I was talking to a partner company one time and they were all about telling me how much they've spent on a patent attorney to patent their web site, which was basically a paint-by-numbers hosting site. There would have to be a ton of prior art on that and then they acted surprised when I told them about the Bilski case.
Another one in New York was convinced they could patent the idea of specialized user portal. When I tried to explain the difference between patent and copyright, they snuffed and reminded me that no one ever made money on copyright litigation.
The system we have now is absolutely insane. If you really want to reduce nuisance and frivolous litigation, then start with the patent system. And I hope the courts add to the Bilski ruling and puts an end to this nonsense.
You can bet they'll start complaining all this bad stuff happened because they weren't allowed to traffic shape, implement tiered pricing and charge at both ends of the pipe.
Then they'll do what the coal power industry is doing, just drag their feet until the government gives them money to solve the problem or solves it for them, then step in to reap the profits.
After all, some of those high flying execs might have to scrimp by with a few million less if they made infrastructure investments.
But since when did Slashdot become corporate mass media, afraid to call lying "lying"?
Corporations owe no allegiance to the truth but sometimes the interesting question is why they're lying. And why are they so anxious to erase their tracks? Liability or regulation...they're not worried about competition. The US market in telecommunications isn't a free market, it's a cartel.
Figure out what they're afraid you'll know why they're lying. Like the oil companies. They're keeping up the PR assault to try and distract people from the fact they're throttling domestic oil production in the face of lower prices. No point extracting expensive oil at $47 a barrel when they can still make a margin buying from the Saudis. So waive the flag to distract from the uncomfortable reality that big oil is willing to let our national security suffer if they can make a margin on the status quo. And air those slick commercials with the PR gal telling us how they're doing so much for domestic exploration.
That's just being sleazy and two-faced. What AT&T is displaying is fear. They're afraid of something. This isn't a PR embarrassment, there's liability, serious liability. Hand in the cookie jar, massive regulation kind of liability. Maybe they were using non-identifiable data aggregates from the wiretaps as a marketing tool? It'll be something like that.
It's always sparks my curiosity to discover what's in a hole someone is anxious to fill in.
Is that just the result of crappy programming, or is there more to it?
My Linux boxes seem pretty snappy and they don't degrade over time. But I do notice most Windows boxes do seem to slow down over time, unless they're not connected to the internet. I'm guessing it's that load of malware, custom toolbars, background processes and just garbage that grow out of control. Your Windows box is doing a lot of work lugging all that baggage around, it's mot productive for you.
the wiretap capturing Harman's conversation was illegal.
But Roberto and Yoo said it was legal. Bush maintained it was legal. Either it's legal or not. So instead of admitting they're wiretapping Americans, so much better to just blackmail the ones you need something from.
American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.
So now we know the Israelis are lobbying for favors, that's nothing new. What's news to me is how effective they are. They're able to influence who gets committee positions. Does that frighten anyone else? Who else has a committee chair because some lobbying group wanted them in there? A foreign lobbying group at that.
Well, there it is. Selective enforcement to advance a political agenda. The funny thing is the right wing can't really say much because a right wing administration was wiretapping Americans and doling out favors to garner support. It's a mess, the whole sorry affair.
Okay, so what? What's to stop the next Bush/Cheney right wing douche-o-rama from doing the same thing? If there are no consequences, the next time they get a chance they'll do the same thing. We know we can't count on the FBI and NSA to police themselves, the Supreme Court is loaded with people who don't care about the Constitution, so NSA gets a slap on the wrist and new guidance. Big hairy deal. They'd do the same thing again if some sock puppet Attorney General told them it was okay.
So they'll keep that in their back pocket and every time they need to actually put some money into infrastructure improvements, they'll trot this out. Oh, if we could only meter billing for the really big users. Everything that's wrong with telecomm and the internet will hang on this issue. If we could just do this, then everything would be better. They'll pay for PR press hits in industry rags, try to make it look like an inevitable development. They'll wait for the political climate to change, the regulatory environment, like a stubborn infection they'll be ready to strike the moment defenses are weak.
Just call your artificial device a "Woomba" and you'll be in the clear!
I pictured a device like those herb window gardens. Just unpack it. Pour in the nutrient media. Add egg and sperm and in just a few months you'll be growing your own brand new baby!
Get Billy Mays to do the commercials. And, if you call today, we'll throw in a package of Sea Monkeys.
