Not complaining in TFA, but this is/. -- I just anticipated the howls of the unwashed hordes rightfully bitching about yet another "professional" OS with a markedly unprofessional Teletubbies UI which certainly isn't ready for market yet, all while ignoring MS' internal dogfood consumption. I'll bet if enough Microsofties had eaten Office dogfood you could shut off that fucking control-click "Research" panel easily.
Nevermind that the UI for 2008 is roughly the same as 2003, only with a more extensive (yet still looking clean and fairly spartan with the eyecandy) set of configuration utilities for roles and features. Just wish I could say the same for the control panel.:)
As for the 'research' panel... okay, I work here at microsoft, and I own my own copies of office at home, and I have no idea what that is. Of course, I'm hardly an office power user.
You can bet your bottom dollar that office 2007 is all that's in use around most of the company. As is vista, although it tends to be a mixture of vista, xp and 2003/2008 in most offices, usually for a variety of legacy reasons (maintenance of older projects, testing, etc)
I've got all but XP myself, but only because I haven't needed it to do my job.
Which we do on a regular basis. Every few weeks I see emails going around from higher-ups asking us to test their team's RC or beta stuff at home for them, and the project I'm working on has been dependent on VS2008 since beta2. Everyone here has their favourite project they like to keep tabs on. I've got longhorn server 2008 running on one of my machines here.
That said, the choice to use longhorn server in production isn't actually a bad one. It's really, REALLY stable. I keep hearing (from people both inside and outside the company) that it's more stable than 2003 is (and 2003 has the benefits of multiple service packs). It's also a lot more configurable about what it runs, and how much of it it enables when it's installed. I wouldn't bet the entire stable on it, but I'd be willing to put money on it getting a place.
All in all, it's pretty sweet, if you look at it from the sysadmin perspective. Also, the stuff you can setup when you couple it with vista is really nice (from a security standpoint, particularly). That said, some of that functionality is being backported to XP with SP3 or whatever.
As for the player's lack of effect on the world... well... did you pay attention to the story at all? The whole story revolves around how the world effected YOU, you play the grunt, the pawn in the bigger story... something tells me that not changing the world around you was by design
I personally don't have a major problem with this. My problem with the linearity of the game is that the damned lead designer or whatever keeps ragging on about how he hates games that are linear, and don't let you explore, and then he creates a game that's basically linear, and any 'exploration' you do doesn't affect anything, and drops off to nothing except in about 2-3 places I can think of, which wind up giving you ammo you don't need, and maybe a little back story.
Contrast this to system shock 2, where you could go anywhere you wanted (to a point, it didn't open the entire place from the get go, admittedly), but in bioshock, there was almost no reason to go back to any place, except to pick off a stray girl (and lets face it, just how many did you miss? I practically tripped over them every time I turned around. I even managed to kill 4 in a level that was supposed to only have 3 (The game tried to tell me I hadn't killed them all after that, and to go back and kill the ones i hadn't killed:))!)
Let's not forget that the storytelling in SS2 was rich. REALLY rich. Sure, it's after the fact, and everyone's dead and shit, but listening to the voice recordings really gave you a sense of the struggle on both sides, and that there are other people there trying to get out (The two lovers, for instance, who do manage to escape, just before you catch up with them, and (MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT)are pegged as the cause for SS3 (which sadly never happened) because the girl got 'infected' by shodan. Their story was awesome, immersive, and really made you feel connected to the game, not a pawn.
Then, of course, what the lead designer probably really wanted to do was create GTA:SA, where you can basically go anywhere in 3 'cities' and do anything, if you're bored. (I know I did).
The thing is, I haven't seen many reviews written from a position of rage and loathing. In fact, I can't remember any off the top of my head. Even as flames on boards go, genuine rage and loathing tends to be somewhat of a tiny minority of the messages, and easily identified as such. So, you know, you don't have to read it, if you don't like that kind of messages.
Okay, you definitely need to watch some of Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation reviews.
Some of those are definitely filled with rage and loathing (well, comically so). That said, he'll still point out good stuff with a game, but he won't spend too much time on it (after all, that's not why people are going to him)
I personally found his bioshock review to be spot on. In system shock 2, towards the end, I found myself critically short on ammo. In bioshock, I found myself critically overstocked. So much so that i actually started to feel anxious when I found I was full of all the ammo I found lying around. A game really shouldn't be making me feel this way over something so trivial (sure, if it's the plot, then by all means, make me anxious, but over ammo? And money? Gimme a break!)
