I think Microsoft is still capable of producing good products, but they are getting rarer and rarer. And they tend to be produced by a single team, it doesn't filter through to the rest of the organisation.
Frankly I'd say that it was arguable whether 2007 is much better than 2003. In a number of areas, 2007 is more of a headache, and that is not just a comment on the new UI. MSDN is also pretty good, however it sometimes a little... odd. For example shifting all the members out of the pages for the object. 90% of the time, the members are what you are looking for.
The number of standout products released by Microsoft is diminishing. There was a point where I could point to quite a few, Office 2003 was great (as was 2000), Win 2K3 is very solid and was the first Microsoft OS upgrade that took *less* resources, SQL Server 2000 was nice.
Now? Vista sucks, even studiously avoiding it I've had to use it a couple of times and it is buggy, slow and un-intuitive. I've only used Office 2007 for powerpoint and that has been unpleasant, besides the whole ooxml thing sours that somewhat. SQL Server 2005 is less promising than I had hoped, but again only limited experience. Visual Studio 2005 is nothing really special - there are times when I consider that moving to textpad and compiling from batch files might make more sense. There ain't much coming out of Redmond that either interests or excites me these days.
Oh, and evidence? Go back and read my about documentation for the EU. Remember that Neil Barret was unable to get working code with this first release of the documentation. There was also a Microsoft employee commenting here about the amount of staff time being spent documenting this stuff for the EU.
Yeah, I think that Vista really demonstrates the Microsoft of today. They have a number of problems: 1. They aren't attracting the kind of people they once were, and many of the very good people have left. This exacerbates their other problems. 2. They are still trying to develop the same way they used to (cowboy), but are now finding that it does not scale well for the size of projects. 3. There seems to be a lack of long term direction, planning and vision. And by long term I mean as short as 3 years from now. This might be a result of 1.
One of the problems with windows is that you have something that is both static and something that moves. For example the.Net framework moved, but you still need to know the win32 API. This is something of the point of the article: Do one or the other and since the older stuff sucks, actually implement the new stuff properly.
Everything I have read and heard about Microsoft suggests that they are cowboys.
Code first, design later. For example, I note with interest the amount of pain involved in trying to provide server protocol documentation for the EU. Some of the foot dragging is deliberate but some of it is that they don't have quality internal documentation.
There is a severe lack of direction and leadership at Microsoft. They are just not forward planning. As a result they are tearing themselves to pieces, doing the same work again and again.
I'm no mac faboy, but is that actually a problem? All the advice I'm hearing now is that software RAID is a better option except in a few, limited situations.
Mao is like Bartok on speed. Bartok has two basic rules, you cannot create rules that impact future rules and you can't create rules specific to players. It plays like uno with a normal deck, but each time you win a round you get to make up a new rule. The starting rules are, questions are penalised, pointing is penalised and slow play is penalised.
Mao is like bartok but you cannot speak (except where permitted by the rules) and the rules are *not stated* at the end of each round.
Suggested rules: - switch direction on a certain card - penalty cards to the person on the left/right on a certain card - Require thank you for every penantly (better for Mao, add one extra thank you and get another penalty) - increment cards (eg clubs) when a particular suite is played. This makes things interesting because if people are waiting for a 3 of clubs, they are now waiting for a 4, no a 5 of clubs. Add variation (eg fibonacci series). - penalty cards, two cards after a specific card is played. This one is *especially* nasty in Mao, hard to work out what the rule is.
I also figured out the real problem is water. While the US, EU, and CN have large navigable rivers running deep into their continents, AU has nothing to bring water to the center of the country (or more accurately there isn't enough rain in the center to drain and form navigable rivers).
That is part of the problem. Another problem is that Australia is extremely nutrient poor. Being in the middle of a continental plate, with few volcaones (none active), means that little new material comes to the surface.
"The Liberty ships were transport ships built very quickly and in great numbers during WWII. One of the reasons they were able to build them so fast was they used welded, rather than riveted, seams.
I'm not sure that unzipping implies that the rivets were in straight lines. I think it is a statement that the seams gave way.
Slightly OT, this applied to later vessels also, particularly the liberty ships. The Liberty ships were transport ships built very quickly and in great numbers during WWII. One of the reasons they were able to build them so fast was they used welded, rather than riveted, seams.