The worst place I ever had to write code was an on a Navy base as a contractor. The Navy does many things well and some things amazingly well, but it's hellish to work as a contractor in some of their offices. Everyone talks really loud, they dial with their speaker phones turned all the way up, people are constantly walking behind you and interrupting productive work. It was like trying to write music in a bus station. And for some of the female employees it was worse, especially if they were good looking. They were constantly pinged on by both military and other civilian personnel. Turn over among staff, particularly female staff, was quite high.
They also stifled productive work by layering byzantine access requirements and a continually more restrictive operating environment. Experimenting with new technologies was virtually impossible. You had to login to your workstation with a badge, so that meant people were constantly leaving their badge behind, making it difficult to get back on to the base. The politics were terrible. Incompetent civilian managers who would train in their equally incompetent lackeys. Excessive process, many times for the sake of process that added no real value.
Eventually we moved over with the research people. It was a lot quieter and more productive, but you never could completely escape the bus station office atmosphere. I have great respect for the job our service people do in every branch of the military, they really do amazing things. But I'd rather pin my hand to a desk with a bayonet than write code in another military office or try to maintain consistency in a programming team. The only way I'd do it is if the offices were off base.
As someone who has been a regulator, that attitude is, quite frankly, ignorant. Lawmakers are politicians, with that associated baggage, but in most case are neither incompetent nor ignorant. And most of the time, surprisingly, they come out with well-intended and thoughtful legislation. Not always, but much of the time. What they can get past industry lobbyists trying to help write the legislation.
Once they cross that hurdle the laws go to the appropriate regulatory agencies where industry gets another bite at the political apple by pressuring legislators to encourage the regulators to implement the regulations in the most industry-favorable manner possible.
If by some miracle of decency, a regulation gets past all that pressure, then industry will hire consultants to analyze the regulations and then start playing the Consistent Application Game. Where consultants will offer a weak solution and demand regulators tell them what they have to do to be in compliance. Always aiming for the absolute minimum and constantly coming back with, "Can we do this?" and "Can we do that instead?" They'll go from department to department trying to find a more favorable interpretation. When they find it, they'll circulate that out to everyone and all of a sudden the lower compliance standard is suddenly the new norm. They'll stall, drag their feet, file spurious court actions which they know states and municipalities are ill-equipped to fight. And, they'll find loopholes, or imagine loopholes, and wait until the regulatory agency gets a judgment that they're wrong maybe three or four years later, at which time they go back and start saying big fines will cost the state jobs and the money would be better spent on compliance. Even if they lose, they'll start trying wiggle out of any real responsibility.
Because, right now, there's no real downside for them getting silly trying to game the system. If there was say, jail time for the execs, that would clear up the silly business pretty fast. Short of that, what I'm describing is the reality of the regulatory environment at the state and federal level. Throw in a few genuinely corrupt politicians in the pocket of those same industries who calls and regularly rips on the agency head and you have a tough job enforcing the simplest of regulations.
But how would you know that when you don't have to reach any farther than your butt for conventional wisdom?
To have such l33t haX0r at the helm of cybersecurity? Someone who understands and can divine the true identities of the Anonymous, an elite cabal of terrorists bent on flooding the internets machine with p0rn and clogging the tubes. Slashdot, you're blown. Now the whole world will know that all this tech talk is just a veneer of respectability....except without the veneer.
Microsoft researchers provides detailed cost/benefit analysis for several real workloads.
If Microsoft researchers report that SSD's are not cost effective storage, it means that Microsoft is not getting any revenue from SSD storage. Or that they're behind on incorporating SSD's into the server stack. Or they caught blind-sided by the trend like they did with netbooks and are now scrambling to explain why they didn't see it coming. Oh, we found that wasn't cost effective, so we didn't incorporate it.
I really miss the days Microsoft had it together. There was a time they were great to work with. Now they seem like the Three Stooges Do IT. SSD, eh? Oh, a wise guy! SMACK! Wo-wo-wo-wo!
In this case the parent is quite accurate. The truth is our electrical grid security has been dismal for decades. Hackers infiltrating control systems is only the latest discovery. If a foreign government wanted to sabotage our electrical grid it would be shockingly easy to do. 5 to 10 people working together with a few resources could black out the entire west coast for weeks if not months.
