What kind of education are they supposed to be getting? Microsoft University?
Last I checked, a ridiculous majority of the international business world uses MS Office to get shit done. That's not exactly a useless or unmarketable skill to have.
I think Sugar is a great idea for what it is, but I doubt even one kid in ten that you could give an OLPC to (in any country) is going to become a developer. Some people in any crowd have the right kinds of mindset and interests to do it, and some don't.
It's not what you or I would want for our kids, but maybe at least a few of the random third-world kids in the other 90% who grow up with Excel etc. can get jobs in offices or whatever with those skills as their countries gradually emerge from poverty.
I went to the theatre expecting to hate it (a bunch of my friends were going to see it and I thought, it'll probably be stupid but with this crowd that'll probably still be fun), but I actually really enjoyed it. I started off the movie thinking it was all pretty ridiculous, and somehow maybe twenty minutes into the movie I went straight past ridiculousness overload into just accepting it for what it was and enjoying it.
It's probably as good of a movie as could have been made out of the source material.
Also, one of the people in our group either started crying during the final race or had an eyegasm from the preposterous, yet somehow enjoyable, visuals. I've decided I don't want to know which or why.
You must not work in the IT industry. You don't get promoted up the ranks, you get hired at another company for higher wages.
There's a lot of truth to this.
Further, businesses have gotten pretty good at providing advancement tracks for non-technical people (maybe you start as an administrative assistant or working on a production floor, transition into some kind of more advanced office job, transition into some kind of middle management, etc.) but are generally much less good at or able to provide the same thing for technical people. For example, imagine a manufacturing business that has some internally-developed software that runs some aspects of their business and has a constant need for 2-3 developers to improve/maintain it. There really isn't an advancement track for those developers within IT in that company -- they either need to transition to non-technical middle management (probably not a good fit for them) or change jobs completely to get better pay or more challenging work.
I am somehow puzzled by the lack of presence of real life (read: useful) silverlight applets. I would expect microsoft to start using it extensively at this point, because we're hearing about silverlight for quite some time now.
I think it's mainly two things:
1) Silverlight 1.0 wasn't very good. I mean, it's pretty impressive for a first release of what it is, but, it's clunky to work with. Someone who really understands how to use it can make a pretty slick looking app out of it, but it isn't really anything you couldn't do already with Flash, and there's lots of people with lots of years of experience with Flash. Not much incentive there.
2) The announcement of Silverlight 2.0 killed Silverlight 1.0 development. I know a lot of people who were sort of interested in Silverlight, but were hesitant at how 'beta' it was or how much they'd have to relearn. Then Microsoft announces 2.0 and mentions that, by the way, you just write.NET code for it, no need to learn 1.0's weird bastard child of Javascript version. Now all the people with years of.NET web dev experience have to look at that and think, even if I did learn the 1.0 way, it's going to be completely obsolete in a few months, and at that time I'll already know most of what I need to know to write a Silverlight 2 app. Lots of incentive to wait and not a lot to be on the cutting edge of a technology already pronounced dead.
Note the absence of *a single* significant Silverlight application.
Well, no shit. Flash has been out for around a decade, and the first real version of Silverlight will be out... soon. (They did release 1.0, but any company but Microsoft would call it a Beta.)
It gets a bad rap because poor developers will use that power to write powerfully terrible code, and "smart" developers will typically use that power to write clever but unmaintainable code.
You also get all the other benefits of DVCS that Subversion doesn't do or doesn't do well.
Examples? Specifically, I'm wondering what advantages a DVCS can offer in a situation where what you would choose is very close to or exactly like the centralized model that something like Subversion forces on you -- and similarly, what the trade-offs are.
I know that's not the situation for most Open Source projects, but I think it is the case for a lot of businesses that are currently running Subversion, or are looking at Subversion to replace whatever older and crappier VCS they have. Probably I'll have to make that kind of call at least once in the next few years and it would be nice to have a better handle on the pros and cons.
PyratByran is run by Swedes. Sweden is not part of the United States. Your silly American laws do not apply in Sweden.
That's true, right up to the point that Al-Qaeda operatives are revealed to be hiding in TPB's server room and Sweden is declared part of the Axis of Evil.
Give it time, the American military-industrial complex will figure out some way to bone Sweden over it, even if it screws itself more in the process.
I don't have to waste time scanning for malware constantly or defragging my linux box, so I save time.
