Which is the sole reason I dont use NetFlix. Or watch videos on Microsoft's site.
I've seen this response many times, yet I have never seen a reasonable explanation for the boycott. Do you hate Silverlight because it's Microsoft or is there something wrong with the technology that has made you stay away?
I have limited exposure to the Bing Video site, but with that limited exposure, I have had nothing but positive experiences. I've experienced no problem streaming HD content, for example. YouTube, on the other hand, struggled badly to stream 720P content through my FiOS connection running at 25 Mb/sec (both up and down).
From an architectural / security standpoint, Silverlight runs in a Sandbox, among other things, which greatly improve security (this most certainly isn't another Active X). Additionally, as a developer, I feel that C# is a better language than AS 3. I don't know any designers that have worked in Expression Blend, so I can't comment on their vantage point. I welcome their comments, however.
Exactly...it's the same thing I've seen over and over, again. I've worked on a number of projects, from commercial contracts, to government and health care projects. By far, the ones that have been the most difficult to work with are the clients that have strict bureaucracies (read government and health care). I'm sure hospitals are very similar, in this sense. It's incredibly difficult to convince streamlining a workflow with people that have become accustomed to a strict bureaucratic process. In many peoples eyes, the process is gospel: ye shall not challenge thy process. As such, when software replaces antiquated systems, they implement the same failed processes that existed before they got there.
In order for a new system to be successful, people need to learn to accept change.
Not to say that this is a duplicate story, but am I the only one that remembers this Slashdot post from years ago? It's obviously a new patent, but is it not essentially the same patent?
Just out of curiosity, are there any modern file systems that are better at this? For example, rather than storing the entire content of a message in the database, what if sites like Facebook stored only a pointer to a file in the database and then saved the actual message content on disk? That way, the database can stay lean. Furthermore, it is my understanding (though I have no personal experience) that distributed file systems scale fairly well.
It's not that CAML and XML are beyond our understanding or ability to understand, it's that it adds undo complexity to a problem that can be solved far easier with other platforms.
Years ago (just out of high school), I developed a CMS that provided List-like functionality. The difference is that my design centered around creating database tables for each List. The columns were strongly typed and allowed for real-time calculations. SharePoint, on the other hand, stores all of the lists in a single database table as XML. The SharePoint schema is interesting in that sense, but it's so complicated that even MS failed to implement real-time calculations on data (calculated fields are calculated at the time the record is saved). Additionally, this hinders performance, greatly (list performance degrades substantially after 3-4k records, depending on schema complexity).
With the next release of SharePoint, I understand that each list will be stored in its own table. Under the covers, I'm not sure whether or not the tables will also be strongly typed --we'll have to wait and see. But at this point, SharePoint is so bad that it would require a substantial rewrite before my opinion would change.
They focus their energy entirely on common CMS features, such as how easy it is to enable search and create a new page.
Right. The rest of us out here, who aren't developers, web designers, or software engineers, we call those features "doing work". The point of the software is to make it easier for the workers to do their jobs. Not to make it easier for the IT staff to interface with.
I completely understand your point of view. I would never suggest that SharePoint is a blad platform because it makes somebody's life easier. The fact of the matter is, there are tons of search engines out there (many are free). But SharePoint, as a platform, is very difficult to extend (don't believe the marketing hype that would suggest otherwise). If a platform becomes more of a hindrance than a problem solving technology, it's time to look elsewhere. Unfortunately, technology leaders see how easy it is to activate one simple feature (like search) and assume everything else is just as easy. It's a dangerous mindset and leads to unrealistic expectations.
But, per the fanbois, it's a Microsoft product, therefore it is inherently evil and must be destroyed.
The truth is that SharePoint is a fabulous product. I use it at work and at home with a variety of document types and have no issues. Those documents are even search-able if a filter is available.
I could care less who made SharePoint. It's a horrible platform and that's the end of the story. On the other hand, I actually love the.NET platform. ASP.NET has been great, for years and I have had the privilege of working on some really great projects that made use of the platform. With the recent release of ASP.NET MVC, I am even more inclined to stick with.NET as my development platform of choice for most organizations.
