He said it took crap for bogus reasons. Meaning on TOP of the crap it took for being buggy and broken, it took crap for things that weren't true, which is a common thing to happen, be it when people talk of MS, Linux, Apple, documents, OS, IDEs, whatever.
It uses javascript to load Flash because of that issue with IE and plugins because of patents problems. Its the workaround to go around the workaround (wow...) that allows external code to load a plugin without user interaction so you don't have the "Click here to enable this plugin" thingy popping up.
Wow, thats the most runabout post I ever wrote. Going to bed.
I agree and do the same. Passports are all sort of awesome as an ID. As an added bonus, most places that asks for 2 pieces of ID for whatever service or another, will take a passport without any other ID. Its so much better than a DL.
I know it can't be extended to standards, don't worrie, I completly agree with you. Its just that having worked for corporation of very large size, one can never discount that, even in a incredibly important and critical project, the wrong project manager was appointed, and something retarded was done.
I'm pretty damn sure that the people who were writing the specs were BEGGING their boss not to make them push the standard in the shape it was, but that moron did it anyway:) You can go through some blogs of the IE7 developers and see that something similar happened to the CSS implementation.
Im sure there's part of that (though OOXML works perfectly fine under non-Vista, hehe), but having read a bit of it, what I see is that its not complete. It was rushed. The specs were copy pasted from internal documentation to save time (thus the "As of Office [insert obsolete version here]) garbage.
Having worked on a lot of similar projects, it really look like its 1 part evil, 2 part simply rushed and unfinished.
I agree, its not how a company should handle things. However Microsoft is part of two "groups" of businesses that don't think the way a company like yours do. #1: Software Companies. A very good way of handling software development (not that everyone agrees, but it DOES work, in many, MANY scenarios) is "Fail early, fail often". Since in most areas (not stuff like medical and such...), it isn't going to kill anyone, it is more efficient to push software out and find kinks as you go. Its not even always out of disrespect for your customers, because it is a good way to get solid software faster even when its just internally! (so there's no customers to screw over).
An inexperienced (with standards, which would make sense considering MS) MS project manager probably tried to apply this rational, while everyone around him tried to stop him, but on that day, he was in charge, and he screwed it up for everyone. Probably a group of project manager even.
The second group MS belongs to, is the "money-first" business kind. Where all these standards and ethics are pretty much just a way to make money. This where MS is on the "evil" side rather than just on the "dumb" side like the first group. They'll learn the hard way.
Anyway, not the best analogy in the world, but point is, the kind of businesses that handle more "real" things (like yours) tend to think very very differently from software/business companies, who (usually) work more with abstract concepts, and where usually no one gets killed. And a huge machine like Microsoft can't change in 1 day. Even if Steve Balmer was a -saint-, it would still not be possible to steer that ship in one shot. So expect MS to fuck up a lot in the next couple of years.
If in 20+ years they're still alive, they'll probably be quite different from what we've seen in the last couple of decades. The market is showing that their ways won't work much longer, and they'll end as the next Novell if they aren't careful. So like you said, ISO shouldn't give them any respect, until MS learns, which comes down to what I said. If at first you don't succeed, try again.
I'm sure when the company you work for just started working with standards and such (which they probably did at some point... as they probably were too small at first for that), they made mistakes. Its not because Microsoft is big that its any smarter. Especially since Microsoft's side is mostly split up in tiny pieces, and its one of those tiny portions that messed up on OOXML.
Without being able to know exactly what happens internally at Microsoft, the feeling I get is that someone actually got the good idea and enough power at MS to try and get MS to make something that would actually be standard, and it got approved. Architects, developers and co went ahead and started something that would have had the stuff to be approved by ISO. However, time ran short, and some bozo project manager and such at the top rushed the people to get something out of the door.
Those people then complained "But boss! Its not ready yet!", and said project manager (or whatever) said "Well, you can't have everything in life, thats how we're gonna present it. Your job is on the line, is it ready enough or not?", "Well sir...I.....guess...maybe....". And it was pushed to ISO. Most people who ever worked for a large company probably had to deal with a similar situation at least once.
Now that its getting rejected, maybe said person at the top will see more clearly and actually let em fix it. So this version isn't good enough, but after some fixes and cleanups, and removing the legacy crap, it might be ok in the end.
The problem with that, is while my first reaction is to agree with you, when you think about it more deeply... it would end up being "majority's win", or at least significant portion. There simply isn't enough people in this world (hell, continent or country) that live in a situation where they can realistically feel strongly enough about an issue like this to give up a job over something that doesn't kill them on the spot... And thats not even counting the people that are just plain stupid.