Who even does that on a Windows box anymore? I think it's great that you're off Windows for a decade or whatever, but beating that horse isn't any more valid than bashing Linux because it doesn't have a graphical user interface.
here are some people who love Microsoft products, use Visual Studio to develop C# code, run Vista and swear up and down that they've never had any problems with it, and have purchased a Zune.
Heh. I use Visual Studio to develop C# code, run Vista and have never had any problems with it, but even I bought an iPod.
(Although, its hard drive died within a month of the warranty running out and it's not worth the cost to replace it, so maybe I did make a mistake diverging there... even still my next mp3 player won't be an iPod but it probably won't be a Zune either.)
According to TFA, Google and other companies are exploring having filtering technology similar to this to eliminate copyrighted content from their shared video sites. Unless/until that happens, I can't really see even Microsoft making this move.
As TFA points out, MS is way at the back of the portable mp3/video/etc. pack and it knows it can't afford to stick more "features" in that will drive users away. Now, the NBC dude quoted in the article brings up the idea that through whatever the Zune store is called they'd have options to offer whole seasons of a show at a discount instead of being forced to the $2/episode no matter what pricing standard of iTunes, and I could see that drawing people to buy the episodes from Microsoft -- but not so long as the alternative is to get them free for the iPod from YouTube. A generation raised with free TV and VCRs hesitates even less about 'stealing' TV episodes than it does about songs.
So unless YouTube etc. put a filter in place that successfully blocks this same content I can't see it going anywhere on portable players so long as Apple refuses to do it to the market-dominant iPod.
Exactly! Google understand this. Innovation is the future, buying old already established businesses is not
Well, no. Basically everyone big in the industry, including both Google and Yahoo!, also buys successful companies to replace their homegrown failing offerings in the same space. Without even leaving the fairly narrow field of online video offerings, I give you Exhibit A: YouTube. Exhibit B: JumpCut.
I think it's just one of those personal preference things, honestly.
I used Eclipse for years (still do, when I'm on a Java project) and I generally hate it. I can't back that up with any kind of empirical reason for the dislike besides its resource-hogginess -- it's just designed in such a way that whatever feels like the intuitive way to do something to me is wrong. It's like I've stepped into a bizarro world where the knob marked 'H' in the shower makes cold water come out of the nozzle and the knob marked 'C' makes hot water come out, and no matter how many times I do it it always feels confusing and backwards to me. People whose opinions I greatly value think it's the best thing since sliced bread, and more power to them.
I can almost always get more done with less time with VS, even though I've done Java development and used Eclipse twice as long. Your mileage may (and clearly does) vary.
Well, considering that we're talking about Visual Studio, I don't think that you can count astronomical resource usage against Eclipse - VS is a multi-gigabyte install and has a huge footprint. I haven't used Eclipse with C/C++, but it is great for Java.
I don't have the numbers to back this up, but my experience (having spent multiple years using Eclipse for Java and Visual Studio) is that Eclipse is a MUCH bigger resource hog. I've had machines that could handle 2 or 3 instances of VS running at a time without problems that were brought to their knees by 1 instance of Eclipse.
The point to Team System, such as it is, is that all of the other tools that you need to do development on a medium to large project are part of the same suite and designed for interoperability above all else. Not just source control, but also automated builds, defect tracking, feature tracking, automated testing, database versioning, etc.
You definitely can find a better free tool for almost all those things than Team System's version of them; for example, NUnit for your unit testing vs. Team System's unit testing. I seriously can't say enough good things about how nice it is to have all those things integrated. It's easy to pull up a bug and see which build it broke in and which build it was fixed in. Being able to do code reviews from within your IDE with all the power and functionality that gives you vs. doing them with a tool like Crucible (which, yes, in pretty much every way but smooth integration with Visual Studio is superior) is just so much better.
Granted, it's not cheap, and I wouldn't seriously recommend it to more than a small fraction of my clients. For most shops it makes more sense to put together the Frankenstein monster of a dozen different tools that don't play nice with the IDE or each other but are individually stronger tools, even if it means that, hey, developer A spends a third of his time being the poor man's Subversion admin. If you've got a sizeable enough shop of developers who work in Visual Studio, though, it really does pay for itself in saved time. I wish I worked in a shop like that more than occasionally.
Having done lots of development across Windows, Mac, and Linux with all kinds of editors, IDEs and debuggers, nothing comes close to Visual Studio in terms of functionality, quality, and just being solid. It's not perfect, but it's way better than anything else out there. For that reason alone Microsoft deserves some kudos from developers.
