Apple has gotten where it is almost exclusively by taking the low road, with borderling false advertising and Microsoft-style tactics. They originally make an excellent product (MacOSX, Ipods, etc), get a name from it, then push it further using the low road. Its always been that way. If you're going to move away from Microsoft because of shady marketing as one of your primary reasons, stay clear from Apple. Jobs makes Balmer look like a saint in that department.
Indeed. Postgres was my open source DB of choice years ago because it had all these features when MySQL didn't.
I think the grandparent had issues understanding why people go for DB2/Oracle/SQL Server/Whatever... transactions, data integrity check, etcs are the basic of the base, and even MS Access has that (not the large amount of simultaneous users though, hahaha).
Replication, OLAP cubes, table partitioning, load balancing, data mining orchestration, complex backup and failover scenarios. advanced diagnostic solutions, ETL solutions, etc etc etc etc etc is where the "big enterprise" market is at. The only "databases" (and I use that term lightly...very lightly) that are "allowed" to not support transactions and such basic features are spreadsheets, in my opinion:)
Postgres has always been a fairly nice "in the middle" solution... When Spreadsheets and MS Access/JET are failing you, but Oracle would be overkill. Now that most of the big names have free "Small installation" editions, it lost a bit of its niche, but its still definately there when you have large databases with lots of users that don't need the hardcore tools (which is actually very, VERY common).
And using any number of database abstraction tools when building your applications (Hibernate, LLBLGEN, whatever) means that the day you swap RDBMS, the only thing that needs to go is the one trick pony DBA:)
That said, Microsoft for example charges per socket, not per core/cpu/whatever in their "per cpu" softwares such as SQL Server. I foresee Oracle changing its way eventually.
Your first line explains my point exactly. Britney Spears suck. However, she used to be (at least in the eyes of teenagers) hot, and had marketing experts push career. As long as you're relatively good looking (not even on your own: as long as you have something to work with for the makeup artist, good enough), and can follow a tune, it just depends on how good the marketing is. And stars such as Britney are the best example of it.
And your last comment also confirms exactly my point:) The big labels already have the connections, the contracts, and all the deals to "make 100k copies and put them on retail shelves". They built up a network that allows them to call the shot. There's very few that can do that and do it well (thus why you can count them on one hand) And they have THOUSANDS of employes to make it work. People with talents? Hundreds.
Open source, in house closed source...in the end, its all developers coding, and as a general rule, programmers spit out crap code. There's a few top of the line open source projects that have wonderful code, there's a lot of even big name projects that have hellish code (I was told many times that they improved it a LOT by now, but a few years back, PostgreSQL's code base was really, REALLY awful, for example).
The only difference is that most crappy open source projects are sleeping on FreshMeat or something, and no one hear about them. You only hear about the few good ones.
The other side of the picture is that a lot (most?) programmers have had , at one time or another, to work with bad code, and since they were paid for it and had to pay for food somehow. Didn't have much choice, so had to endure it, thus giving the impression that in house code is always much worse. I've had to deal with a bunch of awful codebase... I've also had to deal with in house code bases that virtually no open source project (that I know of anyway) have been able to dream of matching...
You were a contractor. If they go and say "Open source is allowed, but only if it uses license XYZ, or compatible licenses, or this, or that...", they start risking that you misunderstand them and stuff code they don't want in your work. It is simply easier to say "no open source". Less chance of confusion.
Thats most likely all there was to it. Give people an inch, they take a foot...and they didn't want to risk it.
How many people with talent for music are there? Lets draw a simple line: how many indy bands are there who can make better music than Britney Spears (who made millions until she went nutso).
Now, how many companies/business groups are there who can pump out a hundred thousand discs with a pretty picture on it, convince big name chains to put it on the shelves, and advertise it?
I don't know about you, but just among the people I personally know, there's more GOOD bands than there are of the later. And those people are making the music for FUN, not even money. Finding people with talent is the easy part by far.
Re:Artists should make the most money, not the lab
on
Must a CD Cost $15.99?
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· Score: 1
How many people work on a song? Often only 1. Sometime a few? Compare that to how many people work on a movie. Hundreds? Thats what I meant. Its still one product. One has at most a band working on the artistic part...maybe with a few extras to help with song writing and whatsnot... For a movie or a game, its a totally different ballpark.
