I love writing code. I've spent most of my career working in C++, then moved on to a job working in plain C, and now I'm leaving a job where most of my work is in C#. At the same time, I do a lot of private work, and most of it is embedded C. At university I studied perl, assembler, java and smalltalk, and I started programming when I was 6 in BASIC on a Commodore 64.
While I really love the low-level work I do in the embedded C projects, C# just makes life easier, because I don't have to write lines of boilerplate C in order to get certain things done. He seems to think that the moment you touch.net, you forget all of the low-level knowledge you may already have, and turn into a McDonald's kitchen-worker zombie. While it may be true that some developers who only have experience with.net may not have a low-level understanding of how their code actually works, it's ridiculous to say that having.net on your resume immediately makes you a button-pushing drone.
What this CEO doesn't realise is that a good deveoper is a good developer. It doesn't matter what platform he's most familiar with. What matters is the way he solves problems. Once you've solved the logic problem, it's often a lot easier to implement the solution in something like C#, because of the huge class libraries available to you, allowing you to focus on solving *your* problem, rather than reimplementing socket/windows/threading/collection/etc libraries that are required, but not the focus of what you're trying to achieve..NET (and Java, although I don't work with Java), gives you the building blocks so that you don't need to worry about them, and allows you to focus on putting them together to solve *your* problem.
This "Venture Capital CEO" (who apparently thinks that.NET is a language for some reason) sounds like he's had a bunch of bad experiences with dumb.net developers, and is now holding the platform responsible for that. He also seems to think that in order to be a great developer, you have to write everything low level, and avoid the rich class libraries available, because using libraries makes you a cookie-cutter developer. I wonder what he thinks of all those perl and python developers that build systems by leveraging existing CPAN/etc libraries? Would he rather have his "best of the world" developers create their own libraries from scratch, purely in order to avoid re-using the ones that Microsoft provided? Or would he rather have his developers focus on solving problems in his own domain, and not having to worry about all of the plumbing, since it's already there?
Finally, he's updated his post with a few responses to the comments he's received. One of them is that, apparently, startups don't use.net. He apparently bases this on looking at the HTTP headers of startups websites and deciding on their platform of choice based on whether their websites run IIS instead of Apache. Well, I'm leaving my current job in 2 weeks to form a startup with a friend. We will be developing almost exclusively on.net, because it will allow us to put our product out a whole lot sooner than if we were to do it in C++ (which both of us are extremely familiar with) because it allows us to focus on *our* product, and not reimplementing low-level plumbing. And our website is currently running PHP on Apache, because, being a startup, hosting a php site is a hell of a lot cheaper than hosting an IIS one, especially when there isn't much content yet because we don't have a product yet.
We're both people who "grew up cooking squirrels over campfires that we caught and skinned ourselves from the deep forests". Now, we buy our ingredients from a supplier and spend our time creating a meal, rather than wasting our time running around in the bush gathering our own herbs from the ground and hunting our own cattle, then having to come home, clean and prepare, and only then actually start working i
If you actually believe that Internet Explorer was *ever* integrated with the Windows kernel, then you need a refresher course in "history".
The only time IE was part of the Windows kernel was in the dreams of commenters posting on slashdot.
Unfortunately, every time we tread down that path again, the path is always filled with the same misinformed FUD that gets modded up as insightful, with the corrections being modded down as flamebait. e.g. IE is embedded in the kernel, Dos ain't done till Lotus won't run, 640k should be enough for everybody. These have repeatedly been proven to be false, yet they still get spouted around on/. as if they were the gospel truth.
For a supposedly tech-savvy audience, and for the number of times people are quick to point out that Linux is "only a kernel, not an operating system", it's quite sad that people are completely unable to apply that same logic to the Windows kernel vs the Windows OS.
Stop spreading the FUD and we won't have to go down these paths every time someone posts the same tired old incorrect junk.
Now all we need is to figure a way to get all the cabon-laden pollution to be recycled into graphene and we'll be all set. How plausible would that be once the technology is refined enough?
It is a South Africanism, in that everything here gets turned into a race issue whether it has anything to do with race or not. Despite the fall of apartheid and having a democratically elected government, the new 'leadership' still has a vested interest in creating the perception that whites are still out to get blacks - it's a nice diversion to distract their voters away from the government's corruption and hypocrisy. Everything the ANC seems to do these days creates the impression that they deliberately keep their own supporters beaten down in order to retain their support, blaming the supporters misfortune on racism and 'the legacy of apartheid'. I get the impression that we'll still be blaming apartheid in another 50 years time... that is assuming that the ANC doesn't finally give up all pretenses and just publicly turn the country into another Zimbabwe, rather than trying to do it behind the scenes.
