More like Microsoft's human resources problem of hiring people from good colleges who lack real programming experience.
Whatever. MS loves to hire kids out of college and convince them to accept a low ball offer because they'll be working for Microsoft and it will make their career. Grads from better schools laugh at them because they don't need MS on their resume to make their career and they have better offers from other companies.
You don't have to be authorized to play a song bought on iTunes, on an iPod. In other words, if you bought a song on iTunes Music Store, and put it on my iPod, I would be able to play it. I wouldn't be able to play it on my iBook or PC or whatever, but there is no DRM checking on iPods. So super easy song swapping on iPods might not be such a desireable thing for Apple. At the very least, it would probably force them to add DRM checking to iPods equipped with file swapping abilities.
When was the last time Microsoft themselves came up with an innovative product?
How about.NET? Yeah I know, they stole a lot from Java, but Java has turned around and borrowed from.NET (see generics, metadata, foreach etc. in JDK 1.5.) Their web services tools have definitely inspired stuff like Apache Axis and BEA's workbench. One can also argue that Java Server Faces is really just ASP.NET Web Forms.
Of course nothing is ever truly original, but.NET is certainly much more innovative than anything else MS has done in the last five years. There is an obvious reason for this, they were willing to break with backwards compatibility. VB/ASP were broken by VB.NET/ASP.NET. Of course Windows still supports ASP and VB still compiles and runs under its own runtime, but it still took a break from these older technologies for MS to come up with something that was relatively innovative.
One of the most interesting things in the articles:
But lets not forget that Mail 2.0 is also 100% compliant with Apple's Spotlight search technology. Spotlight searches instantly search not only Mail headers, but the complete contents of Mail messages as well, displaying results to the user in a matter of seconds.
This is one of the great strengths of GMail. Searching through thousands of mail messages is trivial and useful. Seems like a great addition to Mail. You get great email searching without the ads...
or.NET. Those are the only two viable enterprise platforms these days. My company builds enterprise systems for large (Fortune 500) companies. Most of our clients are still Java on Solaris. In the past we did some work for start-ups with cash to burn, and we had a couple of Java on Linux projects. We've also done a few.NET (on Windows of course, no large companies are going to touch Mono anytime soon) though it has always been.NET talking to an Oracle database. Still the most common combination in any industry (finance, staffing, supply chain) is Java/Weblogic on Solaris with an Oracle database. Nothing's really changed in the last four years in that regard.
Case in point! FUD FUD FUD! Or is it just ignorance...
The first three things you listed have all been MySQL features ever since they added the InnoDB engine (version 4.0 I think, two years ago). Maybe you should
RTFM!
As for "stored procedures, views, triggers,..." these fall under the category of --USELESS FEATURES--. The only exception there might be views, but even that is debatable.
As for enterprise class, you can certainly
pay somebody for support if you want to. No it's not the vendor, but they have the source code (along with anybody else who wants it.)
Ch-ching! If I had a nickle for every DBA I've had to deal with who loved to say crap like :
If you would let The Database make that calculation, it would be faster.
The Database has a feature that can do that for you
If you're going to use that programming language, use this extension of it that The Database supports
Re-write that query as a stored procedure and it will be so much faster
DBAs love to lock you into the database. Put more logic there. Use extensions so you're tied to a vendor. Squeeze out the extra millisecond of performance so that you'll have to continue to use Oracle or DB2 forever. Blah blah blah.
The truth is that these guys want you locked in their product, because they have training on that produce. It's all about job security. These guys hate object-relational techniques because they turn databases into storage/retrieval devices. They REALLY hate simplified databases (especially MySQL) that don't have built-in XQuery support or Java stored procedures or binary content indexing or --INSERT USELESS FEATURE HERE--.