And for the rest: I'm not just talking about the packaging process. I'm talking about advertising, entering in agreements with retailers to get the stuff on the shelves, connection networks... It is a heck of a lot harder to have the peeps of walmart/bestbuy/sears/whatever (depending on the field) to sit down and sign a contract, than it is to write a song/make a piece of software/draw some stuff for a pretty simple reason: its anything but fun. No one would DREAM of doing that legal/administrative garbage in their spare time, and to deal with the giants you need to be a giant in the first place, something an artist will (almost) never be alone.
In virtually every businesses, the actual creators of the work generally have the easy/fun part. The real stress and money handling is NOT done by them...so they don't get to be picky when it DOES come to money. (And again: 1 artist vs hundreds of people and companies dealing with all the surrounding stuff... OF COURSE the artist isn't going to get a large percentage).
Again though: music artists ARE getting the shaft. But there's no way in hell they could be more than everyone else put together.
Re:Artists should make the most money, not the lab
on
Must a CD Cost $15.99?
·
· Score: 1
No, im implying that the creative process of a select subset of the artistic market is easier than getting the the darn things on the shelves.
Re:Artists should make the most money, not the lab
on
Must a CD Cost $15.99?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It should, though we have to agree: writing and singing a song isn't much compared to all of the processing that has to be involved to print thousands of CDs, handle all of the stuff with the retailers (thats one of the worse parts), all the marketing, etc. Its 1 person's work vs hundreds, who will also most likely spend douzans of time more man hours on it than the artist.
That being said, they are still pushing it a lot, as artists don't even get that.
Also a note of interest, in other fields, such as the gaming industry, the developers/artists get a lot more. But there's also WAAAAAAAY more people involved in making a videogame, than there is making a song. (Same deal with movies). So there is something to keep in mind here.
I dont think Microsoft has much of a choice but to lower price... between the pressure of free software, cheaper alternatives, and (yeah, that counts too) piracy, they won't last long...
Just take MS Office for example: the home-only version is stupid cheap (compared to previous versions) now and is a bundle of 3 licenses (a first step toward copying Apple's model, I beleive... I'm not a Mac user myself, but if I remember well, stuff like OS upgrades come in family packs or something there...I'm sure someone can precise/correct me), so it literally goes from a bundle that used to be several hundred dollars (even if you only considered the lower end versions that only had stuff like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, whatever), and now is basically 50$ per license.
They don't have any choice, else people go for the alternatives. So I do expect prices to go down quite sharply.
Vista also is still the same price as XP for equivalent versions, and they have dumbed down versions that are cheaper... so maybe...just maybe....
The idea would have been that its easier to prevent a monopoly, than to break one.
I mean, if people had been more critical from Microsoft from day one, things would be quite different today. MS did the same things back then that Apple did now. They did it long before they were a monopoly. But it was seen as "ok" then. MS was the messiah (remember Windows 95's launch?). The only reason MS is where it is today, is because people originally drooled over their stuff the way they drool over Apple's. The only real difference is that Apple is doing it in a time where we see first hand the end result of their practices.
I mean, if Apple only need to twitch in the direction of a lockin, you should already be going back to Linux: Apple lock people into their hardware (even though their hardware is standard stuff, by using EULAs and all sorts of other crap). Hell, I think OSX is very neat, and their hardware is standard high end OEM stuff (which I like and get when I can find it in the non-MAC pc market), but if I go down the Mac path, I'm pretty much stuck buying computers only from Apple from there and on if I want to keep using the software I get used to using... not exactly as free as I'd like.
Their primary concern is probably far more to be able to ditch or unbundle a feature as soon as they feel a threat from Anti-Thrust agencies or something of the kind: they learned the hard way that saying "but its so integrated, we can't separate it!!" doesn't work, so there's no point to program their OS like crap on purpose anymore, and they can deal with the real problems instead.
I mean, Google is easier to see, since it already has a majority marketshare in its main market, but is anyone dreaming enough to think that once (if) Apple gets a large marketshare, it will just be the next Microsoft?