An unfortunate side-effect of the continuous cry of racism is that a (hopefully small and insignificant) number of the youth of today are growing up indoctrinated with the belief that everything is still a race issue. A key example of this is the leader of the ANC youth league, Julius Malema. While he's generally ridiculed universally for his stupid utterances and ridiculous beliefs, the sad reality is that he actually believes in what the rest of us consider to be drivel. And he is poised to rise into the leadership of the ANC and therefore the country within the next decade or two.
Every time you read a report of something being connected to racism in South Africa, take it with a grain of salt. Yes, there is still a lot of racism going on, but it's the same sort that you experience anywhere else... nowhere near what we used to have. It's sad to see the ANC that fought so hard to end apartheid is now working so hard to ensure that it prevails.
I have no idea if its related or purely coincidental, but ever since I've had the 'Disable Ads' box checked, I've never received mod-points, despite receiving them somewhat regularly up till then.
No need for crazy car-stuck-on-crossing scenarios...
- I'm driving, my passenger is on the phone, relaying landmarks to the person on the other side, and giving me directions as I drive. ("Ok, let me call you back after the next two turns and we've come to a safe stop because driver Runaway1956 doesn't want me to talk on the phone while he drives") - I'm driving, we pass a big traffic jam, my passenger calls others that we know will be taking the same route, advising them to take another route ("Yeah sorry dude, we saw the traffic jam you got stuck in 15 mins before you left the office, but I had to wait until Runaway1956 stopped the car in order to call and let you know about it and of course by then you were already stuck")
Those are both completely legitimate scenarios of a passenger using the phone while the car is moving. You must be a bundle of joy, demanding that your passengers hand over their cellphones to be locked up until the car is at a safe stop.
A common trend I've noticed amongst the vast (99%) majority of PHP developers is that they are almost guaranteed to be a) completely devoted to PHP b) incredibly arrogant c) mediocre developers at best
Except that the standard warranty generally doesn't last as long as you would reasonably expect the product to work. Notebook computers usually come with a standard 1 year warranty, but I would reasonably expect a notebook to continue working for at least 3 years. My personal notebook is well over 2 years old and still works fine, however, thanks to the extended warranty that I purchased, I got a new screen yesterday because of a column of blue pixels that suddenly showed up last week.
Unless you make a habit of replacing all of your devices every year, the extended warranty is often useful, depending on the device. I use my notebook every day, all day, and the extended warranty was worth the peace of mind knowing that I would only need to replace it after a minimum of 3 years - it's insured against theft and accidental damage, and the extended warranty covers device faults and failures. Without it, I'd probably have had to buy a new notebook in the next few weeks/months, depending on how annoying the screen fault became.
The problems you experienced at new years are because of network congestion, and that can happen at other times as well. I sent my girlfriend an SMS last Tuesday at lunch time and it only arrived on Friday or Saturday night. Cellular networks occasionally have problems which could lead to SMSs being delayed. While you might be used to SMSs arriving instantly, they very often do not.
Then either your app quality or your support skills were lacking. Developers routinely run local copies of SQL server on their development machines without having any issues whatsoever. I ran SQL server 2005 for years on my development machine without even noticing it was running. I currently run SQL Server Express 2008 on my development machine and it runs perfectly. I have also installed SQL Server Express 2008 on 1GHz compact pcs with 512mb ram and 4gb of disk space. The only issue with performing the installation on those was freeing up enough space for the installer to unpack itself and run. Installing SQL server is as simple as clicking next a bunch of times.
A desktop machine/os is so slightly different from a server machine/os that unless you are doing something horribly wrong, there should be no performance/functionality difference between running something like sql server on either of them.
I've worked on both. I spent 6 years working on online gambling software and my former employer is very highly regarded, both for their software as well as their staff, benefits, etc.
I currently work on casino management software for land-based casinos - software that manages player accounts, points and rewards allocations and redemptions, slot and table accounting - pretty much everything to do with the casino. (I've also had other jobs and positive interviews for other jobs in other completely unrelated industries, so it's also not a case of being stuck in the industry once you've entered it).
