Good points, I hadn't thought to question MSRP on smart phones before. Thanks. Are you aware of any other channels for legal, new smart phones I can activate on a US carrier?
Why the vitriol? We both know this is aimed at Canonical/Ubuntu fans with disposable income. If you're not a fan or you don't have the money to burn, there is no harm done.
If you buy a modern smart phone without a contract in the US, $600 is a pretty normal price. That's for companies like Samsung, HTC, and Apple, which make millions of phones in a batch so they can negotiate a bulk discount from their suppliers.
Canonical is making 40,000 phones at most, so that's too few to get a bulk discount. I think $830 is a reasonable price. However, I don't have $830 handy, or $600. Or $60. I have debt and kids that need to visit an orthodontist. So I'm out.
Exactly. Now I realize that Microsoft needs to support millions of combinations of hardware components, peripherals, and software programs. That's an incredibly difficult task. However, they have literally billions upon billions of dollars to invest in solving the problem. More thorough testing could have been done. Better documentation could have been done. Etc... etc... Windows 7 was their best offering yet, but it still has plenty of rough edges.
Right. My wife has an Asus Transformer Prime and I have a Barnes & Noble Nook HD Plus. Both have 10 inch screens, hers has 1280x800 pixels, mine has 1920x1080. The difference is pretty easy to notice, especially when you have a website that doesn't use oversize fonts.
Information wants people to stop anthropomorphizing it.
I'll repeat my question: how many news websites have successfully built a funding model around subscriptions? Very few, and most that succeed are very well established names. I think a lesser known website is more likely to succeed through ad revenue than paid subscriptions - people are not likely to pay for content unless they know the content is high quality. They can't know the content is high quality if they have to pay before they access it.
I supported the H Online by visiting the site with third party cookies enabled and no ad-blocker software running. That was my support. Evidently me and others like me were not enough to generate the ad revenue they needed.
The iPad Mini was cheaper than the Surface and has a smaller physical screen. The full size iPad 3 and Microsoft Surface are both about 10 inch screens, and the iPad 3 has nearly twice the pixel density. There is a visible difference.
There is tremendous work going into improving HTML5 features and developer experience - Typescript, Coffeescript, Dart, Clojurescript, and even changes to Ecmascript itself are making Javascript better for large projects. The situation will improve - we may be ten years from it being as good as building native apps, but we are heading in that direction.
Google for all of its evil, and there's enough of it, has done plenty for open source and their consumer products usually (always?) run an open source operating system with proprietary add-ons. That's less evil than Microsoft.
Facebook and Apple are in the same boat as Microsoft.
But I think the real difference is that a lot of us geeks are still bitter at Microsoft for years of headaches. Windows Update broke. This update needs a reboot. This program is hung and I have to open a damn command line and remember the command flags for taskkill to shut it down. This file transfer crashed explorer.exe. That laptop needs to be activated again. This Terminal Server is out of TSCAL licenses. Mom is confused by the latest pop-up masquerading as an anti-virus update. This batch of software updates for Windows 95 just wiped out my boss's computer, and he's screaming at me about it. Netscape was crushed by Microsoft.
Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft might all four be taking us by the hand and leading us straight to hell, but of the four only Microsoft has been methodically torturing IT workers for 20 years or longer. So many of us are most angry at them.
I never had a problem with it. It was a great site with well-written news articles.
But a subscription model? How many news sites have made that work? Damn few, and for all of the other Linux and open source magazines and websites that folded, how would you expect something already having trouble reaching a wide audience to convince people to spend a monthly amount for their services?
An integrated app store makes a lot of sense - as long as it's well done and optional.
I have Windows 8 on my home PC. I wanted to set up two accounts, one for my kids which included a few Windows 8 games from the App store, and one for me to get things done. I couldn't figure out how to buy games for my account and give them access on their account. I could do that in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, but not the actual release version. So I had to create a new email account, associate a credit card with that account, give that email account a login on my Windows 8 machine, buy the applications, and then remove the credit card (so my youngest could not accidentally buy anything else).
Naturally I am not recommending Windows 8 to other parents for its ease-of-use. I am still astonished my use-case was not covered by the software. Or if it was covered, it wasn't in any of the documentation I could find.
I'll admit, I haven't ever been a Microsoft fanboy. But I respected their attempt to re-invent themselves with Windows 8. I really did. But it came out half-baked.