I mean, looking at all their marketing tactics and dirty moves... its fine now, because its mostly aimed at Microsoft, and its with a small market...but if Apple was to NOT change tactics once it reaches 30%+ marketshare? OUCH! Bundling, false advertising, FUD, price jacking, bullying their partners around, etc? That would be fairly bad.
Now to hope that the only reason they do that now is because they have no choice (have to sink to the competition's level), but I somehow have my doubts.
Jokes aside, while it virtually implements the entire standard (and in some cases, more so than basically all other implementations),.NET's regexes actually DO have a few "extensions" to them, like special syntax to handle dynamic amounts of matching pairs more easily. The syntax is hell though, so not more approachable to beginners:)
Of course, thats not considering that the XP machines would have ended up running on those same computers anyway (since most Vista installs are on new computers to begin with... the hardware industry would have pushed the same machines be it XP, Vista, Linux or MS DOS was on it...)
I'm confused about what a "true" regular expression is, vs a "non-true" one... I mean, back references are part of the ECMA standard... I'm sure there's something Im missing here, but I'd like to know what...
That cannot be stressed enough, and it goes farther than that. Once you have a certain level of experience, your degree doesnt even matter to HR either...
Experience may vary, but after only 5-7 years of experience, HR and employers and general don't even look at that section of my resume anymore... They quickly scan the experience section, the introduction and (unfortunately they are still a sucker for that) certifications, and never even ASK (or consider) what degree I have. They simply don't give a damn.
You can extremely easily tell Vista to stop bogging you about particular updates, or to the extreme, you can (if you have a lot of computers to manage) push a tool over a domain that will prevent SP1 from installing. So big freagin deal.
Science is a "This is what we think is a good model for things we don't understand, until we find a better model". That is, everything in science is true until proven otherwise, and its an EXTREMELY important part of science. Religion, and other such beleifs, are presented as universal fact (note that "bad" scientists do this too, so its not limited to religious zealots...though bad science could be called a religion, too).
So you have on one side things that are rigid, presented as raw fact, and on the other, something flexible that can change anytime, and has as its FOUNDATION a "you may prove it wrong if you know better". So obviously, the rigid "facts" will be pushed as a "we know better".
A lot of things in life are like that. Take western culture, which embraces (officialy anyway...in practice its something else sometimes) all cultures, then you have mid eastern culture, which is extremely close minded. So you have an increase in the mid eastern culture, as it will inevitably spread faster.
Flexible and "open minded" things will always get eaten alive by the close minded who push harder. Heck, the only way science ever goes through lately is when legislation gets in the way...because then science lowers itself to a point where it does the same thing religion does.
My work machine (on Vista, with -1- gig of RAM...more than your arcade cabinet, but its still what everyone says to be "unusable" with Vista, or "bare minimum" is usuable within 45 seconds of the switch. Sure its no trimmed Gentoo, but its better than the post stated.
In general, rediculous boot time on Vista is due to only half-compatible anti-virus...and virtually all of em fit in that category. A very popular culprit is AVG, for example.
WTF does MVC have to do with it? There are douzans of UI design patterns. MVC Type 2 (the one you're thinking of) is a popular one, especially because of the like of Struts and Rails, but the vast majority of (even well designed) apps don't follow it... There's so many other good ones. MVC Type 2 is just a freagin design pattern, and a semi-obsolete one at that (that people follow semi-blindly because its been around for so long), its not the holy grail of software architecture model (its not even one!)
That being said, in the case I was presenting, they would only be a view, since all they do is send events to the backend, which will act as the controller (the server) and the model (the OLAP).
Office document applications are an integral and essential part of a complete enterprise application, and aren't any harder to maintain or develop than any other kind of integration. And i'm talking about when its done the real way, not the "lets make a spreadsheet to save 5 minutes" deal. (As a note, usually you can select if the password is in the document or not...it ALLOWS it for convenience, usually with development...but when I access our Sharepoint/Team foundation server documents that need the database, I get asked for the password, and its sent over a trusted connection, not clear).
Because people actually do work with Office Suites, and they are an integral part of the workflow and ecosystem of significant companies IT.
For example, a spreadsheet is often the favored client for an OLAP system, and complex spreadsheets will get reused a lot, so connection strings may be part of the overall "application" that the document has become.
People like me and (probably) you tend to use documents as just that: documents. But in the big boy's world, they're far more important than that.