It's all about job security with these guys. They've always got FUD prepared like
You can't rely on that other vendor's database because it will not scale
You can't rely on that other vendor's database because it will corrupt your data
Don't let developers write DDLs or they will crash the database
Moving business logic out of the database will cause huge performance problems
You are almost right. American culture glorifies movies stars, singers, and professional athletes. American culture worships beauty. It is acceptable to ridicule intelligence in American culture. It's ok for one child to call another child a "geek" or a "nerd." It's ok to make fun of the kids who participate in the national spelling bee every year.
That is America. Is it any wonder that as the world becomes more technical, American companies have to rely on offshore talent? It's so hard to find American workers with technical skills, and because of the shortage of them, the ones you do find can demand a very high salary.
Clearly being the first mover is a risky proposition. If it works, then lots of folks will buy Xbox2s and MS will have a nice installed base before the compettition releases their next gen consoles. In other words, MS can assume a leadership position and make their Xbox product line very profitable. If it doesn't work, then MS has a flop of a console and they've wasted a lot of time and money. That sucks and all, but will it even ever show up on the company's bottom line? Will they even have a quarter where their earnings per share is down a single penny because of an Xbox2 flop? So why shouldn't they roll the dice? They have the money to get the product out the door ahead of their compettition, promote it like crazy, and get lots of games written for it (like what they did buying Bungie and getting Halo out there.) MS is not going to be content to just release their console at the same time as everyone else and hope to eek out more gains slowly over time.
There's another thing that the author of this article missed out on. He seems to think that no existing software houses will be able to leverage existing work for Xbox2 games. That's just plain crazy to start with. Clearly things like art, design, production can be leveraged. It may not be as easy to leverage code, but it might be easy to leverage code from PC games. DirectX9 anyone?
Whenever I seem someone mention Abi, I think of the first time I saw it on Red Hat 7 a couple of years ago. It had to be the ugliest looking program I have ever seen. It totally looked like a bad clone of MS Word 97. The 2.0 version is a big improvement, UI wise. Now it looks like a nice clone of Word XP.
Upgraders: DO NOT install Mozilla Thunderbird into a directory containing program files from a previous version. Overwriting files from a previous release WILL cause problems.
They have an installer and yet they have this problem? How amateur is this? If this is the case, then the installer should delete the old directory or better yet, delete the files that are not overwritten and cause problems. I love Thunderbird, but this is pretty weak.
The new "streamlined" interface kinda sucks though. What's with all the Windows 95 buttons all over the place? How is that "streamlined" over using native buttons? It's really annoying on a Mac too, though I would think it would look ugly on Win XP if you were using the Luna UI.
It doesn't matter why somebody leaves work undone. If you aren't doing your job, you need to change jobs. Hopefully you'll do it by choice. I've never worked anywhere or heard of any place where having kids can consistenly be used as an excuse to not do your job.
as far as Sam Singleton is concerned, seeing LOTR or setting the weekend's LAN party is just as emotionally important to Sam, as setting up the kid's birthday party is to Paul Parenthood.
It is absolutely ridiculous to try and equate a movie with a child. Until you have had children, you cannot possibly understand their emotional significance to their parents. This is a genetic trait that is millions of years old. Be glad that your father didn't have problems deciding between a movie and his child.
Several people have made good points in this discussion. Personally, I am a software architect who has an eleven week old son. Thus this is something that I have thought a lot about in the past. I realized that there was no way that I could work 80-90 hour work weeks anymore. However, I realized that I have NEVER worked those kind of weeks consistently. Sure I've had my share of nights where I worked until 3 AM, but if I had to do that everyday (or once a week every week for that matter) then I would have burned out a long time ago. I've worked for several startups and consulting firms, never any 9 to 5 gigs. The beauty of working at such places is that it's about getting your job done. If it takes you 80 hours every week to get your job done, then you are in the wrong business and should reconsider careers.
Try any from SPEC, for example. Maybe you're thinking about x86 because otherwise, the Itanium2 is way out of the Opteron's league (as well as price range, but that is besides the point.)
