I don't know if you're comparing IDEs to Wizards, but in a world where your platform does not have decent job control (Windows - god how I wish they'd fix tty and job control, a decent copy of CTRL-Z would be awesome), I need an IDE. I can't manage shit-tons of vi windows and a shell on my modest amount of laptop screen display - for me in this scenario, Eclipse is my savior.
If I'm at home on my opensuse or centos (proper unix hosts (arguably:->)), with proper job control, my brain can grok 15 background vi windows, make or maven, and all the source control tools I need. I can map things very well, I just can't stand the mouse + keyboard switching I have to do on my laptop to just peruse code, without an IDE.:-/
IIRC, Microsoft did not use to license the Intel compiler. When I was using it in 1995-2001 the one *WE* licensed directly from Intel gave us compiled code benefits of 1.5-3.0 compared to stock Visual Studio.
When I worked for Parametric Technology, we used to comment that we were a compiler writers worst nightmare. We couldn't link on Alpha NT for nearly three months while Microsoft tried to work out a linker problem, and we broke more compilers on more platforms than I can count - Intel's cc gave us few problems.
I'll give you a great example. Access 2000 (Office). DateTimePicker Control. Allows you to put a control widget on your dialog that lets you pick a date and time for something. Useful tool, right? Only available as an ActiveX control in particular versions of Office. Withdrawn from Office 2003. Not replaced. I spent about 4 hours of an Access contract porting this and rewriting a DateTimePicker widget (badly, I only spent four hours:->)
But which Ribbon is the right Ribbon? Which semantics are going to win? Which are good, which are bad? Which will eventually get forced into the OS in the manner of comctl32, remember that bastard? Or how about the myriad shitstorm of MDAC versions getting installed on your system.
Microsoft is entirely too dependent on the "redistributable" market, where everyone and their sister has a particular version of something that has to be installed and clobbers other software that has particular requirements. We *THOUGHT* they stopped this with MDAC (we being *I*) - they obviously haven't.
I don't know if you mean absurd in that it's a horrible argument to make, or absurd in that it's unbelievable that Microsoft could be so inconsistent. I would tend to argue that it's the latter. For all their UI guidelines, they do not present a consistent interface anywhere. MDI was in, now it's out and SDI or pseudo SDI is out, but opening a Word document brings the last opened Word document to the foreground which is a PITA if you're on multiple displays. Well now SDI is out, and the tabbed interface is king (SQL 2005 Management Studio, DevStudio, etc).
Microsoft is schizo. They latch onto every new craze without for once considering if it's appropriate or meaningful or that they pain their end-users with horrendous retraining time.
That screenshot was eyeopening. They want to present a consistent interface to their end users and want others to adhere to a specific set of guidelines to pass their vaunted Logo certifications - I wonder if there's a single Microsoft app today that could pass Logo certification.
Do as I say and not as I do is the law at Microsoft.
Because maybe, just maybe, he, like I (though I'm not published) can see the beauty that is the Windows platform. Ubiquitousness. For the most part, clean presentation. Consistency (even though his argument doesn't agree with me).
When I first started using WindowsNT back in 1994 it was in sore need of a GOOD commandline shell, headless operation, a UNIFIED filesystem, none of this drive bullshit, and full accessibility of the management tools via command line.
Begets Scripting Host, then Powershell in 2000 and 2005. Headless operation in 2005. Still no unified filesystem, but getting closer (no symlinks cross filesystem). Single SID connection to an SMB server per login session. No BOOTP/netboot support (not without serious fuckuppery).
Windows is so much, so ubiquitous, and getting powerful, secure and reliable in WindowsXP. With the best of the UNIX tools native and Microsoft becoming less Schizo (SQL 2000 management tools integrated with Management Console, now 2005 is completely segregated). They invent new technologies and drop them at a whim. There's no coherent vision among their apps and OS group. Microsoft is schizophrenic.
One of the things I hate about Java is the requirement to have close() methods. In C++, I knew that when an object on the stack went out of scope, it would do whatever necessary cleanup it had to. Perhaps this is bad practice, but I tended to rely upon it. My constructors built objects, my destructors destroyed them, deterministically. When my save routine ran, I could exit the function and I knew the file would get committed, closed and resources freed.