Okay, so now they can disrupt control systems from the comfort of their data center. Whoopy do. Yes, fix the data security, but spend the money to make the needed improvements to physical security and redundant infrastructure. Our grid is routinely stretched to the breaking point. There's very little extra capacity. I think of people realized how vulnerable our electrical grid really is, they'd be terrified. The fact electricity is so reliable we take it for granted is testimony to the quality of the people working in the field.
Imagine living in L.A. or San Francisco with no electricity for a week.
There are few companies that work as hard at making poor decisions as MSFT. They fielded a loser OS at a time in computing history that they really needed a home run. To placate enterprise users and stop the bleeding in the netbook space they turned to XP at a time they should have been phasing it out.
So now they rush Windows 7 out the door with many of the capabilities Vista should have had and they're chopping off support for XP before Windows 7 is established.
It's not the computing world's fault MS dropped the ball on Vista but, as usual, they're making it your problem. Instead of owning up to the mistake and supporting XP until it's clear Windows 7 is an adequate replacement.
I wish the article would have explained why MLB went with Silverlight in the first place.
Here's what I've seen. The reps bypass the IT department and pitch directly to the execs. Every IT shop...except mine...has a couple Microsoft cheerleaders. So between the former Ms. Arizona sales rep and rah-rah squad on staff, management starts believing it'll actually work. Most management types don't understand the concept of scale. Just because you can make a product work in a demo or for a small number of users, doesn't mean it will work for an audience of thousands. That's a surprisingly difficult concept for management types. They just saw it work, the rep with the nice legs showed them half a dozen web sites already doing it. Why are you telling me it won't work?
My experience has been that Microsoft delivers great products for small to medium size sites but you'd never what to build a really big system on their platform. And that cross-platform compatibility is just a concept in Redmond. They try to tie everything to their platform. Just my 0.02, YMMV. But I can say, and have the numbers to back it up, that I can build enterprise scale systems for the cost of the hardware and developer salaries with competitive time to market.
Not that I'd ever use that fact to say NEENER, NEENER, NEENER to legions of people heavily invested in MSFT. No, sir, not me. [insert innocent look here]
I might suggest switching to tea. It has less caffeine than coffee and I find the lift much more refreshing. I started by cutting off coffee after a couple cups and switching to tea, then gradually reducing the amount of coffee. I've cut my coffee consumption in half after just a couple weeks. Beats going cold turkey.
Start with black tea. It's got more bite for coffee drinkers. Add a dash of cream if it's too bitter. Then switch to white and green teas. Trying to go from coffee to white tea is like trying to switch from German beer to American beer, too much of a transition all at once.
Always thought it was odd we don't drink more tea here in the states. Everywhere I went in Europe tea seemed to be the preferred drink. In Russia you drink it in a glass with lemon, in England with a biscuit thingy, in India with enough sugar to clog a truck motor. I've been many places where coffee wasn't available but never where I couldn't get tea. Even at Starbucks when you order tea instead of proper brewed hot tea, you get a cup of hot water and a tea bag. It seems...primitive.
Same question crossed my mind. The last place I worked, coincidentally a Windows shop, was rife with bureaucratic decision making and process for the sake of process. Tasks that could be accomplished for thousands and take weeks ended up taking years and costing millions. The ironic justification for all the process was that the customer did not feel the old agile environment was providing good value for their development dollars. So they took the vague suspicion and turned it into a massive reality.
The new contractor manager brought in an army of unproductive people. Including one with the spiffy title Configuration Control Manager. I never did figure out exactly what she did, other than act bossy, look stressed out and pretend to be busy all the time. Busy digging sand. They spent money on Rational licenses but not on training and no one ended up using it. Tried to fit development into a process that lost contact with the actual application users. They brought in five people to maintain an application built by two, instead of keeping the two who built it. What made this mass insanity more than passing amusement while I looked for another job was they were squandering taxpayer dollars. It was Iraq for IT.
The days of massive IT development projects are over. They've actually been dead for several years but like a zombie those massive projects still limp aimlessly across the IT landscape looking for additional funding blood.
I'm glad not to be only one who didn't think that article was a bit funny. Using April Fools as an excuse to yell fire in a theater isn't what it's about. If there's enough of that going around on one day, what happens if something really bad happened? If you tried reporting it April 1, everyone would just ignore it.
That article was the equivalent of pulling the fire alarm or calling 911 as a joke. I guaran-damn-tee the fire department is not amused.
