Too many are missing the point
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Too many people I talk to (and read) have the wrong idea of what the latest WinFS iteration was and what it was supposed to do. WinFS was intended to provide sql query like filtering to files on unstructured file metadata. While this is certainly 'file search' for those who know how to make it work, it was not a consumer friendly mechanism. It was intended to be the underlying API that a consumer friendly search like desktop search would use.
If you read the article(s) you will understand that a) it grew into something more / bigger that overlaps with ORM mapping (and what was ObjectSpaces) b) it will exist in the not too distant future (next SQL server version) and c) consumer friendly desktop searches and apps you probably haven't even thought of will be able to use it. For example, why not search SNMP trap data, html log data etc. the same way you search for a file? You will be able to.
Obligatory MS bash - the fact that it has taken so many iterations does worry me as to how much longer it might take before I can actually use the technology. We are probably talking at least the next version of office - 4 years away? Thinking back, that was obvious even from the last public WinFS CTP, so I guess this whole 'WinFS is dead' (which it's not) announcement is no surprise, just a re-packaging of what I already knew.
It is not the end of the WinFS concept - it is the end of the WinFS stand alone product and the beginning of the concept's availability as an enabling technology.
The evil was from the marketing guy jeff raikes (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/jeff/defa ult.mspx). He was from apple. The marketing people (and to some extent the HR people) were the most evil people I have ever worked for or with in my life. No holes barred get the sale no matter who you have to kill attitude.
Raikes perfected the pre-canned answer to every question that gates and balmer soon adopted. Talking to anyone of them is like pressing buttons on a child's speak and spell toy - there is absolutely no thought behind what they say, just pr department approved pre-canned responses.
Gates was a good guy. Balmer is a hot head that is out of his league but because of his friendship with bill and bill's desire to get out of it, balmer has had the lead for a while.
But again, i reiterate, the evil is from the ruthless marketing leadership. Unfortunately they got the job done.
I had satellite. In fact I still have the Direcway dish on my roof and right under Direcway I spray painted "SUCKS" so everyone can see it from the road. Plus I fit in with the neighborhood better that way too.
Direcway is a rip off - so bad in fact that DirecTV is now selling Wild Blue instead and they used to be sister companies. Maybe some of the other satellite providers are ok - but with the download limits it just didn't fit my needs.
I moved to the sticks a couple of years ago. The rednecks here can barely keep the dial up service working. As my ONLY choice, I pay $600 / month for a 3 year contract for a t1. The t1 has yet to stay up for 5 days in a row, so cost recovery via business hosting is impossible. I tried dial up a couple of times, but the line quality was so limited I couldn't even keep up with windows update (or yum update or whatever).
The local phone company people tell me this area is not likely to ever see high speed internet. Man I wish I could bitch about the high costs of my adsl line / cable connection.
LOL - I got a huge kick one time at a Microsoft SE meeting where some dumb SE gave Gates grief over Microsoft's implementation of DCE RPC. Gates ripped him a new butthole stating intricate details of DCE specs and it's failing points and how code was written to get around the problems.
There does not exist in all of slashdotdome more of a nerd than Bill Gates (nor anyone as rich).
yeah that's what i eventually did - just bought it again once hl2 ended up in the bargain bin. I really wanted to return it defective right away (with the old CD key) but didn't.
I did send valve both letters and emails, with pictures of everything. Got a standard robot response for the email that i must have forgotten my password or some such shit. Never got anything back on the letter. The company is a piece of shit.
One thing I will credit Microsoft for, is I do not know ANYONE legitimate or not, where windows stopped running because of verification failure.
In 2 personal cases, other products I paid a lot of good money for stopped. First Norton anti virus, after a hard drive failure would not validate and refused to run on the new hard drive.
And second the most evil spy ware in the universe - steam - tells me I have a banned CD key - I'm sitting here looking at a CD, a box, a manual, and a receipt for $50 and I have never given a copy of anything to anybody - and they call me a crook and ban me - I swear if I ever get the opportunity I will do physical harm to someone who is responsible for steam. Then their joke of tech support says they cant offer any help since i have a banned key. Don't cross my path in a dark alley, i'll ban your head from your shoulders, thiefs.
"FWI, you can't be found guilty of any of these things unless the other party proves they were somehow harmed by the slander or liable speech. If they can't prove it, you can still say it, even though its not true."