But you know, even with the rage, his reviews are worth watching. He calls out the bullshit, and he pulls in the readers. Every time he rags on a game, there's surprisingly little backlash against his negativity in his comments (of course, I don't know if he or the escapist moderate them,) just mountains of 'damn, couldn't have said it better, or more graphically, myself!'
Except that the zune goes one step better, and won't delete music off the device unless you specifically request it, ever, even if you DO change sync systems. I've changed it a few times already on my one without any problems.
The zune might be a generation behind, but it's definitely got a few minor advantages. I can't say I'm too interested in the market place stuff tho, and the social aspect isn't really why I'm using a player. (when I put the headphones on, it means "rack off, i'm being *anti*social, damnit"
I doubt you'll find it an industry last. While it sucked for the people it supposedly bit in the butt (I doubt there was that many of them, if you discount the hooting from the minority), the reality is that it worked for the publisher. It actually took the pirates several days to get the DRM scheme bypassed so they could distribute it.
Several days is long enough for the sales to jump significantly, and is far better than any previous scheme to date.
The DVD application did not close, but it did stop the movie.
My guess is that the dvd app paused when it lost focus, or got minimized?
The reality is, this feature is easily turned off, even if you want to leave UAC on.
Type 'secpol.msc' into the start menu's "search/run" text area, go to Local Policies->Security options and change User Account Control: Switch to secure desktop when prompting for elevation to be disabled.
That way, there's no jarring thud of the screenshot being taken, and the switch to the darkened version that almost feels like it's trying to induce an epileptic attack, but you still get some of the benefits of UAC. Of course, this is less secure, since, in theory, an application can snoop this or try to click on it itself, but the reality is, apps like that are more likely to assume that you'd turned of UAC anyway.
It's security by obscurity (and thus, security by stupidity), but it's less annoying:)
Google is known to be looking for qualities other than diplomacy and tact, and Google has said that they don't like to hire long term Microsoft employees because it is to hard too retrain them
So does microsoft, when you get right down to it. We've got a fairly large array of non-standard people here.
On the subject of retraining, I'd be interested to see a link to back that up, I really doubt it's any more difficult than training anyone else. My guess is that someone was making an off-the-cuff remark. As i said in a different post, it's more likely that microsoft's employees just generally work in areas outside of google's realm of expertise. MS makes a much broader array of software than google, after all.
I have never worked for Microsoft and to be honest, I'd probably never want to. I think the key problem for Microsoft is that nothing they do is exciting anymore.
Then you're not looking hard enough. I work in CSD. I can't tell you too much about what I'm working on (NDA for the time being), but it's awesome. Bits of it have been in the news recently, and that's not even half of it.
I think Vista has really damaged Microsoft. Not in terms of revenue, since a sale of Windows XP is still a sale for Microsoft. No, the damage is in morale. Vista was an absolute disaster for morale. They worked for a couple of years only to ditch it and start again from the Windows 2003 Server source-code. Nothing they put in to Vista was in anyway something you can get developers energised about. Every feature had nightmarish committees which destroyed any hope of motivation. They even developed anti-features like SecurePath that nobody cares about.
Vista's benefits pay off when longhorn server (win2k8 server) ships. Business will be into that pretty quickly (the *betas* of win2k8 are more stable than win2k3, and 2k3 isn't bad in the slightest, there's a lot to like in 2k8.) The management features are nice++, particularly the tools for preventing systems that don't adhere to policy from connecting to (and damaging) the network, seamlessly.
I read somewhere that Microsoft developers write something like 1,000 lines of code a year. Last-year, I contributed around forty times that to our source control at work. When you're paid so much to do so little - that has to destroy morale too. Most developers I know like to work.
Dude, I've been working here just under 2 months, and I've written almost half that many lines already. It can depend a lot on which division you're in, and what you're working on, of course. Right now, the focus is on getting it done right, getting it done in a testable manner, and above all, getting it done *securely*. You wouldn't believe the amount of effort that's gone into security recently, and you know what? It shows. It won't be long before the old bathwater of legacy code is gone, and along with it, 90% of our problems.
Vista is a symptom of a much deeper problem. Microsoft doesn't know how to be sexy. it doesn't now how to to be secure and it doesn't know how to please it's users. Worst of all, it doesn't know how to make it's huge base of developers happy!