If we lived in a world where everyone lived in the upper class, and was smart enough to pass a 6 grade exam, we'd be ok. But we're not in that kindda world, so choice and capitalism isn't/always/ enough.
one thing after reading the article. The guy didn't refuse to let his bags get inspected. He refused to show his -receipt-. A receipt that the store gave you is a world of difference from having em go through your bags.
Indeed. Its the entitlement culture. "I don't HAVE to do it!!!". Seriously, the only reason these stores can work the way they do (being able to pay just about anywhere in the store, as opposed to make a god damn stupid line in front of the register lugging a 40 pounds printer with you) is because most people will have the common sense to let a clerk look at their receipt or goods before leaving.
Does that seriously hurt anyone? Eesh. And for something that silly, doing it for "the principle of the thing" is just childish 5 years old behavior.
Actually, its more complicated than that, even for C#. In.NET 3.5, C# has a new feature, called anonymous types, which are defered at compile time from the context, so Visual Studio has to do some work anyway.
Something like (I forget the exact syntax):
var anon = {first = 2, second = "test", third = 32.2};
And then if you type anon followed by a period, intellisense will correctly pick up the types of the object and each of its members, defered from the initialization. Though even if it wasn't for that, Visual Studio 2008 supports stuff like javascript intellisense, so it "tracks" whats happening to the object at a given position in the program... pretty clever.
No, they won't. To get Team Suite (without a volume license agreement or a microsoft partnership/certification of the company), you only have a single option: MSDN Premium with Visual Studio Team Suite (you cannot buy the Team edition products without an MSDN subscription, they're part of it).
That is incredibly expensive. If you're upgrading from MSDN Universal, its not -too- bad (a few grands), but if you're a newcomer, an MSDN Premium (not Pro, which sucks, missing too much stuff like Expression Blend for XAML, and isn't available with the team editions at all) for VS2005 Pro is like 2000-2500$ US. For one of the partial Team Edition SKUs (aka: all of em except Team Suite), they're something of the order of 5 grands. And team suite (OUCH) is 10-12 grands US at first glance.
That -IS- with MSDN subscription. The cheap 1000$ MSDN subscription will -not- include Visual Studio Team Suite (or any team SKUs).
The only cheap way of getting the Team SKUs I know of, is to get your company certified by microsoft, then you get a few licenses (not many). Thats like 200$ but you need to be selling an app made using Microsoft products and get it tested by MS (easy, they don't test it much). But for a solo developer starting up, they'll need to shell out the 10-12 grands with 3 grands renewal/upgrade if they wanted it.
Uh, Visual Studio Express is free. Sure it doesn't have some of the higher end team management systems stuff in it but it's an incredible package for no money. And if you are woking for a company the cost of VS is like... nothing? I have never worked ANYWHERE where the cost of VS was a concern for even a microsecond. Maybe some f the VERY expensive tool libraries yes... VS? never.
VS Express doesn't support plugins, which is what that was about. And that was my whole point. For companies the price isn't a concern, but when comparing the two in your basements for fun little projects, it definately IS relevent, which will most definately affect the options of people still in college or who work for tiny companies (which is a lot of people on these boards.).
Also, even for large companies, VS team Suite at 8-12 grands a pop depending on which country you buy it from will hurt if its not a software oriented firm.
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you, but have to see things from other people's perspectives sometimes.
You should check out VS2008's Javascript intellisense to see what Visual Studio can do with dynamic types. Its not perfect, but its pretty slick overall.Also in.NET 3.5, there's a new dynamic type enhanced runtime, so quite a few dynamically typed languages are popping up for Visual Studio, too.
VS will definately show you errors you make without compiling. I've never paid enough attention (because I'm a chronic compiler for other reasons) to see which one was better, but VS definately catches a lot of compile-time errors on the fly.
Also, Source Safe really, really blows. Team foundation is actually great though.
Its true that for the price, Eclipse can't be beat though:)
The problem is that people here will always write off anything that costs money, in which case any MS based development is serverly hurting. Visual Studio has amazing plugins, but a lot of the best ones (not all) cost a few bucks (like the full edition of Refactor, which is downright amazing). For a large corporation, that gets written off, and they'll get back half of it from taxes anyway.