That is wrong. The harm to the reputation is assumed IF it is proven something was said with the intent to harm. EG if i said "you were a lying cock sucker", you would not have to find someone who thought less of you to prove harm, only prove that I said it about you and that other people heard it. What is also wrong is that the implication that it only applies to lies. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, if the intent is to harm, it is actionable. If you can prove it was a true statement though you may lose the case and be fined $0.01.
Note that in most cases, the award for is usually much less than the costs to win the case and cases of slander or liable are seldom bothered with by lawyers - there's no money to be made - unless it's big company A slandering big company B.
"No one with any technical savvy is going to believe that these systems pose a greater security risk, unless someone independently confirms this and demonstrates how a backdoor exists."
Why would you think this has not already happened? Add to that the fact the the government buys these things in bulk and even IF a sample posessed no backdoor, how hard would it be to put a backdoor in 1 out of 1000 and hope it gets by?
Paranoid? I think not, you haven't had night shift cleaning crews hired by the chinese into your business have you? It happens.
If Windows has US government demanded backdoors as so many Slahdotters insist, why would ANYONE think the Chinese (or the Russians or the French or the Germans or the English or the Japanese or the Koreans....) wouldn't do the same on their hardware?
This is a perfect example of where submarines are used and why companies have to have them to do business.
It will take Microsoft all of 5 seconds to identify patents that Symantec is violating and force them to cross license. It's a waste of tax payer money (use of the courts) and a stupid desperate move on symantecs part.
I'm probably going to get modded troll/flamebait - but it needs to be said.
While I am not in any shape form or fashion for big brother and fascist governments, what a lot of people fail to realize is; is that the world is not really a nice place. There are a terrible lot of people with their fingers on big bombs. As much as we all would like to believe that in a totally free society we would be safe, the truth is we would not.
Things like these NSA projects save millions of lives every year. There would be no less than 12 9/11 size disasters a year in the US if it wasn't for these types of projects. Are the projects evil? It depends on your point of view. You can say that they are wrong all you want - but look at the facts - several large scale attacks have occurred even with these types of projects in place - do you really think there would be the same or less number of attacks without spying projects? Obviously there would be more - now you choose - more personal privacy AND more terrorist attacks - is that what you really want?
I'm not sure what your point is? You call me a liar, but then confirm what I said - the need to make the stuff work yourself. Make up your mind.
Which one did you download and install and it "just worked"? None? then troll someone else asshole.
Yeah - I probably didn't HAVE to reinstall - I just chose to. Removing bluettooth somehow killed gnome - when I started X I got the very very basic window manager. I could have messed around trying to figure it out, or simply reinstall, leaving bluettooth and some other stuff out.
The reason for the installation is OpenNMS. It is an XML/Java based app. It takes days just to track down compatible versions of RPMs to make it work. Then you have to deal with the "no two linuxes are alike as far as where the files are" problems. That is the kind of problems I'm talking about. There is no one who insures that when you install product A it will work. You have to do the work yourself. I don't want to start a flame war, but that isn't something I worry about with MS. Not that there isn't an occasional problem, but significantly less of a chance for problems than in OSS. And that is because a huge amount of time and money is spent insuring every product runs out of the box. MS used to go to the local EggHead and buy 1 copy of every single program during testing prior to release. I'm sure they don't still do that, but I am sure they do something like that. There is no single entity in OSS that can take on that responsibility, time or financially.
It doesn't reduce the value of OSS, but it is a very real difference that must be understood.
I've tried every FC since it came out. This (FC5) is the first one that ran worth a crap. Although I will admit uninstalling bluetooth support crashed the whole thing and i had to re-install - but that seems pretty typical of my linux experiences.
One thing that just can't happen in open source is to get so many diversified projects to run together nicely - it is not the nature of open source. Not that any one piece is bad on it's own - there is just no single entity accountable for getting them all together and thoroughly tested as a whole. Simple QA at best is all you can hope for, not a year of open beta.
If you're not good at getting the individual pieces to work by themselves, Linux is probably not a good thing to be using.
indemnify v. to guarantee against any loss which another might suffer. Example: two parties settle a dispute over a contract, and one of them may agree to pay any claims which may arise from the contract, holding the other harmless.
You see, if you understood the word, you would realize that the end user is not suffering a loss. They are losing some convenience.
Microsoft is just the first case. All other browsers will be required to change their way of business as well. The precedent has been set. There is nothing 'indemnifying" Firefox or Opera.