1. The nifty keyboards cost $100 or $150 extra, putting it on par with the iPad 3.
2. The iPad 3 had 2048x1536 display resolution, the Surface had 1366x768. You can easily see the difference, you don't have to be an Apple fan.
3. The iPad 2 was still on sale, at a significant discount, so it undercut the Surface on price but had a huge application market.
4. The Windows App Store for Surface had nothing compelling.
I would also note that the Surface had a 1366x768 display and the iPad that came out six months earlier was 2048x1536. You don't have to be a hardware enthusiast to notice a difference between them.
1. No, I didn't know about the checkbox. I'll take that option for a spin. I was having that problem with Windows Explorer hanging on XP, Vista, 7, 2003 Server, and 2008 Server. So maybe there's just some oddness with our network - but again, there should be a separation between the flow of control drawing the GUI and the flow of control reading and writing data, so that no matter how bizarre or unreliable your network is, the entirety of the file manager doesn't hang because one folder out of 1000 is slow to read.
2. I am impatient. I consider it a virtue in a software developer - if waiting for a program to react to me makes me angry, then I am more likely to work extra hard to ensure that programs I write won't make their users wait either. If one of my programs hangs - sometimes Firefox, Eclipse, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, pgAdmin3 (a GUI tool for manipulating PostgreSQL databases), I've had them all hang - I Alt-Tab to a command prompt and do "taskkill/f/im firefox.exe" (or "taskkill/f/im eclipse.exe", or whatever for the appropriate program) to exit immediately. It would be nice if the GUI let me do that, because I don't care if it takes 10 seconds or 2 minutes for the program to react, it's too long. More than once PowerPoint, Eclipse, pgAdmin3, and Word have hung for more than ten minutes before I killed them manually. This is also on more than one physical machine, so it's not a specific problem to one particular workstation or laptop. Granted, I do run more programs concurrently than the average Windows user.
3. Fair point, if she's got a lot going on she might miss the notification.
4. The update process failures I've had were with the security updates, not the optional ones. I don't want the Bing Desktop, I don't install it. But as you say their information display for the updates is terrible - instead of trying to use plain English, it's KB4949339.
5. Part of the reason Microsoft can't switch to an elitist strategy is that they just don't have the consistency in user interface and user experience that Apple does. I realize Microsoft came to success by being cheap, but they should have realized ten years earlier that all of the crapware HP, Gateway, and Dell were bundling with each machine was nearly ruining the user experience. Now they have the "Microsoft Signature PC" experience, which I would recommend to anyone that wants a least-possibly-sucky Microsoft PC experience without having to do the work for themselves. When they released Vista, they should have insisted the PC vendors give even the minimum machines more computing power so nobody was stuck with a dog slow piece of junk. They had the power, just call HP and say "If you sell any Vista machines with less than 2 GB of memory, we are revoking your ability to activate Windows licenses."
Related to this, the Search and Help features in Windows 7 are incredibly well done. I'll give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and guess that weaker hardware in 2001 or 2006 prevented them from making Search as good in Windows XP or Windows Vista. But there was no magic technology that made Help better in 2009, just more attention to making Help files that don't suck. Microsoft could have done that in 2001 for Windows XP, but they did not. I don't know any experienced Windows user that ever uses the Help button in Windows, because we all learned to use Windows back when Help was totally useless.
6. At work we have laptops that we purchase from Lenovo or Dell with Windows 7 and Office Professional installed. They're fine. But the only recovery data we receive with the laptop is a partition on the hard drive. When we have a laptop hard drive failure, we typically replace the hard drive with any available 2.5 inch SATA drive with enough space - and I can't figure out how to legally re-use our lawfully purchased Windows 7 and Office Professional lice
1. Windows Explorer hangs because it's single-threaded, not because of hardware problems. It has one process trying to move files, copy files, read the directory list, etc... and that same process trying to update the graphical user interface. It should split them into two linked processes, one to do the actual disk reading and writing, and the other to display everything for the user. That way when the disk process has a problem, the GUI continues to work flawlessly for the data it already has, and just shows an hourglass icon or some other helpful information for the contents it does not have. Instead, the whole damn window hangs. That's just laziness, they could have fixed it years ago.
2. Likewise, having a program hang before you force it to close it is not a hardware problem, it's a software problem. If the whole computer hangs it could be because there is a heat or power supply problem, and there is nothing Microsoft can be expected to do about it. But if one program hangs and Windows won't let you close it immediately using Task Manager when you CAN close it immediately from a command prompt or PowerShell, then they just don't want the "close it immediately" option in the Task Manager. The only possible reason for that is to make annoyed people froth at the mouth and switch to Linux - which is what I did.
