Thats the direct way of calculating the cost, and as a single customer, its valid. However, on the large scale, there's more to it.
If a substancial amount of people (and I'm not talking 50%+ here, it doesnt need to be that much) start using these as a complementary power source on top of the grid, oil, etc, what do you think would happen to the price of the primary sources...?
that it is Microsoft. A soon as they get more than 15% market share in anything (got forbid higher like with the Ipods), they start pulling stunts and tricks to lock-in people, hardware, devs..
Steve Jobs makes Bill Gates and Ballmer look like open source zealots.
It really depends, like everything, on your target market. If you're making an indoor solution for a company thats, let say, dependant on Windows for the next decade for other reasons, it would be a waste of money to cross-platform (in-house apps in this day and age just tend not to last as long as they did 20 years ago, so you'll replace it before you replace the OS in your company).
If however, you're a small ISV making corporate solutions, and have at most 4-5 customers... well, being able to add just ONE customer to your list thanks to Linux support means increasing your customer base by 20-25%. Its worth it.
If you're making server side application, then being cross-platform is even more important, since no platform is really dominant there, and stuff like GUI integration isn't as common.
If however, you're making a desktop thick client application, then cross-platform is meh, because you'll never achieve the same level of integration... You can cross-platform your libs though.
Because we're not in 1985 anymore. In this day and age, languages are often (almost) exclusively selected depending on the APIs they offer. Not completly, but... Even if you're thinking about performance, that often even depends almost completly on the API you'll be using...
Languages are becoming more and more cosmetics, its all in the API.
Indeed. I can't beleive the people approving this have any experience in corporate environments... I mean, if you're really close minded and ONLY know about home use, it can semi sortoff make sense to say you HAVE to use the physical media and no copy... you're 1 person, 1 media...
But for a corporation? OH YES! I -REALLY- want the junior sysadmin running around with my multi-thousand dollar server software disks! YEEEEEEEEEES.
Ironically, on my work computer right now Aero is shut off (poor drivers on a very crappy videocard... Aero does work, just not for long), and the UI (taking both the explorer.exe and the processes/apps ran by the new stuff, like dwm.exe) take a -lot- less memory than UI takes on XP...
With Aero on, it is a bit higher by a few douzan megs, I'll admit., but Vista's memory management is actually a decent bit better (it will adjust depending how much memory you have). Doing Visual Studio + SQL Management + douzans of plugins and add-ons, browser, and misc tools on 1 gig of RAM under XP is just -painful-, but on Vista it works quite peachy. I'm actualy not even close to hitting swap.
If you have a lot more RAM, then Vista just uses it up (otherwise its just wasted), so on a 2+ gig machine, it tends to stay around 500 megs away from hitting swap at all timm after you used it for a bit (assuming its possible... if you start opening every software in the book, of course that won't work:) )
So really, the RAM upgrade requirement thing is the biggest myth ever. You don't even need good hardware at all, you just lose the shineys... It is DEFINATELY a bigger improvement over XP than XP was over 2000 (I held out on XP for years because there was no point whatsoever...I realise you said depending on who you ask though).
One thing that is 100% sure in my book though, my 2 years old computer was running circles around Vista, on Vista's launch... When XP came out, it was unbearable on my 1 year old lap-top of the time (at the time lap-tops were more significantly behind desktops than they are today, but thats exactly my point... XP wasn't an option for me back then, while with Vista, I could have had a MUCH older machine and still work it up with all the bells and whistles). I feel people just don't remember XP's launch because it was so long ago... Hardware wise its even worse if you compare 98 and XP (since a lot of people skipped ME, and 2k was mostly business). The amount of people that kept 98 for gaming was insane (and the performance difference was actually quite major)
at 23 years old you sure as hell don't have a PhD, so your education is probably nothing all that special... so I'd be curious about your "background".
That being said, 40k for a project manager (assuming a project manager in the real sense of the word, not just a speudo-manager-wannabee) is a ripoff, no matter where you live, so its quite the poor example. When I was your age I was being paid a -lot- more than 40k, for jobs that generally pay a -lot- less than project managers, and my "education" was nothing special at all.