Funny enough, despite the fact that I need to have a gambling board license for the current job, and that our software needs to be tested and certified by an independent verification lab, and then certified and licensed by the gambling board, the quality of the software produced by my completely unregulated previous employer was light years ahead of the stuff I've inherited at my current job. Despite having two gambling related jobs on my CV, I've had no problems with recruitment agents hassling me for interviews despite the job slump, so I think the perceived black mark is very subjective and due to misplaced perceptions about the industry - in fact, it appears that you have incorrect assumptions about the industries yourself, most likely arising purely from perceptions, rather than actual exposure to either industry from the inside.
Although the online gambling industry is not regulated, the various big players in the market have a very huge incentive to be completely legit - firstly, most of the big suppliers have their software and accounts independently audited as a piece-of-mind assurance to their players. Secondly, there is absolutely no incentive to crook the payouts, as the serious players would notice this in an instant and your reputation would fall through the floor overnight (besides, an online casino has much less overhead than a physical one, and can afford higher payout percentages rather than forcing lower payouts through dubious means). Finally, the competition between online casinos is very intense - players generally have accounts across a dozen different casinos and will choose the one that has the best bonuses, best games, best features, and best overall playability without much regard to loyalty at all. This means that online casino developers need to be able to predict the markets demands and adapt their software ahead of the competition much faster than the land-based developers need to, which in turns leads to online casino development houses looking for the best of the best to satisfy their requirements.
tl;dr: there's nothing wrong or shady about hiring people that have worked in large, reputable gambling companies, just like any other industry. Of course there are shady "gambling" sites, but you get those in any industry. My former employer's reputation of hiring excellent staff and producing excellent online gambling software makes their name on my CV a seal of approval - in many interviews, the interviewer raises an eyebrow at the fact that I left there voluntarily, and on numerous occasions have dropped a comment about the fact that they've heard many good things about them.
That's not a Visual Studio C++ issue, it's the way Windows memory management works. No matter what IDE/compiler/CRT you use, memory allocated by one dll cannot be (reliably) freed by another. It has to be freed by the same dll that allocated it. I'm not 100% sure, but I think you might also run into the same issue if you unload the dll and reload it before freeing the memory.
Apple pulled the Commodore 64 emulator from the app store after it was accepted. To be fair, this was after reports of how to get to a BASIC command prompt surfaced, which is why the app was originally rejected. But Apple has removed previously accepted apps from the store. If they had a kill-switch mechanism on the iPhone, they most likely would have remotely remoted the C64 emulator from those phones that had purchased it as well.
What I don't get is how supposedly intelligent people actually believe that Microsoft would do such a retarded thing, and how other supposedly intelligent people actually mod that up as insightful.
I get that the slashdot community generally has a dislike for microsoft, but believing absolute bullshit like this is puzzling.
What possible use could microsoft have for a list of your non-drm'd files? Why would they give the slightest hint of a shit about your poor taste in music or pornography?
MS isn't a hardware company, it's a software company, and it competes directly with Linux.
Anyway, other than this, it really isn't different, but several posters here are acting like it's some kind of useful contribution to Linux. It's not. It's only useful for MS customers running Hyper-V who want to run Linux on top of that.
SO WHAT?
If MS doesn't do this, it's their customers who will suffer, not the Linux community at large.
Are you saying that the people that run linux on microsoft platforms don't count? You keep on going on about how this only benefits people running linux on windows servers, but really, SO FUCKING WHAT?
Why is Intel allowed to make drivers that directly benefit running linux on only intel hardware, but when microsoft delivers a driver that benefits linux running on a microsoft hypervisor, suddenly that's being greedy and the contribution is worthless?
Both intel and microsoft are providing a platform on which linux runs. Intel's happens to be actual hardware, microsoft's happens to be a virtualized environment. Either way, it doesnt fucking matter because they have contributed a driver that improves the performance of running linux on a particular platform, yet because it's from the evil microsoft, you refuse to acknowledge the benefit of it.
Or is software contributed under the GPL only worthwhile if it meets your sophisticated requirements?
If MS doesn't do this, it's their customers who will suffer, not the Linux community at large.
No, you are so very wrong. The customers that this driver will benefit are already running windows servers, and have decided to virtualize linux on top of that, instead of virtualizing windows on top of linux. If the linux performance sucks because people like you are too arrogant to work with microsoft patches, then those companies will simply decide that linux doesn't suit their needs and move the software they were planning on running in linux, onto windows. So the linux community will suffer, not MS.