3. If it's copying the photos off of her camera without notifying her somehow, that's poor user interface design. She shouldn't need an experienced IT person to explain it to her.
4. Using Windows Update for Windows Updates is what Microsoft recommends, it is the default option. If I need to use some other website to get Windows Update then clearly Microsoft is doing it wrong. And the great majority of updates on Windows Update are security fixes. If you want to run with a botnet zombie box, that's your privilege. Me, I prefer not to be open to every script kiddie that downloads last year's publicly documented hacks.
5. High price alone won't make your company rich or your product sexy. You could add a $700 price jump to every Windows laptop and it would only hurt sales because the product itself just isn't that exciting. Cadillac tried to do that with the XLR, which was a Corvette plus angular lines and a $30,000 price jump. It was one of the biggest car sales disasters of the 2000-2010 period. You need high price and a good product, and that's what Apple has. Now, I don't own anything by Apple and I'll never buy anything by Apple because I hate Apple as much as I hate Microsoft. But Apple clearly has smarter people in charge of marketing and product design.
6. And you didn't address my other complaints. The different versions of products, the inconsistent marketing, the bad naming conventions, the unmemorable advertisements, and the legalese around licensing types and configuration and so forth.
While I'm complaining - for Windows 8 they took out DVD playback for no good reason, unless you get the top version plus a Media pack. Apple would not have done that. With Windows 8 they came up with the confusing and useless name Windows RT so that consumers would have a hard time understanding the difference between Windows 8 regular and Windows RT. How could they not see that better naming conventions were required?
Even look at application stores. Valve has been doing one on Windows with Steam for many years now, and it's a well-done product. Microsoft's Store for Windows 8 is fine - but they could have been doing that first, even before the Apple app store, and they failed.
Even Steve Ballmer's memo is 300 words of information in 2700 words of text. That's half the company problem right there, fluff and complexity in so much of their official documents for no obvious reason except maybe to annoy customers.
But I don't think that's fair at all. The reason Microsoft can't be Apple is that they have earned a reputation for not sweating the details. Windows Explorer still hangs periodically, even in Windows 8, when you're looking at a big directory tree or accessing a network share. Too many updates require a system restart. The user interface for the control panels isn't consistent. Navigating the legalese to figure out licensing if your company is too small to just throw money at the problem is a nightmare. Navigating the documentation as a home user to figure out which version of Windows you want is a nightmare. As recently as last year I had Windows Update break with an obscure error message and I had to spend hours entering a DWORD into search engines before I gave up, wiped the entire machine, and started over. When a program does hang, there is no "stop immediately option" unless you bring up a command shell and use Taskkill, you are always forced to wait even when you know from the first second that you just want to exit the program completely.
Apple has the love of millions because they sweat the details as much as they can. They still screw up - see the Apple Maps fiasco - but they try very hard to make everything clean and consistent. Microsoft has an install-base of millions because they sweat the details just enough not to lose the customers, and don't seem to care if what remains will annoy the customer as long as they keep getting their money. That attitude works fine for keeping Microsoft where it is, but it won't help them take marketshare in phone or tablets from Apple, and it won't help them get nearly the fanatical loyalty that Apple has.
I hate Apple. I hate Microsoft. But I think it's easy to see why Apple's fans are fanatics and Microsoft fanatics are comparatively rare.
Yeah, we just have a note with each release - run a copy of the software against a copy of the production database, and manually run all of the stored procedures and see what breaks.
I work at a small company that has a Java web application in front of a Postgres database. For us, the PL/pgSQL (Postgres equivalent to PL-SQL) snowballed because it's something you can add and change while the database is running without kicking your current users off the web application. Unless of course you screw up.
It snowballed from there. Most of the application is still in Java, but we have a heavy set of stored procedures because once we had them working well enough to run on the production system, it's hard to justify re-implementing them in the Java code when the next big feature is a high priority.
I'm not saying this is a smart way to do things. It's not, and we have a boatload of documentation and testing for each release around the compatibility between the database, the stored procedures, and the application code. But I imagine the way it evolved for us is not unique.