Slashdot Mirror
2 reasons.
A) Web developers.
B) Steve Jobs worshippers.
B is a freagin huge group of people.
Apple has gotten where it is almost exclusively by taking the low road, with borderling false advertising and Microsoft-style tactics. They originally make an excellent product (MacOSX, Ipods, etc), get a name from it, then push it further using the low road. Its always been that way. If you're going to move away from Microsoft because of shady marketing as one of your primary reasons, stay clear from Apple. Jobs makes Balmer look like a saint in that department.
Indeed. Postgres was my open source DB of choice years ago because it had all these features when MySQL didn't.
:)
:)
I think the grandparent had issues understanding why people go for DB2/Oracle/SQL Server/Whatever... transactions, data integrity check, etcs are the basic of the base, and even MS Access has that (not the large amount of simultaneous users though, hahaha).
Replication, OLAP cubes, table partitioning, load balancing, data mining orchestration, complex backup and failover scenarios. advanced diagnostic solutions, ETL solutions, etc etc etc etc etc is where the "big enterprise" market is at. The only "databases" (and I use that term lightly...very lightly) that are "allowed" to not support transactions and such basic features are spreadsheets, in my opinion
Postgres has always been a fairly nice "in the middle" solution... When Spreadsheets and MS Access/JET are failing you, but Oracle would be overkill. Now that most of the big names have free "Small installation" editions, it lost a bit of its niche, but its still definately there when you have large databases with lots of users that don't need the hardcore tools (which is actually very, VERY common).
And using any number of database abstraction tools when building your applications (Hibernate, LLBLGEN, whatever) means that the day you swap RDBMS, the only thing that needs to go is the one trick pony DBA
That said, Microsoft for example charges per socket, not per core/cpu/whatever in their "per cpu" softwares such as SQL Server. I foresee Oracle changing its way eventually.
Your first line explains my point exactly. Britney Spears suck. However, she used to be (at least in the eyes of teenagers) hot, and had marketing experts push career. As long as you're relatively good looking (not even on your own: as long as you have something to work with for the makeup artist, good enough), and can follow a tune, it just depends on how good the marketing is. And stars such as Britney are the best example of it.
:) The big labels already have the connections, the contracts, and all the deals to "make 100k copies and put them on retail shelves". They built up a network that allows them to call the shot. There's very few that can do that and do it well (thus why you can count them on one hand) And they have THOUSANDS of employes to make it work. People with talents? Hundreds.
And your last comment also confirms exactly my point
Open source, in house closed source...in the end, its all developers coding, and as a general rule, programmers spit out crap code. There's a few top of the line open source projects that have wonderful code, there's a lot of even big name projects that have hellish code (I was told many times that they improved it a LOT by now, but a few years back, PostgreSQL's code base was really, REALLY awful, for example).
The only difference is that most crappy open source projects are sleeping on FreshMeat or something, and no one hear about them. You only hear about the few good ones.
The other side of the picture is that a lot (most?) programmers have had , at one time or another, to work with bad code, and since they were paid for it and had to pay for food somehow. Didn't have much choice, so had to endure it, thus giving the impression that in house code is always much worse. I've had to deal with a bunch of awful codebase... I've also had to deal with in house code bases that virtually no open source project (that I know of anyway) have been able to dream of matching...
You were a contractor. If they go and say "Open source is allowed, but only if it uses license XYZ, or compatible licenses, or this, or that...", they start risking that you misunderstand them and stuff code they don't want in your work. It is simply easier to say "no open source". Less chance of confusion.
Thats most likely all there was to it. Give people an inch, they take a foot...and they didn't want to risk it.
How many people with talent for music are there? Lets draw a simple line: how many indy bands are there who can make better music than Britney Spears (who made millions until she went nutso).
Now, how many companies/business groups are there who can pump out a hundred thousand discs with a pretty picture on it, convince big name chains to put it on the shelves, and advertise it?
I don't know about you, but just among the people I personally know, there's more GOOD bands than there are of the later. And those people are making the music for FUN, not even money. Finding people with talent is the easy part by far.
