You should have seen the.NET dev community back when Silverlight was just an extension of WPF and a tech demo... It took quite the spin since then... Originally MS virtually delivered WPF/E (its original name) kicking and scripting while developers were begging for the features it has now...
THEN the PR people and the marketing team got their paws on it... But really, it was much more a "pull" event than Microsoft "pushing" it (they'd much rather people use the real WPF, which is Windows-only).
I keep seeing people saying that, but when I ask em to do the math, its often not true. I don't know about the Dell, but when you buy a pre-build, if you wait for the planets to be aligned, you can get free shipping (depending where you live, getting cheap spare parts to build a computer requires shopping online).
Then add a legitimate copy of a commercial OS, and your 20% markup is getting eaten alive. A few years ago I would build my own computers from scratch, and I'd save hundreds of dollars on a 1000$~ machine. But today? If I add my hourly salary on top of the price of the machine (since it, you know, takes time to make it), I probably lose 500$ if i build in myself in the best case scenario.
If you have so much fun that you dont consider building your own computer as burning your own time, and you're going to run Linux on it, then you probably break even, or save 100-200$ (unless its a very high end box, then of course the savings scale). Not worth it, especially once something break and you have to deal with returning pieces to 3 different retailers (since you were looking for the best deals).
I mostly agree with you, but I figured I'd drop my two cents on the reliability part. I currently only use CFLs (not for the energy savings: I'm just freakishly lazy and I hate changing lightbulbs), and they definately last as long as they say.
The catch is, quite a few brands are worthless scams. My girlfriend started using em not long ago, and the first time she bought some, I dont think they lasted 200 hours. The whole batch. At 10$ for 6 that sounds pretty darn cheap to me... the ones I get (though most are dimmable) are like 5-6$ -per-. But they last so long, I don't even -remember- when's the last time I replaced one....
I'm not sure about that... Its easier to get IE users to upgrade to IE8, than it is to make them switch to Firefox. Less so today than 5 years ago, mind you, as Firefox is a fairly well known name now, even in the non-techie world, but... It hasn't been that long since IE7 came out, and I already find myself in situations where I can ignore IE6... if in the same timeframe I can start ignoring IE7, that will be an amazing productivity boost.
Mind you, thats not for ecommerce and other super-public web sites, but its a start.
The API is extremely commonly used, and is the "norm" in the MS dev world... its not "sometimes used". Its the -norm- for this kindda thing. You can't really stop updating it. And if they have a browser renderer, especially an Acid2 compliant one, well, why not?
And each browsers have their quirk really. If you simply do normal html documents, IE is hell on earth. If you do javascript intensive web applications, Safari 2 is the most annoying things ever. Some really hard to find bugs in there. If you try to make a browser history manager that can be controlled from server side (useful in AJAX apps), Opera can work with it on and off and back on and back off from versions to versions. It goes on, and firefox isn't perfect either. I think we're better off with the competition. Hell, I don't think Firefox would even exist if IE6 hadn't been.
It is, however, a lot easier to make a web site that breaks on IE7, and say "run windows update or tough luck", than to have a web site that breaks on IE7, and say "go download opera, install it, and get used to it, or tough luck".
Its not "easy" by any mean, and stuff like e-commerce web sites can't ever afford something like that, but I can definately think of a lot of situations (internal corporate IE-only web sites) where it will work.
Also great, because then the "IE-only" web site will NOT be IE-only anymore, by default.
"box ticked"? Err? Have you ever heard of how doctype handling, quirkmode vs standardmode, etc works? Its been that way for like ever, and it has nothing to do with a "box being ticked". Its not like its the user that picks the rendering mode.
Because IE's rendering engine is NOT just used by web browsers, but (like Gecko can, too) it is also used in hundreds of applications that you'd never guess, to render anything from reports to design surfaces for dev tools. Give up on it, you break the API for hundreds of tools, APIs, and others that depend on it (and want to continue upgrading without throwing away all their existing code).
That would piss off a LOT of people. Microsoft has their own development tool stack. They can give it up for now. Maybe in another decade.
And yeah, its the only thing thats really required. I could do with everything else. Display table solves 90% of the problems (the last 10% comes from the fact that CSS sucks, even if you fully support CSS 3 somehow).