I think the general product plan to unify user interface paradigms between desktop, server, tablet, and phone makes sense. And I think putting together an application store makes sense - you can check applications in the store for security problems, and get into the book/music/movie streaming and rental service just like Apple, Amazon, Google, etc...
But while the concept of what Windows 8 tried to be makes complete sense to me, the implementation did not.
I agree, I am speculating. But my wild guess is that projects like Node.js and to a lesser extent Meteor.js, etc... went from nothing to immensely popular in a short time specifically because developers were working in the same language on both sides. Aside from ease of development, what else could server-side Javascript have to recommend it?
Is it bad at doing floating point? As I stated elsewhere, Java has support for primitive types in arrays but not in other data structures like Set, List, and Map or in Java generics. So unless you carefully constraint your code to only use arrays and custom objects, you're going to have your little and fast int and double values converted to Integer and Double objects and take a huge performance hit. But beyond that, I'm not aware that Java floating point is slow.
You're right about the unsigned types, but how often is that really a problem? It doesn't matter in web development and most fat client applications. It's only a problem for certain classes of number-crunching.
If you click through the various configurations in the TechEmpower benchmarks, there are places where Java handily outdoes the lone C++ entry for performance. But in other places, C++ has a clear lead. That's also the first C++ entry to the benchmark - you have a lone C++ entry against most of the kings of the Java web world, and the Java entries have been in the benchmark for all six rounds with plenty of chances for tuning. If there were lots of C++ entries, I would be more comfortable declaring the results significant.
Conversely, the Computer Language Shootout specifically "warms" the JVM before executing the benchmarks, so that you get best-possible Java performance. So that 2x difference is realistic for some specific applications.
And I realize Java handily outdoes PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby in the benchmarks on a consistent basis.
In Java, arrays can hold the primitive types but the common data types List, Map, Set, Stack, and Queue require boxed objects. Also, Java generics only work with object types. You are free to use third party libraries or write your own code that has MyListOfInt which stores a list of int without boxing them or MyMapOfDoubles that has maps with double that is not boxed, but now you've lost interoperability with the rest of the Java universe. Or you can just work with arrays, which is fine but the whole point of List, Map, Set, Stack, and Queue is that they give you features a raw array does not have.
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Good points, I hadn't thought to question MSRP on smart phones before. Thanks. Are you aware of any other channels for legal, new smart phones I can activate on a US carrier?
Why the vitriol? We both know this is aimed at Canonical/Ubuntu fans with disposable income. If you're not a fan or you don't have the money to burn, there is no harm done.
If you buy a modern smart phone without a contract in the US, $600 is a pretty normal price. That's for companies like Samsung, HTC, and Apple, which make millions of phones in a batch so they can negotiate a bulk discount from their suppliers.
Canonical is making 40,000 phones at most, so that's too few to get a bulk discount. I think $830 is a reasonable price. However, I don't have $830 handy, or $600. Or $60. I have debt and kids that need to visit an orthodontist. So I'm out.
Exactly. Now I realize that Microsoft needs to support millions of combinations of hardware components, peripherals, and software programs. That's an incredibly difficult task. However, they have literally billions upon billions of dollars to invest in solving the problem. More thorough testing could have been done. Better documentation could have been done. Etc... etc... Windows 7 was their best offering yet, but it still has plenty of rough edges.
Right. My wife has an Asus Transformer Prime and I have a Barnes & Noble Nook HD Plus. Both have 10 inch screens, hers has 1280x800 pixels, mine has 1920x1080. The difference is pretty easy to notice, especially when you have a website that doesn't use oversize fonts.
Information wants people to stop anthropomorphizing it.
I'll repeat my question: how many news websites have successfully built a funding model around subscriptions? Very few, and most that succeed are very well established names. I think a lesser known website is more likely to succeed through ad revenue than paid subscriptions - people are not likely to pay for content unless they know the content is high quality. They can't know the content is high quality if they have to pay before they access it.
I supported the H Online by visiting the site with third party cookies enabled and no ad-blocker software running. That was my support. Evidently me and others like me were not enough to generate the ad revenue they needed.
The iPad Mini was cheaper than the Surface and has a smaller physical screen. The full size iPad 3 and Microsoft Surface are both about 10 inch screens, and the iPad 3 has nearly twice the pixel density. There is a visible difference.
There is tremendous work going into improving HTML5 features and developer experience - Typescript, Coffeescript, Dart, Clojurescript, and even changes to Ecmascript itself are making Javascript better for large projects. The situation will improve - we may be ten years from it being as good as building native apps, but we are heading in that direction.
