The thing is, let say they do that. Then what. Developing something like that is hard, takes really smart (read: command a high salary) people, tons of project management resources, etc. Thats a lot of dough.
You get some good will and dominate the market, but that won't repay anything. Almost anyone still using Windows who doesn't do it for legacy reasons (that is, people who have been using Windows and can't go through the trouble of switching) on the server, does so because of.NET.
So you'd have.NET all over the place, and Microsoft with a lot less money in their pockets.
Now, if Microsoft had a cross platform strategy FIRST, then it would make sense. Now though, they're basically doing this just to win back developer good will.. and their competitor are already trying to extend -> extinguish them the moment they started (ie: TypeScript -> Google AtScript)
A lot of people mention money, but its a tricky one. You absolutely have to pay competitively, but then you end up with a few issues:
a _lot_ of good engineers will pick a projects they like over money. There's a reason a lot of fantastic ones will jump over to that fun startup that pays them NOTHING (aside equity) even when they know the odds of it working out is minuscule. No, its not because they expect the next Facebook.
You end up with a lot of candidate looking for money alone, so your pipeline ends up flooded with shitty people.
Really, you need to pay premium, but only at the offer phase after you confirmed what you have in front of you is a strong candidate. But getting the candidate in front of you and interested is the hard part.
A lot (a _lot_) of developers like those. Some don't of course, and the stereotypical "The only thing I do is code in a silo in the dark" definitely don't.
For the former group, its a matter of providing huddles, library atmosphere areas, etc. The later, well, you don't want those anyway.
There is the issue that this isn't black and white. There are VERY, VERY few things someone can do that won't affect me. The neighbor letting his kid play outside and screaming passed midnight prevents me from sleeping, which reduce my productivity at work and costs me real dollars.
The dude who's casually strolling down the sidewalk smoking weed makes my kitchen smell like weed unless I have closed air tight windows (and then I can't enjoy fresh air).
The guy who's leaving his house's outside go to hell is reducing the value of mine.
I can keep going all the way down to petty things. Virtually anything someone does affects someone else. So the line has to be drawn somewhere...and very few people agree on where it should be drawn.
And yet another reason the US will go to hell (faster than other first world countries). Pretty much all governments are corrupt by definition, but among first world countries, the US beats records. Because of that people don't trust it things a government should be doing, like making sure people are forced to get the important vaccines. And thus they don't get the benefits and fall behind..
The way humans are going, sooner or later all countries have that issue...but the ones that do later are at a net advantage.
Yup, i saw that happen at work (well, almost happen). The department had no female engineer. Zero, nadah. Its a problem because if you have none, getting 1, is hard, which sucks when you're interviewing an amazingly talented one. If you have even one on staff, convincing the second to take the offer is a LOT easier. Losing out on an awesome engineer on something like that makes you then want to do anything in your power to fix it...
Then you have the junior wannabe hacker without even so much as basic coding behind her, and everyone wants to hire her "because we need female engineers". Keep that train of thought, and all the women in your department are notably inferior. Not because women are bad, but because you selectively lowered your standards when screening them.
Fortunately the hiring managers listened to reasons, and now we have qualified women on staff, and things are fine, and no one looks down on them.
Especially since quickly, employers are starting to care a lot more about your github account/activity than your degree.
Even in this economy with batshit insane demand for software engineers, I've been asked to see my github account, blog, whatever (which until recently, was anemic...I could still get a job easily, but I had to do better in interviews to snatch the best ones). My degree? No one cares.
Schools do this openly, brag about it, and people cheer them up for it. There's the occasional (rare) asian male who'll sue over it (because they're not considered a minority in STEM fields and elite schools, lol), but that's about it.
HTML5 eventually became the term used to mix recent javascript and html updates along with all the surrounding things like canvas, webgl and all the other new stuff.
Its not actually refering to the markup language only.
No shelter? So if I earned some money abroad, and was taxed abroad, the US should also be able to tax me? 50% in Canada, then another 50% in the US? Making money will end up being a net loss.
Oh ok, so if its income thats already taxed, then we have treaties to avoid being taxed twice. So now I put the money in a low tax country...oh so now you're saying the US should simply tax me the difference I guess?
And that's just one obvious example. Taxes are complicated.
