Even Microsoft already did what had to be done for that. Integrate the tools with the content management system, duh!
Sharepoint Designer is pretty much Expression Web made to modify Sharepoint's dynamically generated pages. Point Sharepoint Designer to a Sharepoint site where you have required permissions, and have fun. All the power of a content management system, all the power of design and web development tool, all at the same place.
Adobe and Dreamweaver are in an even better position for this. They could work with the open source community, and various vendors (like Alfresco), and make Dreamweaver work the same way Sharepoint Designer works, but across a variety of content management system. The idea of something like Drupal and Alfresco with Dreamweaver having the same kind of integration as MOSS and Sharepoint Designer is quite exciting, in my opinion, and has far more potential.
Unfortunately no. In many schools, students are lazy whiny crybabies... mentioning a test more than once every few weeks (or months!) will get such a backlash, that teachers cave in.
I know this is Slashdot and "Vista sucks" and shit. But when you make jokes, could you at least make them a bit current? Windows Update in Vista doesn't depend on IE, as its a stand alone desktop application, and has nothing to do with the browser. Same with Windows 7.
For IE locking up randomly, make sure you don't have Flash 10 installed (if you can, get 9). Piece of garbage that locks up all browsers every so often, but on IE its constant, and even after several reports from tons of people, Adobe doesn't do anything about it.
They did. Utilities just have to work with list of objects, which themselves can be converted to list of "members". So basically think that everything can be converted to generic tables. Thats how you process them. It actually works so well there are even utilities to make GUIs out of any utility, such as PowerGUI: http://www.powergui.org/index.jspa
Lets you quickly make a pretty powerful GUI out of mostly anything you can think of.
well, Flash (even without Flex) has form and input support, can communicate via web services and other protocols, etc. Flex is a framework built on top of that to make it -easier-, but the functionalities are still there out of the box in Flash. In any case, I think we can agree SL2 is better compared to Flex than Adobe Air.
No actually. Silverlight 1.0 is very close in philosophy to Flash... Silverlight 2.0 is fairly close to Flex's later incarnations (well, not -quite- from a technical perspective, but the use cases are similar-ish). Adobe Air is just a platform to use web-like technologies on your desktop. Silverlight 1.0 is a vector-based graphics engine for the browser, and Silverlight 2.0 is a runtime based on the first one to make rich apps in a browser. Adobe Air -kindda- has the same end result as WPF, but the philosophy is totally different...its somewhat unique, really.
they're signing up with Microsoft to force Silverlight onto the world, reminding me of Medica's website -- which is completely inaccessible in anything but Internet Exploiter thanks to them deploying Sharepoint for everything.
Of course, Silverlight can do some very impressive streaming. http://www.smoothhd.com/ This is just Netflix who goofed up.
And Sharepoint works fine in non-IE browsers, including the javascript and stuff. There's a few integration features with office that require ActiveX, but if its used as a website, those wouldn't matter.
I could be wrong but i always thought they used that terminology because, really, lifespan of the unit aside, how many watt/hour the thing generates really just depend on how long you leave it on your roof. So if you pay 1000$ for a 1kw panel, and leave it in the sun for 10 hours, you got 10 kw/h...if you leave it for 20 hours, you get twice, and so on. Now, if the power company buys it, then yeah...but if YOU buy it and put it on your roof, then its really the price of the unit and how much it can generate at any given time that matters.
Now, of course, how long it lasts matters too, of course:)
To oversimplify things, these scenes are just prerendered videos with more or less all possibilities of position in a database. So no matter where you are, you're seeing a prerendered "still" picture. They just select and display the pictures fast enough that it looks like its 3d. So it doesn't need hardware acceleration for anything beyond buffering the images, which are probably rendered as textures on a flat plane.
Sorry, I was comparing shells vs shells only (and well, perl, python, etc are available for Windows too, even without Cygwin). The main thing is that Powershell, at its core, is object oriented, including the pipes. So you're piping objects, not text. The implications of that are pretty extreme. No text parsing to get output from one tool to the other. In other scripting environments, you'll have to use a bunch of tools to make the output of another tool useful. And if you're not doing something standard, it can get tricky real fast. Linux always had the advantage by a billion miles in this, since it has extremely powerful and efficient tools to do this...but with powershell, it has become an obsolete method of doing things. If the "commandlets" pipe along objects that include both data and behavior in a consistant manner, you can push your scripts a lot further.