Now I have to have special close() methods to do the same thing. You trade language functionality for verbosity and explicit method calls. I'm not sure I like the tradeoff. Then again, I was running purify on my unit tests long before it became the "in" thing to do, so pretty much my only memory and resource leaks were hidden inside the win32 api.
Wait a minute, did you just call.Net cross platform? If by platform you mean Windows, and cross meaning XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista, you might be right.
While Mono is certainly an admirable project, cross platform.Net it most certainly is not.
I'm not too sure yet on.Net being the best thing Microsoft ever came up with...
I think COM with IDispatch truly is what has made their platform the de-facto choice. Without it, ASP would never have taken off, VBA would have never seen the light of day, Office and Word and Excel wouldn't have such excellent type libraries -.Net simply continues this tradition, of Objects of Code being first class Operating System Citizens, usable by any compatible program or language, something that no Unix platform has yet devised (though some are close).
Don't be so sad to see PA-RISC dead. It's the whole reason HP joined with Intel to build Itanium, to get a better CPU to run PA-RISC on because HP couldn't compete with Intel, MIPS or Alpha. How ironic was it that six or seven years later they would own the Alpha ?
Yes, it was billed as exactly that - or perhaps my impressions clouded my evaluation of the trade press and Microsoft propaganda circa 2001, 2002..Net was to be the new way of doing things, no more Win32 API.
Face it -.Net was a hastily cobbled answer to the fact that Microsoft was losing market share to J2EE like crazy and had absolutely NOTHING to compete and wasn't even going to touch a Java that couldn't be intimately tied to Windows. We were spun one way while the man behind the curtain was simply insuring that Java would be a non-starter on Windows, and that.Net would be a non-starter on anything other than Windows, ECMA standards be damned - yet more lock-in.
Personally, I'm a C++ guy. ACE makes my portability problems go away, and there's a myriad of MFC replacements out there without all the baggage. I'm picking up Java now simply because it's portable - I refuse to be tied to a single platform. But mostly, I'm a C++ guy.:-)
I'll tell you this, if you don't run your work in a separate thread, you end up with unresponsive interfaces. You can do tricks like periodically stopping work and checkpointing. But if you run into a database deadlock, or some communications deadlock, or you have a developer on your team who doesn't know his code is going to be used in a UI, then your interface hangs.
Threading is almost mandatory in well behaved Windows Apps.
The promise was that.Net was going to be *NEW* It wasn't. It still suffers all the major failures of the Win32API - though it does bring ease of use. Microsoft has a habit of abandoning technologies they invent (MAPI, MMC, RDO).
Then again, Swing/SWT has 5+ years on.NET, so I'm being a bit unfair. I just don't see Windows making a clean break from the past - they abandon the only thing that keeps them dominant, backwards compatibility.
I've never had Linux in a VZ or Xen guest fail to run postgresql::initdb like Solaris Zones do. Granted my Solaris Zone server *IS* running in a VMware Server guest. Who knows.
And I do know that for real loads (except perhaps IO), Solaris on Sparc cannot compete with anything on Intel. Time and again, in my own experience, real customers with real business loads have moved from Solaris on Sparc to Windows or Linux on Intel, from CAD software to massive J2EE servers.
T2000 may be a great webserver platform, but it's not a good compute platform. OpenSolaris on Intel has promise, I'll probably be using it for my NAS heads and webservers, but not my dbs, for that I'll continue to use Windows and Linux.
The early 90's death of Unix was mostly attributable to their not being a decent Unix that ran on an Intel platform, which was decimating the CPU manufacturers of the day. Linux just happened to be it. If SGI or DEC had managed to pull their heads out of their asses and MIPS or Alpha were faster at a better price point, we'd probably be running WindowsXP and True64 on AXP right now.
If you have a death certificate and are next of kin and can reasonably prove the account belongs to who you say it does, they probably do not have a choice. A subpoena could probably compel them to provide you with access.
Mature, are you kidding? About the only thing that has matured in my career has been databases. Everything else is going through churn. Domains / Active Directory - vendors purposefully breaking interoperability. We're only slightly better off than we were back when Unix machines ran off BOOTP servers in 32MB of disk and NFS mounted everything over the 5mbit network. Now we have the predominant client (windows xp) which cannot be network booted without a shitload of trickery, the predominant (arguably) server OS that is only recently getting it's head out of it's ass and going Headless (Windows).