Google for all of its evil, and there's enough of it, has done plenty for open source and their consumer products usually (always?) run an open source operating system with proprietary add-ons. That's less evil than Microsoft.
Facebook and Apple are in the same boat as Microsoft.
But I think the real difference is that a lot of us geeks are still bitter at Microsoft for years of headaches. Windows Update broke. This update needs a reboot. This program is hung and I have to open a damn command line and remember the command flags for taskkill to shut it down. This file transfer crashed explorer.exe. That laptop needs to be activated again. This Terminal Server is out of TSCAL licenses. Mom is confused by the latest pop-up masquerading as an anti-virus update. This batch of software updates for Windows 95 just wiped out my boss's computer, and he's screaming at me about it. Netscape was crushed by Microsoft.
Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft might all four be taking us by the hand and leading us straight to hell, but of the four only Microsoft has been methodically torturing IT workers for 20 years or longer. So many of us are most angry at them.
I never had a problem with it. It was a great site with well-written news articles.
But a subscription model? How many news sites have made that work? Damn few, and for all of the other Linux and open source magazines and websites that folded, how would you expect something already having trouble reaching a wide audience to convince people to spend a monthly amount for their services?
An integrated app store makes a lot of sense - as long as it's well done and optional.
I have Windows 8 on my home PC. I wanted to set up two accounts, one for my kids which included a few Windows 8 games from the App store, and one for me to get things done. I couldn't figure out how to buy games for my account and give them access on their account. I could do that in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, but not the actual release version. So I had to create a new email account, associate a credit card with that account, give that email account a login on my Windows 8 machine, buy the applications, and then remove the credit card (so my youngest could not accidentally buy anything else).
Naturally I am not recommending Windows 8 to other parents for its ease-of-use. I am still astonished my use-case was not covered by the software. Or if it was covered, it wasn't in any of the documentation I could find.
I'll admit, I haven't ever been a Microsoft fanboy. But I respected their attempt to re-invent themselves with Windows 8. I really did. But it came out half-baked.
At the time the Surface went on sale, remember:
1. The nifty keyboards cost $100 or $150 extra, putting it on par with the iPad 3.
2. The iPad 3 had 2048x1536 display resolution, the Surface had 1366x768. You can easily see the difference, you don't have to be an Apple fan.
3. The iPad 2 was still on sale, at a significant discount, so it undercut the Surface on price but had a huge application market.
4. The Windows App Store for Surface had nothing compelling.
I would also note that the Surface had a 1366x768 display and the iPad that came out six months earlier was 2048x1536. You don't have to be a hardware enthusiast to notice a difference between them.
I'm enjoying the debate, thank you.
/f /im firefox.exe" (or "taskkill /f /im eclipse.exe", or whatever for the appropriate program) to exit immediately. It would be nice if the GUI let me do that, because I don't care if it takes 10 seconds or 2 minutes for the program to react, it's too long. More than once PowerPoint, Eclipse, pgAdmin3, and Word have hung for more than ten minutes before I killed them manually. This is also on more than one physical machine, so it's not a specific problem to one particular workstation or laptop. Granted, I do run more programs concurrently than the average Windows user.
1. No, I didn't know about the checkbox. I'll take that option for a spin. I was having that problem with Windows Explorer hanging on XP, Vista, 7, 2003 Server, and 2008 Server. So maybe there's just some oddness with our network - but again, there should be a separation between the flow of control drawing the GUI and the flow of control reading and writing data, so that no matter how bizarre or unreliable your network is, the entirety of the file manager doesn't hang because one folder out of 1000 is slow to read.
2. I am impatient. I consider it a virtue in a software developer - if waiting for a program to react to me makes me angry, then I am more likely to work extra hard to ensure that programs I write won't make their users wait either. If one of my programs hangs - sometimes Firefox, Eclipse, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, pgAdmin3 (a GUI tool for manipulating PostgreSQL databases), I've had them all hang - I Alt-Tab to a command prompt and do "taskkill
3. Fair point, if she's got a lot going on she might miss the notification.
4. The update process failures I've had were with the security updates, not the optional ones. I don't want the Bing Desktop, I don't install it. But as you say their information display for the updates is terrible - instead of trying to use plain English, it's KB4949339.