Its a country where everyone can do whatever the hell they want short of stealing at gunpoint, rape and murder, and get away with it. If you're not happy, you're told to "grow a thicker skin". Pretty much anyone from anywhere can come in and live there. If you think that's wrong, you're racist. Anything goes in the name of religion. Anything goes in the name of money. This is the place where when in Mass, they realized the law didn't stop people from taking upskirt pictures, and the law was changed, a seisable amount of people thought you should be allowed to (fortunately, not enough to prevent the law from changing).
Ya, not trusting anyone I don't know. Everyone should have the Right (tm) to be a dick. But for a society where that right exists to work, people should have common sense of when to use it. And they don't.
someone's confusing the device's id used for marketing by products like MixPanel, Localytics, maybe Omniture (dunno if web analytics used on native apps tap into it) with the verizon supercookie.
Bah, formatter messed things up. The last line was me joking about the crazy nested generic chains that F# types end up looking like in a language that doesn't support the same syntax sugar.
Back in the days of.NET 1~2, decompiling via Reflector or whatever other tool got you back pretty good stuff. Today, there's a LOT more sugar, from LINQ to async/await and everything in between. If you go back to the original language, good decompilers sometimes infer what the original sugar was from the output following certain conventions and patterns...but moving that to another language will give you unreadable garbage.
The gaming console wars end up the same way, though in that case one at least can make the argument that the more successful company attracts more games (so its more about device sold than profit margin, which confirms your point about Apple being even worse)
Nexus 6 is good. My personal usage pattern for a "phone" is: "Really, I don't make many phone calls, ever, so what I really want is a tablet that can make a phone call every now and then...but if I can't fix a tablet in my pocket and have to read for my bag every time, I'll never use it, so I need the largest possible 'tablet' that will fit in my pocket and be able to make phone calls". The Nexus 6 fit that bill, though millage will vary if you don't have large pockets:)
If you read around you'll hear about how the N6 does full device encryption in software, and can't be disabled without custom ROM. That doesn't really affect performance in practice except for app loading, which absolutely feel slower than it should for a premium device (though its not nearly as bad as at launch. They patched it up since most of the negative reviews popped). If you flash a custom rom (i don't have the patience for that), it supposingly flies. That said, one can't help but be jealous of the iphone 6 plus battery life.
All around I like it. Its the only intersection of near tablet sized phone thats fully hackable if I ever need to, that has guaranteed OS updates, so for me it ended up being my only real option.
That depends on the "why" though. Currently, one of the thing that will prevent a company from growing is how hard it is to get resources. An argument could be made that good C++ devs are rare and expensive. PoS systems are frequently written in higher level languages, so you'll more easily be able to find people to work on it if you use one of those languages. So the time and money you lose rewriting it will be made back, often several times over.
C# is actually a pretty wonderful language, with its platform being its only real drawback, and depending on your scale, it may not even be a drawback. If your total cost of ownership of one of these PoS boxes was $5000, the 20 bucks (after volume licensing) for the OS wouldn't a big deal..NET will also easily be able to consume legacy C++ code because it has decent interop for it (better than most other languages with C++ interop).
Now, the PoS I used to work on had a much lower TCO than that, so until.NET core becomes mainstream on Linux, it may not be the correct choice, unless the C++ interop become a factor. But keeping a PoS system in C++ is almost certainly the wrong choice. You won't get many super star devs willing to work on that kind of thing, so you need to architect accordingly.
Apple's marketing is just genius.... have useless things be considered critical, bug and issues be considered advantages, ridicule cheaper products...
I have a Nexus 6, which I got 64gb and without contract, so after shipping and taxes, it came up over $700. The only reason the 64gb is that important is that Android SD card support was crippled in Android 4 to the point of being useless aside for music/video, so people end up being more to get screwed more.
Anyway, at one point I'm sending a message on my overpriced N6, which I only forked over because I'm not fond of Apple products yet I wanted a phone that actually gets updates. Someone in my office look at me, and couldn't help but going: "Oh, you use Android? Wtf, that's a phone for poor people, I thought you were an engineer".
So not only from their point of view being ripped off is a good thing, else you're a "poor person", but getting ripped off by Google is still not good enough.