We are no better off. I still spend the same amount of time every day resetting users passwords, fixing print queues, managing security and performing the backups necessary to keep the whole fucking house of cards working.
Computers may have matured, but the software has not kept pace, not even close.
I've been staring at the realization that after fourteen years of doing this, computers have gotten faster, storage has grown exponentially, and yet we're still fighting the same damn fights, technology has not made our lives easier, software is not growing in relation to the hardware advancements we've made. It's like having a jet fighter with buggy reins for steering and ball muskets for cannons.
So I'm going back to school. I'm getting an EE degree, going to pick up an education degree and maybe a business degree, and look forward to my senior years teaching kids about why exactly Calculus is useful. Having a goal is often enough to help you overlook the misery or lack of excitement or challenge, as you weather a slowing economy, while awaiting the perfect opportunity to find another job. Not every place is as backwards as where we are now. You might want a startup next time (cut in pay, bennies). Perhaps contracting? Tough with a wife and kids a mortgage and two car loans (just for example).
But give yourself something to look forward to, a challenge, even if it's amorphous and seven years in the future (like mine, six now.:) ). Time keeps ticking, set yourself up to retire happy.
I wouldn't say I love it... The only FS I've fallen in love with lately is ZFS and that's more because it combines MultiDisk, LVM and a decent FS all at the same time...
I love to remind my gun-hating female friends that women's lib is about three days away from being completely unrolled if the gun was uninvented - the gun is their only defense against the more powerful male specimens of the species.
Over-simplification of the situation, but a reality. Guns and rule of law are the thin veneer of civility that keeps us all from tearing each other apart.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if you're comparing IDEs to Wizards, but in a world where your platform does not have decent job control (Windows - god how I wish they'd fix tty and job control, a decent copy of CTRL-Z would be awesome), I need an IDE. I can't manage shit-tons of vi windows and a shell on my modest amount of laptop screen display - for me in this scenario, Eclipse is my savior.
:->)), with proper job control, my brain can grok 15 background vi windows, make or maven, and all the source control tools I need. I can map things very well, I just can't stand the mouse + keyboard switching I have to do on my laptop to just peruse code, without an IDE. :-/
If I'm at home on my opensuse or centos (proper unix hosts (arguably
IIRC, Microsoft did not use to license the Intel compiler. When I was using it in 1995-2001 the one *WE* licensed directly from Intel gave us compiled code benefits of 1.5-3.0 compared to stock Visual Studio.
When I worked for Parametric Technology, we used to comment that we were a compiler writers worst nightmare. We couldn't link on Alpha NT for nearly three months while Microsoft tried to work out a linker problem, and we broke more compilers on more platforms than I can count - Intel's cc gave us few problems.
Fanboi-izm aside, to all those performance junkies who bitch about Java being slow...
Eclipse vs. SQL Management Studio 2005.
You can't tell me interpreted environments don't suck, whether branded Microsoft or Sun.
I'll give you a great example. Access 2000 (Office). DateTimePicker Control. Allows you to put a control widget on your dialog that lets you pick a date and time for something. Useful tool, right? Only available as an ActiveX control in particular versions of Office. Withdrawn from Office 2003. Not replaced. I spent about 4 hours of an Access contract porting this and rewriting a DateTimePicker widget (badly, I only spent four hours :->)
But which Ribbon is the right Ribbon? Which semantics are going to win? Which are good, which are bad? Which will eventually get forced into the OS in the manner of comctl32, remember that bastard? Or how about the myriad shitstorm of MDAC versions getting installed on your system.
Microsoft is entirely too dependent on the "redistributable" market, where everyone and their sister has a particular version of something that has to be installed and clobbers other software that has particular requirements. We *THOUGHT* they stopped this with MDAC (we being *I*) - they obviously haven't.
The big one that I remember is spare file support, which I think was for SQL Server.
I don't know if you mean absurd in that it's a horrible argument to make, or absurd in that it's unbelievable that Microsoft could be so inconsistent. I would tend to argue that it's the latter. For all their UI guidelines, they do not present a consistent interface anywhere. MDI was in, now it's out and SDI or pseudo SDI is out, but opening a Word document brings the last opened Word document to the foreground which is a PITA if you're on multiple displays. Well now SDI is out, and the tabbed interface is king (SQL 2005 Management Studio, DevStudio, etc).
