isn't the only one, here), without a strategy in place for mitigating those risks, is stupid.
The problem here isn't Windows or Microsoft (those systems could just as well be built on a 10-year old version of Linux that turns out to have security flaws), it's SCADA system vendors who want to pretend the underlying systems are perfect when they release.
Slashdot Mirror
I am, and that was the first place I looked...
but with 3TB drives for $100 these days
Where are you buying your drives? I can't find them for less than about $185...
If you're on Windows (and you seem to be), then you ought to be using PowerShell. It really is that good.
Holy crap, I don't even know where to begin. Let's do this:
See point that it was an example. Read into that, if you may, that it is a single element of a set. Therefore conclude, that I have a list of items "that depends on VS" but as oppose to getting into an exhaustive list of that set, I have merely stated a single element from the list.
Uh huh, How's this for logic: If you were attempting to make an argument, and you had a "list" of evidence, you'd pick the best piece of evidence from your list to present. When that piece of evidence turns out to not be evidence at all, it bodes poorly for your entire list. You keep going on about EF. You seem to not like it at all. Why not simply not use it (as I have chosen to do)?
Then, you go on about XAML. Your argument there is, "VS is the best/only viable XAML editor, therefore VS and .NET are inextricably tied together". Again, you've taken something built on top of .NET that has strong VS tooling (yet could be used via notepad and the command line, if one were persistent enough), and presented it as evidence. It's not.
Why do we have static typing? Why is type safety important? It exists to help break programmers of bad habits.
There's a lot of language designers that would disagree with you there. Static typing isn't a programmer training tool. It's not my place to educate you on that, however. This particular argument boils down to, "VS is bad, so .NET is bad, so VS is bad (because it's built on .NET)". Does that mean that VS2001 (the first version with .NET support) wasn't bad, since it wasn't built on .NET?
Anyway, you seem to be a very angry person, and I wish you peace and luck in your endeavors.
People actually store contacts on SIM cards?
Huh.
Phones have hardware, therefore there are drivers. Users don't "muck" with them, but that doesn't mean they're not there. Because drivers are software, they can (and often do) have bugs. This is true for every phone platform from the old WM, to Android, iOS, BB, WP7, you name it. If hardware and software are interacting, a driver is necessarily involved, because that's what we call the bits of software that interact with hardware.
If you didn't know, AT&T has WiFi APs in various areas. The software on my stock Galaxy S II (AT&T version, i-777) has some sort of weird built-in extra support for these access points. It connects to them automatically whenever they're in range.
This is AT&T's software (at least on Android, I don't know how it works on WP7), so on my phone at least, I'd blame AT&T if it didn't work, not the underlying Android OS.
powershell?
In case you need an example of how absolutely dependent .NET and Visual Studio are to each other look no further than the Entity Framework
The Entity Framework isn't integral at all to .NET. I program in .NET every day (have for about 10 years, since 1.0), and I've never used it. I don't understand how something that is built on top of .NET and has strong tooling in VS proves "how absolutely dependent" .NET and VS are on each other. EF may be dependent on VS (I wouldn't know, and don't care), but that's a whole other thing entirely.
Other than that, I'm only going to address a few of your points:
2. Auto-generated boiler plates *usually* makes it to production and *usually* remains until version three or four. ... Visual Studio coders tend to not even realize that this is going on behind the GUI.
So, incompetent coders are incompetent. Great. VS didn't make them that way, it just made coding easy enough for incompetents to be able to do a passable job at it. I don't think that "it's not hard enough to use" is really a valid criticism, sorry. Not in my world, anyway. Most of your arguments boil down to this. "I worked with bad programmers, and they used VS, so VS is therefore bad". Doesn't cut it, sorry. Correlation, causation, you know the drill.
I like Visual Studio but the most frustrating thing is it always seems to get in my way, it always wants to think for me (usually doing a pretty bad job at it), and it really does so many things behind the scene that it tends to breed a "ignorance is bliss" attitude that carries over into actual user written code.
Aha, so now we're at the real problem. You don't know how to use the tool well, so it must be a bad tool, in your estimation. In mine, you don't know how to use the tool, so that makes YOU bad.
Also, IntelliJ IDEA is ten times the IDE that Eclipse is.
Except what's across the street isn't a restaurant, it's a DVD warehouse, and you're not buying a "torrent steak", you're breaking in and making a copy.