Microsoft is large. Very F**** large. Their development tool division, while it has had some hiccups over the years, overall has been pretty good, devs liked them and they were always pushing to embrace open source. The rest of the company, not so much.
So things like this look weird depending on where you're looking from. If you look at Microsoft the company that makes Windows and Office, this is awkward, they're trying too hard, etc.
If you look at it from Microsoft the company that makes C#, has been pushing a bunch of open source stuff for a pretty long time now, has Microsoft Research, etc, its really not that special and pretty much expected of them at this point, even if it wasn't true 15 years ago.
They're trying to take the "cool" division and make it do things that affect Microsoft's reputation as a whole. That will be long and hard.
Didn't replace anything that I could see, but I can't talk beyond that. The running theory, since it only affected very specific sites (big MMOs, Youtube, Netflix, etc...while you could easily download at maximum speed from Steam or Microsoft) is that it was just the same freagin crap that happened with Comcast, except they may actually have upgraded without needing to be bribed.
For a while (2-3 years ago) most (not all!) of FiOS customers, especially on the east coast, had terrible (TERRIBLE) experience on most popular streaming services. Worse than Comcast + Netflix. As in Youtube would barely play 360p videos.
You could see it on that youtube statistic pages that showed the average streaming speed per ISP. FiOS was abysmal.
From what I understand, its been fixed by now, but it it was so bad I had to switch back to Comcast when I realize everyone with FiOS in my region had that issue (their forums was flooded about it, etc). Worse, some MMORPGs were completely unplayable because of some bad routes... unrelated, but it made everything so painful...
Its not "cable in your house to a cable modem". Its using MoCA, and the router is a moca -> ethernet bridge (my terminology is probably off). Sure, its just semantic, but its just the easiest way for most people to have effectively an ethernet wired house, since its pretty damn unlikely you have fibers running in your walls. Since you don't share that coax with your neighbors, its fast enough.
And as someone else pointed out, whats telling you its coax cable on the street? You opened one up, removed its cover, and looked inside?
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, let say they do that. Then what. Developing something like that is hard, takes really smart (read: command a high salary) people, tons of project management resources, etc. Thats a lot of dough.
You get some good will and dominate the market, but that won't repay anything. Almost anyone still using Windows who doesn't do it for legacy reasons (that is, people who have been using Windows and can't go through the trouble of switching) on the server, does so because of .NET.
So you'd have .NET all over the place, and Microsoft with a lot less money in their pockets.
Now, if Microsoft had a cross platform strategy FIRST, then it would make sense. Now though, they're basically doing this just to win back developer good will.. and their competitor are already trying to extend -> extinguish them the moment they started (ie: TypeScript -> Google AtScript)
A lot of people mention money, but its a tricky one. You absolutely have to pay competitively, but then you end up with a few issues:
a _lot_ of good engineers will pick a projects they like over money. There's a reason a lot of fantastic ones will jump over to that fun startup that pays them NOTHING (aside equity) even when they know the odds of it working out is minuscule. No, its not because they expect the next Facebook.
You end up with a lot of candidate looking for money alone, so your pipeline ends up flooded with shitty people.
Really, you need to pay premium, but only at the offer phase after you confirmed what you have in front of you is a strong candidate. But getting the candidate in front of you and interested is the hard part.
A lot (a _lot_) of developers like those. Some don't of course, and the stereotypical "The only thing I do is code in a silo in the dark" definitely don't.
For the former group, its a matter of providing huddles, library atmosphere areas, etc. The later, well, you don't want those anyway.
There is the issue that this isn't black and white. There are VERY, VERY few things someone can do that won't affect me. The neighbor letting his kid play outside and screaming passed midnight prevents me from sleeping, which reduce my productivity at work and costs me real dollars.
The dude who's casually strolling down the sidewalk smoking weed makes my kitchen smell like weed unless I have closed air tight windows (and then I can't enjoy fresh air).
The guy who's leaving his house's outside go to hell is reducing the value of mine.
I can keep going all the way down to petty things. Virtually anything someone does affects someone else. So the line has to be drawn somewhere...and very few people agree on where it should be drawn.
And yet another reason the US will go to hell (faster than other first world countries). Pretty much all governments are corrupt by definition, but among first world countries, the US beats records. Because of that people don't trust it things a government should be doing, like making sure people are forced to get the important vaccines. And thus they don't get the benefits and fall behind..
