I agree. That just shows how a lot of teams are filled with fucking spoiled little brats who still think they're in college.
If someone wants to make developers "happy" to keep them productive, make sure the projects managers aren't acting like idiots, and that the devs have the tools they need to do their job (Doing business application development on a single 17 inch monitor = painful. Fortunately that doesn't seem to be the issue of the person who submitted the article).
Beyond that, its a fucking job, not a party. You can have fun while doing your job, but there are god damn limits.
Windows Home Server has nice add-ins and applications for houses wih automations. And there are add-ons to expose these to Windows Mobile devices. The two together ends up with a fairly interesting proposition.
It depends where you live, as it varies widely across states or countries. My fiancee (girl, who because of the way things are, on average, gets paid less than a guy with equivalent experience) in Boston, straight out of school with no experience (no internship aside for Summer of Code, not a single job on her resume, very average GPA), got her first job at 80000$ USD + bonuses and advantages, and got a 5% raise within 4 months.
Now, imagine someone with actual experience, consultants, architects, etc that are paid MUCH more than a programmer straight out of school, and you have it. I, myself (software dev and architect), pushes the 6 digit figures and I don't even have a university degree and I'm not 30 years old yet.
Thats what pushes the average up, compared to the other side of the coins (a programmer without so much as an associate in the middle of nowhere doing minimum wadge for hacking up VB6 legacy code)
Normally I'd agree, but right now it seems there's more to it than that. Microsoft is trying to stop the whole "getting sued to oblivion because of their monopoly" thing.
-They open source.NET (notice I'm not using capital letters here. Its not real open source, but you can see the code) -Silverlight running on multiple platform, and they're helping out the Linux version, plus are funding efforts to make a cross-platform eclipse-based set of tools. -Many of their new.NET projects are fully open source (for real) -They are packaging and distributing open source (even GPL in some cases) apps in easy installers (not code they control: the installer pull it from the original web site, so its not "extended) -They are embedding LGPL (I think thats the license) stuff in some of their core products (jquery in Visual Studio) -There's more that I forget.
All of this aside the first one happened in the last couple of -months- (weeks in many cases). The first one is fairly recent.
Part of it, like I said, is because of all the lawsuits over their monopoly. Another part (some of the above fit in that category) are from the inside: some of MS' own employees with influence want to see better open source integration.
Its already interoperable, but the MS AD team isn't going to stop adding features just because its going to break the desktops of people who don't pay them. But if they break things too much, they get sued to death over their monopoly. Their only solution is to make sure the Samba project keeps up, so its what they do.
No. I'm a consultant, so "searching for work" is something I tend to do regularly. My own personal projects/training/practicing gets done regardless of if im looking for work or not. Even while you're working, its unlikely that what you do at work is diverse enough to keep up with technology, avoid forgetting things, etc. You need to have projects on the side either way.
Even in the current economic context, if you're searching right (I'd give some slack to people living in the middle of nowhere) you will not have more time while out of work than you did while working. If you do, you're doing it wrong.
Exactly the opposite will happen. There will be more open source because the 'poor starving masses' with software development skills will have nothing else to do.
The poor idiot starving masses you mean. Looking for a job is a full time job in itself (and actually is more labor intensive than actually having a job, in many cases, especially in IT). If you have nothing better to do while being unemployed, you deserve to starve.
As for moonlight, I'm looking for version 1.0. What you send me is version 0.8 -- yet Microsoft is already at version 2.0.
You're getting confused by version numbers. Silverlight 2.0 is basically what Silverlight 1.0 was spposed to be. 1.0 was just to get the name out of the door... what you hear about the olympics wasn't SL 1.0 either. Moonlight 1.0 will be an implementation of Silverlight 2.0, not 1.0.
Last I checked they were keeping up with MS during the SL 2.0 development...so it should be almost ready.
Silverlight, as a subset of WPF, isn't made for design first. There are tools for designers for it, but they're secondary. You'll never see a "Silverlight video" made by a designer that does nothing else but animate vector shapes on screen... while you could, its not the focus.
Hey, at least they didn't pick a 3 letter word, with punctuation, that is used in all of the URLs of a major top level domain, and is also not searchable in most forum softwares like others
Sorry. Not useful for web sites that are going to be heavily public, that traffic is not garenteed (so you can't pull the arm of your customers to get them to install it), AND you're not paid large amounts of money to do it. The NBC Olympics site was also using a -beta- version of SL. Would you put beta stuff on your production servers normally? I think not:)
If you're trying to save time and money by reusing your existing development tools and training by using.NET, you use Silverlight, if you're making an app where the fact that users will have to install a plugin isn't a big deal (intranet, targeted web app, etc).
silverlight 1.0 didn't even have the above... thats why it was so stupid. It had less features than even many javascript libs like ExtJS or JQuery, it supported even less platforms than Flex (or even other more obscure ones), no one had it installed, and you still had to code against it in Javascript, using a shitty feature anorexic API (ASP.NET AJAX, which, while the name confuses it, is more about Javascript API than Ajax, like JQuery and stuff, but still, almost no features).