The one that cracks me up is "its permissions-based scheme which is dramatically more hackable than Java's sandbox-based scheme" - lol - never really read about computers before I take it? The patent does not only affect activeX it also affects Java, since last time I looked, Java was a plug-in. Both are affected by the ruling. That baseless statement of false facts (about hackable) does not even apply.
"Ajax page could provide the same level of interactivity as ActiveX" - please - do you have any idea what you are talking about? I didn't think so. Ajax can help avoid postbacks to the server. ActiveX controls are code that has full access to the Win32 stack. Show me an Ajax control^h^h^h^h^h^h^hscript that does what the ActiveX performance Monitor control does.
If you have any idea how these systems work, you realize that not only does the US have the ability to turn off these jets, BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY if the US gives complete software over then you THEY HAVE THE ABILITY TO TURN OFF THE US JETS.
No one with a working brain is going to expect differently - If you don't like it, buy it without the computers and build your own - good luck.
I don't expect or get the source for the software in my car, or even my microwave oven for that matter. And I make a choice to buy or not buy regardless. I am 100% sure GM and the feds can turn it off my car anytime and anywhere they want.
"4% seems high to you just because of the type of shop you work in. "
I don't work in a shop. I am a freelance for hire developer/consultant. Clients come to me. They don't need or want non-Microsoft solutions. I am perfectly happy accepting work for non-MS stuff, but it doesn't happen. Non-MS stuff only happens within big companies.
"Still, there are companies that use Java as it was intended- to write cross-platform apps that can be deployed under Linux, Solaris, Windows, or OS X, all using the same bytecode package and one unified codebase."
Now see, right up until then I thought you were really a developer. No self respecting developer would spout that completely marketing made up crap in the last 2 years. It has been disproven so many time not even sun says it anymore.
i'll agree with that - I wish Java had not lost its steam - but it has. I have never gone as far as you suggest with swing as a web app. I did dabble some in JSP pre Tomcat days but it was still HTML web apps. 4% seems a bit high to me:) I haven't had one single non-microsoft based client in the last 15 years.
Although sparkle and WPF may not be about beating Flash directly, as several commenters have noted, it does have the potential of reducing the need for flash.
Sparkle is about improving the development process of graphically rich applications. In today's development environments, artists use Photoshop to design graphics and UIs, and then the developer has to 'make it all work'. With sparkle/WPF, the developer writes code to make things work, and the artists/designer builds the UI for it. The two work together interactively, not sequentially.
Hopefully the results are graphically richer desktop apps, and web apps. If WPF becomes available on XP as promised and in IE7 for other Microsoft platforms, then there will be diminished need to use something like flash for rich web apps.
Web apps in their current state suck big time. I don't care who gets mind share, sparkle or flash, but please let someone jump to the lead so I don't have to continue torturing my clients with HTML web apps.
First, I would agree with most of the 'he is an idiot. quit.' comments previously posted.
But let me go into some detail about a similar situation I had. I worked for a small company - the boss who could write C code, and three decent developers. The boss was a die hard 'BSD/emacs is all you ever need' type. He would do things like write his own 'toupper' because he did not know it was built into the standard library. Most of his code was thousands of duplicated lines of code with thousands of imbedded printf statements ("I don't need no stinking debugger").
His idea of version control was which laptop the code had been copied onto last. When the project became somewhat more 'official' I was able to convince him that we needed CVS and we installed it. The problem was he continued just copying files around because he didn't (want to) understand it, and it made matters worse. When his client asked about how we managed versions he went into rants about creating all 'the trees and branches for the products immediately' so he could show our expertise. I think he read an article that mentioned branches on NetBSD so we had to do them as well.
This approach was reflected in the product in general. There was no plan, no architecture, no specification, things were designed and written on the fly often on the way to the customer acceptance meeting. He was used to the old ways and wasn't going to change. I eventually did quit because I felt we were delivering extremely poor product and I didn't want to be part of it.
BTW, what was the product? How about the central message delivery system (pilot reports, weather notices, notices to airmen aka AFTN) for every commercial aircraft in the world. I still am afraid to get on an airplane knowing how at least one (major) part of the system was written.
The bottom line is there are plenty of people out there like your boss that are in a position of power for whatever reason. You can stay and try to influence the project, or bail - but the project will probably go on, regardless.
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woa, incredibly insightful - good 1
Too many people I talk to (and read) have the wrong idea of what the latest WinFS iteration was and what it was supposed to do. WinFS was intended to provide sql query like filtering to files on unstructured file metadata. While this is certainly 'file search' for those who know how to make it work, it was not a consumer friendly mechanism. It was intended to be the underlying API that a consumer friendly search like desktop search would use.