The reason I dislike SharePoint so much is because it's almost always more cost effective and easier to build something from scratch. Developers and technology leaders should choose a technology platform that is cost-effective and extensible. SharePoint is neither. 100% of the estimates that I (along with many, many other developers) have put together have significantly more development hours associated with them.
Everything in SharePoint is a list in the database. A calendar is just a list of events with start and end times. A address book is a list of contacts. All you need is some basic SQL, and your information is free.
Complete nonsense. Sure, SharePoint stores List content inside of a database, but it's stored as XML, making parsing a royal pain, not to mention it makes referential integrity among Lists impossible. Lookup lists have very loosely been implemented. Nobody in their right mind would work with SharePoint directly at the database level. Nor is it supported by MS. This is why a public API has been exposed.
A good web designer and a good SharePoint developer are apparently almost never the same human being (hell, our SP "developer" gets lost in an Event Log... how am I supposed to help explain the basics of CSS to the guy?)
PS: The search function is pure hell to get working right, if at all. The consultant who put ours together actually knew what he was doing, and SP search still works only half-assed, so don't feel too badly about it.
You couldn't have been more accurate. 49 out of every 50 SharePoint "developers" I have talked to or interviewed are far from designers or software engineers. It's as if they were attracted to SharePoint because they were unable to make it in the real software development world. Not that this would necessarily be a problem, but SharePoint is one of the most difficult platforms I have ever had the unfortunate experience to program against. While these "developers" are busy building InfoPath forms and exposing tons of meaningless columns to interface with the workflow engine (they often use WF to overcome the fact that InfoPath is NOT a development platform), it's my job to interface the pile of mess with other COTS products by building convoluted ETL processes. The unfortunate truth of the whole situation is that the senior technical staff (e.g., CTO) fails to see the flaws that SharePoint brings. They focus their energy entirely on common CMS features, such as how easy it is to enable search and create a new page. If you dare suggest an alternative, you'll find yourself amongst the other outcasts --lonely, frustrated and unheard.
SharePoint is, by far, the most hideous platform I know of. It makes me long for the days of hacking HTML to make it render correctly in IE6.
While I'm not against what your saying, looking at this from a business standpoint, it could make sense because it's easy for Microsoft to find staff with the required sales experience. It could also backfire if, for example, the staff at the Apple store is anti-Microsoft.
When I was a kid, my grandparents lived on a farm. There was a spot on the side of my grandfathers garage that everybody would go to pee because nobody could see you. Maybe we were peeing toxic piss, but the grass never grew there.
Kind of a sidetrack, but I've worked for a government consulting firm for the past five years and I've actually been surprised with the proposal process, at times. I'm not sure if things are different now than they were years ago, but during the proposal process, the government was actually undermining the abilities of contractors with bids they thought were "too low", fearing that they would overwork their staff and/or hit the government for more money, later on. I also worked for an extremely low bidding contractor and it wasn't uncommon for us to go back to the client, midway through the project to double our original estimate. Needless to say, we didn't have a large number of return clients.
For what it's worth, 300 is one of the worst movies I've ever seen in HD. I know exactly what you're talking about when you say that you could tell where green screens were used. I had a similar experience with The Hills Have Eyes (might have been the 2nd one) where I could easily tell that the mutant people were rubber dummies. Thankfully, the number of great movies in HD far outweigh the number of bad ones.
I definitely think you should give it another try.
Silverlight is an open-standard. While Microsoft doesn't actively develop a Linux client, they have collaborated with Novel to bring the Moonlight project to the Linux and other Unix/X11 platforms.
Granted, the Moonlight 2.0 implementation is behind Microsoft's implementation, with the Moonlight Roadmap indicating a planed release date of September 2009. While this is frustrating to end users and developers, I don't think it's fair to call Silverlight "proprietary".
As a non admin, the system should still give you the ability to install applications under your own account...
The system should also give the admin the ability to take away the above ability from normal users.
