I switched to Mac about a decade ago. Primarily because I needed a new laptop and was tired of trying to get things like sound cards to work on Linux at the time. Apple gave me a Unix laptop that also happened to have commercial software support like MS Office. And I've been sold ever since. My time is worth something to me, especially now. I deal with technology at work all day. Last thing I want to do when I get home is get on or fix another computer. Same when I go visit my Dad, hence why I got him an iMac. Spent a total of 2 hours in 3 years working on it and that was upgrading to OS 10.6. I used to spent 2 - 3 hours everytime I was home.
The problem I find with web developers is that they are too busy chasing the "Ohh shiny" of the month. I've worked off and on with a development group over the years usually as their systems & database guru during the planning stages. This is usually once or twice a year. And each time they are using a different framework "Because it has killer feature xyz". But then they get into it and it seems like it won't do A or B and they end up coding their own.
Meanwhile, at the day job, we had a project that was very close to something I did 12 years ago and wrote in perl5. I dusted off the old scripts, installed, changed the path to perl to the new system and was up and running in less than an hour. I had to update a few lines of code to use new perl modules, but a decade later it still worked. We rewrote the backend to use PostgreSQL instead of flatfiles and updated the template files so the web pages generated don't look like something out of the NS4 days, but maintenance has been a breeze.
But most people don't care. We ship on openSuSE & SLED, primarily because that is the only distro that I've been able to run as a desktop consistently for a decade now with the fewest problems. Plus our larger customers can always get enterprise support from Novell if they want it.
But when we're dealing with smaller customers and I tell them that we ship openSuSE they'll ask, "Well I want that Ubuntu." and are often confused or don't believe that there is not much difference between openSuSE Linux and Ubuntu, both are still Linux. At first I tried the ice cream analogy, but now I've found one that works better: the GM analogy. And it should be popular here on Slashdot because it's cars.
The GM Analogy:
Me: "You know how you how a Chevy Pick up and and a GMC Pick up are the same truck with a different Grill?" Customer: "Yeah." Me: "Same thing. Ubuntu and SuSE are both linux, just with different grills." Customer: "Oh, okay. I get it."
iWork is still no MS Office. I have both and use both. Pages is extremely useful for us to create brochures and datasheets that look nice without having to have InDesign and I find it easier to work with than Word for publishing tasks. It makes up for the lack of publisher on Mac. I also like Numbers as well. I find it to be the best spreadsheet for our requirements.
But for word processing Word is still king in my book. And I still like PowerPoint better than Keynote.
More like curing cancer would put the charities out of business. It's like the March of Dimes. They're goal was to wipe out Polio. When that happen, they didn't exactly fold the tents and go home.
Last time this happened, when they dropped Adobe Premiere, Apple bought Final Cut Pro and turned it into a good replacement with version 3 vs Premiere 6 and with Final Cut Pro 4 blew Premiere out of the water for a good number of years. Even though Premiere is back on Mac, I don't know anyone in the industry that uses it on Mac. They all still use FCP.
My guess would be Apple's response would be to fork or support programs like GIMP and Inkscape and throw developers at them and overhaul their UI's to Apple's standards. What better way to spite Adobe than create free tools to replace their cash cow. Adobe already bought out and killed the only competition in professional web & graphics tools (Macromedia).
VB I agree with as we see it replaced with HTML/JS/Scripting Language of Choice for most form apps. Ruby, I still fail to see the allure. We had developers swearing it was the NEXT BIG THING and wanting to use it for everything a couple years ago. We stuck with Java, Perl and PHP and I don't even hear Ruby brought up much in development meetings anymore. Our interns had no problems finding jobs after graduating. Those that took internships & jobs at the two "Ruby Shops" in town had problems after graduating.. (In fact those Ruby Shops are now defunct and out of business). I don't think it's a problem with Ruby per sue, but those shops were always "look at this cool new shiny project we're doing" and always seemed to run into problems when it came time to scale into production.
We work with a local university with internships. It's amazing when we get third year students and the first thing we have to teach them is source control management with SVN followed by a crash course in SQL. (Specifically PostgreSQL). Now we generally bring in interns and start them off in the Java group their Junior year as they've had 4 semesters of Java at the point. Even then it seems like they spend the first two months really learning Java. If things work out well, we're moving them over to the web development group where they learn Perl (our API & backend is Perl) or PHP and Javascript (Front end stuff). Over the Summer. By the time they take their 4th year database classes, things are pretty much a breeze. Generally they know SQL better than their instructors and have already mastered everything they teach in the "web programming" course.