:-/
Microsoft is schizo. They latch onto every new craze without for once considering if it's appropriate or meaningful or that they pain their end-users with horrendous retraining time.
That screenshot was eyeopening. They want to present a consistent interface to their end users and want others to adhere to a specific set of guidelines to pass their vaunted Logo certifications - I wonder if there's a single Microsoft app today that could pass Logo certification.
Do as I say and not as I do is the law at Microsoft.
I love 'em, and I hate 'em.
Because maybe, just maybe, he, like I (though I'm not published) can see the beauty that is the Windows platform. Ubiquitousness. For the most part, clean presentation. Consistency (even though his argument doesn't agree with me).
When I first started using WindowsNT back in 1994 it was in sore need of a GOOD commandline shell, headless operation, a UNIFIED filesystem, none of this drive bullshit, and full accessibility of the management tools via command line.
Begets Scripting Host, then Powershell in 2000 and 2005. Headless operation in 2005. Still no unified filesystem, but getting closer (no symlinks cross filesystem). Single SID connection to an SMB server per login session. No BOOTP/netboot support (not without serious fuckuppery).
Windows is so much, so ubiquitous, and getting powerful, secure and reliable in WindowsXP. With the best of the UNIX tools native and Microsoft becoming less Schizo (SQL 2000 management tools integrated with Management Console, now 2005 is completely segregated). They invent new technologies and drop them at a whim. There's no coherent vision among their apps and OS group. Microsoft is schizophrenic.
One of the things I hate about Java is the requirement to have close() methods. In C++, I knew that when an object on the stack went out of scope, it would do whatever necessary cleanup it had to. Perhaps this is bad practice, but I tended to rely upon it. My constructors built objects, my destructors destroyed them, deterministically. When my save routine ran, I could exit the function and I knew the file would get committed, closed and resources freed.
Now I have to have special close() methods to do the same thing. You trade language functionality for verbosity and explicit method calls. I'm not sure I like the tradeoff. Then again, I was running purify on my unit tests long before it became the "in" thing to do, so pretty much my only memory and resource leaks were hidden inside the win32 api.
Wait a minute, did you just call .Net cross platform? If by platform you mean Windows, and cross meaning XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista, you might be right.
.Net it most certainly is not.
While Mono is certainly an admirable project, cross platform
I'm not too sure yet on .Net being the best thing Microsoft ever came up with...
.Net simply continues this tradition, of Objects of Code being first class Operating System Citizens, usable by any compatible program or language, something that no Unix platform has yet devised (though some are close).
I think COM with IDispatch truly is what has made their platform the de-facto choice. Without it, ASP would never have taken off, VBA would have never seen the light of day, Office and Word and Excel wouldn't have such excellent type libraries -
Don't be so sad to see PA-RISC dead. It's the whole reason HP joined with Intel to build Itanium, to get a better CPU to run PA-RISC on because HP couldn't compete with Intel, MIPS or Alpha. How ironic was it that six or seven years later they would own the Alpha ?
Yes, it was billed as exactly that - or perhaps my impressions clouded my evaluation of the trade press and Microsoft propaganda circa 2001, 2002. .Net was to be the new way of doing things, no more Win32 API.
.Net was a hastily cobbled answer to the fact that Microsoft was losing market share to J2EE like crazy and had absolutely NOTHING to compete and wasn't even going to touch a Java that couldn't be intimately tied to Windows. We were spun one way while the man behind the curtain was simply insuring that Java would be a non-starter on Windows, and that .Net would be a non-starter on anything other than Windows, ECMA standards be damned - yet more lock-in.
:-)
Face it -
Personally, I'm a C++ guy. ACE makes my portability problems go away, and there's a myriad of MFC replacements out there without all the baggage. I'm picking up Java now simply because it's portable - I refuse to be tied to a single platform. But mostly, I'm a C++ guy.
I'll tell you this, if you don't run your work in a separate thread, you end up with unresponsive interfaces. You can do tricks like periodically stopping work and checkpointing. But if you run into a database deadlock, or some communications deadlock, or you have a developer on your team who doesn't know his code is going to be used in a UI, then your interface hangs.
.Net was going to be *NEW* It wasn't. It still suffers all the major failures of the Win32API - though it does bring ease of use. Microsoft has a habit of abandoning technologies they invent (MAPI, MMC, RDO).