This kind of technology could find its way to home users via ISPs. Imagine AOL Broadband users getting 3 free apps and the ability to pick other apps for $3 more month (random numbers, just an example.) Talk about a way to add value to a premium ISP. If you look at what AOL tries to do right now with its photo editing tools, it's really not much of a reach (though they probably got the idea for those tools from places Ofoto and Shutterfly.)
I don't think this MS schmuck is saying re-write Firefox in XAML, or if he is then he is an idiot. However, the Windows implementation of XUL and the Gecko runtime could make use of Longhorn APIs. The current Windows implementations definitely make use of Win32 APIs, just read the build instructions for Windows. Going from XUL to XAML is just a matter of doing an XSLT transformation. Firefox could still be done in cross-platform XUL, just its implementation on Longhorn systems could make use of Longhorn specific APIs, kinda like its implementation on Linux making use of GTK+ for example.
I love CS guys who don't know any math. Why? Because I eat their lunch and take their jobs. Well actually that was a few years ago. Now I'm the guy they have to come to get a job. When I interview them, I test their math skills. If it is apparent that they are lacking, I show them the door. Yes, I am what all CS degree holders fear the most, I am a programmer (well my business cards say architect now...) with a degree in math. So go ahead and take as little math as possible and still get your CS degree. Here's what I took in college (click here for descriptions):
Ma 2 ab. Probability, Statistics, and Differential Equations. What happened to calculus and all that? I took it in high school...
Ma 5 abc. Introduction to Abstract Algebra. You want to really understand the essence of object oriented design?
Ma/CS 6 abc. Introduction to Discrete Mathematics.
Ma 7. Number Theory for Beginners
Ma 108 abc. Classical Analysis.
Ma 109 abc. Introduction to Geometry and Topology.
Ma 112 ab. Statistics.
Ma 116 abc. Mathematical Logic and Axiomatic Set Theory.
A purchaser of a DVD should be able to do whatever they like with the DVD and it's content provided they don't break any copyright laws.
No they shouldn't, not unless they have also purchased a device for viewing the DVD. The viewing of a DVD requires decryption technology that is the intellectual property of the MPAA and must be licensed. There are no DVD-rom drives for Linux that have this licensed decryption technology. Therefore a Linux user must use their own decryption technology to view the DVD. They have purchased nothing that gives them this legal right. They did not buy a device for watching DVDs on Linux, because there is no such device. They bought a device that can read DVD-roms, it takes that plus decryption to play a DVD. They probably bought a device that can play DVDs on Windows because it included decryption software that only runs on Windows.
I am merely stating the law in the above. Personally I don't think that encryption should be legally protected. The moment you encrypt something and throw it out to the public you are taking a risk that someone will break your code. If you start licensing decryption technology en masse then you are taking a huge risk that your code will be broken. Decryption is really just picking the right prime numbers after all... Of course I also have no problem with busting people for sharing mp3s online. If you want decryption and sharing to both be legal, then you become just as bad as the MPAA because you want the laws to be determined by what is best for you financially.
It is a major flaw in C# that has been "spun" as a by-design feature. The only design justification for it is that it makes it easier for VB programmers to switch.
"Stress" is definitely an excuse used way too much. Anything other than living on a beach and being served by naked beautiful women is considered stressful. Then you get ridiculous anecdotal comments like "I loved working in the fields picking fruit because there was no stress." Another non-stressful situation is being dead or in a coma. "Stressed out" people are, in most cases, just whiny bitches.
Why is MS held to such a standard of compatibility when others use their own propritary formats
Because they have a monopoly on desktop operating systems and include applications with it. They get to put their apps on everybody's computers because everybody runs Windows and for no other reason. Imagine if they made it where Norton AV suddenly wouldn't work on Windows. Wouldn't that be an illegal maneuver. Well, including a competing product with Windows and defining a file format that other products cannot use is just a more subtle way of doing the same thing.