When Windows XP was still young, many users and especially gamers latched onto Windows 98 with a death grip saying things like "M$ can take Windows 98 away from me when they can pry it from my cold dead hands"
thats the big one. It took YEARS for gamers to give up. The main problem of Vista, is that it took so long to come out, people forgot how XP used to be.
I'll be first to admit that it doesn't excuse anything, but people calling doomsday really have a short memory.
No, maybe I wasn't clear in what I meant: what I mean is, even if you know about it. From the time you know its going to hit you, to the time it ACTUALLY does... you need to build enough ships (or something) to get out, and -actually- get out... we're talking potentially several lightyears. So even at speed of light, to get out of the blast and of its effects (stars going supernova, etc), it will take years.
So you need to detect that not only it exists, but also that its going to hit you, research lightspeed travel technology (if you don't already have it, thus my original point), actually build enough crafts to get a reasonable amount of people out, then actually get out, and find a safe location to get out -to-.
Even for an heavily advanced civilisation, thats no small feat.
Well, the Earth is pretty chock full of life, and if that thing aimed for us, we'd be amazingly screwed.
Maybe its not even technologicaly and physically possible to protect yourself from something like that. At best, if there was a super high tech civilisation in that galaxy, they got their alien asses out of there. But even then, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but even if you have a ship capable of light speed, you better have had that technology LONG before the ray hit the galaxy to make it out in time...
Unfortunately, the universe has constraints, some of which, assuming we are right about them, can't easily be defied through technology, theoriticaly speaking..
First, let it be known I feel exactly like you about it. However, the only thing I can think of, is that the people unhappy with it just have very loud mouths. One thing I noticed about Vista, is that it either works beautifully, like for you, or, in rare instances (yes, RARE), it works like total garbage...usually because of poor hardware. I have a lot of computers with Vista now, and tried many more. It works perfectly, except on ONE computer (which unfortunately happens to be my work computer).
On it, the UI behaves relatively strangely, I get lots of crashes, etc. Since I've tried Vista on so many machines, I know the problem is the machine, not Vista, but someone else would not...and from there on it goes downhill. On top of the anti-MS nerds that WANT Vista to suck even though they didn't try it, and all the problems that ALL new OSs (even Linux distros!) have at launch but somehow everyone in the MS world forgot, since Vista took so long to come out, it makes a very loud anti-Vista noise.
Man, as much as north americans tend to think they're the only place in the world, or the "default" location, Europeans, or people who "know" about Europe, really think they're way much special and different than they truly are. Since even in the US and Canada, there are many places where you can't do right turns, INCLUDING intersection specific ones (like, in a city where its allowed to do right turns on a red, there could be a sign saying that this specific cross doesn't allow it), their software will have to be able to deal with all these cases even just for the US or Canada.
If you can deal with such particular cases as specific cities, or intersections, you can deal with a freagin country/continent easily.
A quote I use a lot, and that came from me (though its fairly obvious), is that the only person worse than someone who has no clue how to design software and use patterns, is someone who knows a "little".
From the tone of your post, I'm sure you've been in that situation, and you know what I mean:) People who use Factories that are not -quite- factories, people who use Visitor all over (omg...and you mentionned that one), people who talk about Aspect Oriented Programming but have no clue whatsoever what it means... Those are downright dangerous, and drive me totally insane.
People really need to understand that its about the -WHY-, not the -HOW-... the design patterns are documented as being solution to problems, not solutions in search of a problem, and it causes all the issues you mentionned when developers miss that line.
As a sidenote, I've found that simply, any object that accesses a singleton should always do so through a pluggable factory, or a virtual factory method, so that you can decouple it. That solves most problems. And Visitor is definately overrated... in most cases, a much cleaner and simpler solution can be achieved by changing one's design a bit and using a cleverly put Observer pattern. Easier to implement anyway, and decouple things much better.
Hmm, while im sure the softwares cost a lot, the summary at least (I didn't read the article, bleh =P ) states that the missing tape is going to cause 3 million $ in loss. I'm guessing a lot of that money is from the damage the loss has caused and stuff... I'd be surprised if the software was even close to half of that.
It doesn't make your argument any less valid, mind you, but...
