There are a few Exchange clients out ther, but they do not address an enterprises needs. If you already have Exchange, you've already plopped down a load of cash. That's the major expense that at least my company, chose to decline. What is really needed is an alternative to Exchange. At least we need it for group calendaring.
You are absolutely right. My company did not want to incur the costs of Exchange, though most of our Windows users (75%, other 25% are Mac users) do use Outlook as their email client. Email is no problem, and group contact management isn't too hard either. But group calendaring is the holy grail. Our upper management uses Yahoo calendaring because they need it. Everybody else uses a hack (auto-publishing calendar items to an active directory.) If there was a good group calendaring program out there, particulary if it worked on OS X as well, we would use it in a heartbeat.
If you use InnoDB tables in MySQL, you get full ACID transactions.
We have an interesting database architecture. We had a database that would be read from all the time at a pretty heavy rate, and would be written to sporadically, but pretty heavily during those times. We decided to split things up. All the writes go to a MySQL db using InnoDB tables. All the reads are done from a cluster of machines (behind a load balancer) where each machine has a copy of the database but running in-memory using Heap tables. The only difficult part was the "update" mechanism for getting new data to the read-only machines. Luckily most of the data can be stale for several hours. The performance is outstanding and cheap!
You might have had a problem finding a job three years ago if you were 35+, but probably not because most places would hire anybody who was even remotely competent. These days if you are light on experience (which most really young people are) you are completely screwed. Every company I've seen needs people who can be immediately productive and require no training. If anything, I would imagine that a 25 year old programmer with 3 years of experience would have a significantly more difficult time finding a job than a 40 year old programmer with 15 years of experience. Companies don't hire young people because they're cheap, they hire old people because they are just as cheap. This may be unique to Silicon Valley...
Of course the philosophy at big software shops is different. Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, IBM all like to recruit directly out of college/grad school. It's easier to teach people the "right" way to do things that way. This also lets them pay people less. Of course they are able to do this because they don't need people to be immediately productive. They can afford to invest a few years of brainwashing, err training.
It is absolutely true that C# has advantages over Java. It's the classic "learning from the other guy's mistakes." It's also classic MS strategy. But C# has a large number of disadvantages over Java.
I have been a Java programmer since 98. Last year I took a job at an MS shop, working in C# (damn Silicon Valley economy!) I loved C# at first. One of my favorite things was the aforementioned delegates. But instead of them being another tool for programmers to use, C# often forces you to use them when there are other, more elegant solutions. The classic example of this is a thread pool. C#'s Thread object is sealed and has no public constructor. Creating a thread requires a delegate, which in return requires its parent object to already be instantiated or for the method to be static. So what if you want to maintain a pool of allocated threads, each waiting to be dispatched as requests come in? It can be done, but you gotta use reflection. This is trivial to do in Java. C# does provide a ThreadPool class, which is a direct link to the thread pool created by Windows for your application. It requires a delegate to a static method, and you have to surrender any control on when to dispatch.
The other biggest C# problem was how it allowed unsafe code. This seems great at first. We were using an embedded version of MySQL. It was so simple to import objects from the MySQL DLLs. But these DLLs could easily bomb and trash the CLR. If that happened, you had one option -- reboot.
Actually that brings up a bigger problem with C#: Exception handling. Or should I say its lack thereof. It's a huge flaw (IMHO) of the language to not force exceptions to be caught or any information to be revealed about them. Of course it makes programming easier, but it does so by essentially encouraging poorly written code.
Another seemingly cool feature of C# was its "unconnected" database APIs (System.Data.) These gave database structures for holding data that was probably pulled from a database that there is now no connection to. These seemed great, but we quickly found their limitations. You could have a Dataset (collection of tables) and once the amount of data reached a certain size, everything slowed to a crawl. Didn't matter how much memory the computer had, how fast its CPU was, or if it had multiple processors. The sysem-killing-size-limit was the same on my 1.7GHz/256 MB laptop as it was on a dual processor, 2.4GHz/4 GB Xenon server.