Which is funny, because this is what our main competitor "runs in the cloud" and we're fielding calls daily with their customers wanting to know how soon can they deploy our locally running software because it's faster and they can still work even if their internet connection goes down.
I've seen joins scale decently with Teradata. Might not be the best OLTP oriented database, but a great analytical database when you need to do very complex BI Logic searches across large datasets.
If you were hired to create an internal project that is going to be used for internal purposes and not distributed to third parties in any way, then the university can keep the code they paid you do develop as an employee without ever having to release the source code.
How is it Apple's fault when Verizon is deploying a network technology that virtually none of the rest of the world uses (CDMA)? GSM is in more places world wide and the two GSM carriers in the US are T-Mobile and AT&T. And between the two AT&T has better coverage.
This generation of the internet was initially dismissed as a toy by most companies and governments and the genie got out of the bottle. They won't make that mistake with the next generation.
Meanwhile I needed something to replace my now 6 year old 12.1" PowerBook that on its last legs. For the past year I've used my iMac for any coding or other "work", but I always have my powerbook open on the other (I have an L-shaped desk) with Email, Skype, iChat and web pages like Slashdot open. I will do my work on the iMac so I'm not interrupted and slide over the PB when I need communication. I also have a MacBook that I take with me out and about if I need to go to a meeting or want to go to a coffee shop and need battery life.
But I wanted something that replaced the role of this PowerBook. (Actually I still like the keyboard on it better than any of my other Macs. I don't like the wide spaces between the keys on the newer keyboards and laptops). The iPad does exactly what my powerbook and a little more. It plays video much smoother than this 1.5Ghz PowerPC laptop with 1.25GB of Ram and 64MB Nvidia graphics card.
I have the 3G iPad and the dataplan is cheaper than the cell card I had from the company. With it I can still log into Logmein and provide technical support to clients anywhere I go and it is much easier to tuck into my glove compartment. And if it gets stole, yeah it's $800 to replace vs. $1500 for a new 13" MacBook Pro.
You know, it would have been better from a PR stand point to have the lawyers and whomever draft up some kind of Trademark usage license for the site. I know that we have such agreements with several companies that clearly define what and how we can use their logos and marks. Hell, most of the agreements are only one sheet of paper. It would have seemed to make more sense for any company to make a reasonable and fair deal.
Got a phone call from the Illinois Dept. of Revenue wondering why we hadn't paid sales tax. Well, it's because our software is opensource. We don't see it, we sell installation, implementation, and support contracts. The guy on the other end of the phone could not get it through his head until I explained: 6% of $0.00 = $0.00.
Why we use Logmein is because we can tunnel through the firewall and do remote support even if the person standing at the terminal at the other end is a non tech. They just go to a website, download the Logmein Rescue installer, we can log in, and after the session is over the program deletes itself.
The only problem is that we can only use it from Windows and only on Windows and Macs. That leaves clients who would like to use BSD or Linux out in the cold.
Until we can use Google Apps on an Airplane, we'll be sticking with Office for Mac for the foreseeable future. There are things I like about Google Apps, especially when you need to share a document for editing during a conference call. But the privacy problem renders that to anything you don't mind your competitors seeing. And with the advent of better screen sharing tools, it renders those needs fulfilled for us.
Recently I've come across this in the day job where we forked an opensource project in order to get it PA-DSS certified, which the original supporting organization had no will to do so. But the process required by PA-DSS makes a community driven development model almost impossible. There has to be proper testing procedures in place and documented and a chain of trust for security updates, etc.. That pretty much means that the project now has to be run by our internal development team and signed binaries distributed if a customer wants PA-DSS certification. We supply the source code on the installation CD, but we have to tell customers if they do make any customizations, they are on their own when it comes to PA-DSS & other PCI requirements.
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I switched to Mac about a decade ago. Primarily because I needed a new laptop and was tired of trying to get things like sound cards to work on Linux at the time. Apple gave me a Unix laptop that also happened to have commercial software support like MS Office. And I've been sold ever since. My time is worth something to me, especially now. I deal with technology at work all day. Last thing I want to do when I get home is get on or fix another computer. Same when I go visit my Dad, hence why I got him an iMac. Spent a total of 2 hours in 3 years working on it and that was upgrading to OS 10.6. I used to spent 2 - 3 hours everytime I was home.