The way humans are going, sooner or later all countries have that issue...but the ones that do later are at a net advantage.
Yup, i saw that happen at work (well, almost happen). The department had no female engineer. Zero, nadah. Its a problem because if you have none, getting 1, is hard, which sucks when you're interviewing an amazingly talented one. If you have even one on staff, convincing the second to take the offer is a LOT easier. Losing out on an awesome engineer on something like that makes you then want to do anything in your power to fix it...
Then you have the junior wannabe hacker without even so much as basic coding behind her, and everyone wants to hire her "because we need female engineers". Keep that train of thought, and all the women in your department are notably inferior. Not because women are bad, but because you selectively lowered your standards when screening them.
Fortunately the hiring managers listened to reasons, and now we have qualified women on staff, and things are fine, and no one looks down on them.
Especially since quickly, employers are starting to care a lot more about your github account/activity than your degree.
Even in this economy with batshit insane demand for software engineers, I've been asked to see my github account, blog, whatever (which until recently, was anemic...I could still get a job easily, but I had to do better in interviews to snatch the best ones). My degree? No one cares.
Schools do this openly, brag about it, and people cheer them up for it. There's the occasional (rare) asian male who'll sue over it (because they're not considered a minority in STEM fields and elite schools, lol), but that's about it.
HTML5 eventually became the term used to mix recent javascript and html updates along with all the surrounding things like canvas, webgl and all the other new stuff.
Its not actually refering to the markup language only.
No shelter? So if I earned some money abroad, and was taxed abroad, the US should also be able to tax me? 50% in Canada, then another 50% in the US? Making money will end up being a net loss.
Oh ok, so if its income thats already taxed, then we have treaties to avoid being taxed twice. So now I put the money in a low tax country...oh so now you're saying the US should simply tax me the difference I guess?
And that's just one obvious example. Taxes are complicated.
Its a country where everyone can do whatever the hell they want short of stealing at gunpoint, rape and murder, and get away with it. If you're not happy, you're told to "grow a thicker skin". Pretty much anyone from anywhere can come in and live there. If you think that's wrong, you're racist. Anything goes in the name of religion. Anything goes in the name of money. This is the place where when in Mass, they realized the law didn't stop people from taking upskirt pictures, and the law was changed, a seisable amount of people thought you should be allowed to (fortunately, not enough to prevent the law from changing).
Ya, not trusting anyone I don't know. Everyone should have the Right (tm) to be a dick. But for a society where that right exists to work, people should have common sense of when to use it. And they don't.
hyper-v not so hot on desktop versions of windows...
someone's confusing the device's id used for marketing by products like MixPanel, Localytics, maybe Omniture (dunno if web analytics used on native apps tap into it) with the verizon supercookie.
Not the same thing. At all.
Bah, formatter messed things up. The last line was me joking about the crazy nested generic chains that F# types end up looking like in a language that doesn't support the same syntax sugar.
Back in the days of .NET 1~2, decompiling via Reflector or whatever other tool got you back pretty good stuff. Today, there's a LOT more sugar, from LINQ to async/await and everything in between. If you go back to the original language, good decompilers sometimes infer what the original sugar was from the output following certain conventions and patterns...but moving that to another language will give you unreadable garbage.
Reading F# in C# , this>but,worse>
People still use these stupid 90s style comments with authors and dates and shit? Really?
Just use the source control system for that.
Good thing there are Android phones not running touchwiz!
The gaming console wars end up the same way, though in that case one at least can make the argument that the more successful company attracts more games (so its more about device sold than profit margin, which confirms your point about Apple being even worse)
Nexus 6 is good. My personal usage pattern for a "phone" is: "Really, I don't make many phone calls, ever, so what I really want is a tablet that can make a phone call every now and then...but if I can't fix a tablet in my pocket and have to read for my bag every time, I'll never use it, so I need the largest possible 'tablet' that will fit in my pocket and be able to make phone calls". The Nexus 6 fit that bill, though millage will vary if you don't have large pockets :)
If you read around you'll hear about how the N6 does full device encryption in software, and can't be disabled without custom ROM. That doesn't really affect performance in practice except for app loading, which absolutely feel slower than it should for a premium device (though its not nearly as bad as at launch. They patched it up since most of the negative reviews popped). If you flash a custom rom (i don't have the patience for that), it supposingly flies. That said, one can't help but be jealous of the iphone 6 plus battery life.