5. Part of the reason Microsoft can't switch to an elitist strategy is that they just don't have the consistency in user interface and user experience that Apple does. I realize Microsoft came to success by being cheap, but they should have realized ten years earlier that all of the crapware HP, Gateway, and Dell were bundling with each machine was nearly ruining the user experience. Now they have the "Microsoft Signature PC" experience, which I would recommend to anyone that wants a least-possibly-sucky Microsoft PC experience without having to do the work for themselves. When they released Vista, they should have insisted the PC vendors give even the minimum machines more computing power so nobody was stuck with a dog slow piece of junk. They had the power, just call HP and say "If you sell any Vista machines with less than 2 GB of memory, we are revoking your ability to activate Windows licenses."
Related to this, the Search and Help features in Windows 7 are incredibly well done. I'll give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and guess that weaker hardware in 2001 or 2006 prevented them from making Search as good in Windows XP or Windows Vista. But there was no magic technology that made Help better in 2009, just more attention to making Help files that don't suck. Microsoft could have done that in 2001 for Windows XP, but they did not. I don't know any experienced Windows user that ever uses the Help button in Windows, because we all learned to use Windows back when Help was totally useless.
6. At work we have laptops that we purchase from Lenovo or Dell with Windows 7 and Office Professional installed. They're fine. But the only recovery data we receive with the laptop is a partition on the hard drive. When we have a laptop hard drive failure, we typically replace the hard drive with any available 2.5 inch SATA drive with enough space - and I can't figure out how to legally re-use our lawfully purchased Windows 7 and Office Professional lice
Nonsense.
1. Windows Explorer hangs because it's single-threaded, not because of hardware problems. It has one process trying to move files, copy files, read the directory list, etc... and that same process trying to update the graphical user interface. It should split them into two linked processes, one to do the actual disk reading and writing, and the other to display everything for the user. That way when the disk process has a problem, the GUI continues to work flawlessly for the data it already has, and just shows an hourglass icon or some other helpful information for the contents it does not have. Instead, the whole damn window hangs. That's just laziness, they could have fixed it years ago.
2. Likewise, having a program hang before you force it to close it is not a hardware problem, it's a software problem. If the whole computer hangs it could be because there is a heat or power supply problem, and there is nothing Microsoft can be expected to do about it. But if one program hangs and Windows won't let you close it immediately using Task Manager when you CAN close it immediately from a command prompt or PowerShell, then they just don't want the "close it immediately" option in the Task Manager. The only possible reason for that is to make annoyed people froth at the mouth and switch to Linux - which is what I did.
3. If it's copying the photos off of her camera without notifying her somehow, that's poor user interface design. She shouldn't need an experienced IT person to explain it to her.
4. Using Windows Update for Windows Updates is what Microsoft recommends, it is the default option. If I need to use some other website to get Windows Update then clearly Microsoft is doing it wrong. And the great majority of updates on Windows Update are security fixes. If you want to run with a botnet zombie box, that's your privilege. Me, I prefer not to be open to every script kiddie that downloads last year's publicly documented hacks.
5. High price alone won't make your company rich or your product sexy. You could add a $700 price jump to every Windows laptop and it would only hurt sales because the product itself just isn't that exciting. Cadillac tried to do that with the XLR, which was a Corvette plus angular lines and a $30,000 price jump. It was one of the biggest car sales disasters of the 2000-2010 period. You need high price and a good product, and that's what Apple has. Now, I don't own anything by Apple and I'll never buy anything by Apple because I hate Apple as much as I hate Microsoft. But Apple clearly has smarter people in charge of marketing and product design.
6. And you didn't address my other complaints. The different versions of products, the inconsistent marketing, the bad naming conventions, the unmemorable advertisements, and the legalese around licensing types and configuration and so forth.
While I'm complaining - for Windows 8 they took out DVD playback for no good reason, unless you get the top version plus a Media pack. Apple would not have done that. With Windows 8 they came up with the confusing and useless name Windows RT so that consumers would have a hard time understanding the difference between Windows 8 regular and Windows RT. How could they not see that better naming conventions were required?
Even look at application stores. Valve has been doing one on Windows with Steam for many years now, and it's a well-done product. Microsoft's Store for Windows 8 is fine - but they could have been doing that first, even before the Apple app store, and they failed.
Even Steve Ballmer's memo is 300 words of information in 2700 words of text. That's half the company problem right there, fluff and complexity in so much of their official documents for no obvious reason except maybe to annoy customers.