How many people work on a song? Often only 1. Sometime a few? Compare that to how many people work on a movie. Hundreds? Thats what I meant. Its still one product. One has at most a band working on the artistic part...maybe with a few extras to help with song writing and whatsnot... For a movie or a game, its a totally different ballpark.
And for the rest: I'm not just talking about the packaging process. I'm talking about advertising, entering in agreements with retailers to get the stuff on the shelves, connection networks... It is a heck of a lot harder to have the peeps of walmart/bestbuy/sears/whatever (depending on the field) to sit down and sign a contract, than it is to write a song/make a piece of software/draw some stuff for a pretty simple reason: its anything but fun. No one would DREAM of doing that legal/administrative garbage in their spare time, and to deal with the giants you need to be a giant in the first place, something an artist will (almost) never be alone.
In virtually every businesses, the actual creators of the work generally have the easy/fun part. The real stress and money handling is NOT done by them...so they don't get to be picky when it DOES come to money. (And again: 1 artist vs hundreds of people and companies dealing with all the surrounding stuff... OF COURSE the artist isn't going to get a large percentage).
Again though: music artists ARE getting the shaft. But there's no way in hell they could be more than everyone else put together.
No, im implying that the creative process of a select subset of the artistic market is easier than getting the the darn things on the shelves.
It should, though we have to agree: writing and singing a song isn't much compared to all of the processing that has to be involved to print thousands of CDs, handle all of the stuff with the retailers (thats one of the worse parts), all the marketing, etc. Its 1 person's work vs hundreds, who will also most likely spend douzans of time more man hours on it than the artist.
That being said, they are still pushing it a lot, as artists don't even get that.
Also a note of interest, in other fields, such as the gaming industry, the developers/artists get a lot more. But there's also WAAAAAAAY more people involved in making a videogame, than there is making a song. (Same deal with movies). So there is something to keep in mind here.
I dont think Microsoft has much of a choice but to lower price... between the pressure of free software, cheaper alternatives, and (yeah, that counts too) piracy, they won't last long... Just take MS Office for example: the home-only version is stupid cheap (compared to previous versions) now and is a bundle of 3 licenses (a first step toward copying Apple's model, I beleive... I'm not a Mac user myself, but if I remember well, stuff like OS upgrades come in family packs or something there...I'm sure someone can precise/correct me), so it literally goes from a bundle that used to be several hundred dollars (even if you only considered the lower end versions that only had stuff like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, whatever), and now is basically 50$ per license. They don't have any choice, else people go for the alternatives. So I do expect prices to go down quite sharply. Vista also is still the same price as XP for equivalent versions, and they have dumbed down versions that are cheaper... so maybe...just maybe....
The idea would have been that its easier to prevent a monopoly, than to break one.
I mean, if people had been more critical from Microsoft from day one, things would be quite different today. MS did the same things back then that Apple did now. They did it long before they were a monopoly. But it was seen as "ok" then. MS was the messiah (remember Windows 95's launch?). The only reason MS is where it is today, is because people originally drooled over their stuff the way they drool over Apple's. The only real difference is that Apple is doing it in a time where we see first hand the end result of their practices.
I mean, if Apple only need to twitch in the direction of a lockin, you should already be going back to Linux: Apple lock people into their hardware (even though their hardware is standard stuff, by using EULAs and all sorts of other crap). Hell, I think OSX is very neat, and their hardware is standard high end OEM stuff (which I like and get when I can find it in the non-MAC pc market), but if I go down the Mac path, I'm pretty much stuck buying computers only from Apple from there and on if I want to keep using the software I get used to using... not exactly as free as I'd like.
Their primary concern is probably far more to be able to ditch or unbundle a feature as soon as they feel a threat from Anti-Thrust agencies or something of the kind: they learned the hard way that saying "but its so integrated, we can't separate it!!" doesn't work, so there's no point to program their OS like crap on purpose anymore, and they can deal with the real problems instead.
Apple and Google's current offerings being made from the ground up? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
I mean, Google is easier to see, since it already has a majority marketshare in its main market, but is anyone dreaming enough to think that once (if) Apple gets a large marketshare, it will just be the next Microsoft?
I mean, looking at all their marketing tactics and dirty moves... its fine now, because its mostly aimed at Microsoft, and its with a small market...but if Apple was to NOT change tactics once it reaches 30%+ marketshare? OUCH! Bundling, false advertising, FUD, price jacking, bullying their partners around, etc? That would be fairly bad.