It's not like they're contributing something that's generally useful to most Linux users, like a codec or a font, or a filesystem. So stop acting like it is.
So a driver that improves linux's performance on a new platform isn't useful? Please pull your head out of your ass and stop looking at it as something from the evil microsoft corporation, and instead see it as something beneficial to the linux community.
Visual Studio Express is also free, as are the Windows and Windows Mobile SDKs. And you can develop in.net for WinMo using the.net Compact Framework, not only C/C++.
And it doesn't cost money to deploy to a real phone or list on an app store (and you dont run the risk of having your dev costs flow down the toilet entirely because Apple rejected your app).
Not only that, but he gives Snow Leopard a point for doing a 'flawless upgrade' while Windows 7 didn't pick up his video card during installation, but it was rectified immediately afterwards when it pulled it from Windows Update. Then later in the article he goes on about how Apple controls the entire hardware platform and Microsoft has to battle with countless configuration combinations. Why didn't be bring that point up in the installation/upgrade section? Microsoft can't include every possible driver on the disc, but the fact that all his hardware was working as soon as he visited Windows Update is a feather in MS's cap in my opinion. Apple only had to care about a handful of different setups, and they control them all.
It seems the author went out of his way to make sure that the 'test' resulted in a tie, to prevent being flamed from either side. I mean really... giving a point based on the name... that's just ridiculous.
The bug is really dangerous because it allows userspace to write anywhere to kernelspace. Yes, it's a local-only exploit, so the attack surface isn't that large. Or is it? How many pieces of software do you have running on your system right now that may contain vulnerabilities? It would be trivial for a skilled hacker to find an exploit in some arb application, with the payload being an exploit of this particular issue. So your local-only exploit has a remote entry-point from any other piece of software thats running on your system.
Local-only exploits are only less dangerous than remote exploits if your system has no contact with other systems. When you expose your system to others, all of your local exploits become remote exploits the moment any piece of software that you run has a remote exploit. Recently there have been a number of reports of vulnerabilities in common applications like Firefox, and Adobe doesn't have a particularly great security track record either. Ideally, a vulnerability in one of these applications would only be able to run code as the user, or attack the user's home directory. Except since you can now modify any address in kernel space, you can craft code that tells the kernel your userid actually has root permissions, in which case you now have complete control over the whole system.
Every kernel-level exploit is *really dangerous*. Marketing people will try to play it down by saying that since its local-only, it's not that bad, so that they can carry on making dumb 'im a pc, im a mac' adverts and patting themselves on the back. But all they're doing is lulling their userbase into a false sense of security.
Do you realise that most of the guts of Windows is actually written in C++? And that the secretary of the C++ Standards Committe, Herb Sutter, works for Microsoft? Are you even a C++ developer at all?
No, MS's motto was never "dos aint done til lotus won't run", and it frustrates me that people that continually repeat these lies get modded up, which helps to spread the misinformation. Microsoft puts immeasurable effort into ensuring backwards compatibility. And because Lotus was the predominant spreadsheet for quite a while, Microsoft went to great lengths to ensure that lotus would most definitely run on newer versions of DOS. Who would buy a newer version of DOS if their spreadsheet didn't work on it?
Slashdot itself ran an article that showed it to be a myth. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/02/2219208 Please stop spreading these untruths. And don't bother calling me a shill or an astroturfer - it just makes you look childish.
As I just mentioned in another post, in South Africa, I pay around $15 for 2GB of data per month. That's excluding line rental. After that, its around $9-$10/GB. Fastest home DSL line speed available is officially 1MB/s, going up to 4MB/s depending on your line quality and distance from the exchange. Local bandwidth (connecting to South African hosts) is dirt cheap, but international is pretty much daylight robbery. The US has the benefit that most datacenters are hosted in the US already, and the US also has a huge number of undersea cables running from all over the coastlines to Europe and Asia where most of the rest of the internet is hosted. The whole of Africa has a tiny number of cables, meaning that internet access is hideously expensive.
It always amuses me that people from the US complain when their ISPs threaten to impose 100GB/month caps. You guys have absolutely no idea how lucky you are.