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You mention that it has all changed with 2007, that people are looking at alternatives or downgrading like they are with Vista, you never explain where the hell you're getting that from?
2007 is perfectly backward compatible, 2003 is forward compatible... so I don't see why because of 2007, someone would buy 2003?
Trident is exposed as a component in windows, and is used in a LOT more things than one could imagine... less so now than a few years ago, but still. It is incredibly frequently used as a RAD renderer in memory, for one, but can also be used as a component inside other applications.
Back when I was a newbie VB6 programmer (yeah yeah i know...) I made a tiny "browser" that way. It took all of 15 minutes. There's a lot of "shells" around Trident. They're obviously not as popular as they were pre-Firefox, but back then a lot of people used those alternative "browsers", back when all web sites were IE-only.
The problem is that Trident is also used as an all purpose rendering engine. Just about everything you can think of that renders "something", aside from big hot shots companies, will use Trident to render their content...so break Trident, you break everything. Thats part of why upgrades to it are so incremental and never revolutionary.
Now, why don't they change the engine in IE while keeping both versions for backward compatibility? Thats the more interesting question.
I agree. The only reason Netflix didn't change yet is either because they didn't know, either because no one told them they "have" to (Have to meaning: either that or surchage your butt).
Its such a simple thing to change, this is a non-story.
They do, and they push -hard- for it. And people never get the hint..NET has an entire, very complete set of APIs to replace any task that would require useless admin priviledge (saving files to the disk in a non-user-specific way, for example) with a "safe" method. Those things are also part of windows itself, so raw C/C++ can access them easily too. All of the developer certifications by microsoft (You know, the stuff thats considered "useless and meaningless"? have that as one of their primary focus.
Yet devs are lazy and don't care. Thats why Microsoft introduced UAC. Now if you don't do it right, even if your user is running admin, they get a popup. You'd think the users would bitch and moan at the app developers. But nope, they bitched at MS instead.
There's no excuse to develop app that require admin (unless, of course, they do admin-related stuff!). But the only thing in this world that sucks more than Windows ME, is an average windows-centric developer.
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You should have seen the .NET dev community back when Silverlight was just an extension of WPF and a tech demo... It took quite the spin since then... Originally MS virtually delivered WPF/E (its original name) kicking and scripting while developers were begging for the features it has now...
THEN the PR people and the marketing team got their paws on it... But really, it was much more a "pull" event than Microsoft "pushing" it (they'd much rather people use the real WPF, which is Windows-only).
I keep seeing people saying that, but when I ask em to do the math, its often not true. I don't know about the Dell, but when you buy a pre-build, if you wait for the planets to be aligned, you can get free shipping (depending where you live, getting cheap spare parts to build a computer requires shopping online).
Then add a legitimate copy of a commercial OS, and your 20% markup is getting eaten alive. A few years ago I would build my own computers from scratch, and I'd save hundreds of dollars on a 1000$~ machine. But today? If I add my hourly salary on top of the price of the machine (since it, you know, takes time to make it), I probably lose 500$ if i build in myself in the best case scenario.
If you have so much fun that you dont consider building your own computer as burning your own time, and you're going to run Linux on it, then you probably break even, or save 100-200$ (unless its a very high end box, then of course the savings scale). Not worth it, especially once something break and you have to deal with returning pieces to 3 different retailers (since you were looking for the best deals).
I mostly agree with you, but I figured I'd drop my two cents on the reliability part. I currently only use CFLs (not for the energy savings: I'm just freakishly lazy and I hate changing lightbulbs), and they definately last as long as they say.
The catch is, quite a few brands are worthless scams. My girlfriend started using em not long ago, and the first time she bought some, I dont think they lasted 200 hours. The whole batch. At 10$ for 6 that sounds pretty darn cheap to me... the ones I get (though most are dimmable) are like 5-6$ -per-. But they last so long, I don't even -remember- when's the last time I replaced one....
I'm not sure about that... Its easier to get IE users to upgrade to IE8, than it is to make them switch to Firefox. Less so today than 5 years ago, mind you, as Firefox is a fairly well known name now, even in the non-techie world, but... It hasn't been that long since IE7 came out, and I already find myself in situations where I can ignore IE6... if in the same timeframe I can start ignoring IE7, that will be an amazing productivity boost.