If Real player had 95% of the media player market, they would still not be held to the same standard. The difference would be that 95% of the market had chosen Real player. However, nobody choses Windows Media Player, it is just part of Windows. It's what launches the first time you try to play a CD. Now you could try and argue that people have chosen to use Windows. I think many would contend that there really is little choice there either. But even if one concedes Windows as a choice, it still does not make Windows Media Player a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to be authorized to play a song bought on iTunes, on an iPod. In other words, if you bought a song on iTunes Music Store, and put it on my iPod, I would be able to play it. I wouldn't be able to play it on my iBook or PC or whatever, but there is no DRM checking on iPods. So super easy song swapping on iPods might not be such a desireable thing for Apple. At the very least, it would probably force them to add DRM checking to iPods equipped with file swapping abilities.
Of course nothing is ever truly original, but
or .NET. Those are the only two viable enterprise platforms these days. My company builds enterprise systems for large (Fortune 500) companies. Most of our clients are still Java on Solaris. In the past we did some work for start-ups with cash to burn, and we had a couple of Java on Linux projects. We've also done a few .NET (on Windows of course, no large companies are going to touch Mono anytime soon) though it has always been .NET talking to an Oracle database. Still the most common combination in any industry (finance, staffing, supply chain) is Java/Weblogic on Solaris with an Oracle database. Nothing's really changed in the last four years in that regard.
Case in point! FUD FUD FUD! Or is it just ignorance...
..." these fall under the category of --USELESS FEATURES--. The only exception there might be views, but even that is debatable.
The first three things you listed have all been MySQL features ever since they added the InnoDB engine (version 4.0 I think, two years ago). Maybe you should RTFM!
As for "stored procedures, views, triggers,
As for enterprise class, you can certainly pay somebody for support if you want to. No it's not the vendor, but they have the source code (along with anybody else who wants it.)
The truth is that these guys want you locked in their product, because they have training on that produce. It's all about job security. These guys hate object-relational techniques because they turn databases into storage/retrieval devices. They REALLY hate simplified databases (especially MySQL) that don't have built-in XQuery support or Java stored procedures or binary content indexing or --INSERT USELESS FEATURE HERE--.
It's all about job security with these guys. They've always got FUD prepared like It never ends...
Don't tell Google this! They have a site that is ALL JavaScript...
That would be awesome. HDTV is especially nice on my laptop's 1280x800 widescreen display. As it is, I'm stuck with Windows Media HD.
You are almost right. American culture glorifies movies stars, singers, and professional athletes. American culture worships beauty. It is acceptable to ridicule intelligence in American culture. It's ok for one child to call another child a "geek" or a "nerd." It's ok to make fun of the kids who participate in the national spelling bee every year.
That is America. Is it any wonder that as the world becomes more technical, American companies have to rely on offshore talent? It's so hard to find American workers with technical skills, and because of the shortage of them, the ones you do find can demand a very high salary.
Clearly being the first mover is a risky proposition. If it works, then lots of folks will buy Xbox2s and MS will have a nice installed base before the compettition releases their next gen consoles. In other words, MS can assume a leadership position and make their Xbox product line very profitable. If it doesn't work, then MS has a flop of a console and they've wasted a lot of time and money. That sucks and all, but will it even ever show up on the company's bottom line? Will they even have a quarter where their earnings per share is down a single penny because of an Xbox2 flop? So why shouldn't they roll the dice? They have the money to get the product out the door ahead of their compettition, promote it like crazy, and get lots of games written for it (like what they did buying Bungie and getting Halo out there.) MS is not going to be content to just release their console at the same time as everyone else and hope to eek out more gains slowly over time.
There's another thing that the author of this article missed out on. He seems to think that no existing software houses will be able to leverage existing work for Xbox2 games. That's just plain crazy to start with. Clearly things like art, design, production can be leveraged. It may not be as easy to leverage code, but it might be easy to leverage code from PC games. DirectX9 anyone?