Speaking of databases, make sure you never have to changes RDBMS if you have an app running C#. The APIs for SQL Server are different than for any other database.
Serializers are very cool with C#. But there are some big surprising bugs. C# gives you three serializers: binary, XML, and SOAP. The surprising thing here is that while binary and SOAP will work for any object, XML will not. So even though SOAP is a type of XML, an object that can be serialized to SOAP might not be serializable to XML in C#.
Garbage collection is also dubious in C#. Non-referenced, first generation objects could not be reliably expected to be garbage collected by the CLR. At first we though that the CLR was just not doing any GC'ing, but we could be running out of memory like crazy and this was still the case. A lot of code had to be re-written because of this
These were all things I noticed about the language and its implementation. I was constatnly having to reboot my computer when programming in C#. We had to recommend to our customers that they back up / reboot on a regular basis. We had a close relationship with MS, and they advised us that many of our ailments would be solved by.NET 2003 and especially in the 64-bit versions of some other code.
You are correct that they should have conducted the tests more than twice. That way they could do a true error analysis. Now chances are that the errors would have been low, but they should have done this anyways.
You could be right that there could be a conflict of interest between the two companies. However, your list of institutional shareholders is meaningless. The reason Fidelity and BGI are such large holders of Microsoft is because they run huge index funds. These are funds based on popular indexes, such as S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100. Microsoft is part of both indexes (as well as others.) Microsoft's weight in the indexes is determined by its market cap, which of course if very big. Fidelity and BGI run these index funds for 401k plans, pension plans, etc. They are the #1 and #2 financial institutions in America, in terms of how much money they manage. In other words, they may own a billion shares of Microsoft, but its not their money, its other people's money they manage for them, that is being used to buy those shares. Fidelity and BGI are not on the board of directors of Microsoft, even though they may technically own more shares than many of the board members. This is not evidence of bias. They are going to be near the top of any list of institutional investors for any large companies. I would guess that this is also why Morgan Stanley and State Street are such large holders as well.
Let's say I buy a new CD. I decide to rip this CD and share it on my favorite P2P network. This is the kind of thing that DRM is supposed to prevent, right? So whatever I use to rip the CD must somehow tie the CD to my computer. But if I am ripping to MP3, how is it going to do this? Sure Win Media Player could do something like that (tag my MP3), but I don't even know if that is even the most popular program to rip CDs. There are certainly many alternatives to it. Will Palladium make it so that my computer will not play music that was created using a DRM enabled ripping program? So it's controlling my sound card, or at least the channels to it?
For fifty years Americans have been crying about jobs being lost for a variety of reasons. The two biggest culprits are technology and globalization. It hasn't killed the American economy as so many people claimed (and are still claiming) it would. Instead the American economy has only gotten stronger. It's called evolution. As less unskilled jobs are available, it forces people to obtain more education and higher skills. This is a good thing.
Software has been just as responsible for this as South American farm workers, Chineese textile workers, or Indian programmers. Now we see some of the people who have benefitted from job evolution, software engineers, cry that they are being replaced by cheap labor in India. It's time for you to feel the flipside of evolution, adapt or die. Increase your skills, increase your education, whatever it takes. Adapt or die!
As for the American economy... Just as there a billion people saying the sky was the limit back in 2000, there are now a billion people saying the economy will never recover, or its recovery will be diabolical in some respect. The fact is that the economy is very unpredictable. Nobody knows what the economy is going to do yet. Nobody knows what kind of technologies will be important in the future. All the "experts" do is either spew self-serving advice, or just try to apply some small subset of past historical data to the future. That is what produced the tech bubble.
$16 in 1986 would be ~ $26.84 in year 2003 dollars (calculated using inflation adjustments that can be found here.) If, as you claim, CDs averaged $16 in 1986 and $18 in 2003, that would still be 32.9% drop in real price.