If you read the article(s) you will understand that a) it grew into something more / bigger that overlaps with ORM mapping (and what was ObjectSpaces) b) it will exist in the not too distant future (next SQL server version) and c) consumer friendly desktop searches and apps you probably haven't even thought of will be able to use it. For example, why not search SNMP trap data, html log data etc. the same way you search for a file? You will be able to.
Obligatory MS bash - the fact that it has taken so many iterations does worry me as to how much longer it might take before I can actually use the technology. We are probably talking at least the next version of office - 4 years away? Thinking back, that was obvious even from the last public WinFS CTP, so I guess this whole 'WinFS is dead' (which it's not) announcement is no surprise, just a re-packaging of what I already knew.
It is not the end of the WinFS concept - it is the end of the WinFS stand alone product and the beginning of the concept's availability as an enabling technology.
The evil was from the marketing guy jeff raikes (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/jeff/defa ult.mspx). He was from apple. The marketing people (and to some extent the HR people) were the most evil people I have ever worked for or with in my life. No holes barred get the sale no matter who you have to kill attitude.
Raikes perfected the pre-canned answer to every question that gates and balmer soon adopted. Talking to anyone of them is like pressing buttons on a child's speak and spell toy - there is absolutely no thought behind what they say, just pr department approved pre-canned responses.
Gates was a good guy. Balmer is a hot head that is out of his league but because of his friendship with bill and bill's desire to get out of it, balmer has had the lead for a while.
But again, i reiterate, the evil is from the ruthless marketing leadership. Unfortunately they got the job done.
"to a younger audience more interested in Jessica Alba's Bikini or Britney Spears" who the fsck isnt interested in that? at any age?
I had satellite. In fact I still have the Direcway dish on my roof and right under Direcway I spray painted "SUCKS" so everyone can see it from the road. Plus I fit in with the neighborhood better that way too. Direcway is a rip off - so bad in fact that DirecTV is now selling Wild Blue instead and they used to be sister companies. Maybe some of the other satellite providers are ok - but with the download limits it just didn't fit my needs.
I moved to the sticks a couple of years ago. The rednecks here can barely keep the dial up service working. As my ONLY choice, I pay $600 / month for a 3 year contract for a t1. The t1 has yet to stay up for 5 days in a row, so cost recovery via business hosting is impossible. I tried dial up a couple of times, but the line quality was so limited I couldn't even keep up with windows update (or yum update or whatever).
The local phone company people tell me this area is not likely to ever see high speed internet. Man I wish I could bitch about the high costs of my adsl line / cable connection.
LOL - I got a huge kick one time at a Microsoft SE meeting where some dumb SE gave Gates grief over Microsoft's implementation of DCE RPC. Gates ripped him a new butthole stating intricate details of DCE specs and it's failing points and how code was written to get around the problems.
There does not exist in all of slashdotdome more of a nerd than Bill Gates (nor anyone as rich).
yeah that's what i eventually did - just bought it again once hl2 ended up in the bargain bin. I really wanted to return it defective right away (with the old CD key) but didn't.
I did send valve both letters and emails, with pictures of everything. Got a standard robot response for the email that i must have forgotten my password or some such shit. Never got anything back on the letter. The company is a piece of shit.
One thing I will credit Microsoft for, is I do not know ANYONE legitimate or not, where windows stopped running because of verification failure.
In 2 personal cases, other products I paid a lot of good money for stopped. First Norton anti virus, after a hard drive failure would not validate and refused to run on the new hard drive.
And second the most evil spy ware in the universe - steam - tells me I have a banned CD key - I'm sitting here looking at a CD, a box, a manual, and a receipt for $50 and I have never given a copy of anything to anybody - and they call me a crook and ban me - I swear if I ever get the opportunity I will do physical harm to someone who is responsible for steam. Then their joke of tech support says they cant offer any help since i have a banned key. Don't cross my path in a dark alley, i'll ban your head from your shoulders, thiefs.
"FWI, you can't be found guilty of any of these things unless the other party proves they were somehow harmed by the slander or liable speech. If they can't prove it, you can still say it, even though its not true."
o n.html
That is wrong. The harm to the reputation is assumed IF it is proven something was said with the intent to harm. EG if i said "you were a lying cock sucker", you would not have to find someone who thought less of you to prove harm, only prove that I said it about you and that other people heard it. What is also wrong is that the implication that it only applies to lies. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, if the intent is to harm, it is actionable. If you can prove it was a true statement though you may lose the case and be fined $0.01.