Slashdot Mirror
I love writing code. I've spent most of my career working in C++, then moved on to a job working in plain C, and now I'm leaving a job where most of my work is in C#. At the same time, I do a lot of private work, and most of it is embedded C. At university I studied perl, assembler, java and smalltalk, and I started programming when I was 6 in BASIC on a Commodore 64.
While I really love the low-level work I do in the embedded C projects, C# just makes life easier, because I don't have to write lines of boilerplate C in order to get certain things done. He seems to think that the moment you touch .net, you forget all of the low-level knowledge you may already have, and turn into a McDonald's kitchen-worker zombie. While it may be true that some developers who only have experience with .net may not have a low-level understanding of how their code actually works, it's ridiculous to say that having .net on your resume immediately makes you a button-pushing drone.
What this CEO doesn't realise is that a good deveoper is a good developer. It doesn't matter what platform he's most familiar with. What matters is the way he solves problems. Once you've solved the logic problem, it's often a lot easier to implement the solution in something like C#, because of the huge class libraries available to you, allowing you to focus on solving *your* problem, rather than reimplementing socket/windows/threading/collection/etc libraries that are required, but not the focus of what you're trying to achieve. .NET (and Java, although I don't work with Java), gives you the building blocks so that you don't need to worry about them, and allows you to focus on putting them together to solve *your* problem.
This "Venture Capital CEO" (who apparently thinks that .NET is a language for some reason) sounds like he's had a bunch of bad experiences with dumb .net developers, and is now holding the platform responsible for that. He also seems to think that in order to be a great developer, you have to write everything low level, and avoid the rich class libraries available, because using libraries makes you a cookie-cutter developer. I wonder what he thinks of all those perl and python developers that build systems by leveraging existing CPAN/etc libraries? Would he rather have his "best of the world" developers create their own libraries from scratch, purely in order to avoid re-using the ones that Microsoft provided? Or would he rather have his developers focus on solving problems in his own domain, and not having to worry about all of the plumbing, since it's already there?
Finally, he's updated his post with a few responses to the comments he's received. One of them is that, apparently, startups don't use .net. He apparently bases this on looking at the HTTP headers of startups websites and deciding on their platform of choice based on whether their websites run IIS instead of Apache. Well, I'm leaving my current job in 2 weeks to form a startup with a friend. We will be developing almost exclusively on .net, because it will allow us to put our product out a whole lot sooner than if we were to do it in C++ (which both of us are extremely familiar with) because it allows us to focus on *our* product, and not reimplementing low-level plumbing.
And our website is currently running PHP on Apache, because, being a startup, hosting a php site is a hell of a lot cheaper than hosting an IIS one, especially when there isn't much content yet because we don't have a product yet.
We're both people who "grew up cooking squirrels over campfires that we caught and skinned ourselves from the deep forests". Now, we buy our ingredients from a supplier and spend our time creating a meal, rather than wasting our time running around in the bush gathering our own herbs from the ground and hunting our own cattle, then having to come home, clean and prepare, and only then actually start working i
If you actually believe that Internet Explorer was *ever* integrated with the Windows kernel, then you need a refresher course in "history".
The only time IE was part of the Windows kernel was in the dreams of commenters posting on slashdot.
Unfortunately, every time we tread down that path again, the path is always filled with the same misinformed FUD that gets modded up as insightful, with the corrections being modded down as flamebait. e.g. IE is embedded in the kernel, Dos ain't done till Lotus won't run, 640k should be enough for everybody. These have repeatedly been proven to be false, yet they still get spouted around on /. as if they were the gospel truth.
For a supposedly tech-savvy audience, and for the number of times people are quick to point out that Linux is "only a kernel, not an operating system", it's quite sad that people are completely unable to apply that same logic to the Windows kernel vs the Windows OS.
Stop spreading the FUD and we won't have to go down these paths every time someone posts the same tired old incorrect junk.
Now all we need is to figure a way to get all the cabon-laden pollution to be recycled into graphene and we'll be all set. How plausible would that be once the technology is refined enough?
It is a South Africanism, in that everything here gets turned into a race issue whether it has anything to do with race or not. Despite the fall of apartheid and having a democratically elected government, the new 'leadership' still has a vested interest in creating the perception that whites are still out to get blacks - it's a nice diversion to distract their voters away from the government's corruption and hypocrisy. Everything the ANC seems to do these days creates the impression that they deliberately keep their own supporters beaten down in order to retain their support, blaming the supporters misfortune on racism and 'the legacy of apartheid'. I get the impression that we'll still be blaming apartheid in another 50 years time... that is assuming that the ANC doesn't finally give up all pretenses and just publicly turn the country into another Zimbabwe, rather than trying to do it behind the scenes.