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There are a few Exchange clients out ther, but they do not address an enterprises needs. If you already have Exchange, you've already plopped down a load of cash. That's the major expense that at least my company, chose to decline. What is really needed is an alternative to Exchange. At least we need it for group calendaring.
You are absolutely right. My company did not want to incur the costs of Exchange, though most of our Windows users (75%, other 25% are Mac users) do use Outlook as their email client. Email is no problem, and group contact management isn't too hard either. But group calendaring is the holy grail. Our upper management uses Yahoo calendaring because they need it. Everybody else uses a hack (auto-publishing calendar items to an active directory.) If there was a good group calendaring program out there, particulary if it worked on OS X as well, we would use it in a heartbeat.
If you use InnoDB tables in MySQL, you get full ACID transactions.
We have an interesting database architecture. We had a database that would be read from all the time at a pretty heavy rate, and would be written to sporadically, but pretty heavily during those times. We decided to split things up. All the writes go to a MySQL db using InnoDB tables. All the reads are done from a cluster of machines (behind a load balancer) where each machine has a copy of the database but running in-memory using Heap tables. The only difficult part was the "update" mechanism for getting new data to the read-only machines. Luckily most of the data can be stale for several hours. The performance is outstanding and cheap!
You might have had a problem finding a job three years ago if you were 35+, but probably not because most places would hire anybody who was even remotely competent. These days if you are light on experience (which most really young people are) you are completely screwed. Every company I've seen needs people who can be immediately productive and require no training. If anything, I would imagine that a 25 year old programmer with 3 years of experience would have a significantly more difficult time finding a job than a 40 year old programmer with 15 years of experience. Companies don't hire young people because they're cheap, they hire old people because they are just as cheap. This may be unique to Silicon Valley...
Of course the philosophy at big software shops is different. Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, IBM all like to recruit directly out of college/grad school. It's easier to teach people the "right" way to do things that way. This also lets them pay people less. Of course they are able to do this because they don't need people to be immediately productive. They can afford to invest a few years of brainwashing, err training.
Increasing education does not imply starting over in a new field. If you have a BS in CS, go get your PhD. Or an MBA.
It is absolutely true that C# has advantages over Java. It's the classic "learning from the other guy's mistakes." It's also classic MS strategy. But C# has a large number of disadvantages over Java.
.NET 2003 and especially in the 64-bit versions of some other code.
I have been a Java programmer since 98. Last year I took a job at an MS shop, working in C# (damn Silicon Valley economy!) I loved C# at first. One of my favorite things was the aforementioned delegates. But instead of them being another tool for programmers to use, C# often forces you to use them when there are other, more elegant solutions. The classic example of this is a thread pool. C#'s Thread object is sealed and has no public constructor. Creating a thread requires a delegate, which in return requires its parent object to already be instantiated or for the method to be static. So what if you want to maintain a pool of allocated threads, each waiting to be dispatched as requests come in? It can be done, but you gotta use reflection. This is trivial to do in Java. C# does provide a ThreadPool class, which is a direct link to the thread pool created by Windows for your application. It requires a delegate to a static method, and you have to surrender any control on when to dispatch.
The other biggest C# problem was how it allowed unsafe code. This seems great at first. We were using an embedded version of MySQL. It was so simple to import objects from the MySQL DLLs. But these DLLs could easily bomb and trash the CLR. If that happened, you had one option -- reboot.
Actually that brings up a bigger problem with C#: Exception handling. Or should I say its lack thereof. It's a huge flaw (IMHO) of the language to not force exceptions to be caught or any information to be revealed about them. Of course it makes programming easier, but it does so by essentially encouraging poorly written code.
Another seemingly cool feature of C# was its "unconnected" database APIs (System.Data.) These gave database structures for holding data that was probably pulled from a database that there is now no connection to. These seemed great, but we quickly found their limitations. You could have a Dataset (collection of tables) and once the amount of data reached a certain size, everything slowed to a crawl. Didn't matter how much memory the computer had, how fast its CPU was, or if it had multiple processors. The sysem-killing-size-limit was the same on my 1.7GHz/256 MB laptop as it was on a dual processor, 2.4GHz/4 GB Xenon server.