I call bullshit on the 'secure' part. Go read the stats on SQL server vs Oracle sometime. I didn't believe them either when I first saw them (I should get around to comparing the base parts of sql server to postgres sometime, however, I suspect that'll be a much fairer comparison). And just how are we not making developers happy? The stuff we've added to.NET in 3.5 rocks (WPF, WCF and WF are awesome frameworks, and the stuff coming down the line is going to make it even better). VS 2008's due for release soon, and it's a nice IDE (admittedly, I still pine for eclipse now and then tho, VS still has some catching up to do with eclipse in many areas (except for visual form design, damnit eclipse people, get a move on, VE sucked last i checked))
All of this makes Google a very attractive place. If all your talent walks right of your door, it isn't too long until there is no way whatsoever to fix any of the problems I've just mentioned.
This depends a lot on what area you want to work on. I'm not interested in 95% of what google's working on. It won't even be remotely related to 95% of what most MS developers and testers do. I'm very over web development, and MS is catching up in the AJAX department too (WCF is helping there)
Put more succinctly, Microsoft sucks and Google rocks. [citation needed]
Trying to kill that damned werewolf was a fricking PITA. You basically had a nice game of cat & mouse in some house where you run up the stairs, and he almost always goes up after you, then you go down, he follows, you go up, he follows, etc, all to get to the one in a few dozenth time when the bloody werewolf would have decided not to follow you up (maybe he was puffed?:) ) and you finally get to pick up whatever the hell it was.
Sounds like a good idea tho. might find an emulator and actually finish that game.
May I ask where you are from? I would use the phrase "Good for 'em", and I'm just wondering if this is a regional saying? I'm from the U.S., by the way.
I don't know about the parent's location, but we use "Good on 'em" here in Australia a fair bit.
Biased viewpoint. You may be surprised how little tech savvy there is amongst your average human. Frankly, even while most students can use computers, they don't understand what's going on, and are useless when faced with something as simple and common as Clippy the Retarded Paperclip continuously stealing focus.
No doubt. I'm willing to conceed that your average human is no more tech savvy than your average teacher. Unfortunately, one of the problems I noticed was that teachers generally made poor students. They're prone to being impatient and not following instructions just as well as their students are:).
And let me ask - how's your teaching-savvy?;-) My point being, it's easy to criticise others for lack of knowledge in your own narrow speciality...
Fine, my teaching savvy is (imnsho) pretty good. While not the same caliber as getting a Dip-Ed and doing it full time, I spent most of my free time at university being paid to teach under-graduate and post-graduate students how to be system administrators. I know it's a difficult, demanding job, and I was only doing it part time, but I've got experience on both sides of the argument.
Nothing the teachers can do about that, except complain - which is exactly when the usual "teachers are old, useless, out of date shells of humanity who get lots of holidays" smear campaigns start up. Starting to pay teachers properly, and setting a solid core teaching curriculum/strategy/pathway rather than a patchwork of "innovations" aimed at appeasing parents / employers / old people who haven't seen the inside of a school in 30 years and bemoan the fact they don't teach the "3 R's" like they used to (with chalk, slate, and the cane), might be a good start in fixing that.
I completely agree.
And I see the results of the education system every day at uni. While they're generally lacking in lots of areas, I can't pin anything down to being the faults of the teachers. They might be socially / emotionally / practically naïve - but isn't that a lack of social experience and/or parental problem, rather than a problem with the educational system?
Of course, you really do need to keep in mind that university is a completely different environment. At uni, none of the teaching staff are required to have a Dip-Ed, and often have next to no formal training in education. I suspect university wouldn't be as backward as it is now if they did demand that. I would certainly have appreciated it in many of the classes I took on software engineering.
When you've been continually attacked from all sides and blamed for every social sin and ill as much as teachers have, is it any wonder they've learned to immediately circle the wagons?
That's true. I was mainly proving my point that teachers are on the back foot. I was pretty young and undiplomatic at the time. I know better now. I also suspect a lot of that is that power is routinely stripped from teachers when dealing with problem students. Disregarding the removal of punishments such as caning, teachers find it difficult to discipline students simply because of the ever-present lawsuit factor.
I should point out that I also believe that the parents need to stop treating school like day-care. Of course, when the parents get home later and later, and work longer hours, is this even surprising? The cycle won't get better any time soon, i'm betting.