An unfortunate side-effect of the continuous cry of racism is that a (hopefully small and insignificant) number of the youth of today are growing up indoctrinated with the belief that everything is still a race issue. A key example of this is the leader of the ANC youth league, Julius Malema. While he's generally ridiculed universally for his stupid utterances and ridiculous beliefs, the sad reality is that he actually believes in what the rest of us consider to be drivel. And he is poised to rise into the leadership of the ANC and therefore the country within the next decade or two.
Every time you read a report of something being connected to racism in South Africa, take it with a grain of salt. Yes, there is still a lot of racism going on, but it's the same sort that you experience anywhere else... nowhere near what we used to have. It's sad to see the ANC that fought so hard to end apartheid is now working so hard to ensure that it prevails.
I have no idea if its related or purely coincidental, but ever since I've had the 'Disable Ads' box checked, I've never received mod-points, despite receiving them somewhat regularly up till then.
No need for crazy car-stuck-on-crossing scenarios...
- I'm driving, my passenger is on the phone, relaying landmarks to the person on the other side, and giving me directions as I drive. ("Ok, let me call you back after the next two turns and we've come to a safe stop because driver Runaway1956 doesn't want me to talk on the phone while he drives")
- I'm driving, we pass a big traffic jam, my passenger calls others that we know will be taking the same route, advising them to take another route ("Yeah sorry dude, we saw the traffic jam you got stuck in 15 mins before you left the office, but I had to wait until Runaway1956 stopped the car in order to call and let you know about it and of course by then you were already stuck")
Those are both completely legitimate scenarios of a passenger using the phone while the car is moving. You must be a bundle of joy, demanding that your passengers hand over their cellphones to be locked up until the car is at a safe stop.
A common trend I've noticed amongst the vast (99%) majority of PHP developers is that they are almost guaranteed to be
a) completely devoted to PHP
b) incredibly arrogant
c) mediocre developers at best
Except that the standard warranty generally doesn't last as long as you would reasonably expect the product to work. Notebook computers usually come with a standard 1 year warranty, but I would reasonably expect a notebook to continue working for at least 3 years. My personal notebook is well over 2 years old and still works fine, however, thanks to the extended warranty that I purchased, I got a new screen yesterday because of a column of blue pixels that suddenly showed up last week.
Unless you make a habit of replacing all of your devices every year, the extended warranty is often useful, depending on the device. I use my notebook every day, all day, and the extended warranty was worth the peace of mind knowing that I would only need to replace it after a minimum of 3 years - it's insured against theft and accidental damage, and the extended warranty covers device faults and failures. Without it, I'd probably have had to buy a new notebook in the next few weeks/months, depending on how annoying the screen fault became.
The problems you experienced at new years are because of network congestion, and that can happen at other times as well. I sent my girlfriend an SMS last Tuesday at lunch time and it only arrived on Friday or Saturday night. Cellular networks occasionally have problems which could lead to SMSs being delayed. While you might be used to SMSs arriving instantly, they very often do not.
Then either your app quality or your support skills were lacking. Developers routinely run local copies of SQL server on their development machines without having any issues whatsoever. I ran SQL server 2005 for years on my development machine without even noticing it was running. I currently run SQL Server Express 2008 on my development machine and it runs perfectly. I have also installed SQL Server Express 2008 on 1GHz compact pcs with 512mb ram and 4gb of disk space. The only issue with performing the installation on those was freeing up enough space for the installer to unpack itself and run. Installing SQL server is as simple as clicking next a bunch of times.
A desktop machine/os is so slightly different from a server machine/os that unless you are doing something horribly wrong, there should be no performance/functionality difference between running something like sql server on either of them.
I've worked on both. I spent 6 years working on online gambling software and my former employer is very highly regarded, both for their software as well as their staff, benefits, etc.
I currently work on casino management software for land-based casinos - software that manages player accounts, points and rewards allocations and redemptions, slot and table accounting - pretty much everything to do with the casino. (I've also had other jobs and positive interviews for other jobs in other completely unrelated industries, so it's also not a case of being stuck in the industry once you've entered it).