That's a reasonable argument. AFAIK, ClickOnce provides this functionality (I know that ClickOnce applications are installed per-user to get around security restrictions in Program Files directory, etc.; however, I am not 100% sure whether it's possible to outright restrict users from installing something via ClickOnce, altogether). Granted, I realize that ClickOnce deployments are not very common.
As a former admin gone developer, I believe in putting an emphasis on security, first. If you wish to allow users to install applications, you do so with the understanding that you are opening up your system to vulnerabilities. It is for this reason that I would rarely permit average users to install anything without the authorization from an administrator. I will, however, acknowledge that there are exceptions to these rules.
This is very unlikely unless you were installing something using a really, really crappy installer. In either case, this is certainly not the fault of Windows. The operating system API definitely throws an exception if a user tries to access something that he/she does not have access to. It doesn't, however, have the ability to prevent a stupid developer from writing an installer that catches the exception without notifying the end-user of the security-related error. The same idiotic behavior can and will be observed in Linux if developers choose to ignore development best practices.
Nothing would install correctly, nothing would run correctly.
That's the point. You shouldn't be permitted to install anything when you're not an administrator.
Even programs that don't use any administrator functions or zones wouldn't work correctly. Realistically, running in a non-admin account is a pain in the ass.
This was an unfortunate truth for some time because the Windows 9x security model did not enforce strict security practices. In short, all of these problems could be corrected by an administrator by making some registry and file system security tweaks. It was, however, a legitimate cause for frustration among end users and administrators.
The fortunate side of the story is that as the Windows NT security model became more wide spread (because of the popularity of Windows 2000 and XP), developers were made more aware of these problems and better development practices helped eliminate most of these security-related nuances. In other words, things are a lot better now than they were even just a few years ago.
ClickOnce is in no way limited to the Windows platform because it's little more than an installation mechanism that is usually hosted on a web server. There is no reason that a Linux system running Mono couldn't install something via ClickOnce.
Furthermore, ClickOnce is targeted towards desktop applications. The fact that you mention AJAX implies (to me) that you have the wrong idea about ClickOnce functionality.
A typical response from somebody that sees "Microsoft" and automatically jumps to conclusions. Did you even read the article?
The exchange would not say whether volume was the issue and declined to give details on what had caused the problem. But angry customers were demanding an explanation.
The site broke just this once since it was launched in September of 2005. I'd say that the Microsoft servers did a fantastic job hosting the load.
A while back, I thought this was general knowledge. What I found is that people get caught up in all the hype and think only of the positives. If you try to persuade them otherwise, you're ostracized.
A few years ago, I was tasked with setting up the network in a new building. There was already wiring in the building. Unfortunately, it was all CAT-3 (even the data lines). I was the only person on staff in the IT department so I asked if we could hire an outside consultant to help with the task of running new network lines that would be adequate for our company needs. My request was rejected and I was instructed to install WiFi for the entire company to run on (about 50 people, including sub-tenants, which shared the LAN for Internet access).
I advised my company of the pitfalls involved with running a WiFi-only LAN; however, I was told I needed to "come into the 21st century". Not feeling as though it was reason enough to quit on the spot, I did as I was told and installed the wireless network. With the exception of my workstation and all of the servers, everybody connected to the LAN through a wireless access point.
Within the first few hours of operation, I had already gotten a number of complaints about systems loosing connectivity to the servers. This became the norm as my days soon involved at least one reset of the access point at some point in the day.
This lasted about a year and a half before my direct manager was walking over to my desk to ask me if I could reset the access point. To her surprise, I was sitting there working and still connected to the LAN. She asked me how that was possible and I explained to her that I was on a wired connection.
The next thing I knew, I was installing CAT-5e throughout the entire building. In the end, it cost a lot of money in lost productivity, as well as the wireless hardware that barely gets used.
Reasons like this are why I abandoned the system administrator world a few years ago in favor of becoming a software engineer. I have never looked back.
Slashdot Mirror
Combine the built in firewall with Microsoft Security Essentials and keep with Windows updates and you'll generally have a secure system.
Which is the sole reason I dont use NetFlix. Or watch videos on Microsoft's site.