Mind you, thats not for ecommerce and other super-public web sites, but its a start.
The API is extremely commonly used, and is the "norm" in the MS dev world... its not "sometimes used". Its the -norm- for this kindda thing. You can't really stop updating it. And if they have a browser renderer, especially an Acid2 compliant one, well, why not?
And each browsers have their quirk really. If you simply do normal html documents, IE is hell on earth. If you do javascript intensive web applications, Safari 2 is the most annoying things ever. Some really hard to find bugs in there. If you try to make a browser history manager that can be controlled from server side (useful in AJAX apps), Opera can work with it on and off and back on and back off from versions to versions. It goes on, and firefox isn't perfect either. I think we're better off with the competition. Hell, I don't think Firefox would even exist if IE6 hadn't been.
yeah, 10 years to pass a CSS test, wooo~!
Not THAT long compared to other browsers though, eh? Firefox, I'm looking at you.
It is, however, a lot easier to make a web site that breaks on IE7, and say "run windows update or tough luck", than to have a web site that breaks on IE7, and say "go download opera, install it, and get used to it, or tough luck".
Its not "easy" by any mean, and stuff like e-commerce web sites can't ever afford something like that, but I can definately think of a lot of situations (internal corporate IE-only web sites) where it will work.
Also great, because then the "IE-only" web site will NOT be IE-only anymore, by default.
"box ticked"? Err? Have you ever heard of how doctype handling, quirkmode vs standardmode, etc works? Its been that way for like ever, and it has nothing to do with a "box being ticked". Its not like its the user that picks the rendering mode.
Because IE's rendering engine is NOT just used by web browsers, but (like Gecko can, too) it is also used in hundreds of applications that you'd never guess, to render anything from reports to design surfaces for dev tools. Give up on it, you break the API for hundreds of tools, APIs, and others that depend on it (and want to continue upgrading without throwing away all their existing code).
That would piss off a LOT of people. Microsoft has their own development tool stack. They can give it up for now. Maybe in another decade.
Modes are decided by the web page's developer, not the user. It depends on which declaration you use. Even Firefox works that way.
I beleive thats required for ACID2? Not sure.
And yeah, its the only thing thats really required. I could do with everything else. Display table solves 90% of the problems (the last 10% comes from the fact that CSS sucks, even if you fully support CSS 3 somehow).
I'll be first to admit that it doesn't excuse anything, but people calling doomsday really have a short memory.
No, maybe I wasn't clear in what I meant: what I mean is, even if you know about it. From the time you know its going to hit you, to the time it ACTUALLY does... you need to build enough ships (or something) to get out, and -actually- get out... we're talking potentially several lightyears. So even at speed of light, to get out of the blast and of its effects (stars going supernova, etc), it will take years.
So you need to detect that not only it exists, but also that its going to hit you, research lightspeed travel technology (if you don't already have it, thus my original point), actually build enough crafts to get a reasonable amount of people out, then actually get out, and find a safe location to get out -to-.
Even for an heavily advanced civilisation, thats no small feat.
Well, the Earth is pretty chock full of life, and if that thing aimed for us, we'd be amazingly screwed.
Maybe its not even technologicaly and physically possible to protect yourself from something like that. At best, if there was a super high tech civilisation in that galaxy, they got their alien asses out of there. But even then, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but even if you have a ship capable of light speed, you better have had that technology LONG before the ray hit the galaxy to make it out in time...
Unfortunately, the universe has constraints, some of which, assuming we are right about them, can't easily be defied through technology, theoriticaly speaking..
First, let it be known I feel exactly like you about it. However, the only thing I can think of, is that the people unhappy with it just have very loud mouths. One thing I noticed about Vista, is that it either works beautifully, like for you, or, in rare instances (yes, RARE), it works like total garbage...usually because of poor hardware. I have a lot of computers with Vista now, and tried many more. It works perfectly, except on ONE computer (which unfortunately happens to be my work computer).