Funny enough, despite the fact that I need to have a gambling board license for the current job, and that our software needs to be tested and certified by an independent verification lab, and then certified and licensed by the gambling board, the quality of the software produced by my completely unregulated previous employer was light years ahead of the stuff I've inherited at my current job.
Despite having two gambling related jobs on my CV, I've had no problems with recruitment agents hassling me for interviews despite the job slump, so I think the perceived black mark is very subjective and due to misplaced perceptions about the industry - in fact, it appears that you have incorrect assumptions about the industries yourself, most likely arising purely from perceptions, rather than actual exposure to either industry from the inside.
Although the online gambling industry is not regulated, the various big players in the market have a very huge incentive to be completely legit - firstly, most of the big suppliers have their software and accounts independently audited as a piece-of-mind assurance to their players. Secondly, there is absolutely no incentive to crook the payouts, as the serious players would notice this in an instant and your reputation would fall through the floor overnight (besides, an online casino has much less overhead than a physical one, and can afford higher payout percentages rather than forcing lower payouts through dubious means). Finally, the competition between online casinos is very intense - players generally have accounts across a dozen different casinos and will choose the one that has the best bonuses, best games, best features, and best overall playability without much regard to loyalty at all. This means that online casino developers need to be able to predict the markets demands and adapt their software ahead of the competition much faster than the land-based developers need to, which in turns leads to online casino development houses looking for the best of the best to satisfy their requirements.
tl;dr: there's nothing wrong or shady about hiring people that have worked in large, reputable gambling companies, just like any other industry. Of course there are shady "gambling" sites, but you get those in any industry. My former employer's reputation of hiring excellent staff and producing excellent online gambling software makes their name on my CV a seal of approval - in many interviews, the interviewer raises an eyebrow at the fact that I left there voluntarily, and on numerous occasions have dropped a comment about the fact that they've heard many good things about them.
That's not a Visual Studio C++ issue, it's the way Windows memory management works. No matter what IDE/compiler/CRT you use, memory allocated by one dll cannot be (reliably) freed by another. It has to be freed by the same dll that allocated it. I'm not 100% sure, but I think you might also run into the same issue if you unload the dll and reload it before freeing the memory.
Wait, you're such a keyboard power-user that you spent half an hour looking for a shortcut to switch between tabs, and you don't know about ctrl+tab?
This is not an "update". It is a separate application.
Apple pulled the Commodore 64 emulator from the app store after it was accepted. To be fair, this was after reports of how to get to a BASIC command prompt surfaced, which is why the app was originally rejected.
But Apple has removed previously accepted apps from the store. If they had a kill-switch mechanism on the iPhone, they most likely would have remotely remoted the C64 emulator from those phones that had purchased it as well.
see http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/09/09/08/1714205.shtml
What I don't get is how supposedly intelligent people actually believe that Microsoft would do such a retarded thing, and how other supposedly intelligent people actually mod that up as insightful.
I get that the slashdot community generally has a dislike for microsoft, but believing absolute bullshit like this is puzzling.
What possible use could microsoft have for a list of your non-drm'd files? Why would they give the slightest hint of a shit about your poor taste in music or pornography?
SO WHAT?
Are you saying that the people that run linux on microsoft platforms don't count? You keep on going on about how this only benefits people running linux on windows servers, but really, SO FUCKING WHAT?
Why is Intel allowed to make drivers that directly benefit running linux on only intel hardware, but when microsoft delivers a driver that benefits linux running on a microsoft hypervisor, suddenly that's being greedy and the contribution is worthless?
Both intel and microsoft are providing a platform on which linux runs. Intel's happens to be actual hardware, microsoft's happens to be a virtualized environment. Either way, it doesnt fucking matter because they have contributed a driver that improves the performance of running linux on a particular platform, yet because it's from the evil microsoft, you refuse to acknowledge the benefit of it.
Or is software contributed under the GPL only worthwhile if it meets your sophisticated requirements?
No, you are so very wrong. The customers that this driver will benefit are already running windows servers, and have decided to virtualize linux on top of that, instead of virtualizing windows on top of linux. If the linux performance sucks because people like you are too arrogant to work with microsoft patches, then those companies will simply decide that linux doesn't suit their needs and move the software they were planning on running in linux, onto windows. So the linux community will suffer, not MS.