That being said, it has been my experience that british DO get a lot more money pre-tax (and then happily get raped on the price of, well, EVERYTHING), but that example was a fairly bad one.
The one thing about that final argument: If you use a mac, quite a bit of shops, isps, firms, manufacturers, etc will give you their support just fine. Yet Windows doesnt dominate any more or less while someone use Macs...
I beleive that, while somewhat poorly worded, what that part meant was that they'd get SCO's creditors off their backs for a bit while they try to get some work though (lol!), not protect them directly.
Semi-competent software engineers, analysts, programmers, even QAs, get snatched. All the good ones I know get constant calls, emails, etc for job offers, with employers offering to give as much as 50% their current salary at any given time and put the red carpet before them left and right to hire em.
The crap ones keep crying.
Last time I looked for a new job (like 3 months ago), it took me, literally, 2 HOURS to nail a "dream job". 2 hours. And I'm not -that- good. But considering what I saw in all be two companies I worked for...I can see why a lot of "programmers" have a hard time.
No, knowing how to look at an algorythm and bitch about it in big O notation won't let you get a job anytime soon.
#1: Windows XP was so long ago, everyone forgot the pain it is to migrate to a new OS (at least in the Microsoft world). They're spoiled. Same thing happened with IE6 vs IE7. Lets forget "real" browsers for a sec...when comparing IE6 and IE7, its hard to say IE6 is better, but a ton of people didnt want to switch, cuz it had been so long since IE had changed... Im talking developers of IE-only apps here, not just users (though including users).
#2 While I'm a big Vista advocate, I have to admit one thing: Vista is hit or miss. I have 2 machines in my apartment that are on Vista. One is the one Im typing this with, and it works flawlessly. No crash, everything works, its zippy, some games even run SMOOTHER, its a dream for developing with.NET, etc. Then I have my...other...one. Which is actually a more recent machine with hardware that should be even more vista compatible. However, the userland apps (not the OS) crash NON STOP. Remote Desktop is unusable cuz the desktop keeps crashing (thus crashing the client). Its awful. So the people who end up in the second scenario and aren't trying it on another computer will think it really blows.
On all the computers Ive used Vista on, only THAT machine has issues...but if it had been the first machine I tried it with, I probably would have written a X all over Vista.
The entire company I currently work for (which is, though, a pretty small software development firm), are running on Vista. I run Vista on my main computer (and I actually got a copy, it wasn't OEM). Of course I know the bunch of people who bought new computers and its on it, about split in half between normal users and people in the industry (DBAs, project managers, software architects).
At the last place I worked for, the sysadmins all ran it.
Mind you, I am a.NET software developer, so I hang out with a lot of people that would inherently be a bit biaised, but its still a decent amount of people right there.
Thats quite true. Something related happened to me recently, though with Excel 2007. I was doing some business intelligence/datamining using SSAS (OLAP in SQL Server), and was looking around at an easy way for end users to actually, well, USE the cubes I was making, when while playing in Excel I saw it in pretty big in one of the ribbons. Click on the option, pick the connection string, bang, pivot tables and SSAS integration.
Supposed that that existed in older versions, but I never noticed it. I know its a airhead moment, but thats the whole point:)
Huh? Who talked about any legal agreements? I'm not talking on paper stuff (though I'm sure there are some, especially in the Silverlight deal). I'm saying whats (most likely) going through the developer's heads while they so boldly walk all over Microsoft's IP without even sweating it (ASP.NET, VB.NET, I think they started Winform too?).
I'm not saying that Microsoft CANNOT do anything. I'm saying that from the way the Mono people act, they really are seeing themselves as "safe from Microsoft", and so far they have been proven correct (instead of stopping em, Microsoft is giving em their blessing). Thats why I said semi-partner, and not actual partners, and hoped people would read between the lines. But man is it hard on Slashdot.