I've seen this response many times, yet I have never seen a reasonable explanation for the boycott. Do you hate Silverlight because it's Microsoft or is there something wrong with the technology that has made you stay away?
I have limited exposure to the Bing Video site, but with that limited exposure, I have had nothing but positive experiences. I've experienced no problem streaming HD content, for example. YouTube, on the other hand, struggled badly to stream 720P content through my FiOS connection running at 25 Mb/sec (both up and down).
From an architectural / security standpoint, Silverlight runs in a Sandbox, among other things, which greatly improve security (this most certainly isn't another Active X). Additionally, as a developer, I feel that C# is a better language than AS 3. I don't know any designers that have worked in Expression Blend, so I can't comment on their vantage point. I welcome their comments, however.
Exactly...it's the same thing I've seen over and over, again. I've worked on a number of projects, from commercial contracts, to government and health care projects. By far, the ones that have been the most difficult to work with are the clients that have strict bureaucracies (read government and health care). I'm sure hospitals are very similar, in this sense. It's incredibly difficult to convince streamlining a workflow with people that have become accustomed to a strict bureaucratic process. In many peoples eyes, the process is gospel: ye shall not challenge thy process. As such, when software replaces antiquated systems, they implement the same failed processes that existed before they got there.
In order for a new system to be successful, people need to learn to accept change.
You're a funny troll, and I'm going to feed you. Do you like Cheetos?
Not to say that this is a duplicate story, but am I the only one that remembers this Slashdot post from years ago? It's obviously a new patent, but is it not essentially the same patent?
Just out of curiosity, are there any modern file systems that are better at this? For example, rather than storing the entire content of a message in the database, what if sites like Facebook stored only a pointer to a file in the database and then saved the actual message content on disk? That way, the database can stay lean. Furthermore, it is my understanding (though I have no personal experience) that distributed file systems scale fairly well.
It's not that CAML and XML are beyond our understanding or ability to understand, it's that it adds undo complexity to a problem that can be solved far easier with other platforms.
Years ago (just out of high school), I developed a CMS that provided List-like functionality. The difference is that my design centered around creating database tables for each List. The columns were strongly typed and allowed for real-time calculations. SharePoint, on the other hand, stores all of the lists in a single database table as XML. The SharePoint schema is interesting in that sense, but it's so complicated that even MS failed to implement real-time calculations on data (calculated fields are calculated at the time the record is saved). Additionally, this hinders performance, greatly (list performance degrades substantially after 3-4k records, depending on schema complexity).
With the next release of SharePoint, I understand that each list will be stored in its own table. Under the covers, I'm not sure whether or not the tables will also be strongly typed --we'll have to wait and see. But at this point, SharePoint is so bad that it would require a substantial rewrite before my opinion would change.
Right. The rest of us out here, who aren't developers, web designers, or software engineers, we call those features "doing work". The point of the software is to make it easier for the workers to do their jobs. Not to make it easier for the IT staff to interface with.
I completely understand your point of view. I would never suggest that SharePoint is a blad platform because it makes somebody's life easier. The fact of the matter is, there are tons of search engines out there (many are free). But SharePoint, as a platform, is very difficult to extend (don't believe the marketing hype that would suggest otherwise). If a platform becomes more of a hindrance than a problem solving technology, it's time to look elsewhere. Unfortunately, technology leaders see how easy it is to activate one simple feature (like search) and assume everything else is just as easy. It's a dangerous mindset and leads to unrealistic expectations.
But, per the fanbois, it's a Microsoft product, therefore it is inherently evil and must be destroyed. The truth is that SharePoint is a fabulous product. I use it at work and at home with a variety of document types and have no issues. Those documents are even search-able if a filter is available.
I could care less who made SharePoint. It's a horrible platform and that's the end of the story. On the other hand, I actually love the .NET platform. ASP.NET has been great, for years and I have had the privilege of working on some really great projects that made use of the platform. With the recent release of ASP.NET MVC, I am even more inclined to stick with .NET as my development platform of choice for most organizations.