IANAL - but at least I understand some of the basics.
See a decent explanation here;
http://www.attorneys-usa.com/intentional/defamati
Note that in most cases, the award for is usually much less than the costs to win the case and cases of slander or liable are seldom bothered with by lawyers - there's no money to be made - unless it's big company A slandering big company B.
"No one with any technical savvy is going to believe that these systems pose a greater security risk, unless someone independently confirms this and demonstrates how a backdoor exists."
....) wouldn't do the same on their hardware?
Why would you think this has not already happened? Add to that the fact the the government buys these things in bulk and even IF a sample posessed no backdoor, how hard would it be to put a backdoor in 1 out of 1000 and hope it gets by?
Paranoid? I think not, you haven't had night shift cleaning crews hired by the chinese into your business have you? It happens.
If Windows has US government demanded backdoors as so many Slahdotters insist, why would ANYONE think the Chinese (or the Russians or the French or the Germans or the English or the Japanese or the Koreans
Not really. They pay enough to cover the court reporter and the electrical bill. But little else.
This is a perfect example of where submarines are used and why companies have to have them to do business.
It will take Microsoft all of 5 seconds to identify patents that Symantec is violating and force them to cross license. It's a waste of tax payer money (use of the courts) and a stupid desperate move on symantecs part.
I'm probably going to get modded troll/flamebait - but it needs to be said.
While I am not in any shape form or fashion for big brother and fascist governments, what a lot of people fail to realize is; is that the world is not really a nice place. There are a terrible lot of people with their fingers on big bombs. As much as we all would like to believe that in a totally free society we would be safe, the truth is we would not.
Things like these NSA projects save millions of lives every year. There would be no less than 12 9/11 size disasters a year in the US if it wasn't for these types of projects. Are the projects evil? It depends on your point of view. You can say that they are wrong all you want - but look at the facts - several large scale attacks have occurred even with these types of projects in place - do you really think there would be the same or less number of attacks without spying projects? Obviously there would be more - now you choose - more personal privacy AND more terrorist attacks - is that what you really want?
I'm not sure what your point is? You call me a liar, but then confirm what I said - the need to make the stuff work yourself. Make up your mind. Which one did you download and install and it "just worked"? None? then troll someone else asshole.
Yeah - I probably didn't HAVE to reinstall - I just chose to. Removing bluettooth somehow killed gnome - when I started X I got the very very basic window manager. I could have messed around trying to figure it out, or simply reinstall, leaving bluettooth and some other stuff out.
The reason for the installation is OpenNMS. It is an XML/Java based app. It takes days just to track down compatible versions of RPMs to make it work. Then you have to deal with the "no two linuxes are alike as far as where the files are" problems. That is the kind of problems I'm talking about. There is no one who insures that when you install product A it will work. You have to do the work yourself. I don't want to start a flame war, but that isn't something I worry about with MS. Not that there isn't an occasional problem, but significantly less of a chance for problems than in OSS. And that is because a huge amount of time and money is spent insuring every product runs out of the box. MS used to go to the local EggHead and buy 1 copy of every single program during testing prior to release. I'm sure they don't still do that, but I am sure they do something like that. There is no single entity in OSS that can take on that responsibility, time or financially.
It doesn't reduce the value of OSS, but it is a very real difference that must be understood.
I've tried every FC since it came out. This (FC5) is the first one that ran worth a crap. Although I will admit uninstalling bluetooth support crashed the whole thing and i had to re-install - but that seems pretty typical of my linux experiences.
One thing that just can't happen in open source is to get so many diversified projects to run together nicely - it is not the nature of open source. Not that any one piece is bad on it's own - there is just no single entity accountable for getting them all together and thoroughly tested as a whole. Simple QA at best is all you can hope for, not a year of open beta.
If you're not good at getting the individual pieces to work by themselves, Linux is probably not a good thing to be using.
Amen to that.
I'll byte.
indemnify
v. to guarantee against any loss which another might suffer. Example: two parties settle a dispute over a contract, and one of them may agree to pay any claims which may arise from the contract, holding the other harmless.
You see, if you understood the word, you would realize that the end user is not suffering a loss. They are losing some convenience.