My apologies if I don't feel like spelling it out in little details. I figured since we're not in a court of law, common sense had some place... my bad.
And is easier to parse, and very easy to generate through XSLT. All properties that are shared by other, probably superior formats, but still. Its nice when customers want simple Word documents auto-generated and its just a quick XSLT call away.
Isn't it the other way around? I mean, Moonlight will be released under LGPL, with the blessing of Microsoft, which is official and everywhere in the news. That would be freakishly hard to retract in court. Once the code is released under LGPL willingly, its pretty much impossible to retract permanently. So shouldn't OSS advocates be drooling over this?
Microsoft will never be able to close down the code that has been released, nor ever be able to say they didn't willingly allow it to be released under these licenses... especially if there are some contracts between MS and Novell. So in my book, that code is now "Free", and Microsoft can't change their mind or do a damn about it even if they want to...
Well, when it comes to.NET, there is a crap ton of copyrighted and patented stuff, and Mono breaks a lot of em, and they know it. They just know Microsoft won't do anything, since they are semi-partners and all.
C# the language is an ECMA standard (I beleive?), but from VB.NET to just about anything in.NET beyond console applications, everything is patented, copyrighted, etc (well, anything that could be), and MONO uses tons of it. No need to list em (in opposition to Windows vs Linux kernel, where its far from being as obvious).
Now, if those patents and other intellectual property crap would stand up in court, thats another story altogether, but unlike the Windows vs Linux patent thing, these are much harder to deny.
(note that the above doesn't change that telling people to get it from Novell is indeed FUD because no one will ever get sued for using Moonlight from someone else's than Novell. I'm just stating how this situation is different from the mostly baseless "Linux is stepping on X amount of our patents" deal)
In this case, it is useful to understand where its coming from. With.NET 3.0 (which was originally meant to be Vista-only, but never ended up being so), Microsoft implemented a new GUI API called Windows Presentation Foundation to somewhat replace the old Win32/MFC/etc that has been around forever.
Part of the features of WPF is that its applications can be ran in "Express" mode, via a browser (this isn't like Silverlight or Flash where its part of a web page. In this case it IS its own "markup" and all, there's no html or anything, has its own extension, etc). That uses the full features of Windows' UI API, including direct x and such, so thats obviously Windows-only (also only works in IE, though I think I heard there's a Firefox plugin for it now, but still Windows-only, it uses core APIs and such). Running these "express applications" is a bit like Java Web Start or.NET Click Once, except even simpler to use for the end user.
Now, this has an obvious limitation: it can't seriously be used on the public internet, being Windows-only (this isn't 10 years ago anymore), so there was a subset of WPF that was to be implemented for Mac OSX, WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere). That would let people use a subset of XAML/WPF in other browsers and on other platforms. So it was made.
Now, having that, well, the marketing people and such obviously saw a "Why Not" opportunity to expand its market into other areas than simple "Express applications". It could be used a bit like Flash, on top of its original purpose. And thus the name got switched to Silverlight, and the marketing came.
So it this case, the Flash counterpart really came kindda "after" the implementation and is pure marketing. Its not WPF/E's original purpose. Its a lot more useful in its Silverlight form though. Lets you reuse existing.NET code to make cross-platform clients for backend apps. Win-Win for windows developers, thats for sure. Now if its win for non-windows...we'll see.
By exposing all of the Silverlight 1.1 API, does that include all of the namespaces that are supposed to be supported by it too? Including stuff like Linq to XML, WCF, etc? (honest question here)
It most likely isn't too far behind honestly..NET on Windows Mobile is a first class environment in Microsoft's eyes, so it missing Silverlight would be pretty dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats the direct way of calculating the cost, and as a single customer, its valid. However, on the large scale, there's more to it.
If a substancial amount of people (and I'm not talking 50%+ here, it doesnt need to be that much) start using these as a complementary power source on top of the grid, oil, etc, what do you think would happen to the price of the primary sources...?
Yeah, exactly.