Agree with this 100%. (Although I can admit I don't have much exposure to anything you'd use for Mac development that isn't also available on Windows or Linux, e.g. Eclipse.)
I don't love everything or even most things about Windows, but spending more of my work time on the interesting parts of the problem and less time fighting with my IDE or other dev tools is worth a lot to me.
I did some work a few years ago on a project for a Fortune 100 company which was deployed on a handful of Windows Server '03 boxes. Everything worked fine on the developers' machines, but predictably, once we got the thing into the production environment and started to put serious enterprise load on it we had serious issues with leaking memory and threading.
Naturally, the developers responsible for the service with the problems swore up and down that their code was correct and a bug in WS03 had to be the problem. The company had some kind of Microsoft support contract, and they went through the same kind of song and dance you're talking about with massive trace files and logging and what not.
It took probably 2-3 weeks of back and forth, but the Microsoft guys actually found the problem for them, and it was in the project's custom code after all. (Do you bet on Microsoft releasing a bug-free product, or on your standard arrogant cowboy developer to write code that's as perfect as claimed? No good choice there, really.)
That's really the only exposure I've had to the MS paid support and it was mostly favorable, although, I couldn't say whether the support actually usually is better than you've seen, or if this company's problems got routed to the "good" support people because it was such a high profile company.
There are rivals to MS Office products that would take market share away from them very quickly and the only thing really preventing that is if they can keep the standard file formats something that only they control.
We'll agree to disagree there. File format compatability isn't really a bar to adopting OpenOffice today; the OpenOffice developers have done a pretty fantastic job on that front.
Death of OOXML = death of MS-Office is more something people would like to be true than something that is actually true.
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What kind of education are they supposed to be getting? Microsoft University?
Last I checked, a ridiculous majority of the international business world uses MS Office to get shit done. That's not exactly a useless or unmarketable skill to have.
I think Sugar is a great idea for what it is, but I doubt even one kid in ten that you could give an OLPC to (in any country) is going to become a developer. Some people in any crowd have the right kinds of mindset and interests to do it, and some don't.
It's not what you or I would want for our kids, but maybe at least a few of the random third-world kids in the other 90% who grow up with Excel etc. can get jobs in offices or whatever with those skills as their countries gradually emerge from poverty.
I went to the theatre expecting to hate it (a bunch of my friends were going to see it and I thought, it'll probably be stupid but with this crowd that'll probably still be fun), but I actually really enjoyed it. I started off the movie thinking it was all pretty ridiculous, and somehow maybe twenty minutes into the movie I went straight past ridiculousness overload into just accepting it for what it was and enjoying it.
It's probably as good of a movie as could have been made out of the source material.
Also, one of the people in our group either started crying during the final race or had an eyegasm from the preposterous, yet somehow enjoyable, visuals. I've decided I don't want to know which or why.
The PC is already and likely permanently dominant in the area of MMORPGs and FPS games. There is little point even questioning it
I don't think I'd be so quick to say that.
I mean, is the same FPS game released on the PC and a console going to always look and play better on the console? Absolutely.
But where will it sell more copies? It's starting to be the console by far.
Those kinds of market forces have to start distorting the status quo there, assuming you don't think they are already.
You must not work in the IT industry. You don't get promoted up the ranks, you get hired at another company for higher wages.
There's a lot of truth to this.
Further, businesses have gotten pretty good at providing advancement tracks for non-technical people (maybe you start as an administrative assistant or working on a production floor, transition into some kind of more advanced office job, transition into some kind of middle management, etc.) but are generally much less good at or able to provide the same thing for technical people. For example, imagine a manufacturing business that has some internally-developed software that runs some aspects of their business and has a constant need for 2-3 developers to improve/maintain it. There really isn't an advancement track for those developers within IT in that company -- they either need to transition to non-technical middle management (probably not a good fit for them) or change jobs completely to get better pay or more challenging work.
That doesn't sound like supporting the troops.
I am somehow puzzled by the lack of presence of real life (read: useful) silverlight applets. I would expect microsoft to start using it extensively at this point, because we're hearing about silverlight for quite some time now.
.NET code for it, no need to learn 1.0's weird bastard child of Javascript version. Now all the people with years of .NET web dev experience have to look at that and think, even if I did learn the 1.0 way, it's going to be completely obsolete in a few months, and at that time I'll already know most of what I need to know to write a Silverlight 2 app. Lots of incentive to wait and not a lot to be on the cutting edge of a technology already pronounced dead.