Microsoft is just the first case. All other browsers will be required to change their way of business as well. The precedent has been set. There is nothing 'indemnifying" Firefox or Opera.
The one that cracks me up is "its permissions-based scheme which is dramatically more hackable than Java's sandbox-based scheme" - lol - never really read about computers before I take it? The patent does not only affect activeX it also affects Java, since last time I looked, Java was a plug-in. Both are affected by the ruling. That baseless statement of false facts (about hackable) does not even apply.
"Ajax page could provide the same level of interactivity as ActiveX" - please - do you have any idea what you are talking about? I didn't think so. Ajax can help avoid postbacks to the server. ActiveX controls are code that has full access to the Win32 stack. Show me an Ajax control^h^h^h^h^h^h^hscript that does what the ActiveX performance Monitor control does.
If you have any idea how these systems work, you realize that not only does the US have the ability to turn off these jets, BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY if the US gives complete software over then you THEY HAVE THE ABILITY TO TURN OFF THE US JETS.
No one with a working brain is going to expect differently - If you don't like it, buy it without the computers and build your own - good luck.
I don't expect or get the source for the software in my car, or even my microwave oven for that matter. And I make a choice to buy or not buy regardless. I am 100% sure GM and the feds can turn it off my car anytime and anywhere they want.
WTF are you babbling about?
"4% seems high to you just because of the type of shop you work in. "
I don't work in a shop. I am a freelance for hire developer/consultant. Clients come to me. They don't need or want non-Microsoft solutions. I am perfectly happy accepting work for non-MS stuff, but it doesn't happen. Non-MS stuff only happens within big companies.
"Still, there are companies that use Java as it was intended- to write cross-platform apps that can be deployed under Linux, Solaris, Windows, or OS X, all using the same bytecode package and one unified codebase."
Now see, right up until then I thought you were really a developer. No self respecting developer would spout that completely marketing made up crap in the last 2 years. It has been disproven so many time not even sun says it anymore.
i'll agree with that - I wish Java had not lost its steam - but it has. I have never gone as far as you suggest with swing as a web app. I did dabble some in JSP pre Tomcat days but it was still HTML web apps. 4% seems a bit high to me :) I haven't had one single non-microsoft based client in the last 15 years.
Well the article is wrong.
Although sparkle and WPF may not be about beating Flash directly, as several commenters have noted, it does have the potential of reducing the need for flash.
Sparkle is about improving the development process of graphically rich applications. In today's development environments, artists use Photoshop to design graphics and UIs, and then the developer has to 'make it all work'. With sparkle/WPF, the developer writes code to make things work, and the artists/designer builds the UI for it. The two work together interactively, not sequentially.
Hopefully the results are graphically richer desktop apps, and web apps. If WPF becomes available on XP as promised and in IE7 for other Microsoft platforms, then there will be diminished need to use something like flash for rich web apps.
Web apps in their current state suck big time. I don't care who gets mind share, sparkle or flash, but please let someone jump to the lead so I don't have to continue torturing my clients with HTML web apps.
First, I would agree with most of the 'he is an idiot. quit.' comments previously posted. But let me go into some detail about a similar situation I had. I worked for a small company - the boss who could write C code, and three decent developers. The boss was a die hard 'BSD/emacs is all you ever need' type. He would do things like write his own 'toupper' because he did not know it was built into the standard library. Most of his code was thousands of duplicated lines of code with thousands of imbedded printf statements ("I don't need no stinking debugger"). His idea of version control was which laptop the code had been copied onto last. When the project became somewhat more 'official' I was able to convince him that we needed CVS and we installed it. The problem was he continued just copying files around because he didn't (want to) understand it, and it made matters worse. When his client asked about how we managed versions he went into rants about creating all 'the trees and branches for the products immediately' so he could show our expertise. I think he read an article that mentioned branches on NetBSD so we had to do them as well. This approach was reflected in the product in general. There was no plan, no architecture, no specification, things were designed and written on the fly often on the way to the customer acceptance meeting. He was used to the old ways and wasn't going to change. I eventually did quit because I felt we were delivering extremely poor product and I didn't want to be part of it. BTW, what was the product? How about the central message delivery system (pilot reports, weather notices, notices to airmen aka AFTN) for every commercial aircraft in the world. I still am afraid to get on an airplane knowing how at least one (major) part of the system was written. The bottom line is there are plenty of people out there like your boss that are in a position of power for whatever reason. You can stay and try to influence the project, or bail - but the project will probably go on, regardless.