But I don't think that's fair at all. The reason Microsoft can't be Apple is that they have earned a reputation for not sweating the details. Windows Explorer still hangs periodically, even in Windows 8, when you're looking at a big directory tree or accessing a network share. Too many updates require a system restart. The user interface for the control panels isn't consistent. Navigating the legalese to figure out licensing if your company is too small to just throw money at the problem is a nightmare. Navigating the documentation as a home user to figure out which version of Windows you want is a nightmare. As recently as last year I had Windows Update break with an obscure error message and I had to spend hours entering a DWORD into search engines before I gave up, wiped the entire machine, and started over. When a program does hang, there is no "stop immediately option" unless you bring up a command shell and use Taskkill, you are always forced to wait even when you know from the first second that you just want to exit the program completely.
Apple has the love of millions because they sweat the details as much as they can. They still screw up - see the Apple Maps fiasco - but they try very hard to make everything clean and consistent. Microsoft has an install-base of millions because they sweat the details just enough not to lose the customers, and don't seem to care if what remains will annoy the customer as long as they keep getting their money. That attitude works fine for keeping Microsoft where it is, but it won't help them take marketshare in phone or tablets from Apple, and it won't help them get nearly the fanatical loyalty that Apple has.
I hate Apple. I hate Microsoft. But I think it's easy to see why Apple's fans are fanatics and Microsoft fanatics are comparatively rare.
Yeah, we just have a note with each release - run a copy of the software against a copy of the production database, and manually run all of the stored procedures and see what breaks.
I work at a small company that has a Java web application in front of a Postgres database. For us, the PL/pgSQL (Postgres equivalent to PL-SQL) snowballed because it's something you can add and change while the database is running without kicking your current users off the web application. Unless of course you screw up.
It snowballed from there. Most of the application is still in Java, but we have a heavy set of stored procedures because once we had them working well enough to run on the production system, it's hard to justify re-implementing them in the Java code when the next big feature is a high priority.
I'm not saying this is a smart way to do things. It's not, and we have a boatload of documentation and testing for each release around the compatibility between the database, the stored procedures, and the application code. But I imagine the way it evolved for us is not unique.
I think the general product plan to unify user interface paradigms between desktop, server, tablet, and phone makes sense. And I think putting together an application store makes sense - you can check applications in the store for security problems, and get into the book/music/movie streaming and rental service just like Apple, Amazon, Google, etc...
But while the concept of what Windows 8 tried to be makes complete sense to me, the implementation did not.
I read your post out of context, then. I apologize.
I agree, I am speculating. But my wild guess is that projects like Node.js and to a lesser extent Meteor.js, etc... went from nothing to immensely popular in a short time specifically because developers were working in the same language on both sides. Aside from ease of development, what else could server-side Javascript have to recommend it?
Is it bad at doing floating point? As I stated elsewhere, Java has support for primitive types in arrays but not in other data structures like Set, List, and Map or in Java generics. So unless you carefully constraint your code to only use arrays and custom objects, you're going to have your little and fast int and double values converted to Integer and Double objects and take a huge performance hit. But beyond that, I'm not aware that Java floating point is slow.
You're right about the unsigned types, but how often is that really a problem? It doesn't matter in web development and most fat client applications. It's only a problem for certain classes of number-crunching.
If you click through the various configurations in the TechEmpower benchmarks, there are places where Java handily outdoes the lone C++ entry for performance. But in other places, C++ has a clear lead. That's also the first C++ entry to the benchmark - you have a lone C++ entry against most of the kings of the Java web world, and the Java entries have been in the benchmark for all six rounds with plenty of chances for tuning. If there were lots of C++ entries, I would be more comfortable declaring the results significant.
Conversely, the Computer Language Shootout specifically "warms" the JVM before executing the benchmarks, so that you get best-possible Java performance. So that 2x difference is realistic for some specific applications.
And I realize Java handily outdoes PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby in the benchmarks on a consistent basis.
In Java, arrays can hold the primitive types but the common data types List, Map, Set, Stack, and Queue require boxed objects. Also, Java generics only work with object types. You are free to use third party libraries or write your own code that has MyListOfInt which stores a list of int without boxing them or MyMapOfDoubles that has maps with double that is not boxed, but now you've lost interoperability with the rest of the Java universe. Or you can just work with arrays, which is fine but the whole point of List, Map, Set, Stack, and Queue is that they give you features a raw array does not have.