Re:My prediction: Silverlight will be like Windows
on
Silverlight 2.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
Close. Though version 2.0 isn't just "moderately better" than 1.0... its night and day, and shouldn't even have the same name. (Note: I'm not saying 2.0 is good or not... just that its a billion times better than 1.0...)
Silverlight 1.0 should never have come out. Silverlight 1.0 vs Silverlight 2.0 is like comparing Flash to Flex, and make the gab between the two 5 times wider. SL1.0 was useless as hell, and even several of Microsoft's more vocal employees and public figures said that much. It was just something the marketing dep pushed when development of SL2.0 was taking too long. And that same marketing dep messed up big time.
Fortunately, Silverlight 2.0 (which really should be SL 1.0) actually has -some- features.
The value is on the developer side, not so much the user in this case. Silverlight allows one to use WPF and the.NET framework in a semi-crossplatform manner and in a browser. Saves time and money if you're a.NET shop. Not super useful for a web site thats going to be heavily public though, but nice for web -applications-, like internal apps or web apps that are heavily targeted (like say a CMS)
The best part of the article is near the end. Something along the line of "Don't worrie, crimes like these are REALLY rare. Only about 300 TSA employees have ever been fired for theft".
300 employees fired for theft. If you read the article (i know, i know...) the only reason this guy got caught was because he's a retard (putting his return address on the stuff he sells, always using the same name on ebay, etc). So if 300 were caught, there's probably several times that many. Then you add that the TSA has like 40-45 thousand employees... and that adds up to 2/3rd of a percent of their total workforce (of course, the 300 figure is over time, but its still interesting to put the numbers in perspective).
Thats just insane. It takes only one person to steal enough to really ruins some people's days. And here you have -hundreds- (just the ones that were caught!!!). I'll suffer through GreyHound busses, thank you.
Indeed, you don't. However, as a company you can pick a subset of the languages available that would fit your problems best (I doubt 1 language is enough to solve anything significant, though it can get close), with factors such as workforce availability, problem solving capabilities, RAD tools, etc.
So you could be making your UI in Silverlight with IronRuby, your backend with C#, the DSLs with Boo, and the data intensive algorythms with F#, if you were using the.NET platform today. Or you could make the UI in VBx, the backend in C++, the DSLs in IronPython, and the algorythms in raw C. All depending on your company's philosophy and ressources. And thats an important thing to have.
Technology evolves faster than moral values and society, thus keeping people in a constant state of panic over it, and causing a mess in the short term (and benefits in the long term). That was always true throughout history, from the discovery of fire (at least according to the theories), to the internet. This will be the same. It may take a civil war, or a nuclear bomb going boom, but we'll either all die, or we'll be better of.
However, people still stick to versions of Windows that don't support it (there's still tons of people on Win98/ME, and of course Win2k, though those really should use another browser if they can help it), and it was "OMG EVIL MS PUSHING THEIR BROWSER", so there was an opt out method, as well as a confirmation that you could refuse.
Thats actually a very important thing to consider: W3C doesn't make "standards", it makes standard propositions, specs.
If it becomes the standard is if its accepted or not. Amusingly enough, the only reason its even semi-accepted is because people pushed it as "THE STANDARD!" way before it ever was, and now it kindda is. A standard thats not accepted is not a standard.
However, the working subset that you can use is much larger, and the browser-specific hacks are almost nonexistent.
Only because we're brainwashed in seeing the web as incredibly limited. The "standard" allows for a lot of things that even FF2 doesn't support (only FF3). Display:inline-block anyone? Oh, there are ways around it, either through hacks, or through workarounds... but when I was is a (&@&)(&#)(#@ block that is...I don't know...inline... it would make sense if I could use inline-block. But nope, not if I want to support FF2. Sure the subset you can use without IE is much larger, but you still need to test cross-browser, heavily, no matter what, which was my point. That your page validates is almost irrelevent.
Erm, it's not the standard that moves slowly. It's adoption
The standard moves slowly as hell. The W3C is a huge entity made of various special interest groups. That cannot go fast no matter what, AND its disconnected from reality (thus slowing down adoption). Even an -open source browser with Google as a sugar daddy pumping MILLIONS into it takes half a decade to get anywhere-. Same with everything the W3C piss out. It takes years to resolve real problems, because they're too busy with edge cases (XML namespaces mess!) to pump out specs that are useful.