For someone doing personal projects for fun, thats simply not possible. Just as an example, I recently switched workplace and lost access to my MSDN Premium subscription with Team System. I still have team system, but I lost access to all the MS tools around it. Not plugins, but I'm hurting now (it was just a side example). If you consider a large software firm who pays its senior developers as much as in the 3 digits/hour, saving them 3-4 hours of work is worth a 400$ tool or plugin, and thus they'll end with machines loaded with everything, and THEN you can compare VS with full plugin against Eclipse with full plugin...
I still think like you that counting VS without plugin vs Eclipse with plugins is a bit unfair, but its not as simple as a 1:1 comparison.
Indeed. ASP.NET 1.1 sucked ass. And it definately had all the problems you mentionned. In VS2005/ ASP.NEt 2.0, for example, VS starts Cassini (a web server) automatically on F5 debug, for example.
Aside for posts like this, I refuse to acknowledge that.NET 1.1 and below ever existed. And thats coming from a pro-.NET guy.
Of course, people always trash Microsoft for not following standards, but this time all they did is fully implement it before a lot of others... you're gonna blame MS for implementing DHCP the right way now?
Ironicaly, I went to a very Windows-heavy college (it did show unix, linux, intel assembly, and other non-MS centric stuff, but overall it was more than 50% windows), and they didn't show us ActiveX especially becuase of all its issues (and that was before.NET, too, back when ActiveX were sortoff relevent).
So not only those institutes may be Windows-only, but they're behind the time and pretty bad too. At least from what I read, not -all- of em are like that...
Creative took -fo.re.ver- to come up with new drivers. And the ones they came out with sucked pretty bad and were in beta for even longer.
That being said, Creative stopped being the "standard" after the Sound Blaster. Their cards (even on XP) single handledly make more games crash (results may vary) than Windows ME ever did. And thats sad.
Ouch, several blue-screen/reboots per day? Vista seems to be a bit hit or miss, depending on what you install on it (especially drivers) and hardware...
Ive used it since soon after release day, on multiple computers (many a few years old), and I have never, ever seen it crash or reboot. The occasional incompatible software, and crap like iTune/Quicktime that always mess up Windows bigtime (and at first the Vista compatibility was horrible for those), but aside that flawless.
Now recently I got a new computer for work, and while it still never crash, the windows desktop crash a lot, but aside that its ok. From what I read/heard, it really tends to be something specific that causes problems... a crappy videocard or sound driver (which was all of em until recently, and then again), or a specific app...
What sucks more than Vista ever will, is windows developer.
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He said it took crap for bogus reasons. Meaning on TOP of the crap it took for being buggy and broken, it took crap for things that weren't true, which is a common thing to happen, be it when people talk of MS, Linux, Apple, documents, OS, IDEs, whatever.
It uses javascript to load Flash because of that issue with IE and plugins because of patents problems. Its the workaround to go around the workaround (wow...) that allows external code to load a plugin without user interaction so you don't have the "Click here to enable this plugin" thingy popping up.
Wow, thats the most runabout post I ever wrote. Going to bed.
I agree and do the same. Passports are all sort of awesome as an ID. As an added bonus, most places that asks for 2 pieces of ID for whatever service or another, will take a passport without any other ID. Its so much better than a DL.
I know it can't be extended to standards, don't worrie, I completly agree with you. Its just that having worked for corporation of very large size, one can never discount that, even in a incredibly important and critical project, the wrong project manager was appointed, and something retarded was done.
:) You can go through some blogs of the IE7 developers and see that something similar happened to the CSS implementation.
I'm pretty damn sure that the people who were writing the specs were BEGGING their boss not to make them push the standard in the shape it was, but that moron did it anyway
Its Sony. Even corporate apologists don't think much of Sony.
Im sure there's part of that (though OOXML works perfectly fine under non-Vista, hehe), but having read a bit of it, what I see is that its not complete. It was rushed. The specs were copy pasted from internal documentation to save time (thus the "As of Office [insert obsolete version here]) garbage.
Having worked on a lot of similar projects, it really look like its 1 part evil, 2 part simply rushed and unfinished.
I agree, its not how a company should handle things. However Microsoft is part of two "groups" of businesses that don't think the way a company like yours do. #1: Software Companies. A very good way of handling software development (not that everyone agrees, but it DOES work, in many, MANY scenarios) is "Fail early, fail often". Since in most areas (not stuff like medical and such...), it isn't going to kill anyone, it is more efficient to push software out and find kinks as you go. Its not even always out of disrespect for your customers, because it is a good way to get solid software faster even when its just internally! (so there's no customers to screw over).