All around I like it. Its the only intersection of near tablet sized phone thats fully hackable if I ever need to, that has guaranteed OS updates, so for me it ended up being my only real option.
That depends on the "why" though. Currently, one of the thing that will prevent a company from growing is how hard it is to get resources. An argument could be made that good C++ devs are rare and expensive. PoS systems are frequently written in higher level languages, so you'll more easily be able to find people to work on it if you use one of those languages. So the time and money you lose rewriting it will be made back, often several times over.
C# is actually a pretty wonderful language, with its platform being its only real drawback, and depending on your scale, it may not even be a drawback. If your total cost of ownership of one of these PoS boxes was $5000, the 20 bucks (after volume licensing) for the OS wouldn't a big deal. .NET will also easily be able to consume legacy C++ code because it has decent interop for it (better than most other languages with C++ interop).
Now, the PoS I used to work on had a much lower TCO than that, so until .NET core becomes mainstream on Linux, it may not be the correct choice, unless the C++ interop become a factor. But keeping a PoS system in C++ is almost certainly the wrong choice. You won't get many super star devs willing to work on that kind of thing, so you need to architect accordingly.
Apple's marketing is just genius.... have useless things be considered critical, bug and issues be considered advantages, ridicule cheaper products...
I have a Nexus 6, which I got 64gb and without contract, so after shipping and taxes, it came up over $700. The only reason the 64gb is that important is that Android SD card support was crippled in Android 4 to the point of being useless aside for music/video, so people end up being more to get screwed more.
Anyway, at one point I'm sending a message on my overpriced N6, which I only forked over because I'm not fond of Apple products yet I wanted a phone that actually gets updates. Someone in my office look at me, and couldn't help but going: "Oh, you use Android? Wtf, that's a phone for poor people, I thought you were an engineer".
So not only from their point of view being ripped off is a good thing, else you're a "poor person", but getting ripped off by Google is still not good enough.
Because then people don't have any assurance that they won't get sued for using it.
Microsoft is large. Very F**** large. Their development tool division, while it has had some hiccups over the years, overall has been pretty good, devs liked them and they were always pushing to embrace open source. The rest of the company, not so much.
So things like this look weird depending on where you're looking from. If you look at Microsoft the company that makes Windows and Office, this is awkward, they're trying too hard, etc.
If you look at it from Microsoft the company that makes C#, has been pushing a bunch of open source stuff for a pretty long time now, has Microsoft Research, etc, its really not that special and pretty much expected of them at this point, even if it wasn't true 15 years ago.
They're trying to take the "cool" division and make it do things that affect Microsoft's reputation as a whole. That will be long and hard.
Didn't replace anything that I could see, but I can't talk beyond that. The running theory, since it only affected very specific sites (big MMOs, Youtube, Netflix, etc...while you could easily download at maximum speed from Steam or Microsoft) is that it was just the same freagin crap that happened with Comcast, except they may actually have upgraded without needing to be bribed.
For a while (2-3 years ago) most (not all!) of FiOS customers, especially on the east coast, had terrible (TERRIBLE) experience on most popular streaming services. Worse than Comcast + Netflix. As in Youtube would barely play 360p videos.
You could see it on that youtube statistic pages that showed the average streaming speed per ISP. FiOS was abysmal.
From what I understand, its been fixed by now, but it it was so bad I had to switch back to Comcast when I realize everyone with FiOS in my region had that issue (their forums was flooded about it, etc). Worse, some MMORPGs were completely unplayable because of some bad routes... unrelated, but it made everything so painful...
Its not "cable in your house to a cable modem". Its using MoCA, and the router is a moca -> ethernet bridge (my terminology is probably off). Sure, its just semantic, but its just the easiest way for most people to have effectively an ethernet wired house, since its pretty damn unlikely you have fibers running in your walls. Since you don't share that coax with your neighbors, its fast enough.
And as someone else pointed out, whats telling you its coax cable on the street? You opened one up, removed its cover, and looked inside?