Hard to believe something like this was ever introduced in this county. And supported by...a lot of you. At least many of you voted and stuck up for the dirt bags who proposed it.
Obama bailing out the auto industry and trying to fix health care is the path to socialism, but spying on Americans without due process and then trying to forbid them from talking to an attorney, you're okay with that.
...'search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content' doesn't hold water any more..."
Oh, really? Okay, when Google stops indexing the content of your rag, then you can look for its rotting body in the ditch next to the information highway.
You should be glad Google isn't charging you to carry your stories.
No longer holds water...okay, skippy, let's see you come up with a way to promote your site that doesn't include Google. Then I'll be impressed. Cause, see, in all the excitement, I can't remember whether we spidered your worthless rag or not. What you have to ask yourself...is do you feel lucky? Well, do ya...punk?
Shows what you know. I worked a MS shop for years and have developed many apps in.NET. VB and C# with SQL Server on the back end. SQL Reports, CrystalReports all that program-by-numbers garbage. Many of them still in operation today. I'm not sure where the framework is today but I left Microsoft World just after 3.0 was rolled out.
It's FrontPage on steroids. And I like PHP/MySQL much better. It's a little slower time to market, but once you get a library of classes built up, not a lot slower. And it's got a lot of functions.NET only dreams about for web apps. There's a reason few really major sites are built on.NET. You can get applications 80% finished in.NET a lot faster. But the last mile of debugging and optimization is a killer. My opinion of.NET is that's it good for small to medium apps in an all MS environment but not much else.
You sound like someone invested in MS training and certification.
...but the curriculums now create people who think that the compiler, the runtime, and the OS are a black box.
That is the truth, particularly in the MS world. My opinion of.NET is FrontPage on steroids but a lot new grads don't even know what FrontPage was. And most of them can't do anything beyond plugging in a PC. If a workstation has a problem, their hardware knowledge is limited to the Dell customer service number.
They don't know how any of it works together. And I'll hear people defend superficial knowledge with lines like, "I don't need to know how a computer works to program it."
Slashdot Mirror
I was talking to a partner company one time and they were all about telling me how much they've spent on a patent attorney to patent their web site, which was basically a paint-by-numbers hosting site. There would have to be a ton of prior art on that and then they acted surprised when I told them about the Bilski case.
Another one in New York was convinced they could patent the idea of specialized user portal. When I tried to explain the difference between patent and copyright, they snuffed and reminded me that no one ever made money on copyright litigation.
The system we have now is absolutely insane. If you really want to reduce nuisance and frivolous litigation, then start with the patent system. And I hope the courts add to the Bilski ruling and puts an end to this nonsense.
You can bet they'll start complaining all this bad stuff happened because they weren't allowed to traffic shape, implement tiered pricing and charge at both ends of the pipe.
Then they'll do what the coal power industry is doing, just drag their feet until the government gives them money to solve the problem or solves it for them, then step in to reap the profits.
After all, some of those high flying execs might have to scrimp by with a few million less if they made infrastructure investments.
But since when did Slashdot become corporate mass media, afraid to call lying "lying"?
Corporations owe no allegiance to the truth but sometimes the interesting question is why they're lying. And why are they so anxious to erase their tracks? Liability or regulation...they're not worried about competition. The US market in telecommunications isn't a free market, it's a cartel.
Figure out what they're afraid you'll know why they're lying. Like the oil companies. They're keeping up the PR assault to try and distract people from the fact they're throttling domestic oil production in the face of lower prices. No point extracting expensive oil at $47 a barrel when they can still make a margin buying from the Saudis. So waive the flag to distract from the uncomfortable reality that big oil is willing to let our national security suffer if they can make a margin on the status quo. And air those slick commercials with the PR gal telling us how they're doing so much for domestic exploration.
That's just being sleazy and two-faced. What AT&T is displaying is fear. They're afraid of something. This isn't a PR embarrassment, there's liability, serious liability. Hand in the cookie jar, massive regulation kind of liability. Maybe they were using non-identifiable data aggregates from the wiretaps as a marketing tool? It'll be something like that.
It's always sparks my curiosity to discover what's in a hole someone is anxious to fill in.
Is that just the result of crappy programming, or is there more to it?