I think it's mainly two things:
1) Silverlight 1.0 wasn't very good. I mean, it's pretty impressive for a first release of what it is, but, it's clunky to work with. Someone who really understands how to use it can make a pretty slick looking app out of it, but it isn't really anything you couldn't do already with Flash, and there's lots of people with lots of years of experience with Flash. Not much incentive there.
2) The announcement of Silverlight 2.0 killed Silverlight 1.0 development. I know a lot of people who were sort of interested in Silverlight, but were hesitant at how 'beta' it was or how much they'd have to relearn. Then Microsoft announces 2.0 and mentions that, by the way, you just write
Note the absence of *a single* significant Silverlight application.
Well, no shit. Flash has been out for around a decade, and the first real version of Silverlight will be out... soon. (They did release 1.0, but any company but Microsoft would call it a Beta.)
Javascript is a full blown power-users' language
It gets a bad rap because poor developers will use that power to write powerfully terrible code, and "smart" developers will typically use that power to write clever but unmaintainable code.
You also get all the other benefits of DVCS that Subversion doesn't do or doesn't do well.
Examples? Specifically, I'm wondering what advantages a DVCS can offer in a situation where what you would choose is very close to or exactly like the centralized model that something like Subversion forces on you -- and similarly, what the trade-offs are.
I know that's not the situation for most Open Source projects, but I think it is the case for a lot of businesses that are currently running Subversion, or are looking at Subversion to replace whatever older and crappier VCS they have. Probably I'll have to make that kind of call at least once in the next few years and it would be nice to have a better handle on the pros and cons.
PyratByran is run by Swedes. Sweden is not part of the United States. Your silly American laws do not apply in Sweden.
That's true, right up to the point that Al-Qaeda operatives are revealed to be hiding in TPB's server room and Sweden is declared part of the Axis of Evil.
Give it time, the American military-industrial complex will figure out some way to bone Sweden over it, even if it screws itself more in the process.
I don't have to waste time scanning for malware constantly or defragging my linux box, so I save time.
Who even does that on a Windows box anymore? I think it's great that you're off Windows for a decade or whatever, but beating that horse isn't any more valid than bashing Linux because it doesn't have a graphical user interface.
I'm sure this isn't relevant to your particular SanDisk player, but from TFA:
Mr. Perrette added that NBC is trying to develop similar hardware technology with SanDisk, through whom NBC also sells its programming.
here are some people who love Microsoft products, use Visual Studio to develop C# code, run Vista and swear up and down that they've never had any problems with it, and have purchased a Zune.
Heh. I use Visual Studio to develop C# code, run Vista and have never had any problems with it, but even I bought an iPod.
(Although, its hard drive died within a month of the warranty running out and it's not worth the cost to replace it, so maybe I did make a mistake diverging there... even still my next mp3 player won't be an iPod but it probably won't be a Zune either.)
According to TFA, Google and other companies are exploring having filtering technology similar to this to eliminate copyrighted content from their shared video sites. Unless/until that happens, I can't really see even Microsoft making this move.
As TFA points out, MS is way at the back of the portable mp3/video/etc. pack and it knows it can't afford to stick more "features" in that will drive users away. Now, the NBC dude quoted in the article brings up the idea that through whatever the Zune store is called they'd have options to offer whole seasons of a show at a discount instead of being forced to the $2/episode no matter what pricing standard of iTunes, and I could see that drawing people to buy the episodes from Microsoft -- but not so long as the alternative is to get them free for the iPod from YouTube. A generation raised with free TV and VCRs hesitates even less about 'stealing' TV episodes than it does about songs.
So unless YouTube etc. put a filter in place that successfully blocks this same content I can't see it going anywhere on portable players so long as Apple refuses to do it to the market-dominant iPod.
Exactly! Google understand this. Innovation is the future, buying old already established businesses is not
Well, no. Basically everyone big in the industry, including both Google and Yahoo!, also buys successful companies to replace their homegrown failing offerings in the same space. Without even leaving the fairly narrow field of online video offerings, I give you Exhibit A: YouTube. Exhibit B: JumpCut.
As your obvious superior in UI matters, I grant you the last response in this particular thread.
I'd say the only thing that seems obvious is that you also think you can piss farther than that guy.
Seriously, go back and read what you wrote. It's pompous enough to choke on.
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll have to give that a shot for my next Java project.
I think it's just one of those personal preference things, honestly.