Then there's the fact that the sound on my T61 doesn't work after waking from suspend 25% of the time, the 15" T61 laptop is bigger than the 15" Macbook Pro in size (and possibly in weight too, haven't checked), and the speakers aren't as loud or as clear. And to top it off, the thinkpad came with about 10-15 unnecessary extra programs bundled from Lenovo that turned my "fast" laptop into a wreck. Took me a while to remove enough programs to drop the boot time under 4 minutes. Miserable.
lol
I bought a macbook pro over a T6* about 6 months ago. My macbook doesn't work coming out about 90% of the time. A sizable proportion of that is when I open my bag to find the laptop almost hot enough to cause blisters. It is so bad that I've given up using suspend alltogether.
I got a macbook pro about 6 months ago, my first mac.
My questions is, where the f*ck are the home and end keys? Do they actually expect people to code on these things? Holding the function key and hitting the arrow keys is awkward to say the least.
Also, there is documentation, and Intellisense (freely available, now), and a naming convention that actually makes sense after a while. F1 isn't that hard to press.
Actually when it comes to Microsoft, it is. I seriously think there is a conspiracy at Microsoft to make help files as useless as possible. Pointers to that theory: 1. multi-gig installs, I know space is cheap these days but still. (Re)installing Visual Studio is rather painful exercise for this reason alone 2. Often you don't end up going to the right place in the help file. I've found googling the specific class or method is generally more accurate 3. Online lookups for everything. Tell me how this is smart. I've installed gigabytes of documentation (see 1), which is largely static, and the first place is checks is online. This ensures several seconds of waiting while it tries to connect and down the documentation. Then there is the wait while it installs it. Then half the time it *doesn't work* and has roll it back (more waiting). I've had VS.Net (2005) lock up for *minutes* after accidentally hitting F1. This is on Core Duo machines with 2Gb of RAM and 10K RPM Raptors with a 2M+ net connection.
Incidentally the look up online meme seems to have been introduced in Office 2003. Stupidity seems to have transferred through.
Read as: I am not going to pay Microsoft for the privilege of contacting Microsoft to report bugs in their systems. I have run into some bugs in the past: - IIS parsing.Net 1.1 code in IIS using the 2.0 framework and generating 2.0 bugs. This was following a SP upgrade to 2.0.
Response: You must be wrong, have you run aspnet_regiis?
Me: Yes.
Response: Try running it again.
Me: same problem.
Response: crickets - IE7 interprets the no-cache directive for a SSL site as a directive not to write anything to HD under any circumstances. That means if you binary write a file to IE7 using this header the file cannot be opened.
Response: this is by design
Me: According to the standards this is broken
Respose: we like our dead lightbulb feature
Now I'll be buggered if I'll waste my company's time and money reporting bugs to microsoft for that kind of response. I can file bugs with Mozilla. I can file bugs with opera. I can't file bugs with Microsoft without paying for the privilege.
Screw that, it is cheaper and easier for me to code around their issues.
*nod* Most good software I've ever seen was designed to solve the specific needs of a very few people, often needs the software author h(im/er)self had. I think the focus group method is practically guaranteed to lead to mediocre or poor designs. There is nothing specific it's really trying to do, and it's hard to get enthusiastic over something and do a really good job on it when no individual seems all that excited over it.
If the "few people" are customers this is a recipe for bad software. When software is designed for just a few customers, it ends up being very specific to their needs and business. I think that tight control of the feature-set by a very small group of the right people generally produces good software.
A classic example is the Cube - a computer everyone wanted but no one thought was worth the price (the down side of designing products for a multibillionaire). It remains to be seen whether the MacBook Air will fall into that category.
There is a classic "Australian" car, the monaro. Judging the car purely on sales, it was a financial failure however it was a great success for Holden. Why? Because it was similar to the qube. People bought Holdens because the monaro was associated with holden. People went into holden show rooms and bought other Holdens because the monaro was in the showroom.
I think this is how the Air works. They might never sell a whole lot of them but their existance will sell other Mac laptops. Here in Australia I'm only seeing Mac ads for the Air. I'll bet that only a small proportion of the macs sold are Airs.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Microsoft is still capable of producing good products, but they are getting rarer and rarer. And they tend to be produced by a single team, it doesn't filter through to the rest of the organisation.
... odd. For example shifting all the members out of the pages for the object. 90% of the time, the members are what you are looking for.
Frankly I'd say that it was arguable whether 2007 is much better than 2003. In a number of areas, 2007 is more of a headache, and that is not just a comment on the new UI. MSDN is also pretty good, however it sometimes a little
The number of standout products released by Microsoft is diminishing. There was a point where I could point to quite a few, Office 2003 was great (as was 2000), Win 2K3 is very solid and was the first Microsoft OS upgrade that took *less* resources, SQL Server 2000 was nice.