The problem I find with web developers is that they are too busy chasing the "Ohh shiny" of the month. I've worked off and on with a development group over the years usually as their systems & database guru during the planning stages. This is usually once or twice a year. And each time they are using a different framework "Because it has killer feature xyz". But then they get into it and it seems like it won't do A or B and they end up coding their own.
Meanwhile, at the day job, we had a project that was very close to something I did 12 years ago and wrote in perl5. I dusted off the old scripts, installed, changed the path to perl to the new system and was up and running in less than an hour. I had to update a few lines of code to use new perl modules, but a decade later it still worked. We rewrote the backend to use PostgreSQL instead of flatfiles and updated the template files so the web pages generated don't look like something out of the NS4 days, but maintenance has been a breeze.
But most people don't care. We ship on openSuSE & SLED, primarily because that is the only distro that I've been able to run as a desktop consistently for a decade now with the fewest problems. Plus our larger customers can always get enterprise support from Novell if they want it.
But when we're dealing with smaller customers and I tell them that we ship openSuSE they'll ask, "Well I want that Ubuntu." and are often confused or don't believe that there is not much difference between openSuSE Linux and Ubuntu, both are still Linux. At first I tried the ice cream analogy, but now I've found one that works better: the GM analogy. And it should be popular here on Slashdot because it's cars.
The GM Analogy:
Me: "You know how you how a Chevy Pick up and and a GMC Pick up are the same truck with a different Grill?"
Customer: "Yeah."
Me: "Same thing. Ubuntu and SuSE are both linux, just with different grills."
Customer: "Oh, okay. I get it."
iWork is still no MS Office. I have both and use both. Pages is extremely useful for us to create brochures and datasheets that look nice without having to have InDesign and I find it easier to work with than Word for publishing tasks. It makes up for the lack of publisher on Mac. I also like Numbers as well. I find it to be the best spreadsheet for our requirements.
But for word processing Word is still king in my book. And I still like PowerPoint better than Keynote.
More like curing cancer would put the charities out of business. It's like the March of Dimes. They're goal was to wipe out Polio. When that happen, they didn't exactly fold the tents and go home.
Last time this happened, when they dropped Adobe Premiere, Apple bought Final Cut Pro and turned it into a good replacement with version 3 vs Premiere 6 and with Final Cut Pro 4 blew Premiere out of the water for a good number of years. Even though Premiere is back on Mac, I don't know anyone in the industry that uses it on Mac. They all still use FCP.
My guess would be Apple's response would be to fork or support programs like GIMP and Inkscape and throw developers at them and overhaul their UI's to Apple's standards. What better way to spite Adobe than create free tools to replace their cash cow. Adobe already bought out and killed the only competition in professional web & graphics tools (Macromedia).
VB I agree with as we see it replaced with HTML/JS/Scripting Language of Choice for most form apps. Ruby, I still fail to see the allure. We had developers swearing it was the NEXT BIG THING and wanting to use it for everything a couple years ago. We stuck with Java, Perl and PHP and I don't even hear Ruby brought up much in development meetings anymore. Our interns had no problems finding jobs after graduating. Those that took internships & jobs at the two "Ruby Shops" in town had problems after graduating.. (In fact those Ruby Shops are now defunct and out of business). I don't think it's a problem with Ruby per sue, but those shops were always "look at this cool new shiny project we're doing" and always seemed to run into problems when it came time to scale into production.
We work with a local university with internships. It's amazing when we get third year students and the first thing we have to teach them is source control management with SVN followed by a crash course in SQL. (Specifically PostgreSQL). Now we generally bring in interns and start them off in the Java group their Junior year as they've had 4 semesters of Java at the point. Even then it seems like they spend the first two months really learning Java. If things work out well, we're moving them over to the web development group where they learn Perl (our API & backend is Perl) or PHP and Javascript (Front end stuff). Over the Summer. By the time they take their 4th year database classes, things are pretty much a breeze. Generally they know SQL better than their instructors and have already mastered everything they teach in the "web programming" course.
However, for security reasons, the software has been declared secret under the states secret act.
no....