Things have changed since my day then. Work i did in Victoria and just across the border in NSW had me installing school-administrated content blocking. Of course, it's entirely possible that stuff like VicOne and equivalent for NSW have made that more centralized.
Understandable, of course, since local-to-school IT staff assume the block will 'just work' and not need constant attention.
I can't see what justification the Dept of Education has for blocking access to these sites
The thing is, you'll generally find that the blocklists are controlled by individual schools, *not* by the department of education, so any tin-god principal can go on a rampage blocking sites (or turn around and turn it off when someone complains that they can't do their report on 'breast cancer' (why is that always the search that people reference btw? personally, i use one filter blocking it's own FAQ page because the FAQ page contained XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX in the page for an IP address.:) )
Having worked (briefly) in the Victorian education system as an IT support lackey, I can definitely say that teachers here have security issues and closet inferiority complexes.
Some of the general reasons that lead to this include, but are not limited to: * The advancing average age of secondary teachers * The general lack of tech savvy amoungst teachers and supporting staff * The ultra-low wages, high-volume classrooms. * The mentality from the general public that the teachers are given an 'easy go' and should be teaching their kids how to read/write (nevermind that this should have been done BEFORE the student reaches primary school, let alone secondary school, IMHO)
Case in point. One time, I was in a secondary college, and a group of teachers were discussing general causes of problem students. I casually remarked "You have to admit, sometimes it's not the student that is the direct cause". I didn't get a chance to elaborate, all three teachers immediately assumed I'd accused THEM of being incompetent (when i was going to discuss an event from high school where a teacher had shown up drunk for work)
Teachers tend to be very protective of their egos, so the incident in this slashdot story doesn't surprise me in the slightest (and, I'll also suggest it's being overblown here, it's no-where near what some US schools have done, such as suspending/expelling students, etc, over similar incidents)
A huge waste of time, money and resources, and possibly an economic breakdown.
I'm not sure it'd be an economic breakdown, seems more like all the money would just end up going to the lawyers. We'd have a lawyerocracy instead, since they'd end up being the undisputed rulers of the world.
That said, since they'd be undisputed, they'd run out of cash because there'd be no cases left, so it wouldn't last long.:)
"If it were that unsecure, why would it have zealots in the first place?"
it's called money, as in, people make money from what they know about it, and lets face it, ms was just lucky, followed by having smart (for them) marketing practices, and finally, having good strong-arm tactics.
Fine, you want business usage? Let's look at Mac's MS Office. I'm our business's admin (admittedly, a small business, but a business nevetheless). We have a near majority of mac users. Mac Office is responsible for corrupting or otherwise impeding the work of these people more often than i can care to remember. The 'solution'? A) install openoffice (admittedly, a crap solution on a mac atm). or change everyone's user id's. (note that most of these people use their own laptops, and object to me 'fiddling').
If I don't change the userid's, Mac Office happily has a bug where there are name clashes with temporary files, causing Office to randomly claim that it can't open, or it can't save a particular document, regardless of permissions.
MS have been aware of this problem for a while, and so far, haven't done anything to fix it. The few openoffice users (me on linux, a few others on windows) haven't had any complaints or any issues in months, and I definitely haven't had a problem sending large corporations documents edited with openoffice yet in 6 months of doing so.
That said, I can't comment on the 'standardisableness' of an openoffice install. Rolling out on a site-wide basis might well be a royal PITA for openoffice, since I doubt they've got the tools in place that MS do, at this point. (SUS, etc)
I believe you'll also find that there's a group of us who face a different problem from outsourcing development.
My peers (I'm a sysadmin by trade) often discuss the quality of what they've had to deal with when it comes to products developed this way. I read a report recently from one that noted data from the past 4 years showing that while the per-hour cost was low, the products typically took longer to develop, were of much poorer quality (crimes against database normalization, etc), and often had issues following the specs, or followed them in odd ways. These things tend to lead to massive headaches for your average sysadmin
While it's not completely possible to say that some of these issues might not have happened locally too, it's pretty clear there isn't much value to be gained from outsourcing.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm. I would have said 'High Business Impact' but I don't know the context that he used it in, since I cbf'ed reading the article.
Not complaining in TFA, but this is /. -- I just anticipated the howls of the unwashed hordes rightfully bitching about yet another "professional" OS with a markedly unprofessional Teletubbies UI which certainly isn't ready for market yet, all while ignoring MS' internal dogfood consumption. I'll bet if enough Microsofties had eaten Office dogfood you could shut off that fucking control-click "Research" panel easily.