Now? Vista sucks, even studiously avoiding it I've had to use it a couple of times and it is buggy, slow and un-intuitive. I've only used Office 2007 for powerpoint and that has been unpleasant, besides the whole ooxml thing sours that somewhat. SQL Server 2005 is less promising than I had hoped, but again only limited experience. Visual Studio 2005 is nothing really special - there are times when I consider that moving to textpad and compiling from batch files might make more sense. There ain't much coming out of Redmond that either interests or excites me these days.
Oh, and evidence? Go back and read my about documentation for the EU. Remember that Neil Barret was unable to get working code with this first release of the documentation. There was also a Microsoft employee commenting here about the amount of staff time being spent documenting this stuff for the EU.
Yeah, I think that Vista really demonstrates the Microsoft of today. They have a number of problems:
1. They aren't attracting the kind of people they once were, and many of the very good people have left. This exacerbates their other problems.
2. They are still trying to develop the same way they used to (cowboy), but are now finding that it does not scale well for the size of projects.
3. There seems to be a lack of long term direction, planning and vision. And by long term I mean as short as 3 years from now. This might be a result of 1.
Indeed. After looking at the options in MSDN, the only really practical one (price wise) was the VS.Net (~$1000).
My problem with this is that particular subscription should be given away for free. Do something concrete to encourage development on windows.
One of the problems with windows is that you have something that is both static and something that moves. For example the .Net framework moved, but you still need to know the win32 API. This is something of the point of the article: Do one or the other and since the older stuff sucks, actually implement the new stuff properly.
Everything I have read and heard about Microsoft suggests that they are cowboys.
Code first, design later. For example, I note with interest the amount of pain involved in trying to provide server protocol documentation for the EU. Some of the foot dragging is deliberate but some of it is that they don't have quality internal documentation.
There is a severe lack of direction and leadership at Microsoft. They are just not forward planning. As a result they are tearing themselves to pieces, doing the same work again and again.
I thought there was rather more to it than that.
AFAIK:
The main advantage of SW RAID is it is hardware independant. So if the card dies you can just plug the drives into another machine.
The main advantage of HW RAID is offload the processing to a card. However with faster processors this is less of an issue than it once was.
I'm no mac faboy, but is that actually a problem? All the advice I'm hearing now is that software RAID is a better option except in a few, limited situations.
Is Fluxx the game I know as Bartok or Mao?
Mao is like Bartok on speed. Bartok has two basic rules, you cannot create rules that impact future rules and you can't create rules specific to players. It plays like uno with a normal deck, but each time you win a round you get to make up a new rule. The starting rules are, questions are penalised, pointing is penalised and slow play is penalised.
Mao is like bartok but you cannot speak (except where permitted by the rules) and the rules are *not stated* at the end of each round.
Suggested rules:
- switch direction on a certain card
- penalty cards to the person on the left/right on a certain card
- Require thank you for every penantly (better for Mao, add one extra thank you and get another penalty)
- increment cards (eg clubs) when a particular suite is played. This makes things interesting because if people are waiting for a 3 of clubs, they are now waiting for a 4, no a 5 of clubs. Add variation (eg fibonacci series).
- penalty cards, two cards after a specific card is played. This one is *especially* nasty in Mao, hard to work out what the rule is.
So only people arrested for federal crimes, like protesting, will have their DNA taken?
Forget the kangaroos. We have much .
I also figured out the real problem is water. While the US, EU, and CN have large navigable rivers running deep into their continents, AU has nothing to bring water to the center of the country (or more accurately there isn't enough rain in the center to drain and form navigable rivers).
That is part of the problem. Another problem is that Australia is extremely nutrient poor. Being in the middle of a continental plate, with few volcaones (none active), means that little new material comes to the surface.
I disagree with that portion of the cited article.
Which aspect of that portion of the cited article?
Add some other unpleasant behaviour in there:
* creating links on the desktop and quick launch to safari
* setting safari as the default browser.
Tell you what, if the windows version of the eePC ships with some open source applications exposed to the user, then I will agree with you.
However if it ships without any, I'll think you might just be full of it.
Any guesses as to which is the most likely?
Echoing your comment:
"The Liberty ships were transport ships built very quickly and in great numbers during WWII. One of the reasons they were able to build them so fast was they used welded, rather than riveted, seams.
