"It's ridiculous that we have to have a conversation premised on "ZOMG Republicans are racist" every time there's a news story about Democrats saying something racist, but I guess we're in to this."
Actually, we weren't, at least, not until you decided to have this conversation.
The only thing I said was that there is a correlation between racism and conservatism. That doesn't mean that every Republican is racist, or that any specific Democrats isn't racist. That means that if you take a random sampling of people who identify as having conservative ideologies, they will be statistically more likely to also hold racist beliefs.
"Thanks to Ben Shapiro at Breitbart.com, whose list of "crazy shit Sharpton has said" I have cribbed from liberally. You can find his original piece here."
Seriously, Ben Shapiro and Breitbart are your best sources? That's like deciding what college to go to based on National Lampoons movies.
If you would like some actual scientific reading on the association between ideology, intelligence, and race views, might I recommend:
Furguson, M.J. & Hassin, R.R. (2007). On the automatic association between American and aggression for news watchers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 1632-1647.
And
Hodson, G. & Busseri, M.A. (2012). Bright minds and dark attitudes: Lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice through right-wing ideology and low intergroup contact. Psychological Science, 23, 187-195.
"But you also know that when you're in a MS shop you end up--because of support and tools such a VS--end up being a 100% MS shop. It just happens"
Actually, I don't know that. I have worked in 100% MS shops. And I have worked in blended shops. And seeing as how you point out that you haven't worked in a MS shop for over a decade, I'd wager that YOU don't know that either.
"I doubt MSDN is going to give you oodles of pointers on how to configure.NET and solve esoteric problems on Postgres, MySQL or Oracle."
True, If I go to the MSDN I will find information on connecting TO Postgre, MySQL, and Oracle, but I won't find information on solving esoteric problems within those platforms. Just as I wouldn't go to the Oracle knowledge base expecting to find details on the SQL Server query optimizer.
"So, bottom line, the decision to become an MS shop is a higher cost point "
That's a neat statement for which you have offered no proof. VS Pro is more expensive than MEB, but MEB has an annual license where as VS Pro is a 1-time purchase. VS Pro also includes many tools that allow for more rapid development (Entity Framework + LINQ destroys Hibernate for development speed). If using VS saves me even just a handful of hours in a year, it is the cheaper option. Similarly, if you compare the Oracle and SQL Server licensing, it is easy to see that the vast majority of LOB scenarios will have a lower cost using SQL Server's license structure than Oracles, especially with the advent of multiple-core VMs.
That isn't a MS trumps all endorsement, for just as I can point out numerous actual real world examples where MS is cheaper, I can also point out numerous real-world examples where.Net/SQL Server are NOT the best tool for the job.
"fewer and fewer shops are choosing that"
You realize that this statement is factually incorrect, right? I can show you code repository scans, job indexes, market index, education trends, etc... that all show the same thing:.Net has been gaining popularity consistently over the last 14 years while Java has been losing popularity consistently.
"The last product I worked professionally on that came from Microsoft was VB6 and it constantly fucked up."
So you're justifying your choice in cool aide based on a 17 year old platform that has been deprecated for a decade. I hate to break it to you, but 17 years ago Java was just as fucked up. Heck, even just 10 years ago it was incredibly painful to use. Not to mention the half dozen different 'varieties' to navigate.
Listen, Java is a solid platform. But it isn't the end-all-be-all solution. I would seriously recommend spending some time doing some fun projects in C# (there are plenty of open source C# opportunities out there!) with the FREE edition of Visual Studio. It will take some time to learn, and it will take even longer to learn all of the powers that the IDE presents you with, but you will likely walk away from it as a more well informed developer.
"Even Microsoft has orphaned you by going with HTML5 and JavaScript for Metro interfaces. "
Microsoft had Silverlight, which was designed to compete against Flash. When the mobile platforms exploded, and both Apple and Google said, "Fsk Flash!" Microsoft saw the writing on the wall. Why continue to invest in a platform that wasn't going to be supported on the fastest growing market segment? If Microsoft had continued with Silverlight/WPF for Metro it would have been a ridiculously dumb technical decision. Going to HTML 5 and JavaScript libraries was the logical choice.
".NET is the Zune "
I believe the Zune platform was primarily C/C++, which currently blows Java out of the water for popular programming languages.
"Java is the iPod"
Lol, no. The iPod is C/Objective-C. Even the new stuff is Objective-C and Swift. Java is nothing to the Apple platform.
Which sure seems to point out the exact opposite. Java is losing ground,.Net framework languages are gaining. Not 1-for-1 mind you, but the trend is opposite of your bemoaning.
As for the CEO you quoted, he doesn't appear to understand what it is that the.Net framework and the JVM are actually doing. Either that, or he is expressing an opposition to all high level programming languages (.Net and Java included). In either case, it doesn't really make your point for you other than noting that someone has drank the anti-MS coolaide and is making irrational decisions based on it.
I'm thinking you may want to take a look in the mirror on accusations of denial.
Java is a good programming language, but seeing as how it has lost almost 50% of it's market penetration over the last 12 years while C# and VB.Net have both increased their market penetration significantly over the same time would imply that factually speaking, Java is not "taking over". If anything, it is being replaced.
Not necessarily by.Net languages, with the transition to mobile platforms Objective-C/Swift are taking the place of what would have historically been Java apps.
And even as you mentioned, PHP and Python are also replacing Java.