During that time something like Silverlight gets implemented by Miguel's team in a fraction of the time, and thats a freagin Microsoft product thats supposed to be crappily documented. If you ask the people who designed the specs, they'll tell you it was MADE to be easy to implement (thus its limitations, such as absolute positioning against the closest relative parent, or lack of vertical control aside with the table-* category of displays), but if you ask anyone who actually implements it, they have a different story.
Ivory Tower, meet real world.
Consider, again, how much better life is when you take IE out of the equation.
Ironically, the only reason the standard picked up in the first place was that IE had the best support for it for the longest time:) A lot of the stuff in the specs made it in IE first, too, albeit differently (opacity, ajax, etc)
Erm, XHTML 1.0? And 1.1?
You sound like you know what you're talking about, and then you forget about the fscking doctype.
The part in parenthesis was only about CSS. The part before applied to both XHTML and CSS. CSS versioning is so bad, that when its features get implemented (like by IE8), the community cries foul and say that in -THIS- case, IE8 should break the standard because its stupid. XHTML versionning -is- stupid too though. Its possible to get an XHTML 1.1 page that fully validates, yet its not even XHTML 1.1 (which is very different from 1.0)
For what it's worth, I don't use XQuery. I let jQuery worry about the browser quirks involved -- and I write my queries as CSS selectors, anyway, rarely XQuery-like.
XQuery has NOTHING to do with browsers. Its an XML API like DOM and XSLT:) Think SQL for XML. The specs are awful, and because of that, even though its much smaller to implement than XHTML/CSS, no one actually has a full implementation. Everyone is guessing. You'll see implementations on the market that claim being full, but if you talk with their developer, yes, its a perfect implementation of what was clear, with perfect guesses on the rest. I don't have a clue why you're comparing XQuery with JQuery though.
Finally, its easy to make a site thats standard compliant if the person making the design is the same as the person coding it. Then you can stick to the subset of what XHTML/CSS is good for. The CSS Zen Garden is an example of that. They start from the structure, and then do the best layout they can from that. If they start from a photoshop made by a designer, then try to apply it, its going to be another story.
There's a reason there's now a group for HTML 5.0... because even the experts thought the W3C's current specs are disconnected from reality.
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I agree. That just shows how a lot of teams are filled with fucking spoiled little brats who still think they're in college.
If someone wants to make developers "happy" to keep them productive, make sure the projects managers aren't acting like idiots, and that the devs have the tools they need to do their job (Doing business application development on a single 17 inch monitor = painful. Fortunately that doesn't seem to be the issue of the person who submitted the article).
Beyond that, its a fucking job, not a party. You can have fun while doing your job, but there are god damn limits.
Windows Home Server has nice add-ins and applications for houses wih automations. And there are add-ons to expose these to Windows Mobile devices. The two together ends up with a fairly interesting proposition.
It depends where you live, as it varies widely across states or countries. My fiancee (girl, who because of the way things are, on average, gets paid less than a guy with equivalent experience) in Boston, straight out of school with no experience (no internship aside for Summer of Code, not a single job on her resume, very average GPA), got her first job at 80000$ USD + bonuses and advantages, and got a 5% raise within 4 months.
Now, imagine someone with actual experience, consultants, architects, etc that are paid MUCH more than a programmer straight out of school, and you have it. I, myself (software dev and architect), pushes the 6 digit figures and I don't even have a university degree and I'm not 30 years old yet.
Thats what pushes the average up, compared to the other side of the coins (a programmer without so much as an associate in the middle of nowhere doing minimum wadge for hacking up VB6 legacy code)
Normally I'd agree, but right now it seems there's more to it than that. Microsoft is trying to stop the whole "getting sued to oblivion because of their monopoly" thing.
-They open source .NET (notice I'm not using capital letters here. Its not real open source, but you can see the code) .NET projects are fully open source (for real)
-Silverlight running on multiple platform, and they're helping out the Linux version, plus are funding efforts to make a cross-platform eclipse-based set of tools.
-Many of their new
-They are packaging and distributing open source (even GPL in some cases) apps in easy installers (not code they control: the installer pull it from the original web site, so its not "extended)
-They are embedding LGPL (I think thats the license) stuff in some of their core products (jquery in Visual Studio)
-There's more that I forget.
All of this aside the first one happened in the last couple of -months- (weeks in many cases). The first one is fairly recent.