Yeah, powershell is slick. Though making commandlets is so simple in C# (or reusable scripts in powershell itself), that this is more of a "nice to have" than something worth paying for. Though im guessing they'll push Powershell 2.0 with it (it is in the Windows 7 beta), and now THAT is slick.
I do find it a little ironic, that of all things that Microsoft could have done better than Unix, one of the ones they wiped the floor with, is the -Shell- scripting. Go figures.
The main things is the ability to do a "core" (minimalistic) install, hyper-v, the terminal service enhancements as you mentioned, IIS7 (thats actually a very, very big deal for.NET shops) and souped up Active Directory. The rest is mostly enhanced management (incremental upgrades and some new features here and there to make stuff faster/easier) and incremental improvements on most things, and support for Vista specific features. Its also decently faster overall.
The first things i mentioned are actually pretty major, if you need them, but obviously are irrelevant if all you're using it for is a file server, of course:)
Very good question. I personally looked at Scala and thought it looked pretty good, but that I didn't try at all (just read the documentation). If I had to guess, I'd say its a mix of Microsoft support (which, while I know i'm saying this on Slashdot, is actually pretty damn good, and you have tons of support calls included with MSDN subscriptions, volume licensing agreements, etc), the fact that the language is just really well designed, the better, faster interop with native code (so if you have to do something in C/C++/Assembly, you won't lose 90% of the performance bonus in the interop layer), and that some of these algorithms have to be integrated with thick client software on desktop machines, as Office plugins, etc.
The last 2 are probably the biggest deal. You know for sure you can interop (well) with anything and everything, that it can run on the servers (most are Unix, and its by far the preference, but we can put a Windows server without affecting users if we really need to) and on the client integrated with basically anything. Almost anything that can be extended will support some kind of COM/COM+ or.NET interop model of some kind. Doing it with Scala is not impossible, but far more annoying. And if the F# code needs to be distributed, WCF tends to be better than many alternatives, etc etc.
So in short (and again, its just a guess. I always tend to be quite curious too when a Windows solution gets selected over a Unix one, since we're not locked in on Windows much if at all), easier to extend, and better corporate support.
Let's just hope this company doesn't blow up the stock market again, or there vaguely will be hell to pay, linux or no:)
I may be dense here, but i'm not too sure how one company can blow up stock markets... especially not "again". Wtf does a company coding in F# has to do with the economy, anyway?
Yes, OOP is indirectly the same thing. The Strategy design pattern is just a way to implement functional-like paradigm to non-functional language.
Its still not as easy or elegant, and the compiler cannot optimize as aggressively, and some stuff will take a whole lot more code. Thats why the base functional paradigms were added to VB.NET and C#.
They're also not building domain specific languages at all. Its just the mathematical model (not model as in a DSL model, but really, as in a math one) is extensive, so the formulas are very, very complex, even when done on paper. One of primary reasons to use a functional language (aside that it goes from paper to code easier) is that its easier to prove the code afterward, which is required by law in some businesses.
Another dynamic language that has worked quite well on the platform is JScript.net. Not very popular, but it worked since the beggining. The common runtime doesn't help much with dynamic language, but they definitely are still possible, and interop well 2 ways already (calling C# to JScript.net, and vice versa, is a breeze)
I was introduced to functional programming via C# 3.0, with the lambdas, LINQ, and better delegate support. Not quite "real" functional programming, but its a nice gateway drug, and have been hooked since then (thats background info just to say I'm no expert, but no dummy either).
F# is pretty slick. Its basically a "real" functional language, that still allows it to be easy to integrate with "real business", including databases, IO, and has great support for tooling since its based on.NET. So its pretty much the "perfect" functional language, for the "real" world. (I know many are better from a theoretical or scientific point of view, but i'm talking purely pragmatic here).
That said, I didn't use it much. What I can say, is we have an army of PhDs implementing -extremely- complex algorithms here (functions being passed around with several douzens levels of nested function types, to do very, very complex modeling in a couple lines of code...), and they swear my F# now (they've been using it since early technology previews, and are getting ready to push large amounts of code in it in production...its working awesome, supposingly).
Sorry I'm vague on the details... but what I can say, is its good enough for one of the largest linux-centric company in the world to shift some of its code to it. Nuff said:)
Not really "tool based" programming like the unix stuff that was mentionned...but for example where I work, they combine languages. Our.NET stuff will be a mix of raw intel assembly, managed C++, C#, and F# for the algorithms. Mixing purely functional languages with procedurals languages with some functional features seem to be gaining momentum in algorithm heavy fields.