It was a general statement about a company's behavior. I wasn't talking about the iPhone in particular.
that it is Microsoft. A soon as they get more than 15% market share in anything (got forbid higher like with the Ipods), they start pulling stunts and tricks to lock-in people, hardware, devs..
Steve Jobs makes Bill Gates and Ballmer look like open source zealots.
It really depends, like everything, on your target market. If you're making an indoor solution for a company thats, let say, dependant on Windows for the next decade for other reasons, it would be a waste of money to cross-platform (in-house apps in this day and age just tend not to last as long as they did 20 years ago, so you'll replace it before you replace the OS in your company).
If however, you're a small ISV making corporate solutions, and have at most 4-5 customers... well, being able to add just ONE customer to your list thanks to Linux support means increasing your customer base by 20-25%. Its worth it.
If you're making server side application, then being cross-platform is even more important, since no platform is really dominant there, and stuff like GUI integration isn't as common.
If however, you're making a desktop thick client application, then cross-platform is meh, because you'll never achieve the same level of integration... You can cross-platform your libs though.
Wow, how did THAT happen? I replied to the wrong person in the post below... Eeesh, whoooops.
Because we're not in 1985 anymore. In this day and age, languages are often (almost) exclusively selected depending on the APIs they offer. Not completly, but... Even if you're thinking about performance, that often even depends almost completly on the API you'll be using...
Languages are becoming more and more cosmetics, its all in the API.
Indeed. I can't beleive the people approving this have any experience in corporate environments... I mean, if you're really close minded and ONLY know about home use, it can semi sortoff make sense to say you HAVE to use the physical media and no copy... you're 1 person, 1 media...
But for a corporation? OH YES! I -REALLY- want the junior sysadmin running around with my multi-thousand dollar server software disks! YEEEEEEEEEES.
Ironically, on my work computer right now Aero is shut off (poor drivers on a very crappy videocard... Aero does work, just not for long), and the UI (taking both the explorer.exe and the processes/apps ran by the new stuff, like dwm.exe) take a -lot- less memory than UI takes on XP...
:) )
With Aero on, it is a bit higher by a few douzan megs, I'll admit., but Vista's memory management is actually a decent bit better (it will adjust depending how much memory you have). Doing Visual Studio + SQL Management + douzans of plugins and add-ons, browser, and misc tools on 1 gig of RAM under XP is just -painful-, but on Vista it works quite peachy. I'm actualy not even close to hitting swap.
If you have a lot more RAM, then Vista just uses it up (otherwise its just wasted), so on a 2+ gig machine, it tends to stay around 500 megs away from hitting swap at all timm after you used it for a bit (assuming its possible... if you start opening every software in the book, of course that won't work
So really, the RAM upgrade requirement thing is the biggest myth ever. You don't even need good hardware at all, you just lose the shineys... It is DEFINATELY a bigger improvement over XP than XP was over 2000 (I held out on XP for years because there was no point whatsoever...I realise you said depending on who you ask though).
One thing that is 100% sure in my book though, my 2 years old computer was running circles around Vista, on Vista's launch... When XP came out, it was unbearable on my 1 year old lap-top of the time (at the time lap-tops were more significantly behind desktops than they are today, but thats exactly my point... XP wasn't an option for me back then, while with Vista, I could have had a MUCH older machine and still work it up with all the bells and whistles). I feel people just don't remember XP's launch because it was so long ago... Hardware wise its even worse if you compare 98 and XP (since a lot of people skipped ME, and 2k was mostly business). The amount of people that kept 98 for gaming was insane (and the performance difference was actually quite major)
at 23 years old you sure as hell don't have a PhD, so your education is probably nothing all that special... so I'd be curious about your "background".
That being said, 40k for a project manager (assuming a project manager in the real sense of the word, not just a speudo-manager-wannabee) is a ripoff, no matter where you live, so its quite the poor example. When I was your age I was being paid a -lot- more than 40k, for jobs that generally pay a -lot- less than project managers, and my "education" was nothing special at all.