An inexperienced (with standards, which would make sense considering MS) MS project manager probably tried to apply this rational, while everyone around him tried to stop him, but on that day, he was in charge, and he screwed it up for everyone. Probably a group of project manager even.
The second group MS belongs to, is the "money-first" business kind. Where all these standards and ethics are pretty much just a way to make money. This where MS is on the "evil" side rather than just on the "dumb" side like the first group. They'll learn the hard way.
Anyway, not the best analogy in the world, but point is, the kind of businesses that handle more "real" things (like yours) tend to think very very differently from software/business companies, who (usually) work more with abstract concepts, and where usually no one gets killed. And a huge machine like Microsoft can't change in 1 day. Even if Steve Balmer was a -saint-, it would still not be possible to steer that ship in one shot. So expect MS to fuck up a lot in the next couple of years.
If in 20+ years they're still alive, they'll probably be quite different from what we've seen in the last couple of decades. The market is showing that their ways won't work much longer, and they'll end as the next Novell if they aren't careful. So like you said, ISO shouldn't give them any respect, until MS learns, which comes down to what I said. If at first you don't succeed, try again.
I'm sure when the company you work for just started working with standards and such (which they probably did at some point... as they probably were too small at first for that), they made mistakes. Its not because Microsoft is big that its any smarter. Especially since Microsoft's side is mostly split up in tiny pieces, and its one of those tiny portions that messed up on OOXML.
Without being able to know exactly what happens internally at Microsoft, the feeling I get is that someone actually got the good idea and enough power at MS to try and get MS to make something that would actually be standard, and it got approved. Architects, developers and co went ahead and started something that would have had the stuff to be approved by ISO. However, time ran short, and some bozo project manager and such at the top rushed the people to get something out of the door.
Those people then complained "But boss! Its not ready yet!", and said project manager (or whatever) said "Well, you can't have everything in life, thats how we're gonna present it. Your job is on the line, is it ready enough or not?", "Well sir...I.....guess...maybe....". And it was pushed to ISO. Most people who ever worked for a large company probably had to deal with a similar situation at least once.
Now that its getting rejected, maybe said person at the top will see more clearly and actually let em fix it. So this version isn't good enough, but after some fixes and cleanups, and removing the legacy crap, it might be ok in the end.
The problem with that, is while my first reaction is to agree with you, when you think about it more deeply... it would end up being "majority's win", or at least significant portion. There simply isn't enough people in this world (hell, continent or country) that live in a situation where they can realistically feel strongly enough about an issue like this to give up a job over something that doesn't kill them on the spot... And thats not even counting the people that are just plain stupid.
/always/ enough.
If we lived in a world where everyone lived in the upper class, and was smart enough to pass a 6 grade exam, we'd be ok. But we're not in that kindda world, so choice and capitalism isn't
one thing after reading the article. The guy didn't refuse to let his bags get inspected. He refused to show his -receipt-. A receipt that the store gave you is a world of difference from having em go through your bags.
Indeed. Its the entitlement culture. "I don't HAVE to do it!!!". Seriously, the only reason these stores can work the way they do (being able to pay just about anywhere in the store, as opposed to make a god damn stupid line in front of the register lugging a 40 pounds printer with you) is because most people will have the common sense to let a clerk look at their receipt or goods before leaving.
Does that seriously hurt anyone? Eesh. And for something that silly, doing it for "the principle of the thing" is just childish 5 years old behavior.
Actually, its more complicated than that, even for C#. In .NET 3.5, C# has a new feature, called anonymous types, which are defered at compile time from the context, so Visual Studio has to do some work anyway.
Something like (I forget the exact syntax):
var anon = {first = 2, second = "test", third = 32.2};
And then if you type anon followed by a period, intellisense will correctly pick up the types of the object and each of its members, defered from the initialization. Though even if it wasn't for that, Visual Studio 2008 supports stuff like javascript intellisense, so it "tracks" whats happening to the object at a given position in the program... pretty clever.
No, they won't. To get Team Suite (without a volume license agreement or a microsoft partnership/certification of the company), you only have a single option: MSDN Premium with Visual Studio Team Suite (you cannot buy the Team edition products without an MSDN subscription, they're part of it).
That is incredibly expensive. If you're upgrading from MSDN Universal, its not -too- bad (a few grands), but if you're a newcomer, an MSDN Premium (not Pro, which sucks, missing too much stuff like Expression Blend for XAML, and isn't available with the team editions at all) for VS2005 Pro is like 2000-2500$ US. For one of the partial Team Edition SKUs (aka: all of em except Team Suite), they're something of the order of 5 grands. And team suite (OUCH) is 10-12 grands US at first glance.