Then there's the occasional java program that will invoke perl scripts for jobs, for example.
Its definately there for large projects. Its just that with the power of more modern environments, the projects have to be MUCH larger before they start warranting to take the overhead of mixing languages/tools to gain efficiency. The extra tools, testing, integration, installation, dependencies, etc that are involved are not worth it for "small" projects (and again, by today's definitions, a "small" project can be quite large, hehe)
We have definitely different experiences here. I worked for 11 different companies in the last decade, and many of them made mistakes, and aside for one shitty 1 man consulting firm ran in a basement, I was always paid back pronto, and usually, before I even noticed the mistake. Large corporations never failed in that regard.
I agree. This happens all the time. Accountants and HR people are just human, and they make mistakes. Sure, the systems are mostly automated, but when there are exceptional events or conditions change (this WAS Microsoft's first massive layoff), mistakes happen, and people pay it back all the time. The same way if they underpay you, they'll give it back.
Now, the only difference is those are people who got fired...so unless there's a legally binding agreement over this package (like, if something was signed...which it probably was), they have no reason to pay back, and they're probably not in the mood to do so. But again, if they signed papers, they don't have much choice.
Also, MS has offered to help some of these people to get new jobs, and even may hire some of them back in the future. Thats typical in IT in general. So unless some of these people REALLY hate Microsoft to the level of an average slashdotter, its not in the former employee's best interests to screw their former employer over. May cause issues getting references too, if t he direct supervisors catch ear of it.
no laws set monopolies to define minimum prices for any type of commodity
You'd be surprised. And there's no monopoly. Everyone can sell music. Just the ones who produce a particular song gets to decide where it goes... just like a particular Dell model has to come from Dell. Doesn't mean Dell has monopoly on computers. If I have a farm, only I gets to sell the tomatoes I produced.
Oh wait, you're saying someone should be able to sell what someone else produced without asking for permission? Now you're going to say "But, if I produce the disk or the copy...". But then I'd say "how would you sell it if the artist didn't produce it in the first place?"
Sure, the parallel isn't 1:1 with other commodities, but still. And you're not aware of all the markets with state driven quotas and regulations?
Slashdot Mirror
Err, no, you don't.
Even Microsoft already did what had to be done for that. Integrate the tools with the content management system, duh!
Sharepoint Designer is pretty much Expression Web made to modify Sharepoint's dynamically generated pages. Point Sharepoint Designer to a Sharepoint site where you have required permissions, and have fun. All the power of a content management system, all the power of design and web development tool, all at the same place.
Adobe and Dreamweaver are in an even better position for this. They could work with the open source community, and various vendors (like Alfresco), and make Dreamweaver work the same way Sharepoint Designer works, but across a variety of content management system. The idea of something like Drupal and Alfresco with Dreamweaver having the same kind of integration as MOSS and Sharepoint Designer is quite exciting, in my opinion, and has far more potential.
Unfortunately no. In many schools, students are lazy whiny crybabies... mentioning a test more than once every few weeks (or months!) will get such a backlash, that teachers cave in.
I know this is Slashdot and "Vista sucks" and shit. But when you make jokes, could you at least make them a bit current? Windows Update in Vista doesn't depend on IE, as its a stand alone desktop application, and has nothing to do with the browser. Same with Windows 7.
For IE locking up randomly, make sure you don't have Flash 10 installed (if you can, get 9). Piece of garbage that locks up all browsers every so often, but on IE its constant, and even after several reports from tons of people, Adobe doesn't do anything about it.
They did. Utilities just have to work with list of objects, which themselves can be converted to list of "members". So basically think that everything can be converted to generic tables. Thats how you process them. It actually works so well there are even utilities to make GUIs out of any utility, such as PowerGUI: http://www.powergui.org/index.jspa
Lets you quickly make a pretty powerful GUI out of mostly anything you can think of.
well, Flash (even without Flex) has form and input support, can communicate via web services and other protocols, etc. Flex is a framework built on top of that to make it -easier-, but the functionalities are still there out of the box in Flash. In any case, I think we can agree SL2 is better compared to Flex than Adobe Air.