:)
Nevermind that the UI for 2008 is roughly the same as 2003, only with a more extensive (yet still looking clean and fairly spartan with the eyecandy) set of configuration utilities for roles and features. Just wish I could say the same for the control panel.
As for the 'research' panel... okay, I work here at microsoft, and I own my own copies of office at home, and I have no idea what that is. Of course, I'm hardly an office power user.
You can bet your bottom dollar that office 2007 is all that's in use around most of the company. As is vista, although it tends to be a mixture of vista, xp and 2003/2008 in most offices, usually for a variety of legacy reasons (maintenance of older projects, testing, etc)
I've got all but XP myself, but only because I haven't needed it to do my job.
Which we do on a regular basis. Every few weeks I see emails going around from higher-ups asking us to test their team's RC or beta stuff at home for them, and the project I'm working on has been dependent on VS2008 since beta2. Everyone here has their favourite project they like to keep tabs on. I've got longhorn server 2008 running on one of my machines here.
That said, the choice to use longhorn server in production isn't actually a bad one. It's really, REALLY stable. I keep hearing (from people both inside and outside the company) that it's more stable than 2003 is (and 2003 has the benefits of multiple service packs). It's also a lot more configurable about what it runs, and how much of it it enables when it's installed. I wouldn't bet the entire stable on it, but I'd be willing to put money on it getting a place.
All in all, it's pretty sweet, if you look at it from the sysadmin perspective. Also, the stuff you can setup when you couple it with vista is really nice (from a security standpoint, particularly). That said, some of that functionality is being backported to XP with SP3 or whatever.
As for the player's lack of effect on the world... well... did you pay attention to the story at all? The whole story revolves around how the world effected YOU, you play the grunt, the pawn in the bigger story... something tells me that not changing the world around you was by design
:))!)
I personally don't have a major problem with this. My problem with the linearity of the game is that the damned lead designer or whatever keeps ragging on about how he hates games that are linear, and don't let you explore, and then he creates a game that's basically linear, and any 'exploration' you do doesn't affect anything, and drops off to nothing except in about 2-3 places I can think of, which wind up giving you ammo you don't need, and maybe a little back story.
Contrast this to system shock 2, where you could go anywhere you wanted (to a point, it didn't open the entire place from the get go, admittedly), but in bioshock, there was almost no reason to go back to any place, except to pick off a stray girl (and lets face it, just how many did you miss? I practically tripped over them every time I turned around. I even managed to kill 4 in a level that was supposed to only have 3 (The game tried to tell me I hadn't killed them all after that, and to go back and kill the ones i hadn't killed
Let's not forget that the storytelling in SS2 was rich. REALLY rich. Sure, it's after the fact, and everyone's dead and shit, but listening to the voice recordings really gave you a sense of the struggle on both sides, and that there are other people there trying to get out (The two lovers, for instance, who do manage to escape, just before you catch up with them, and (MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT)are pegged as the cause for SS3 (which sadly never happened) because the girl got 'infected' by shodan. Their story was awesome, immersive, and really made you feel connected to the game, not a pawn.
Then, of course, what the lead designer probably really wanted to do was create GTA:SA, where you can basically go anywhere in 3 'cities' and do anything, if you're bored. (I know I did).
ash
The thing is, I haven't seen many reviews written from a position of rage and loathing. In fact, I can't remember any off the top of my head. Even as flames on boards go, genuine rage and loathing tends to be somewhat of a tiny minority of the messages, and easily identified as such. So, you know, you don't have to read it, if you don't like that kind of messages.
Okay, you definitely need to watch some of Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation reviews.
Some of those are definitely filled with rage and loathing (well, comically so). That said, he'll still point out good stuff with a game, but he won't spend too much time on it (after all, that's not why people are going to him)
I personally found his bioshock review to be spot on. In system shock 2, towards the end, I found myself critically short on ammo. In bioshock, I found myself critically overstocked. So much so that i actually started to feel anxious when I found I was full of all the ammo I found lying around. A game really shouldn't be making me feel this way over something so trivial (sure, if it's the plot, then by all means, make me anxious, but over ammo? And money? Gimme a break!)