That -IS- with MSDN subscription. The cheap 1000$ MSDN subscription will -not- include Visual Studio Team Suite (or any team SKUs).
The only cheap way of getting the Team SKUs I know of, is to get your company certified by microsoft, then you get a few licenses (not many). Thats like 200$ but you need to be selling an app made using Microsoft products and get it tested by MS (easy, they don't test it much). But for a solo developer starting up, they'll need to shell out the 10-12 grands with 3 grands renewal/upgrade if they wanted it.
Also, even for large companies, VS team Suite at 8-12 grands a pop depending on which country you buy it from will hurt if its not a software oriented firm.
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you, but have to see things from other people's perspectives sometimes.
You should check out VS2008's Javascript intellisense to see what Visual Studio can do with dynamic types. Its not perfect, but its pretty slick overall.Also in .NET 3.5, there's a new dynamic type enhanced runtime, so quite a few dynamically typed languages are popping up for Visual Studio, too.
VS will definately show you errors you make without compiling. I've never paid enough attention (because I'm a chronic compiler for other reasons) to see which one was better, but VS definately catches a lot of compile-time errors on the fly.
:)
Also, Source Safe really, really blows. Team foundation is actually great though.
Its true that for the price, Eclipse can't be beat though
The problem is that people here will always write off anything that costs money, in which case any MS based development is serverly hurting. Visual Studio has amazing plugins, but a lot of the best ones (not all) cost a few bucks (like the full edition of Refactor, which is downright amazing). For a large corporation, that gets written off, and they'll get back half of it from taxes anyway.
For someone doing personal projects for fun, thats simply not possible. Just as an example, I recently switched workplace and lost access to my MSDN Premium subscription with Team System. I still have team system, but I lost access to all the MS tools around it. Not plugins, but I'm hurting now (it was just a side example).
If you consider a large software firm who pays its senior developers as much as in the 3 digits/hour, saving them 3-4 hours of work is worth a 400$ tool or plugin, and thus they'll end with machines loaded with everything, and THEN you can compare VS with full plugin against Eclipse with full plugin...
I still think like you that counting VS without plugin vs Eclipse with plugins is a bit unfair, but its not as simple as a 1:1 comparison.
Indeed. ASP.NET 1.1 sucked ass. And it definately had all the problems you mentionned. In VS2005/ ASP.NEt 2.0, for example, VS starts Cassini (a web server) automatically on F5 debug, for example.
.NET 1.1 and below ever existed. And thats coming from a pro-.NET guy.
Aside for posts like this, I refuse to acknowledge that
Of course, people always trash Microsoft for not following standards, but this time all they did is fully implement it before a lot of others... you're gonna blame MS for implementing DHCP the right way now?
Wow, considering even my mom can go to safe mode and fix a lot of things, im glad people around me don't use that as standard practice!
Wow, Oracle DBAs being against SQL Server? Who would have thought!
Ironicaly, I went to a very Windows-heavy college (it did show unix, linux, intel assembly, and other non-MS centric stuff, but overall it was more than 50% windows), and they didn't show us ActiveX especially becuase of all its issues (and that was before .NET, too, back when ActiveX were sortoff relevent).
So not only those institutes may be Windows-only, but they're behind the time and pretty bad too. At least from what I read, not -all- of em are like that...
Creative took -fo.re.ver- to come up with new drivers. And the ones they came out with sucked pretty bad and were in beta for even longer.
That being said, Creative stopped being the "standard" after the Sound Blaster. Their cards (even on XP) single handledly make more games crash (results may vary) than Windows ME ever did. And thats sad.
Ouch, several blue-screen/reboots per day? Vista seems to be a bit hit or miss, depending on what you install on it (especially drivers) and hardware...
Ive used it since soon after release day, on multiple computers (many a few years old), and I have never, ever seen it crash or reboot. The occasional incompatible software, and crap like iTune/Quicktime that always mess up Windows bigtime (and at first the Vista compatibility was horrible for those), but aside that flawless.
Now recently I got a new computer for work, and while it still never crash, the windows desktop crash a lot, but aside that its ok. From what I read/heard, it really tends to be something specific that causes problems... a crappy videocard or sound driver (which was all of em until recently, and then again), or a specific app...
What sucks more than Vista ever will, is windows developer.