No actually. Silverlight 1.0 is very close in philosophy to Flash... Silverlight 2.0 is fairly close to Flex's later incarnations (well, not -quite- from a technical perspective, but the use cases are similar-ish). Adobe Air is just a platform to use web-like technologies on your desktop. Silverlight 1.0 is a vector-based graphics engine for the browser, and Silverlight 2.0 is a runtime based on the first one to make rich apps in a browser. Adobe Air -kindda- has the same end result as WPF, but the philosophy is totally different...its somewhat unique, really.
Sharepoint can be customized completely. That includes modifying the core templates from A to Z. So you can MAKE it not work.
That said, that site works just fine for me in Chrome.
Of course, Silverlight can do some very impressive streaming. http://www.smoothhd.com/
This is just Netflix who goofed up.
And Sharepoint works fine in non-IE browsers, including the javascript and stuff. There's a few integration features with office that require ActiveX, but if its used as a website, those wouldn't matter.
I could be wrong but i always thought they used that terminology because, really, lifespan of the unit aside, how many watt/hour the thing generates really just depend on how long you leave it on your roof. So if you pay 1000$ for a 1kw panel, and leave it in the sun for 10 hours, you got 10 kw/h...if you leave it for 20 hours, you get twice, and so on. Now, if the power company buys it, then yeah...but if YOU buy it and put it on your roof, then its really the price of the unit and how much it can generate at any given time that matters.
Now, of course, how long it lasts matters too, of course :)
To oversimplify things, these scenes are just prerendered videos with more or less all possibilities of position in a database. So no matter where you are, you're seeing a prerendered "still" picture. They just select and display the pictures fast enough that it looks like its 3d. So it doesn't need hardware acceleration for anything beyond buffering the images, which are probably rendered as textures on a flat plane.
Sorry, I was comparing shells vs shells only (and well, perl, python, etc are available for Windows too, even without Cygwin). The main thing is that Powershell, at its core, is object oriented, including the pipes. So you're piping objects, not text. The implications of that are pretty extreme. No text parsing to get output from one tool to the other. In other scripting environments, you'll have to use a bunch of tools to make the output of another tool useful. And if you're not doing something standard, it can get tricky real fast. Linux always had the advantage by a billion miles in this, since it has extremely powerful and efficient tools to do this...but with powershell, it has become an obsolete method of doing things. If the "commandlets" pipe along objects that include both data and behavior in a consistant manner, you can push your scripts a lot further.
Yeah, powershell is slick. Though making commandlets is so simple in C# (or reusable scripts in powershell itself), that this is more of a "nice to have" than something worth paying for. Though im guessing they'll push Powershell 2.0 with it (it is in the Windows 7 beta), and now THAT is slick.
I do find it a little ironic, that of all things that Microsoft could have done better than Unix, one of the ones they wiped the floor with, is the -Shell- scripting. Go figures.
The main things is the ability to do a "core" (minimalistic) install, hyper-v, the terminal service enhancements as you mentioned, IIS7 (thats actually a very, very big deal for .NET shops) and souped up Active Directory. The rest is mostly enhanced management (incremental upgrades and some new features here and there to make stuff faster/easier) and incremental improvements on most things, and support for Vista specific features. Its also decently faster overall.
The first things i mentioned are actually pretty major, if you need them, but obviously are irrelevant if all you're using it for is a file server, of course :)
Very good question. I personally looked at Scala and thought it looked pretty good, but that I didn't try at all (just read the documentation). If I had to guess, I'd say its a mix of Microsoft support (which, while I know i'm saying this on Slashdot, is actually pretty damn good, and you have tons of support calls included with MSDN subscriptions, volume licensing agreements, etc), the fact that the language is just really well designed, the better, faster interop with native code (so if you have to do something in C/C++/Assembly, you won't lose 90% of the performance bonus in the interop layer), and that some of these algorithms have to be integrated with thick client software on desktop machines, as Office plugins, etc.
The last 2 are probably the biggest deal. You know for sure you can interop (well) with anything and everything, that it can run on the servers (most are Unix, and its by far the preference, but we can put a Windows server without affecting users if we really need to) and on the client integrated with basically anything. Almost anything that can be extended will support some kind of COM/COM+ or .NET interop model of some kind. Doing it with Scala is not impossible, but far more annoying. And if the F# code needs to be distributed, WCF tends to be better than many alternatives, etc etc.
So in short (and again, its just a guess. I always tend to be quite curious too when a Windows solution gets selected over a Unix one, since we're not locked in on Windows much if at all), easier to extend, and better corporate support.