But you know, even with the rage, his reviews are worth watching. He calls out the bullshit, and he pulls in the readers. Every time he rags on a game, there's surprisingly little backlash against his negativity in his comments (of course, I don't know if he or the escapist moderate them,) just mountains of 'damn, couldn't have said it better, or more graphically, myself!'
ash
Except that the zune goes one step better, and won't delete music off the device unless you specifically request it, ever, even if you DO change sync systems. I've changed it a few times already on my one without any problems.
The zune might be a generation behind, but it's definitely got a few minor advantages. I can't say I'm too interested in the market place stuff tho, and the social aspect isn't really why I'm using a player. (when I put the headphones on, it means "rack off, i'm being *anti*social, damnit"
ash
I doubt you'll find it an industry last. While it sucked for the people it supposedly bit in the butt (I doubt there was that many of them, if you discount the hooting from the minority), the reality is that it worked for the publisher. It actually took the pirates several days to get the DRM scheme bypassed so they could distribute it.
Several days is long enough for the sales to jump significantly, and is far better than any previous scheme to date.
I fully expect it to get worse.
The DVD application did not close, but it did stop the movie.
:)
My guess is that the dvd app paused when it lost focus, or got minimized?
The reality is, this feature is easily turned off, even if you want to leave UAC on.
Type 'secpol.msc' into the start menu's "search/run" text area, go to
Local Policies->Security options and change
User Account Control: Switch to secure desktop when prompting for elevation to be disabled.
That way, there's no jarring thud of the screenshot being taken, and the switch to the darkened version that almost feels like it's trying to induce an epileptic attack, but you still get some of the benefits of UAC. Of course, this is less secure, since, in theory, an application can snoop this or try to click on it itself, but the reality is, apps like that are more likely to assume that you'd turned of UAC anyway.
It's security by obscurity (and thus, security by stupidity), but it's less annoying
ash
(PS, Zune: Surprisingly less sucky than ipod)
Google is known to be looking for qualities other than diplomacy and tact, and Google has said that they don't like to hire long term Microsoft employees because it is to hard too retrain them
So does microsoft, when you get right down to it. We've got a fairly large array of non-standard people here.
On the subject of retraining, I'd be interested to see a link to back that up, I really doubt it's any more difficult than training anyone else. My guess is that someone was making an off-the-cuff remark. As i said in a different post, it's more likely that microsoft's employees just generally work in areas outside of google's realm of expertise. MS makes a much broader array of software than google, after all.
I have never worked for Microsoft and to be honest, I'd probably never want to. I think the key problem for Microsoft is that nothing they do is exciting anymore.
.NET in 3.5 rocks (WPF, WCF and WF are awesome frameworks, and the stuff coming down the line is going to make it even better). VS 2008's due for release soon, and it's a nice IDE (admittedly, I still pine for eclipse now and then tho, VS still has some catching up to do with eclipse in many areas (except for visual form design, damnit eclipse people, get a move on, VE sucked last i checked))
Then you're not looking hard enough. I work in CSD. I can't tell you too much about what I'm working on (NDA for the time being), but it's awesome. Bits of it have been in the news recently, and that's not even half of it.
I think Vista has really damaged Microsoft. Not in terms of revenue, since a sale of Windows XP is still a sale for Microsoft. No, the damage is in morale. Vista was an absolute disaster for morale. They worked for a couple of years only to ditch it and start again from the Windows 2003 Server source-code. Nothing they put in to Vista was in anyway something you can get developers energised about. Every feature had nightmarish committees which destroyed any hope of motivation. They even developed anti-features like SecurePath that nobody cares about.
Vista's benefits pay off when longhorn server (win2k8 server) ships. Business will be into that pretty quickly (the *betas* of win2k8 are more stable than win2k3, and 2k3 isn't bad in the slightest, there's a lot to like in 2k8.) The management features are nice++, particularly the tools for preventing systems that don't adhere to policy from connecting to (and damaging) the network, seamlessly.
I read somewhere that Microsoft developers write something like 1,000 lines of code a year. Last-year, I contributed around forty times that to our source control at work. When you're paid so much to do so little - that has to destroy morale too. Most developers I know like to work.
Dude, I've been working here just under 2 months, and I've written almost half that many lines already. It can depend a lot on which division you're in, and what you're working on, of course. Right now, the focus is on getting it done right, getting it done in a testable manner, and above all, getting it done *securely*. You wouldn't believe the amount of effort that's gone into security recently, and you know what? It shows. It won't be long before the old bathwater of legacy code is gone, and along with it, 90% of our problems.