The had an unfortunate tendancy to unzip." (from comment)
I'm not sure that unzipping implies that the rivets were in straight lines. I think it is a statement that the seams gave way.
Slightly OT, this applied to later vessels also, particularly the liberty ships. The Liberty ships were transport ships built very quickly and in great numbers during WWII. One of the reasons they were able to build them so fast was they used welded, rather than riveted, seams.
The had an unfortunate tendancy to unzip.
To add another unpleasant detail, most of those other accidents didn't happen to white people.
I find that widescreen sucks for programming. I want a *taller* screen, not a wider one.
lol
I bought a macbook pro over a T6* about 6 months ago. My macbook doesn't work coming out about 90% of the time. A sizable proportion of that is when I open my bag to find the laptop almost hot enough to cause blisters. It is so bad that I've given up using suspend alltogether.
I got a macbook pro about 6 months ago, my first mac.
My questions is, where the f*ck are the home and end keys? Do they actually expect people to code on these things? Holding the function key and hitting the arrow keys is awkward to say the least.
The definitions are even stranger if you aren't an American. From an outside perspective it isn't left and right, it is right and extreme right.
Also, there is documentation, and Intellisense (freely available, now), and a naming convention that actually makes sense after a while. F1 isn't that hard to press.
Actually when it comes to Microsoft, it is. I seriously think there is a conspiracy at Microsoft to make help files as useless as possible. Pointers to that theory:
1. multi-gig installs, I know space is cheap these days but still. (Re)installing Visual Studio is rather painful exercise for this reason alone
2. Often you don't end up going to the right place in the help file. I've found googling the specific class or method is generally more accurate
3. Online lookups for everything. Tell me how this is smart. I've installed gigabytes of documentation (see 1), which is largely static, and the first place is checks is online. This ensures several seconds of waiting while it tries to connect and down the documentation. Then there is the wait while it installs it. Then half the time it *doesn't work* and has roll it back (more waiting). I've had VS.Net (2005) lock up for *minutes* after accidentally hitting F1. This is on Core Duo machines with 2Gb of RAM and 10K RPM Raptors with a 2M+ net connection.
Incidentally the look up online meme seems to have been introduced in Office 2003. Stupidity seems to have transferred through.
Read as: I didn't even try to contact Microsoft.
.Net 1.1 code in IIS using the 2.0 framework and generating 2.0 bugs. This was following a SP upgrade to 2.0.
Read as: I am not going to pay Microsoft for the privilege of contacting Microsoft to report bugs in their systems. I have run into some bugs in the past:
- IIS parsing
Response: You must be wrong, have you run aspnet_regiis?
Me: Yes.
Response: Try running it again.
Me: same problem.
Response: crickets
- IE7 interprets the no-cache directive for a SSL site as a directive not to write anything to HD under any circumstances. That means if you binary write a file to IE7 using this header the file cannot be opened.
Response: this is by design
Me: According to the standards this is broken
Respose: we like our dead lightbulb feature
Now I'll be buggered if I'll waste my company's time and money reporting bugs to microsoft for that kind of response. I can file bugs with Mozilla. I can file bugs with opera. I can't file bugs with Microsoft without paying for the privilege.
Screw that, it is cheaper and easier for me to code around their issues.
*nod* Most good software I've ever seen was designed to solve the specific needs of a very few people, often needs the software author h(im/er)self had. I think the focus group method is practically guaranteed to lead to mediocre or poor designs. There is nothing specific it's really trying to do, and it's hard to get enthusiastic over something and do a really good job on it when no individual seems all that excited over it.
If the "few people" are customers this is a recipe for bad software. When software is designed for just a few customers, it ends up being very specific to their needs and business. I think that tight control of the feature-set by a very small group of the right people generally produces good software.
A classic example is the Cube - a computer everyone wanted but no one thought was worth the price (the down side of designing products for a multibillionaire). It remains to be seen whether the MacBook Air will fall into that category.
There is a classic "Australian" car, the monaro. Judging the car purely on sales, it was a financial failure however it was a great success for Holden. Why? Because it was similar to the qube. People bought Holdens because the monaro was associated with holden. People went into holden show rooms and bought other Holdens because the monaro was in the showroom.
I think this is how the Air works. They might never sell a whole lot of them but their existance will sell other Mac laptops. Here in Australia I'm only seeing Mac ads for the Air. I'll bet that only a small proportion of the macs sold are Airs.