My Linux boxes seem pretty snappy and they don't degrade over time. But I do notice most Windows boxes do seem to slow down over time, unless they're not connected to the internet. I'm guessing it's that load of malware, custom toolbars, background processes and just garbage that grow out of control. Your Windows box is doing a lot of work lugging all that baggage around, it's mot productive for you.
the wiretap capturing Harman's conversation was illegal.
But Roberto and Yoo said it was legal. Bush maintained it was legal. Either it's legal or not. So instead of admitting they're wiretapping Americans, so much better to just blackmail the ones you need something from.
American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.
So now we know the Israelis are lobbying for favors, that's nothing new. What's news to me is how effective they are. They're able to influence who gets committee positions. Does that frighten anyone else? Who else has a committee chair because some lobbying group wanted them in there? A foreign lobbying group at that.
Well, there it is. Selective enforcement to advance a political agenda. The funny thing is the right wing can't really say much because a right wing administration was wiretapping Americans and doling out favors to garner support. It's a mess, the whole sorry affair.
Okay, so what? What's to stop the next Bush/Cheney right wing douche-o-rama from doing the same thing? If there are no consequences, the next time they get a chance they'll do the same thing. We know we can't count on the FBI and NSA to police themselves, the Supreme Court is loaded with people who don't care about the Constitution, so NSA gets a slap on the wrist and new guidance. Big hairy deal. They'd do the same thing again if some sock puppet Attorney General told them it was okay.
"may return to the idea in the future"
So they'll keep that in their back pocket and every time they need to actually put some money into infrastructure improvements, they'll trot this out. Oh, if we could only meter billing for the really big users. Everything that's wrong with telecomm and the internet will hang on this issue. If we could just do this, then everything would be better. They'll pay for PR press hits in industry rags, try to make it look like an inevitable development. They'll wait for the political climate to change, the regulatory environment, like a stubborn infection they'll be ready to strike the moment defenses are weak.
Just call your artificial device a "Woomba" and you'll be in the clear!
I pictured a device like those herb window gardens. Just unpack it. Pour in the nutrient media. Add egg and sperm and in just a few months you'll be growing your own brand new baby!
Get Billy Mays to do the commercials. And, if you call today, we'll throw in a package of Sea Monkeys.
Hey, is it any surprise campus security are afraid of Command Line Interface Terrorism?
I can't wait until the cops try putting their forensic disks designed for Windows in the drive. Why isn't it working?
Bang the rocks together to make a spark, zippy.
The worst place I ever had to write code was an on a Navy base as a contractor. The Navy does many things well and some things amazingly well, but it's hellish to work as a contractor in some of their offices. Everyone talks really loud, they dial with their speaker phones turned all the way up, people are constantly walking behind you and interrupting productive work. It was like trying to write music in a bus station. And for some of the female employees it was worse, especially if they were good looking. They were constantly pinged on by both military and other civilian personnel. Turn over among staff, particularly female staff, was quite high.
They also stifled productive work by layering byzantine access requirements and a continually more restrictive operating environment. Experimenting with new technologies was virtually impossible. You had to login to your workstation with a badge, so that meant people were constantly leaving their badge behind, making it difficult to get back on to the base. The politics were terrible. Incompetent civilian managers who would train in their equally incompetent lackeys. Excessive process, many times for the sake of process that added no real value.
Eventually we moved over with the research people. It was a lot quieter and more productive, but you never could completely escape the bus station office atmosphere. I have great respect for the job our service people do in every branch of the military, they really do amazing things. But I'd rather pin my hand to a desk with a bayonet than write code in another military office or try to maintain consistency in a programming team. The only way I'd do it is if the offices were off base.
Incompetent lawmakers are incompetent.
As someone who has been a regulator, that attitude is, quite frankly, ignorant. Lawmakers are politicians, with that associated baggage, but in most case are neither incompetent nor ignorant. And most of the time, surprisingly, they come out with well-intended and thoughtful legislation. Not always, but much of the time. What they can get past industry lobbyists trying to help write the legislation.
Once they cross that hurdle the laws go to the appropriate regulatory agencies where industry gets another bite at the political apple by pressuring legislators to encourage the regulators to implement the regulations in the most industry-favorable manner possible.