Whenever I seem someone mention Abi, I think of the first time I saw it on Red Hat 7 a couple of years ago. It had to be the ugliest looking program I have ever seen. It totally looked like a bad clone of MS Word 97. The 2.0 version is a big improvement, UI wise. Now it looks like a nice clone of Word XP.
Microsoft says that hardware is going to be free in the future, so how much space are they going to offer?
The new "streamlined" interface kinda sucks though. What's with all the Windows 95 buttons all over the place? How is that "streamlined" over using native buttons? It's really annoying on a Mac too, though I would think it would look ugly on Win XP if you were using the Luna UI.
It is absolutely ridiculous to try and equate a movie with a child. Until you have had children, you cannot possibly understand their emotional significance to their parents. This is a genetic trait that is millions of years old. Be glad that your father didn't have problems deciding between a movie and his child.
Several people have made good points in this discussion. Personally, I am a software architect who has an eleven week old son. Thus this is something that I have thought a lot about in the past. I realized that there was no way that I could work 80-90 hour work weeks anymore. However, I realized that I have NEVER worked those kind of weeks consistently. Sure I've had my share of nights where I worked until 3 AM, but if I had to do that everyday (or once a week every week for that matter) then I would have burned out a long time ago. I've worked for several startups and consulting firms, never any 9 to 5 gigs. The beauty of working at such places is that it's about getting your job done. If it takes you 80 hours every week to get your job done, then you are in the wrong business and should reconsider careers.
Anything Bayesian has to play catch up. Once it is tricked once, it takes a while to "train" it again. Of course Apple has a solution to this...
Try any from SPEC, for example. Maybe you're thinking about x86 because otherwise, the Itanium2 is way out of the Opteron's league (as well as price range, but that is besides the point.)
This kind of technology could find its way to home users via ISPs. Imagine AOL Broadband users getting 3 free apps and the ability to pick other apps for $3 more month (random numbers, just an example.) Talk about a way to add value to a premium ISP. If you look at what AOL tries to do right now with its photo editing tools, it's really not much of a reach (though they probably got the idea for those tools from places Ofoto and Shutterfly.)
I don't think this MS schmuck is saying re-write Firefox in XAML, or if he is then he is an idiot. However, the Windows implementation of XUL and the Gecko runtime could make use of Longhorn APIs. The current Windows implementations definitely make use of Win32 APIs, just read the build instructions for Windows. Going from XUL to XAML is just a matter of doing an XSLT transformation. Firefox could still be done in cross-platform XUL, just its implementation on Longhorn systems could make use of Longhorn specific APIs, kinda like its implementation on Linux making use of GTK+ for example.
I am merely stating the law in the above. Personally I don't think that encryption should be legally protected. The moment you encrypt something and throw it out to the public you are taking a risk that someone will break your code. If you start licensing decryption technology en masse then you are taking a huge risk that your code will be broken. Decryption is really just picking the right prime numbers after all... Of course I also have no problem with busting people for sharing mp3s online. If you want decryption and sharing to both be legal, then you become just as bad as the MPAA because you want the laws to be determined by what is best for you financially.
It is a major flaw in C# that has been "spun" as a by-design feature. The only design justification for it is that it makes it easier for VB programmers to switch.
"Stress" is definitely an excuse used way too much. Anything other than living on a beach and being served by naked beautiful women is considered stressful. Then you get ridiculous anecdotal comments like "I loved working in the fields picking fruit because there was no stress." Another non-stressful situation is being dead or in a coma. "Stressed out" people are, in most cases, just whiny bitches.
Oh my life is so hard! Oh my pussy hurts!
If Real player had 95% of the media player market, they would still not be held to the same standard. The difference would be that 95% of the market had chosen Real player. However, nobody choses Windows Media Player, it is just part of Windows. It's what launches the first time you try to play a CD. Now you could try and argue that people have chosen to use Windows. I think many would contend that there really is little choice there either. But even if one concedes Windows as a choice, it still does not make Windows Media Player a choice.