Vista is a symptom of a much deeper problem. Microsoft doesn't know how to be sexy. it doesn't now how to to be secure and it doesn't know how to please it's users. Worst of all, it doesn't know how to make it's huge base of developers happy!
I call bullshit on the 'secure' part. Go read the stats on SQL server vs Oracle sometime. I didn't believe them either when I first saw them (I should get around to comparing the base parts of sql server to postgres sometime, however, I suspect that'll be a much fairer comparison). And just how are we not making developers happy? The stuff we've added to
All of this makes Google a very attractive place. If all your talent walks right of your door, it isn't too long until there is no way whatsoever to fix any of the problems I've just mentioned.
This depends a lot on what area you want to work on. I'm not interested in 95% of what google's working on. It won't even be remotely related to 95% of what most MS developers and testers do. I'm very over web development, and MS is catching up in the AJAX department too (WCF is helping there)
Put more succinctly, Microsoft sucks and Google rocks. [citation needed]
Ah, man.
:) ) and you finally get to pick up whatever the hell it was.
Yeah, I remember that game.
Trying to kill that damned werewolf was a fricking PITA.
You basically had a nice game of cat & mouse in some house where you run up the stairs, and he almost always goes up after you, then you go down, he follows, you go up, he follows, etc, all to get to the one in a few dozenth time when the bloody werewolf would have decided not to follow you up (maybe he was puffed?
Sounds like a good idea tho. might find an emulator and actually finish that game.
ash
Good on 'em.
May I ask where you are from? I would use the phrase "Good for 'em", and I'm just wondering if this is a regional saying? I'm from the U.S., by the way.
I don't know about the parent's location, but we use "Good on 'em" here in Australia a fair bit.
hahaha.
:)
You do realise that such changes are typically best done inside a
BEGIN;
COMMIT;
block right?
change didn't go as expected?
ROLLBACK baby! ROLLBACK
Biased viewpoint. You may be surprised how little tech savvy there is amongst your average human. Frankly, even while most students can use computers, they don't understand what's going on, and are useless when faced with something as simple and common as Clippy the Retarded Paperclip continuously stealing focus.
:).
;-) My point being, it's easy to criticise others for lack of knowledge in your own narrow speciality...
No doubt. I'm willing to conceed that your average human is no more tech savvy than your average teacher. Unfortunately, one of the problems I noticed was that teachers generally made poor students. They're prone to being impatient and not following instructions just as well as their students are
And let me ask - how's your teaching-savvy?
Fine, my teaching savvy is (imnsho) pretty good. While not the same caliber as getting a Dip-Ed and doing it full time, I spent most of my free time at university being paid to teach under-graduate and post-graduate students how to be system administrators. I know it's a difficult, demanding job, and I was only doing it part time, but I've got experience on both sides of the argument.
Nothing the teachers can do about that, except complain - which is exactly when the usual "teachers are old, useless, out of date shells of humanity who get lots of holidays" smear campaigns start up. Starting to pay teachers properly, and setting a solid core teaching curriculum/strategy/pathway rather than a patchwork of "innovations" aimed at appeasing parents / employers / old people who haven't seen the inside of a school in 30 years and bemoan the fact they don't teach the "3 R's" like they used to (with chalk, slate, and the cane), might be a good start in fixing that.
I completely agree.
And I see the results of the education system every day at uni. While they're generally lacking in lots of areas, I can't pin anything down to being the faults of the teachers. They might be socially / emotionally / practically naïve - but isn't that a lack of social experience and/or parental problem, rather than a problem with the educational system?
Of course, you really do need to keep in mind that university is a completely different environment. At uni, none of the teaching staff are required to have a Dip-Ed, and often have next to no formal training in education. I suspect university wouldn't be as backward as it is now if they did demand that. I would certainly have appreciated it in many of the classes I took on software engineering.
When you've been continually attacked from all sides and blamed for every social sin and ill as much as teachers have, is it any wonder they've learned to immediately circle the wagons?
That's true. I was mainly proving my point that teachers are on the back foot. I was pretty young and undiplomatic at the time. I know better now. I also suspect a lot of that is that power is routinely stripped from teachers when dealing with problem students. Disregarding the removal of punishments such as caning, teachers find it difficult to discipline students simply because of the ever-present lawsuit factor.
I should point out that I also believe that the parents need to stop treating school like day-care. Of course, when the parents get home later and later, and work longer hours, is this even surprising? The cycle won't get better any time soon, i'm betting.