Speaking of databases, make sure you never have to changes RDBMS if you have an app running C#. The APIs for SQL Server are different than for any other database.
Serializers are very cool with C#. But there are some big surprising bugs. C# gives you three serializers: binary, XML, and SOAP. The surprising thing here is that while binary and SOAP will work for any object, XML will not. So even though SOAP is a type of XML, an object that can be serialized to SOAP might not be serializable to XML in C#.
Garbage collection is also dubious in C#. Non-referenced, first generation objects could not be reliably expected to be garbage collected by the CLR. At first we though that the CLR was just not doing any GC'ing, but we could be running out of memory like crazy and this was still the case. A lot of code had to be re-written because of this
These were all things I noticed about the language and its implementation. I was constatnly having to reboot my computer when programming in C#. We had to recommend to our customers that they back up / reboot on a regular basis. We had a close relationship with MS, and they advised us that many of our ailments would be solved by
You are correct that they should have conducted the tests more than twice. That way they could do a true error analysis. Now chances are that the errors would have been low, but they should have done this anyways.
You could be right that there could be a conflict of interest between the two companies. However, your list of institutional shareholders is meaningless. The reason Fidelity and BGI are such large holders of Microsoft is because they run huge index funds. These are funds based on popular indexes, such as S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100. Microsoft is part of both indexes (as well as others.) Microsoft's weight in the indexes is determined by its market cap, which of course if very big. Fidelity and BGI run these index funds for 401k plans, pension plans, etc. They are the #1 and #2 financial institutions in America, in terms of how much money they manage. In other words, they may own a billion shares of Microsoft, but its not their money, its other people's money they manage for them, that is being used to buy those shares. Fidelity and BGI are not on the board of directors of Microsoft, even though they may technically own more shares than many of the board members. This is not evidence of bias. They are going to be near the top of any list of institutional investors for any large companies. I would guess that this is also why Morgan Stanley and State Street are such large holders as well.
DRM in action?
Let's say I buy a new CD. I decide to rip this CD and share it on my favorite P2P network. This is the kind of thing that DRM is supposed to prevent, right? So whatever I use to rip the CD must somehow tie the CD to my computer. But if I am ripping to MP3, how is it going to do this? Sure Win Media Player could do something like that (tag my MP3), but I don't even know if that is even the most popular program to rip CDs. There are certainly many alternatives to it. Will Palladium make it so that my computer will not play music that was created using a DRM enabled ripping program? So it's controlling my sound card, or at least the channels to it?
For fifty years Americans have been crying about jobs being lost for a variety of reasons. The two biggest culprits are technology and globalization. It hasn't killed the American economy as so many people claimed (and are still claiming) it would. Instead the American economy has only gotten stronger. It's called evolution. As less unskilled jobs are available, it forces people to obtain more education and higher skills. This is a good thing. Software has been just as responsible for this as South American farm workers, Chineese textile workers, or Indian programmers. Now we see some of the people who have benefitted from job evolution, software engineers, cry that they are being replaced by cheap labor in India. It's time for you to feel the flipside of evolution, adapt or die. Increase your skills, increase your education, whatever it takes. Adapt or die! As for the American economy... Just as there a billion people saying the sky was the limit back in 2000, there are now a billion people saying the economy will never recover, or its recovery will be diabolical in some respect. The fact is that the economy is very unpredictable. Nobody knows what the economy is going to do yet. Nobody knows what kind of technologies will be important in the future. All the "experts" do is either spew self-serving advice, or just try to apply some small subset of past historical data to the future. That is what produced the tech bubble.
$16 in 1986 would be ~ $26.84 in year 2003 dollars (calculated using inflation adjustments that can be found here.) If, as you claim, CDs averaged $16 in 1986 and $18 in 2003, that would still be 32.9% drop in real price.
You might have heard of it .