The reason I dislike SharePoint so much is because it's almost always more cost effective and easier to build something from scratch. Developers and technology leaders should choose a technology platform that is cost-effective and extensible. SharePoint is neither. 100% of the estimates that I (along with many, many other developers) have put together have significantly more development hours associated with them.
Everything in SharePoint is a list in the database. A calendar is just a list of events with start and end times. A address book is a list of contacts. All you need is some basic SQL, and your information is free.
Complete nonsense. Sure, SharePoint stores List content inside of a database, but it's stored as XML, making parsing a royal pain, not to mention it makes referential integrity among Lists impossible. Lookup lists have very loosely been implemented. Nobody in their right mind would work with SharePoint directly at the database level. Nor is it supported by MS. This is why a public API has been exposed.
A good web designer and a good SharePoint developer are apparently almost never the same human being (hell, our SP "developer" gets lost in an Event Log... how am I supposed to help explain the basics of CSS to the guy?)
PS: The search function is pure hell to get working right, if at all. The consultant who put ours together actually knew what he was doing, and SP search still works only half-assed, so don't feel too badly about it.
You couldn't have been more accurate. 49 out of every 50 SharePoint "developers" I have talked to or interviewed are far from designers or software engineers. It's as if they were attracted to SharePoint because they were unable to make it in the real software development world. Not that this would necessarily be a problem, but SharePoint is one of the most difficult platforms I have ever had the unfortunate experience to program against. While these "developers" are busy building InfoPath forms and exposing tons of meaningless columns to interface with the workflow engine (they often use WF to overcome the fact that InfoPath is NOT a development platform), it's my job to interface the pile of mess with other COTS products by building convoluted ETL processes. The unfortunate truth of the whole situation is that the senior technical staff (e.g., CTO) fails to see the flaws that SharePoint brings. They focus their energy entirely on common CMS features, such as how easy it is to enable search and create a new page. If you dare suggest an alternative, you'll find yourself amongst the other outcasts --lonely, frustrated and unheard.
SharePoint is, by far, the most hideous platform I know of. It makes me long for the days of hacking HTML to make it render correctly in IE6.
Bad copy and paste of original text. It's in the actual article and it's just the SharePoint Wikipedia article.
While I'm not against what your saying, looking at this from a business standpoint, it could make sense because it's easy for Microsoft to find staff with the required sales experience. It could also backfire if, for example, the staff at the Apple store is anti-Microsoft.
When I was a kid, my grandparents lived on a farm. There was a spot on the side of my grandfathers garage that everybody would go to pee because nobody could see you. Maybe we were peeing toxic piss, but the grass never grew there.
Kind of a sidetrack, but I've worked for a government consulting firm for the past five years and I've actually been surprised with the proposal process, at times. I'm not sure if things are different now than they were years ago, but during the proposal process, the government was actually undermining the abilities of contractors with bids they thought were "too low", fearing that they would overwork their staff and/or hit the government for more money, later on. I also worked for an extremely low bidding contractor and it wasn't uncommon for us to go back to the client, midway through the project to double our original estimate. Needless to say, we didn't have a large number of return clients.
It seems to be pretty common after the 3.0 OS upgrade and not limited to the 3GS.:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2045240&tstart=0
http://forums.macnn.com/103/ipod-iphone-and-apple-tv/394175/battery-life-sucks-iphone-3-0-a/
For what it's worth, 300 is one of the worst movies I've ever seen in HD. I know exactly what you're talking about when you say that you could tell where green screens were used. I had a similar experience with The Hills Have Eyes (might have been the 2nd one) where I could easily tell that the mutant people were rubber dummies. Thankfully, the number of great movies in HD far outweigh the number of bad ones.
I definitely think you should give it another try.
This "proprietary" argument is getting old.
Silverlight is an open-standard. While Microsoft doesn't actively develop a Linux client, they have collaborated with Novel to bring the Moonlight project to the Linux and other Unix/X11 platforms.
Granted, the Moonlight 2.0 implementation is behind Microsoft's implementation, with the Moonlight Roadmap indicating a planed release date of September 2009. While this is frustrating to end users and developers, I don't think it's fair to call Silverlight "proprietary".