That being said, it has been my experience that british DO get a lot more money pre-tax (and then happily get raped on the price of, well, EVERYTHING), but that example was a fairly bad one.
The one thing about that final argument: If you use a mac, quite a bit of shops, isps, firms, manufacturers, etc will give you their support just fine. Yet Windows doesnt dominate any more or less while someone use Macs...
I beleive that, while somewhat poorly worded, what that part meant was that they'd get SCO's creditors off their backs for a bit while they try to get some work though (lol!), not protect them directly.
You got it.
Semi-competent software engineers, analysts, programmers, even QAs, get snatched. All the good ones I know get constant calls, emails, etc for job offers, with employers offering to give as much as 50% their current salary at any given time and put the red carpet before them left and right to hire em.
The crap ones keep crying.
Last time I looked for a new job (like 3 months ago), it took me, literally, 2 HOURS to nail a "dream job". 2 hours. And I'm not -that- good. But considering what I saw in all be two companies I worked for...I can see why a lot of "programmers" have a hard time.
No, knowing how to look at an algorythm and bitch about it in big O notation won't let you get a job anytime soon.
2 reason why people hate Vista so much.
.NET, etc. Then I have my...other...one. Which is actually a more recent machine with hardware that should be even more vista compatible. However, the userland apps (not the OS) crash NON STOP. Remote Desktop is unusable cuz the desktop keeps crashing (thus crashing the client). Its awful. So the people who end up in the second scenario and aren't trying it on another computer will think it really blows.
#1: Windows XP was so long ago, everyone forgot the pain it is to migrate to a new OS (at least in the Microsoft world). They're spoiled. Same thing happened with IE6 vs IE7. Lets forget "real" browsers for a sec...when comparing IE6 and IE7, its hard to say IE6 is better, but a ton of people didnt want to switch, cuz it had been so long since IE had changed... Im talking developers of IE-only apps here, not just users (though including users).
#2 While I'm a big Vista advocate, I have to admit one thing: Vista is hit or miss. I have 2 machines in my apartment that are on Vista. One is the one Im typing this with, and it works flawlessly. No crash, everything works, its zippy, some games even run SMOOTHER, its a dream for developing with
On all the computers Ive used Vista on, only THAT machine has issues...but if it had been the first machine I tried it with, I probably would have written a X all over Vista.
The entire company I currently work for (which is, though, a pretty small software development firm), are running on Vista.
.NET software developer, so I hang out with a lot of people that would inherently be a bit biaised, but its still a decent amount of people right there.
I run Vista on my main computer (and I actually got a copy, it wasn't OEM).
Of course I know the bunch of people who bought new computers and its on it, about split in half between normal users and people in the industry (DBAs, project managers, software architects).
At the last place I worked for, the sysadmins all ran it.
Mind you, I am a
Thats quite true. Something related happened to me recently, though with Excel 2007. I was doing some business intelligence/datamining using SSAS (OLAP in SQL Server), and was looking around at an easy way for end users to actually, well, USE the cubes I was making, when while playing in Excel I saw it in pretty big in one of the ribbons. Click on the option, pick the connection string, bang, pivot tables and SSAS integration.
:)
Supposed that that existed in older versions, but I never noticed it. I know its a airhead moment, but thats the whole point
Huh? Who talked about any legal agreements? I'm not talking on paper stuff (though I'm sure there are some, especially in the Silverlight deal). I'm saying whats (most likely) going through the developer's heads while they so boldly walk all over Microsoft's IP without even sweating it (ASP.NET, VB.NET, I think they started Winform too?).
I'm not saying that Microsoft CANNOT do anything. I'm saying that from the way the Mono people act, they really are seeing themselves as "safe from Microsoft", and so far they have been proven correct (instead of stopping em, Microsoft is giving em their blessing). Thats why I said semi-partner, and not actual partners, and hoped people would read between the lines. But man is it hard on Slashdot.
My apologies if I don't feel like spelling it out in little details. I figured since we're not in a court of law, common sense had some place... my bad.