There's a big difference. If the "torrent restaurant" existed, it would be legal. It doesn't, however, and it's not. So, if you want to be legal, then you've got no choice but to pay for steaming piles of crap.
That, or stop watching. Or buy DVDs. Or get them from the library.
And not when you're competing with $29.99 and that gets you the physical DVDs...
http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Bad-Complete-Fourth-Season/dp/B0058YPG1G
Also (for me & the wife): the local public library has a reasonable selection of TV show seasons on DVD. Advertisement-free, watch-at-your-leisure, and no waiting for the next week to resolve the cliffhanger episodes!
A good rack will last you 10 years. A bad rack will last you 20 years
Personally, my racks don't have expiration dates. It was free (rescued it when the building I work in was being demolished), and I plan to use it for roughly the next fourty years or so. It's probably twenty or more old already.
It doesn't smell rotten yet.
Checked it out: first link was directly to a video (I think?) that didn't play, second link was dead, no summaries, no context. Nothing to see here, move along.
My knee-jerk reaction was, "that's a lot of stock photography".
are we to expect crap headlines, spelling mistakes, extreme bias, opinions in the summary, and how could I forget everyone's /. favourite; dup articles that are always 3 days behind the actual news?
No, I don't think you'll need to worry about that. All the "stories" will be written by PR and marketing departments of "Big Data" vendors.
I've been following Slashdot since the 90s and it just seems to be evolving into another unfocused blog.
See, that's where you're mistaken. It USED to be an unfocused blog (well, focused on interesting stuff, but otherwise unfocused). Now, it's focused laser-sharp at generating page views and getting us to swallow sponsored content. The focus that was missing has now been found, and it's money.
Also interested. Maybe it would help if everyone simply started submitting alternatives to slashdot as slashdot articles. Now THAT would be news for nerds.
Do you have a better suggestion than SpiderOak? My requirements are simple: I want to be able to sync files from arbitrary folders on multiple computers to the "cloud", and then sync other arbitrary folders between different machines.
JungleDisk does what I want (using a combination of the backup functionality and the sync functionality), but it seems to have been abandoned by Rackspace.
SpiderOak does what I want, but it has at least one bug where only one drive is available for syncing on one of my machines. SO doesn't seem to be able to help me.
SkyDrive doesn't do what I want, because even if I wrote my own software (the API is documented and powerful), file types that are outside their list of "known" types aren't uploadable through the API.
DropBox doesn't do what I want (only one folder).
Google Drive doesn't do what I want (only one folder, and Google owns everything).
Absolutely agree re: Jungle Disk, except that since the Rackspace acquisition, there's been very little activity, and even less communication from them. My guess is that everyone that mattered over there took their newfound riches and left.
There's a thread over at the JD support forums that's been active for months (since last November) titled "No updates in 7 months... is JD alive??". There have been no responses from JD yet. Does not inspire confidence.
Maybe it's just me and my family/friend/acquaintance circle. We grew up, and decided to either use something that didn't cost money, or pay the legitimate license fees.
Also, many in my circle nowdays just buys surplus computers from the local uni (for $45-65) and use the licenses that come with them.
Why not just say "we think that x86 computers cannot run Win8 acceptably so we are removing this as an option to prevent people from even trying"
Probably because they don't think that. I haven't tried, myself, but the general feeling I've gotten from those I've talked to who HAVE run it is that it runs as well or better than 7 did on the same hardware.
No reason to reduce your potential market arbitrarily. I wouldn't expect x86 to last super long, though. Win8 could be the final x86 operating system from Microsoft.
Linux will likely carry it around for decades.
It's been a long time since I was "in the know", but it seems to me that the hassle involved in running illegitimate copies of recent versions of Windows was sufficient to make it less common than it was in the past. Pretty much everyone I know is running legitimately licensed copies. There are times in the past when that wasn't the case, for me, at least.
You could do that today, in some programming environments, anyway. Some programming languages / compiler combinations allow classes to be split among files, into individual methods, if desired.
You mean, like Code Canvas?
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/codecanvas/
The writing has been on the wall for XP for a long, long time. That Microsoft would end support should be a surprise to exactly nobody.
That SCADA systems were (and are) built in such a fragile way, on operating systems that may or may not be security risks (and Windows isn't the only one, here), without a strategy in place for mitigating those risks, is stupid.
The problem here isn't Windows or Microsoft (those systems could just as well be built on a 10-year old version of Linux that turns out to have security flaws), it's SCADA system vendors who want to pretend the underlying systems are perfect when they release.