If by some miracle of decency, a regulation gets past all that pressure, then industry will hire consultants to analyze the regulations and then start playing the Consistent Application Game. Where consultants will offer a weak solution and demand regulators tell them what they have to do to be in compliance. Always aiming for the absolute minimum and constantly coming back with, "Can we do this?" and "Can we do that instead?" They'll go from department to department trying to find a more favorable interpretation. When they find it, they'll circulate that out to everyone and all of a sudden the lower compliance standard is suddenly the new norm. They'll stall, drag their feet, file spurious court actions which they know states and municipalities are ill-equipped to fight. And, they'll find loopholes, or imagine loopholes, and wait until the regulatory agency gets a judgment that they're wrong maybe three or four years later, at which time they go back and start saying big fines will cost the state jobs and the money would be better spent on compliance. Even if they lose, they'll start trying wiggle out of any real responsibility.
Because, right now, there's no real downside for them getting silly trying to game the system. If there was say, jail time for the execs, that would clear up the silly business pretty fast. Short of that, what I'm describing is the reality of the regulatory environment at the state and federal level. Throw in a few genuinely corrupt politicians in the pocket of those same industries who calls and regularly rips on the agency head and you have a tough job enforcing the simplest of regulations.
But how would you know that when you don't have to reach any farther than your butt for conventional wisdom?
there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
To have such l33t haX0r at the helm of cybersecurity? Someone who understands and can divine the true identities of the Anonymous, an elite cabal of terrorists bent on flooding the internets machine with p0rn and clogging the tubes. Slashdot, you're blown. Now the whole world will know that all this tech talk is just a veneer of respectability....except without the veneer.
To the Bat Cave!
I'm Batman!
Microsoft researchers provides detailed cost/benefit analysis for several real workloads.
If Microsoft researchers report that SSD's are not cost effective storage, it means that Microsoft is not getting any revenue from SSD storage. Or that they're behind on incorporating SSD's into the server stack. Or they caught blind-sided by the trend like they did with netbooks and are now scrambling to explain why they didn't see it coming. Oh, we found that wasn't cost effective, so we didn't incorporate it.
I really miss the days Microsoft had it together. There was a time they were great to work with. Now they seem like the Three Stooges Do IT. SSD, eh? Oh, a wise guy! SMACK! Wo-wo-wo-wo!
In this case the parent is quite accurate. The truth is our electrical grid security has been dismal for decades. Hackers infiltrating control systems is only the latest discovery. If a foreign government wanted to sabotage our electrical grid it would be shockingly easy to do. 5 to 10 people working together with a few resources could black out the entire west coast for weeks if not months.
Okay, so now they can disrupt control systems from the comfort of their data center. Whoopy do. Yes, fix the data security, but spend the money to make the needed improvements to physical security and redundant infrastructure. Our grid is routinely stretched to the breaking point. There's very little extra capacity. I think of people realized how vulnerable our electrical grid really is, they'd be terrified. The fact electricity is so reliable we take it for granted is testimony to the quality of the people working in the field.
Imagine living in L.A. or San Francisco with no electricity for a week.
There are few companies that work as hard at making poor decisions as MSFT. They fielded a loser OS at a time in computing history that they really needed a home run. To placate enterprise users and stop the bleeding in the netbook space they turned to XP at a time they should have been phasing it out.
So now they rush Windows 7 out the door with many of the capabilities Vista should have had and they're chopping off support for XP before Windows 7 is established.
It's not the computing world's fault MS dropped the ball on Vista but, as usual, they're making it your problem. Instead of owning up to the mistake and supporting XP until it's clear Windows 7 is an adequate replacement.
I wish the article would have explained why MLB went with Silverlight in the first place.
Here's what I've seen. The reps bypass the IT department and pitch directly to the execs. Every IT shop...except mine...has a couple Microsoft cheerleaders. So between the former Ms. Arizona sales rep and rah-rah squad on staff, management starts believing it'll actually work. Most management types don't understand the concept of scale. Just because you can make a product work in a demo or for a small number of users, doesn't mean it will work for an audience of thousands. That's a surprisingly difficult concept for management types. They just saw it work, the rep with the nice legs showed them half a dozen web sites already doing it. Why are you telling me it won't work?
My experience has been that Microsoft delivers great products for small to medium size sites but you'd never what to build a really big system on their platform. And that cross-platform compatibility is just a concept in Redmond. They try to tie everything to their platform. Just my 0.02, YMMV. But I can say, and have the numbers to back it up, that I can build enterprise scale systems for the cost of the hardware and developer salaries with competitive time to market.