I used Eclipse for years (still do, when I'm on a Java project) and I generally hate it. I can't back that up with any kind of empirical reason for the dislike besides its resource-hogginess -- it's just designed in such a way that whatever feels like the intuitive way to do something to me is wrong. It's like I've stepped into a bizarro world where the knob marked 'H' in the shower makes cold water come out of the nozzle and the knob marked 'C' makes hot water come out, and no matter how many times I do it it always feels confusing and backwards to me. People whose opinions I greatly value think it's the best thing since sliced bread, and more power to them.
I can almost always get more done with less time with VS, even though I've done Java development and used Eclipse twice as long. Your mileage may (and clearly does) vary.
Well, considering that we're talking about Visual Studio, I don't think that you can count astronomical resource usage against Eclipse - VS is a multi-gigabyte install and has a huge footprint. I haven't used Eclipse with C/C++, but it is great for Java.
I don't have the numbers to back this up, but my experience (having spent multiple years using Eclipse for Java and Visual Studio) is that Eclipse is a MUCH bigger resource hog. I've had machines that could handle 2 or 3 instances of VS running at a time without problems that were brought to their knees by 1 instance of Eclipse.
The point to Team System, such as it is, is that all of the other tools that you need to do development on a medium to large project are part of the same suite and designed for interoperability above all else. Not just source control, but also automated builds, defect tracking, feature tracking, automated testing, database versioning, etc.
You definitely can find a better free tool for almost all those things than Team System's version of them; for example, NUnit for your unit testing vs. Team System's unit testing. I seriously can't say enough good things about how nice it is to have all those things integrated. It's easy to pull up a bug and see which build it broke in and which build it was fixed in. Being able to do code reviews from within your IDE with all the power and functionality that gives you vs. doing them with a tool like Crucible (which, yes, in pretty much every way but smooth integration with Visual Studio is superior) is just so much better.
Granted, it's not cheap, and I wouldn't seriously recommend it to more than a small fraction of my clients. For most shops it makes more sense to put together the Frankenstein monster of a dozen different tools that don't play nice with the IDE or each other but are individually stronger tools, even if it means that, hey, developer A spends a third of his time being the poor man's Subversion admin. If you've got a sizeable enough shop of developers who work in Visual Studio, though, it really does pay for itself in saved time. I wish I worked in a shop like that more than occasionally.
Having done lots of development across Windows, Mac, and Linux with all kinds of editors, IDEs and debuggers, nothing comes close to Visual Studio in terms of functionality, quality, and just being solid. It's not perfect, but it's way better than anything else out there. For that reason alone Microsoft deserves some kudos from developers.
Agree with this 100%. (Although I can admit I don't have much exposure to anything you'd use for Mac development that isn't also available on Windows or Linux, e.g. Eclipse.)
I don't love everything or even most things about Windows, but spending more of my work time on the interesting parts of the problem and less time fighting with my IDE or other dev tools is worth a lot to me.
For what it's worth...
I did some work a few years ago on a project for a Fortune 100 company which was deployed on a handful of Windows Server '03 boxes. Everything worked fine on the developers' machines, but predictably, once we got the thing into the production environment and started to put serious enterprise load on it we had serious issues with leaking memory and threading.
Naturally, the developers responsible for the service with the problems swore up and down that their code was correct and a bug in WS03 had to be the problem. The company had some kind of Microsoft support contract, and they went through the same kind of song and dance you're talking about with massive trace files and logging and what not.
It took probably 2-3 weeks of back and forth, but the Microsoft guys actually found the problem for them, and it was in the project's custom code after all. (Do you bet on Microsoft releasing a bug-free product, or on your standard arrogant cowboy developer to write code that's as perfect as claimed? No good choice there, really.)
That's really the only exposure I've had to the MS paid support and it was mostly favorable, although, I couldn't say whether the support actually usually is better than you've seen, or if this company's problems got routed to the "good" support people because it was such a high profile company.
Wait a minute... you're saying people can lie on the internet in order to get me to give them money?
How will I know which male performance enhancing products and Nigerian generals to trust?
There are rivals to MS Office products that would take market share away from them very quickly and the only thing really preventing that is if they can keep the standard file formats something that only they control.
We'll agree to disagree there. File format compatability isn't really a bar to adopting OpenOffice today; the OpenOffice developers have done a pretty fantastic job on that front.
Death of OOXML = death of MS-Office is more something people would like to be true than something that is actually true.
Serious question: Do you think MS-Office's essential world domination will go away if OOXML takes it in the pants?
I don't. It's got to die eventually, but I doubt this will have anything significant to do with it.