On it, the UI behaves relatively strangely, I get lots of crashes, etc. Since I've tried Vista on so many machines, I know the problem is the machine, not Vista, but someone else would not...and from there on it goes downhill. On top of the anti-MS nerds that WANT Vista to suck even though they didn't try it, and all the problems that ALL new OSs (even Linux distros!) have at launch but somehow everyone in the MS world forgot, since Vista took so long to come out, it makes a very loud anti-Vista noise.
Man, as much as north americans tend to think they're the only place in the world, or the "default" location, Europeans, or people who "know" about Europe, really think they're way much special and different than they truly are. Since even in the US and Canada, there are many places where you can't do right turns, INCLUDING intersection specific ones (like, in a city where its allowed to do right turns on a red, there could be a sign saying that this specific cross doesn't allow it), their software will have to be able to deal with all these cases even just for the US or Canada.
If you can deal with such particular cases as specific cities, or intersections, you can deal with a freagin country/continent easily.
A quote I use a lot, and that came from me (though its fairly obvious), is that the only person worse than someone who has no clue how to design software and use patterns, is someone who knows a "little".
:) People who use Factories that are not -quite- factories, people who use Visitor all over (omg...and you mentionned that one), people who talk about Aspect Oriented Programming but have no clue whatsoever what it means... Those are downright dangerous, and drive me totally insane.
From the tone of your post, I'm sure you've been in that situation, and you know what I mean
People really need to understand that its about the -WHY-, not the -HOW-... the design patterns are documented as being solution to problems, not solutions in search of a problem, and it causes all the issues you mentionned when developers miss that line.
As a sidenote, I've found that simply, any object that accesses a singleton should always do so through a pluggable factory, or a virtual factory method, so that you can decouple it. That solves most problems. And Visitor is definately overrated... in most cases, a much cleaner and simpler solution can be achieved by changing one's design a bit and using a cleverly put Observer pattern. Easier to implement anyway, and decouple things much better.
Hmm, while im sure the softwares cost a lot, the summary at least (I didn't read the article, bleh =P ) states that the missing tape is going to cause 3 million $ in loss. I'm guessing a lot of that money is from the damage the loss has caused and stuff... I'd be surprised if the software was even close to half of that.
It doesn't make your argument any less valid, mind you, but...
Thats probably patented already. Sorry buddy.
You mention that it has all changed with 2007, that people are looking at alternatives or downgrading like they are with Vista, you never explain where the hell you're getting that from?
2007 is perfectly backward compatible, 2003 is forward compatible... so I don't see why because of 2007, someone would buy 2003?
Trident is exposed as a component in windows, and is used in a LOT more things than one could imagine... less so now than a few years ago, but still. It is incredibly frequently used as a RAD renderer in memory, for one, but can also be used as a component inside other applications.
Back when I was a newbie VB6 programmer (yeah yeah i know...) I made a tiny "browser" that way. It took all of 15 minutes. There's a lot of "shells" around Trident. They're obviously not as popular as they were pre-Firefox, but back then a lot of people used those alternative "browsers", back when all web sites were IE-only.
The problem is that Trident is also used as an all purpose rendering engine. Just about everything you can think of that renders "something", aside from big hot shots companies, will use Trident to render their content...so break Trident, you break everything. Thats part of why upgrades to it are so incremental and never revolutionary.
Now, why don't they change the engine in IE while keeping both versions for backward compatibility? Thats the more interesting question.
I agree. The only reason Netflix didn't change yet is either because they didn't know, either because no one told them they "have" to (Have to meaning: either that or surchage your butt).
Its such a simple thing to change, this is a non-story.
They do, and they push -hard- for it. And people never get the hint. .NET has an entire, very complete set of APIs to replace any task that would require useless admin priviledge (saving files to the disk in a non-user-specific way, for example) with a "safe" method. Those things are also part of windows itself, so raw C/C++ can access them easily too. All of the developer certifications by microsoft (You know, the stuff thats considered "useless and meaningless"? have that as one of their primary focus.
Yet devs are lazy and don't care. Thats why Microsoft introduced UAC. Now if you don't do it right, even if your user is running admin, they get a popup. You'd think the users would bitch and moan at the app developers. But nope, they bitched at MS instead.
There's no excuse to develop app that require admin (unless, of course, they do admin-related stuff!). But the only thing in this world that sucks more than Windows ME, is an average windows-centric developer.