Losing one iPhone 4G is happenstance.
Twice is coincidence.
Three times is a marketing campaign.
Which is funny, because this is what our main competitor "runs in the cloud" and we're fielding calls daily with their customers wanting to know how soon can they deploy our locally running software because it's faster and they can still work even if their internet connection goes down.
I've seen joins scale decently with Teradata. Might not be the best OLTP oriented database, but a great analytical database when you need to do very complex BI Logic searches across large datasets.
If you were hired to create an internal project that is going to be used for internal purposes and not distributed to third parties in any way, then the university can keep the code they paid you do develop as an employee without ever having to release the source code.
How is it Apple's fault when Verizon is deploying a network technology that virtually none of the rest of the world uses (CDMA)? GSM is in more places world wide and the two GSM carriers in the US are T-Mobile and AT&T. And between the two AT&T has better coverage.
And then was quoted by Brian Williams later: "The dirty little secret is the world is out of money and the emperor has no clothes."
All of government is going to have to be cut back and more than 50% of the people paying taxes. Not just the "rich".
Ah, the friendly folks over at Red Vs. Blue did a public service anouncement about this a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvNeHthx3Ng
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch some MP48's on my HHD DVVDD BVD player.
This generation of the internet was initially dismissed as a toy by most companies and governments and the genie got out of the bottle. They won't make that mistake with the next generation.
Meanwhile I needed something to replace my now 6 year old 12.1" PowerBook that on its last legs. For the past year I've used my iMac for any coding or other "work", but I always have my powerbook open on the other (I have an L-shaped desk) with Email, Skype, iChat and web pages like Slashdot open. I will do my work on the iMac so I'm not interrupted and slide over the PB when I need communication. I also have a MacBook that I take with me out and about if I need to go to a meeting or want to go to a coffee shop and need battery life.
But I wanted something that replaced the role of this PowerBook. (Actually I still like the keyboard on it better than any of my other Macs. I don't like the wide spaces between the keys on the newer keyboards and laptops). The iPad does exactly what my powerbook and a little more. It plays video much smoother than this 1.5Ghz PowerPC laptop with 1.25GB of Ram and 64MB Nvidia graphics card.
I have the 3G iPad and the dataplan is cheaper than the cell card I had from the company. With it I can still log into Logmein and provide technical support to clients anywhere I go and it is much easier to tuck into my glove compartment. And if it gets stole, yeah it's $800 to replace vs. $1500 for a new 13" MacBook Pro.
You know, it would have been better from a PR stand point to have the lawyers and whomever draft up some kind of Trademark usage license for the site. I know that we have such agreements with several companies that clearly define what and how we can use their logos and marks. Hell, most of the agreements are only one sheet of paper. It would have seemed to make more sense for any company to make a reasonable and fair deal.
Got a phone call from the Illinois Dept. of Revenue wondering why we hadn't paid sales tax. Well, it's because our software is opensource. We don't see it, we sell installation, implementation, and support contracts. The guy on the other end of the phone could not get it through his head until I explained: 6% of $0.00 = $0.00.
*ducks*
Why we use Logmein is because we can tunnel through the firewall and do remote support even if the person standing at the terminal at the other end is a non tech. They just go to a website, download the Logmein Rescue installer, we can log in, and after the session is over the program deletes itself.
The only problem is that we can only use it from Windows and only on Windows and Macs. That leaves clients who would like to use BSD or Linux out in the cold.
Free....so long as your privacy is worth nothing.
Until we can use Google Apps on an Airplane, we'll be sticking with Office for Mac for the foreseeable future. There are things I like about Google Apps, especially when you need to share a document for editing during a conference call. But the privacy problem renders that to anything you don't mind your competitors seeing. And with the advent of better screen sharing tools, it renders those needs fulfilled for us.
Recently I've come across this in the day job where we forked an opensource project in order to get it PA-DSS certified, which the original supporting organization had no will to do so. But the process required by PA-DSS makes a community driven development model almost impossible. There has to be proper testing procedures in place and documented and a chain of trust for security updates, etc.. That pretty much means that the project now has to be run by our internal development team and signed binaries distributed if a customer wants PA-DSS certification. We supply the source code on the installation CD, but we have to tell customers if they do make any customizations, they are on their own when it comes to PA-DSS & other PCI requirements.