Things have changed since my day then. Work i did in Victoria and just across the border in NSW had me installing school-administrated content blocking. Of course, it's entirely possible that stuff like VicOne and equivalent for NSW have made that more centralized.
Understandable, of course, since local-to-school IT staff assume the block will 'just work' and not need constant attention.
I've stopped watching the news shows out here (a current affair, today tonight)
AAHAHAHAH. news. that's classic. I suggest you watch these:
http://abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/
I can't see what justification the Dept of Education has for blocking access to these sites
:) )
The thing is, you'll generally find that the blocklists are controlled by individual schools, *not* by the department of education, so any tin-god principal can go on a rampage blocking sites
(or turn around and turn it off when someone complains that they can't do their report on 'breast cancer' (why is that always the search that people reference btw? personally, i use one filter blocking it's own FAQ page because the FAQ page contained XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX in the page for an IP address.
Having worked (briefly) in the Victorian education system as an IT support lackey, I can definitely say that teachers here have security issues and closet inferiority complexes.
Some of the general reasons that lead to this include, but are not limited to:
* The advancing average age of secondary teachers
* The general lack of tech savvy amoungst teachers and supporting staff
* The ultra-low wages, high-volume classrooms.
* The mentality from the general public that the teachers are given an 'easy go' and should be teaching their kids how to read/write (nevermind that this should have been done BEFORE the student reaches primary school, let alone secondary school, IMHO)
Case in point. One time, I was in a secondary college, and a group of teachers were discussing general causes of problem students. I casually remarked "You have to admit, sometimes it's not the student that is the direct cause". I didn't get a chance to elaborate, all three teachers immediately assumed I'd accused THEM of being incompetent (when i was going to discuss an event from high school where a teacher had shown up drunk for work)
Teachers tend to be very protective of their egos, so the incident in this slashdot story doesn't surprise me in the slightest (and, I'll also suggest it's being overblown here, it's no-where near what some US schools have done, such as suspending/expelling students, etc, over similar incidents)
Was it a comfy chair?
A huge waste of time, money and resources, and possibly an economic breakdown.
:)
I'm not sure it'd be an economic breakdown, seems more like all the money would just end up going to the lawyers. We'd have a lawyerocracy instead, since they'd end up being the undisputed rulers of the world.
That said, since they'd be undisputed, they'd run out of cash because there'd be no cases left, so it wouldn't last long.
ash
It could be worse, it could be a gate and switch scam
"If it were that unsecure, why would it have zealots in the first place?"
it's called money, as in, people make money from what they know about it, and lets face it, ms was just lucky, followed by having smart (for them) marketing practices, and finally, having good strong-arm tactics.
Fine, you want business usage? Let's look at Mac's MS Office. I'm our business's admin (admittedly, a small business, but a business nevetheless). We have a near majority of mac users. Mac Office is responsible for corrupting or otherwise impeding the work of these people more often than i can care to remember. The 'solution'? A) install openoffice (admittedly, a crap solution on a mac atm). or change everyone's user id's. (note that most of these people use their own laptops, and object to me 'fiddling').
If I don't change the userid's, Mac Office happily has a bug where there are name clashes with temporary files, causing Office to randomly claim that it can't open, or it can't save a particular document, regardless of permissions.
MS have been aware of this problem for a while, and so far, haven't done anything to fix it. The few openoffice users (me on linux, a few others on windows) haven't had any complaints or any issues in months, and I definitely haven't had a problem sending large corporations documents edited with openoffice yet in 6 months of doing so.
That said, I can't comment on the 'standardisableness' of an openoffice install. Rolling out on a site-wide basis might well be a royal PITA for openoffice, since I doubt they've got the tools in place that MS do, at this point. (SUS, etc)
ash
Yeah. Damn potpourri. Evil stuff. Should be outlawed everywhere.
I believe you'll also find that there's a group of us who face a different problem from outsourcing development.
My peers (I'm a sysadmin by trade) often discuss the quality of what they've had to deal with when it comes to products developed this way. I read a report recently from one that noted data from the past 4 years showing that while the per-hour cost was low, the products typically took longer to develop, were of much poorer quality (crimes against database normalization, etc), and often had issues following the specs, or followed them in odd ways. These things tend to lead to massive headaches for your average sysadmin
While it's not completely possible to say that some of these issues might not have happened locally too, it's pretty clear there isn't much value to be gained from outsourcing.
ash