So a driver that improves linux's performance on a new platform isn't useful? Please pull your head out of your ass and stop looking at it as something from the evil microsoft corporation, and instead see it as something beneficial to the linux community.
This xkcd comic seems like it was written especially for you
Visual Studio Express is also free, as are the Windows and Windows Mobile SDKs. And you can develop in .net for WinMo using the .net Compact Framework, not only C/C++.
And it doesn't cost money to deploy to a real phone or list on an app store (and you dont run the risk of having your dev costs flow down the toilet entirely because Apple rejected your app).
Not only that, but he gives Snow Leopard a point for doing a 'flawless upgrade' while Windows 7 didn't pick up his video card during installation, but it was rectified immediately afterwards when it pulled it from Windows Update. Then later in the article he goes on about how Apple controls the entire hardware platform and Microsoft has to battle with countless configuration combinations. Why didn't be bring that point up in the installation/upgrade section? Microsoft can't include every possible driver on the disc, but the fact that all his hardware was working as soon as he visited Windows Update is a feather in MS's cap in my opinion. Apple only had to care about a handful of different setups, and they control them all.
It seems the author went out of his way to make sure that the 'test' resulted in a tie, to prevent being flamed from either side. I mean really... giving a point based on the name... that's just ridiculous.
The bug is really dangerous because it allows userspace to write anywhere to kernelspace. Yes, it's a local-only exploit, so the attack surface isn't that large. Or is it? How many pieces of software do you have running on your system right now that may contain vulnerabilities? It would be trivial for a skilled hacker to find an exploit in some arb application, with the payload being an exploit of this particular issue. So your local-only exploit has a remote entry-point from any other piece of software thats running on your system.
Local-only exploits are only less dangerous than remote exploits if your system has no contact with other systems. When you expose your system to others, all of your local exploits become remote exploits the moment any piece of software that you run has a remote exploit. Recently there have been a number of reports of vulnerabilities in common applications like Firefox, and Adobe doesn't have a particularly great security track record either. Ideally, a vulnerability in one of these applications would only be able to run code as the user, or attack the user's home directory. Except since you can now modify any address in kernel space, you can craft code that tells the kernel your userid actually has root permissions, in which case you now have complete control over the whole system.
Every kernel-level exploit is *really dangerous*. Marketing people will try to play it down by saying that since its local-only, it's not that bad, so that they can carry on making dumb 'im a pc, im a mac' adverts and patting themselves on the back. But all they're doing is lulling their userbase into a false sense of security.
Do you realise that most of the guts of Windows is actually written in C++? And that the secretary of the C++ Standards Committe, Herb Sutter, works for Microsoft?
Are you even a C++ developer at all?
Apple is a monopoly when it comes to application availability for the iPhone.
I suggest you read up a bit more about the AARD code before jumping to conspiracy theory conclusions. There were technical reasons for including it:
http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/08/12/213681.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/08/13/214338.aspx
No, MS's motto was never "dos aint done til lotus won't run", and it frustrates me that people that continually repeat these lies get modded up, which helps to spread the misinformation.
Microsoft puts immeasurable effort into ensuring backwards compatibility. And because Lotus was the predominant spreadsheet for quite a while, Microsoft went to great lengths to ensure that lotus would most definitely run on newer versions of DOS. Who would buy a newer version of DOS if their spreadsheet didn't work on it?
Slashdot itself ran an article that showed it to be a myth. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/02/2219208
Please stop spreading these untruths. And don't bother calling me a shill or an astroturfer - it just makes you look childish.
As I just mentioned in another post, in South Africa, I pay around $15 for 2GB of data per month. That's excluding line rental. After that, its around $9-$10/GB. Fastest home DSL line speed available is officially 1MB/s, going up to 4MB/s depending on your line quality and distance from the exchange.
Local bandwidth (connecting to South African hosts) is dirt cheap, but international is pretty much daylight robbery. The US has the benefit that most datacenters are hosted in the US already, and the US also has a huge number of undersea cables running from all over the coastlines to Europe and Asia where most of the rest of the internet is hosted. The whole of Africa has a tiny number of cables, meaning that internet access is hideously expensive.
http://www.nrc.nl/multimedia/archive/00170/270808ECO_glasvezel_170984a.jpg
http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_cable/images/Cable_Map_big.gif
It always amuses me that people from the US complain when their ISPs threaten to impose 100GB/month caps. You guys have absolutely no idea how lucky you are.