And is easier to parse, and very easy to generate through XSLT. All properties that are shared by other, probably superior formats, but still. Its nice when customers want simple Word documents auto-generated and its just a quick XSLT call away.
Isn't it the other way around? I mean, Moonlight will be released under LGPL, with the blessing of Microsoft, which is official and everywhere in the news. That would be freakishly hard to retract in court. Once the code is released under LGPL willingly, its pretty much impossible to retract permanently. So shouldn't OSS advocates be drooling over this?
Microsoft will never be able to close down the code that has been released, nor ever be able to say they didn't willingly allow it to be released under these licenses... especially if there are some contracts between MS and Novell. So in my book, that code is now "Free", and Microsoft can't change their mind or do a damn about it even if they want to...
Well, when it comes to .NET, there is a crap ton of copyrighted and patented stuff, and Mono breaks a lot of em, and they know it. They just know Microsoft won't do anything, since they are semi-partners and all.
.NET beyond console applications, everything is patented, copyrighted, etc (well, anything that could be), and MONO uses tons of it. No need to list em (in opposition to Windows vs Linux kernel, where its far from being as obvious).
C# the language is an ECMA standard (I beleive?), but from VB.NET to just about anything in
Now, if those patents and other intellectual property crap would stand up in court, thats another story altogether, but unlike the Windows vs Linux patent thing, these are much harder to deny.
(note that the above doesn't change that telling people to get it from Novell is indeed FUD because no one will ever get sued for using Moonlight from someone else's than Novell. I'm just stating how this situation is different from the mostly baseless "Linux is stepping on X amount of our patents" deal)
If you reread the parent a bit, they asked if it was static -ENOUGH-, not if it was static.
In this case, it is useful to understand where its coming from. With .NET 3.0 (which was originally meant to be Vista-only, but never ended up being so), Microsoft implemented a new GUI API called Windows Presentation Foundation to somewhat replace the old Win32/MFC/etc that has been around forever.
.NET Click Once, except even simpler to use for the end user.
.NET code to make cross-platform clients for backend apps. Win-Win for windows developers, thats for sure. Now if its win for non-windows...we'll see.
Part of the features of WPF is that its applications can be ran in "Express" mode, via a browser (this isn't like Silverlight or Flash where its part of a web page. In this case it IS its own "markup" and all, there's no html or anything, has its own extension, etc). That uses the full features of Windows' UI API, including direct x and such, so thats obviously Windows-only (also only works in IE, though I think I heard there's a Firefox plugin for it now, but still Windows-only, it uses core APIs and such). Running these "express applications" is a bit like Java Web Start or
Now, this has an obvious limitation: it can't seriously be used on the public internet, being Windows-only (this isn't 10 years ago anymore), so there was a subset of WPF that was to be implemented for Mac OSX, WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere). That would let people use a subset of XAML/WPF in other browsers and on other platforms. So it was made.
Now, having that, well, the marketing people and such obviously saw a "Why Not" opportunity to expand its market into other areas than simple "Express applications". It could be used a bit like Flash, on top of its original purpose. And thus the name got switched to Silverlight, and the marketing came.
So it this case, the Flash counterpart really came kindda "after" the implementation and is pure marketing. Its not WPF/E's original purpose. Its a lot more useful in its Silverlight form though. Lets you reuse existing
By exposing all of the Silverlight 1.1 API, does that include all of the namespaces that are supposed to be supported by it too? Including stuff like Linq to XML, WCF, etc? (honest question here)
Silverlight contains a bunch of .NET 3 and 3.5 exclusive features, which is normally XP/Vista only. So be glad it is gonna be there at all.
Also, Silverlight 1.0 is trash, the 1.1 is where its at, but thats not out yet, ugh.
It most likely isn't too far behind honestly. .NET on Windows Mobile is a first class environment in Microsoft's eyes, so it missing Silverlight would be pretty dumb.
"unless they have a really good explanation and can deliver it with a straight face"
Considering you only drew 6 weeks in 20 years, I'm damn sure you can fulfill that requirement rather easily. So whats the problem?