.NET, so I'm being a bit unfair. I just don't see Windows making a clean break from the past - they abandon the only thing that keeps them dominant, backwards compatibility.
Threading is almost mandatory in well behaved Windows Apps.
The promise was that
Then again, Swing/SWT has 5+ years on
I'm not so sure.
I've never had Linux in a VZ or Xen guest fail to run postgresql::initdb like Solaris Zones do. Granted my Solaris Zone server *IS* running in a VMware Server guest. Who knows.
And I do know that for real loads (except perhaps IO), Solaris on Sparc cannot compete with anything on Intel. Time and again, in my own experience, real customers with real business loads have moved from Solaris on Sparc to Windows or Linux on Intel, from CAD software to massive J2EE servers.
T2000 may be a great webserver platform, but it's not a good compute platform. OpenSolaris on Intel has promise, I'll probably be using it for my NAS heads and webservers, but not my dbs, for that I'll continue to use Windows and Linux.
With ZFS, I thought the point was that the disk is in the pool, and you use raidz on it in an LVM type fashion.
I can create non-raid images in a ZFS pool, and raid1 raid5 raidz images in said pool if I have enough spindles?
Am I misunderstanding this?
The early 90's death of Unix was mostly attributable to their not being a decent Unix that ran on an Intel platform, which was decimating the CPU manufacturers of the day. Linux just happened to be it. If SGI or DEC had managed to pull their heads out of their asses and MIPS or Alpha were faster at a better price point, we'd probably be running WindowsXP and True64 on AXP right now.
Sorry, I get you. Yes, a subpoena on it's own could not compel them to do anything, the court would be the "compelling" party. Splitting hairs.
HAND.
From your own results, about 12-15 down the list:
<quote>
A court order commanding a person or entity either to surrender documents to the court or to testify.
</quote>
So they decide that instead they need to activate the last opened document in order to open a new document. :-/
Can't ever win...
If you have a death certificate and are next of kin and can reasonably prove the account belongs to who you say it does, they probably do not have a choice. A subpoena could probably compel them to provide you with access.
But that's a lot of "ifs".
Mature, are you kidding? About the only thing that has matured in my career has been databases. Everything else is going through churn. Domains / Active Directory - vendors purposefully breaking interoperability. We're only slightly better off than we were back when Unix machines ran off BOOTP servers in 32MB of disk and NFS mounted everything over the 5mbit network. Now we have the predominant client (windows xp) which cannot be network booted without a shitload of trickery, the predominant (arguably) server OS that is only recently getting it's head out of it's ass and going Headless (Windows).
We are no better off. I still spend the same amount of time every day resetting users passwords, fixing print queues, managing security and performing the backups necessary to keep the whole fucking house of cards working.
Computers may have matured, but the software has not kept pace, not even close.
I've been staring at the realization that after fourteen years of doing this, computers have gotten faster, storage has grown exponentially, and yet we're still fighting the same damn fights, technology has not made our lives easier, software is not growing in relation to the hardware advancements we've made. It's like having a jet fighter with buggy reins for steering and ball muskets for cannons.
:) ). Time keeps ticking, set yourself up to retire happy.
So I'm going back to school. I'm getting an EE degree, going to pick up an education degree and maybe a business degree, and look forward to my senior years teaching kids about why exactly Calculus is useful. Having a goal is often enough to help you overlook the misery or lack of excitement or challenge, as you weather a slowing economy, while awaiting the perfect opportunity to find another job. Not every place is as backwards as where we are now. You might want a startup next time (cut in pay, bennies). Perhaps contracting? Tough with a wife and kids a mortgage and two car loans (just for example).
But give yourself something to look forward to, a challenge, even if it's amorphous and seven years in the future (like mine, six now.
I wouldn't say I love it... The only FS I've fallen in love with lately is ZFS and that's more because it combines MultiDisk, LVM and a decent FS all at the same time...
Meh.
Interesting. My openSuse 10 reiser filesystems have been running without error since 10.0 came out in ?2005? Eh, maybe I'm just lucky.
I love to remind my gun-hating female friends that women's lib is about three days away from being completely unrolled if the gun was uninvented - the gun is their only defense against the more powerful male specimens of the species.
Over-simplification of the situation, but a reality. Guns and rule of law are the thin veneer of civility that keeps us all from tearing each other apart.