I may be dense here, but i'm not too sure how one company can blow up stock markets... especially not "again". Wtf does a company coding in F# has to do with the economy, anyway?
Yes, OOP is indirectly the same thing. The Strategy design pattern is just a way to implement functional-like paradigm to non-functional language.
Its still not as easy or elegant, and the compiler cannot optimize as aggressively, and some stuff will take a whole lot more code. Thats why the base functional paradigms were added to VB.NET and C#.
They're also not building domain specific languages at all. Its just the mathematical model (not model as in a DSL model, but really, as in a math one) is extensive, so the formulas are very, very complex, even when done on paper. One of primary reasons to use a functional language (aside that it goes from paper to code easier) is that its easier to prove the code afterward, which is required by law in some businesses.
Another dynamic language that has worked quite well on the platform is JScript.net. Not very popular, but it worked since the beggining. The common runtime doesn't help much with dynamic language, but they definitely are still possible, and interop well 2 ways already (calling C# to JScript.net, and vice versa, is a breeze)
That was an example of my personal responsibilities:) We have more unix machines than Windows, hehe.
I was introduced to functional programming via C# 3.0, with the lambdas, LINQ, and better delegate support. Not quite "real" functional programming, but its a nice gateway drug, and have been hooked since then (thats background info just to say I'm no expert, but no dummy either).
F# is pretty slick. Its basically a "real" functional language, that still allows it to be easy to integrate with "real business", including databases, IO, and has great support for tooling since its based on .NET. So its pretty much the "perfect" functional language, for the "real" world. (I know many are better from a theoretical or scientific point of view, but i'm talking purely pragmatic here).
That said, I didn't use it much. What I can say, is we have an army of PhDs implementing -extremely- complex algorithms here (functions being passed around with several douzens levels of nested function types, to do very, very complex modeling in a couple lines of code...), and they swear my F# now (they've been using it since early technology previews, and are getting ready to push large amounts of code in it in production...its working awesome, supposingly).
Sorry I'm vague on the details... but what I can say, is its good enough for one of the largest linux-centric company in the world to shift some of its code to it. Nuff said :)
Not really "tool based" programming like the unix stuff that was mentionned...but for example where I work, they combine languages. Our .NET stuff will be a mix of raw intel assembly, managed C++, C#, and F# for the algorithms. Mixing purely functional languages with procedurals languages with some functional features seem to be gaining momentum in algorithm heavy fields.
Then there's the occasional java program that will invoke perl scripts for jobs, for example.
Its definately there for large projects. Its just that with the power of more modern environments, the projects have to be MUCH larger before they start warranting to take the overhead of mixing languages/tools to gain efficiency. The extra tools, testing, integration, installation, dependencies, etc that are involved are not worth it for "small" projects (and again, by today's definitions, a "small" project can be quite large, hehe)
We have definitely different experiences here. I worked for 11 different companies in the last decade, and many of them made mistakes, and aside for one shitty 1 man consulting firm ran in a basement, I was always paid back pronto, and usually, before I even noticed the mistake. Large corporations never failed in that regard.
I agree. This happens all the time. Accountants and HR people are just human, and they make mistakes. Sure, the systems are mostly automated, but when there are exceptional events or conditions change (this WAS Microsoft's first massive layoff), mistakes happen, and people pay it back all the time. The same way if they underpay you, they'll give it back.
Now, the only difference is those are people who got fired...so unless there's a legally binding agreement over this package (like, if something was signed...which it probably was), they have no reason to pay back, and they're probably not in the mood to do so. But again, if they signed papers, they don't have much choice.
Also, MS has offered to help some of these people to get new jobs, and even may hire some of them back in the future. Thats typical in IT in general. So unless some of these people REALLY hate Microsoft to the level of an average slashdotter, its not in the former employee's best interests to screw their former employer over. May cause issues getting references too, if t he direct supervisors catch ear of it.
You'd be surprised. And there's no monopoly. Everyone can sell music. Just the ones who produce a particular song gets to decide where it goes... just like a particular Dell model has to come from Dell. Doesn't mean Dell has monopoly on computers. If I have a farm, only I gets to sell the tomatoes I produced.
Oh wait, you're saying someone should be able to sell what someone else produced without asking for permission? Now you're going to say "But, if I produce the disk or the copy...". But then I'd say "how would you sell it if the artist didn't produce it in the first place?"
Sure, the parallel isn't 1:1 with other commodities, but still. And you're not aware of all the markets with state driven quotas and regulations?