Now to hope that the only reason they do that now is because they have no choice (have to sink to the competition's level), but I somehow have my doubts.
Jokes aside, while it virtually implements the entire standard (and in some cases, more so than basically all other implementations), .NET's regexes actually DO have a few "extensions" to them, like special syntax to handle dynamic amounts of matching pairs more easily. The syntax is hell though, so not more approachable to beginners :)
Of course, thats not considering that the XP machines would have ended up running on those same computers anyway (since most Vista installs are on new computers to begin with... the hardware industry would have pushed the same machines be it XP, Vista, Linux or MS DOS was on it...)
I'm confused about what a "true" regular expression is, vs a "non-true" one... I mean, back references are part of the ECMA standard... I'm sure there's something Im missing here, but I'd like to know what...
That cannot be stressed enough, and it goes farther than that. Once you have a certain level of experience, your degree doesnt even matter to HR either...
Experience may vary, but after only 5-7 years of experience, HR and employers and general don't even look at that section of my resume anymore... They quickly scan the experience section, the introduction and (unfortunately they are still a sucker for that) certifications, and never even ASK (or consider) what degree I have. They simply don't give a damn.
You can extremely easily tell Vista to stop bogging you about particular updates, or to the extreme, you can (if you have a lot of computers to manage) push a tool over a domain that will prevent SP1 from installing. So big freagin deal.
These things are like dominant genes...
Science is a "This is what we think is a good model for things we don't understand, until we find a better model". That is, everything in science is true until proven otherwise, and its an EXTREMELY important part of science. Religion, and other such beleifs, are presented as universal fact (note that "bad" scientists do this too, so its not limited to religious zealots...though bad science could be called a religion, too).
So you have on one side things that are rigid, presented as raw fact, and on the other, something flexible that can change anytime, and has as its FOUNDATION a "you may prove it wrong if you know better". So obviously, the rigid "facts" will be pushed as a "we know better".
A lot of things in life are like that. Take western culture, which embraces (officialy anyway...in practice its something else sometimes) all cultures, then you have mid eastern culture, which is extremely close minded. So you have an increase in the mid eastern culture, as it will inevitably spread faster.
Flexible and "open minded" things will always get eaten alive by the close minded who push harder. Heck, the only way science ever goes through lately is when legislation gets in the way...because then science lowers itself to a point where it does the same thing religion does.
My work machine (on Vista, with -1- gig of RAM...more than your arcade cabinet, but its still what everyone says to be "unusable" with Vista, or "bare minimum" is usuable within 45 seconds of the switch. Sure its no trimmed Gentoo, but its better than the post stated.
In general, rediculous boot time on Vista is due to only half-compatible anti-virus...and virtually all of em fit in that category. A very popular culprit is AVG, for example.
WTF does MVC have to do with it? There are douzans of UI design patterns. MVC Type 2 (the one you're thinking of) is a popular one, especially because of the like of Struts and Rails, but the vast majority of (even well designed) apps don't follow it... There's so many other good ones. MVC Type 2 is just a freagin design pattern, and a semi-obsolete one at that (that people follow semi-blindly because its been around for so long), its not the holy grail of software architecture model (its not even one!)
That being said, in the case I was presenting, they would only be a view, since all they do is send events to the backend, which will act as the controller (the server) and the model (the OLAP).
Office document applications are an integral and essential part of a complete enterprise application, and aren't any harder to maintain or develop than any other kind of integration. And i'm talking about when its done the real way, not the "lets make a spreadsheet to save 5 minutes" deal. (As a note, usually you can select if the password is in the document or not...it ALLOWS it for convenience, usually with development...but when I access our Sharepoint/Team foundation server documents that need the database, I get asked for the password, and its sent over a trusted connection, not clear).
Because people actually do work with Office Suites, and they are an integral part of the workflow and ecosystem of significant companies IT.
For example, a spreadsheet is often the favored client for an OLAP system, and complex spreadsheets will get reused a lot, so connection strings may be part of the overall "application" that the document has become.
People like me and (probably) you tend to use documents as just that: documents. But in the big boy's world, they're far more important than that.