Part of it, like I said, is because of all the lawsuits over their monopoly. Another part (some of the above fit in that category) are from the inside: some of MS' own employees with influence want to see better open source integration.
Its already interoperable, but the MS AD team isn't going to stop adding features just because its going to break the desktops of people who don't pay them. But if they break things too much, they get sued to death over their monopoly. Their only solution is to make sure the Samba project keeps up, so its what they do.
No. I'm a consultant, so "searching for work" is something I tend to do regularly. My own personal projects/training/practicing gets done regardless of if im looking for work or not. Even while you're working, its unlikely that what you do at work is diverse enough to keep up with technology, avoid forgetting things, etc. You need to have projects on the side either way.
Even in the current economic context, if you're searching right (I'd give some slack to people living in the middle of nowhere) you will not have more time while out of work than you did while working. If you do, you're doing it wrong.
The poor idiot starving masses you mean. Looking for a job is a full time job in itself (and actually is more labor intensive than actually having a job, in many cases, especially in IT). If you have nothing better to do while being unemployed, you deserve to starve.
You mean, losing their monopoly status (because a large amount of the marketshare would go poof), while not losing a dime?
Yeah, that would be awful!
There's -can't- be a Moonlight 2.0, because Moonlight 1 is the implementation of Silverlight 2.0.
You're getting confused by version numbers. Silverlight 2.0 is basically what Silverlight 1.0 was spposed to be. 1.0 was just to get the name out of the door... what you hear about the olympics wasn't SL 1.0 either. Moonlight 1.0 will be an implementation of Silverlight 2.0, not 1.0.
Last I checked they were keeping up with MS during the SL 2.0 development...so it should be almost ready.
Silverlight, as a subset of WPF, isn't made for design first. There are tools for designers for it, but they're secondary. You'll never see a "Silverlight video" made by a designer that does nothing else but animate vector shapes on screen... while you could, its not the focus.
Hey, at least they didn't pick a 3 letter word, with punctuation, that is used in all of the URLs of a major top level domain, and is also not searchable in most forum softwares like others
Yup, there is version for Mac, made by MS, and fully supported.
Sorry. Not useful for web sites that are going to be heavily public, that traffic is not garenteed (so you can't pull the arm of your customers to get them to install it), AND you're not paid large amounts of money to do it. The NBC Olympics site was also using a -beta- version of SL. Would you put beta stuff on your production servers normally? I think not :)
If you're trying to save time and money by reusing your existing development tools and training by using .NET, you use Silverlight, if you're making an app where the fact that users will have to install a plugin isn't a big deal (intranet, targeted web app, etc).
silverlight 1.0 didn't even have the above... thats why it was so stupid. It had less features than even many javascript libs like ExtJS or JQuery, it supported even less platforms than Flex (or even other more obscure ones), no one had it installed, and you still had to code against it in Javascript, using a shitty feature anorexic API (ASP.NET AJAX, which, while the name confuses it, is more about Javascript API than Ajax, like JQuery and stuff, but still, almost no features).
That was a total joke.
No need :) There's even development tools that will run on non-windows platforms (funded by Microsoft mind you, but still)
http://www.eclipse4sl.org/#features
Close. Though version 2.0 isn't just "moderately better" than 1.0... its night and day, and shouldn't even have the same name. (Note: I'm not saying 2.0 is good or not... just that its a billion times better than 1.0...)
Silverlight 1.0 should never have come out. Silverlight 1.0 vs Silverlight 2.0 is like comparing Flash to Flex, and make the gab between the two 5 times wider. SL1.0 was useless as hell, and even several of Microsoft's more vocal employees and public figures said that much. It was just something the marketing dep pushed when development of SL2.0 was taking too long. And that same marketing dep messed up big time.
Fortunately, Silverlight 2.0 (which really should be SL 1.0) actually has -some- features.
The value is on the developer side, not so much the user in this case. Silverlight allows one to use WPF and the .NET framework in a semi-crossplatform manner and in a browser. Saves time and money if you're a .NET shop. Not super useful for a web site thats going to be heavily public though, but nice for web -applications-, like internal apps or web apps that are heavily targeted (like say a CMS)
The best part of the article is near the end. Something along the line of "Don't worrie, crimes like these are REALLY rare. Only about 300 TSA employees have ever been fired for theft".
300 employees fired for theft. If you read the article (i know, i know...) the only reason this guy got caught was because he's a retard (putting his return address on the stuff he sells, always using the same name on ebay, etc). So if 300 were caught, there's probably several times that many. Then you add that the TSA has like 40-45 thousand employees... and that adds up to 2/3rd of a percent of their total workforce (of course, the 300 figure is over time, but its still interesting to put the numbers in perspective).