Not that I'd ever use that fact to say NEENER, NEENER, NEENER to legions of people heavily invested in MSFT. No, sir, not me. [insert innocent look here]
I might suggest switching to tea. It has less caffeine than coffee and I find the lift much more refreshing. I started by cutting off coffee after a couple cups and switching to tea, then gradually reducing the amount of coffee. I've cut my coffee consumption in half after just a couple weeks. Beats going cold turkey.
Start with black tea. It's got more bite for coffee drinkers. Add a dash of cream if it's too bitter. Then switch to white and green teas. Trying to go from coffee to white tea is like trying to switch from German beer to American beer, too much of a transition all at once.
Always thought it was odd we don't drink more tea here in the states. Everywhere I went in Europe tea seemed to be the preferred drink. In Russia you drink it in a glass with lemon, in England with a biscuit thingy, in India with enough sugar to clog a truck motor. I've been many places where coffee wasn't available but never where I couldn't get tea. Even at Starbucks when you order tea instead of proper brewed hot tea, you get a cup of hot water and a tea bag. It seems...primitive.
Where have you been?
Same question crossed my mind. The last place I worked, coincidentally a Windows shop, was rife with bureaucratic decision making and process for the sake of process. Tasks that could be accomplished for thousands and take weeks ended up taking years and costing millions. The ironic justification for all the process was that the customer did not feel the old agile environment was providing good value for their development dollars. So they took the vague suspicion and turned it into a massive reality.
The new contractor manager brought in an army of unproductive people. Including one with the spiffy title Configuration Control Manager. I never did figure out exactly what she did, other than act bossy, look stressed out and pretend to be busy all the time. Busy digging sand. They spent money on Rational licenses but not on training and no one ended up using it. Tried to fit development into a process that lost contact with the actual application users. They brought in five people to maintain an application built by two, instead of keeping the two who built it. What made this mass insanity more than passing amusement while I looked for another job was they were squandering taxpayer dollars. It was Iraq for IT.
The days of massive IT development projects are over. They've actually been dead for several years but like a zombie those massive projects still limp aimlessly across the IT landscape looking for additional funding blood.
I'm glad not to be only one who didn't think that article was a bit funny. Using April Fools as an excuse to yell fire in a theater isn't what it's about. If there's enough of that going around on one day, what happens if something really bad happened? If you tried reporting it April 1, everyone would just ignore it.
That article was the equivalent of pulling the fire alarm or calling 911 as a joke. I guaran-damn-tee the fire department is not amused.
Hard to believe something like this was ever introduced in this county. And supported by...a lot of you. At least many of you voted and stuck up for the dirt bags who proposed it.
Obama bailing out the auto industry and trying to fix health care is the path to socialism, but spying on Americans without due process and then trying to forbid them from talking to an attorney, you're okay with that.
Oh, really? Okay, when Google stops indexing the content of your rag, then you can look for its rotting body in the ditch next to the information highway.
You should be glad Google isn't charging you to carry your stories.
No longer holds water...okay, skippy, let's see you come up with a way to promote your site that doesn't include Google. Then I'll be impressed. Cause, see, in all the excitement, I can't remember whether we spidered your worthless rag or not. What you have to ask yourself...is do you feel lucky? Well, do ya...punk?
Shows what you know. I worked a MS shop for years and have developed many apps in .NET. VB and C# with SQL Server on the back end. SQL Reports, CrystalReports all that program-by-numbers garbage. Many of them still in operation today. I'm not sure where the framework is today but I left Microsoft World just after 3.0 was rolled out.
It's FrontPage on steroids. And I like PHP/MySQL much better. It's a little slower time to market, but once you get a library of classes built up, not a lot slower. And it's got a lot of functions .NET only dreams about for web apps. There's a reason few really major sites are built on .NET. You can get applications 80% finished in .NET a lot faster. But the last mile of debugging and optimization is a killer. My opinion of .NET is that's it good for small to medium apps in an all MS environment but not much else.
You sound like someone invested in MS training and certification.
That is the truth, particularly in the MS world. My opinion of .NET is FrontPage on steroids but a lot new grads don't even know what FrontPage was. And most of them can't do anything beyond plugging in a PC. If a workstation has a problem, their hardware knowledge is limited to the Dell customer service number.
They don't know how any of it works together. And I'll hear people defend superficial knowledge with lines like, "I don't need to know how a computer works to program it."
You do in my shop.