As a non admin, the system should still give you the ability to install applications under your own account... The system should also give the admin the ability to take away the above ability from normal users.
That's a reasonable argument. AFAIK, ClickOnce provides this functionality (I know that ClickOnce applications are installed per-user to get around security restrictions in Program Files directory, etc.; however, I am not 100% sure whether it's possible to outright restrict users from installing something via ClickOnce, altogether). Granted, I realize that ClickOnce deployments are not very common.
As a former admin gone developer, I believe in putting an emphasis on security, first. If you wish to allow users to install applications, you do so with the understanding that you are opening up your system to vulnerabilities. It is for this reason that I would rarely permit average users to install anything without the authorization from an administrator. I will, however, acknowledge that there are exceptions to these rules.
This is very unlikely unless you were installing something using a really, really crappy installer. In either case, this is certainly not the fault of Windows. The operating system API definitely throws an exception if a user tries to access something that he/she does not have access to. It doesn't, however, have the ability to prevent a stupid developer from writing an installer that catches the exception without notifying the end-user of the security-related error. The same idiotic behavior can and will be observed in Linux if developers choose to ignore development best practices.
Nothing would install correctly, nothing would run correctly.
That's the point. You shouldn't be permitted to install anything when you're not an administrator.
Even programs that don't use any administrator functions or zones wouldn't work correctly. Realistically, running in a non-admin account is a pain in the ass.
This was an unfortunate truth for some time because the Windows 9x security model did not enforce strict security practices. In short, all of these problems could be corrected by an administrator by making some registry and file system security tweaks. It was, however, a legitimate cause for frustration among end users and administrators.
The fortunate side of the story is that as the Windows NT security model became more wide spread (because of the popularity of Windows 2000 and XP), developers were made more aware of these problems and better development practices helped eliminate most of these security-related nuances. In other words, things are a lot better now than they were even just a few years ago.
ClickOnce is in no way limited to the Windows platform because it's little more than an installation mechanism that is usually hosted on a web server. There is no reason that a Linux system running Mono couldn't install something via ClickOnce. Furthermore, ClickOnce is targeted towards desktop applications. The fact that you mention AJAX implies (to me) that you have the wrong idea about ClickOnce functionality.
The site broke just this once since it was launched in September of 2005. I'd say that the Microsoft servers did a fantastic job hosting the load.
In what way would you describe Visual Studio as crippled? Are you comparing Eclipse to Visual Studio 6 (or earlier versions)?
For a free IDE, Eclipse is one of the better ones; however, it's a far cry from what you get from Visual Studio.
A while back, I thought this was general knowledge. What I found is that people get caught up in all the hype and think only of the positives. If you try to persuade them otherwise, you're ostracized.
A few years ago, I was tasked with setting up the network in a new building. There was already wiring in the building. Unfortunately, it was all CAT-3 (even the data lines). I was the only person on staff in the IT department so I asked if we could hire an outside consultant to help with the task of running new network lines that would be adequate for our company needs. My request was rejected and I was instructed to install WiFi for the entire company to run on (about 50 people, including sub-tenants, which shared the LAN for Internet access). I advised my company of the pitfalls involved with running a WiFi-only LAN; however, I was told I needed to "come into the 21st century". Not feeling as though it was reason enough to quit on the spot, I did as I was told and installed the wireless network. With the exception of my workstation and all of the servers, everybody connected to the LAN through a wireless access point. Within the first few hours of operation, I had already gotten a number of complaints about systems loosing connectivity to the servers. This became the norm as my days soon involved at least one reset of the access point at some point in the day. This lasted about a year and a half before my direct manager was walking over to my desk to ask me if I could reset the access point. To her surprise, I was sitting there working and still connected to the LAN. She asked me how that was possible and I explained to her that I was on a wired connection. The next thing I knew, I was installing CAT-5e throughout the entire building. In the end, it cost a lot of money in lost productivity, as well as the wireless hardware that barely gets used. Reasons like this are why I abandoned the system administrator world a few years ago in favor of becoming a software engineer. I have never looked back.