Thats just insane. It takes only one person to steal enough to really ruins some people's days. And here you have -hundreds- (just the ones that were caught!!!). I'll suffer through GreyHound busses, thank you.
Indeed, you don't. However, as a company you can pick a subset of the languages available that would fit your problems best (I doubt 1 language is enough to solve anything significant, though it can get close), with factors such as workforce availability, problem solving capabilities, RAD tools, etc.
So you could be making your UI in Silverlight with IronRuby, your backend with C#, the DSLs with Boo, and the data intensive algorythms with F#, if you were using the .NET platform today. Or you could make the UI in VBx, the backend in C++, the DSLs in IronPython, and the algorythms in raw C. All depending on your company's philosophy and ressources. And thats an important thing to have.
Technology evolves faster than moral values and society, thus keeping people in a constant state of panic over it, and causing a mess in the short term (and benefits in the long term). That was always true throughout history, from the discovery of fire (at least according to the theories), to the internet. This will be the same. It may take a civil war, or a nuclear bomb going boom, but we'll either all die, or we'll be better of.
Windows Update -did- push IE7.
However, people still stick to versions of Windows that don't support it (there's still tons of people on Win98/ME, and of course Win2k, though those really should use another browser if they can help it), and it was "OMG EVIL MS PUSHING THEIR BROWSER", so there was an opt out method, as well as a confirmation that you could refuse.
Because of that, IE6 still lives.
Thats actually a very important thing to consider: W3C doesn't make "standards", it makes standard propositions, specs.
If it becomes the standard is if its accepted or not. Amusingly enough, the only reason its even semi-accepted is because people pushed it as "THE STANDARD!" way before it ever was, and now it kindda is. A standard thats not accepted is not a standard.
Only because we're brainwashed in seeing the web as incredibly limited. The "standard" allows for a lot of things that even FF2 doesn't support (only FF3). Display:inline-block anyone? Oh, there are ways around it, either through hacks, or through workarounds... but when I was is a (&@&)(&#)(#@ block that is...I don't know...inline... it would make sense if I could use inline-block. But nope, not if I want to support FF2. Sure the subset you can use without IE is much larger, but you still need to test cross-browser, heavily, no matter what, which was my point. That your page validates is almost irrelevent.
The standard moves slowly as hell. The W3C is a huge entity made of various special interest groups. That cannot go fast no matter what, AND its disconnected from reality (thus slowing down adoption). Even an -open source browser with Google as a sugar daddy pumping MILLIONS into it takes half a decade to get anywhere-. Same with everything the W3C piss out. It takes years to resolve real problems, because they're too busy with edge cases (XML namespaces mess!) to pump out specs that are useful.
During that time something like Silverlight gets implemented by Miguel's team in a fraction of the time, and thats a freagin Microsoft product thats supposed to be crappily documented. If you ask the people who designed the specs, they'll tell you it was MADE to be easy to implement (thus its limitations, such as absolute positioning against the closest relative parent, or lack of vertical control aside with the table-* category of displays), but if you ask anyone who actually implements it, they have a different story.
Ivory Tower, meet real world.
Ironically, the only reason the standard picked up in the first place was that IE had the best support for it for the longest time :) A lot of the stuff in the specs made it in IE first, too, albeit differently (opacity, ajax, etc)
The part in parenthesis was only about CSS. The part before applied to both XHTML and CSS. CSS versioning is so bad, that when its features get implemented (like by IE8), the community cries foul and say that in -THIS- case, IE8 should break the standard because its stupid. XHTML versionning -is- stupid too though. Its possible to get an XHTML 1.1 page that fully validates, yet its not even XHTML 1.1 (which is very different from 1.0)
XQuery has NOTHING to do with browsers. Its an XML API like DOM and XSLT :) Think SQL for XML. The specs are awful, and because of that, even though its much smaller to implement than XHTML/CSS, no one actually has a full implementation. Everyone is guessing. You'll see implementations on the market that claim being full, but if you talk with their developer, yes, its a perfect implementation of what was clear, with perfect guesses on the rest. I don't have a clue why you're comparing XQuery with JQuery though.
Finally, its easy to make a site thats standard compliant if the person making the design is the same as the person coding it. Then you can stick to the subset of what XHTML/CSS is good for. The CSS Zen Garden is an example of that. They start from the structure, and then do the best layout they can from that. If they start from a photoshop made by a designer, then try to apply it, its going to be another story.
There's a reason there's now a group for HTML 5.0... because even the experts thought the W3C's current specs are disconnected from reality.