The point I would make is that having multiple programming languages available to us is GOOD! I prefer working within Visual Studio, but I am glad that Java exists. Because if Microsoft ever does go belly up, I'm going to need another mainstay to jump to. Likewise, if Java goes through yet another fragmentation, I like knowing that I can drop an increasingly convoluted support structure and switch to the.Net framework.
Options are good. We don't need, nor do we even want a "winner" in this market. If going open source opens another option to compete with Java on the LAMP stack, AWESOME! If Open.Net put's Java at risk, LAME!
Put the coolaide down, go share a beer with your fellow developers, C# and Java alike, and sit there ragging on the Fortran/Cobol programmers:P
Most of our problems with MEB have been tied to the WebSphere and SVN integration features. The devs have been working with the tools team to get it worked out, so I'm not in the details on each issue. But I was getting reports of "delayed for 2 hours due to MEB" pretty much daily from multiple projects and teams. The department as a whole, across ~40 developers, has viewed the upgrade as severely negative and it has sparked talks of switching to Eclipse and other tools.
I'd agree with you on the databases being orthogonal. I was just pointing out that the parent's point about.Net requiring SQL Server was factually incorrect. While I strongly prefer SQL Server because the tools that are included, and the 3rd party tools available, make certain aspects of software development, release management, and debugging sooooo much easier. Oracle has many similar tools, but again, the price is a tough pill to swallow, and in my experience, they don't have the same UX polish that MS has put together in the SQL Server tools. When the Free Toad fork went out of active development 10 years ago and it's still considered one of the better tools to work with Oracle through, it kinda says something about the quality of tools available to Oracle.
I believe you are correct on SharePoint, at least I've never implemented it on anything other than SQL Server, and giving it's reliance on in-document searching and the MS text search engine, I'd be very surprised to find out that it could run on a different back end.
There is an affinity as well between IIS and.Net. I believe you can run.Net sites off of Apache on Windows, but I would wager you would have a much lighter support community.
And while Mono and the MS Open initiative are breaking the affinity between.Net and Windows, that relationship will always exist. At this point though, I'm much less interested in WPF. Not because there is anything wrong with it (Honestly, a true vector based layout engine is soooo much better than dealing with flow based layout of HTML), but because the war is over, Web killed the desktop app. There are very few scenarios where a desktop app is still necessary, especially in the LOB environment that the majority of development is involved.
Don't get me wrong, Java is a great language. Not drinking the coolaid here. I'll jump to PHP or C++, or Java as the project requires. But Visual Studio is by far the strongest, most stable, and feature rich IDE available on the market.
This is only true in an extremely narrow scope of costs analysis.
Yes, Eclipse is free, unless you are using My Eclipse or any other paid tool for additional functionality. At $150 a year for a subscription license, it's still not as expensive as Visual Studio Pro's $680 price tag.
And across a team of 20 developers, I'm going to blow $10k on licenses (assuming I'm not getting a volume discount or maintaining a Silver/Gold partner status).
But there are other costs. For example, my team just upgraded to the latest version of MEB. To call it a cluster-fuck would be an understatement. All told across the team, between the upgrade itself, and issues with the new IDE we spent 200+ hours of labor. We took 1 guy off of his project and had him become the "MEB issue guy" and he spent 2 weeks just walking around helping other devs when they ran into issues with the IDE and build. Figure it costs the company on average $50+/hr for labor on my team. This one upgrade has cost us even more than the $10k in additional license costs I would have paid for VS2013.
And that's not even getting into the data side of the house. Our Oracle license cost an arm and a leg compared to our SQL Server licenses. And.Net apps have no problem what so ever connecting to any data source you have. If there is a connection driver for it,.Net can connect to it. SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Lotus, almost all of the NoSQL databases. And with Entity Framework I get the power of persistent objects without the hassle of crap fest of Hibernate.
Java is a great tool. And it blow MS/.Net out of the water for cross-platform development, no questions asked. But when it comes to LOB applications, working with the.Net stack is just so much easier.
Now, if you're getting into super high performance stuff, ditch Java and.Net and move back in to the realm of C. Although, I'd still rather use VS2013 for C development;)
"EVERYONE WHO SAYS ANYTHING RACIST IS A REPUBLICAN."
This is not an accurate statement.
It is however accurate to say that individuals that are racist are statistically more likely to vote republican.
I would like to believe that the majority of Republicans are not openly racist. But the fact that the majority of open racists are Republicans isn't really up for debate. I'd link a bunch of research studies that show it, but I'm on the work network;)
In addition to the racist issue, there is also the privilege issue. And with lower minority participation, the Republican party definitely skews in favor of those with privilege.
"17 degrees" in this case means a 30 degree F jump. And while 138 F is survivable for short durations with a lot of hydration, 167 F would not be anything to attempt to live in.
We're not talking about an air ship where you can take a leisurely stroll on the pool deck admiring the Venetian sunset. We're talking about a space ship that is suspended in a convection stove.
"Looking at your phone here it appears that you had a 5 minute call with the deceased on the night of the murder. Also, looking at your GPS log, it appears that you were in the vicinity of their apartment and then drove down some country roads near where we found the body."
Never mind the fact that you are a friend of the deceased, live a mile away from them, and take the country roads to avoid the congestion of the main drag at rush hour. You are now suspect #1.
Your phone's existence in today's digital age is in itself "important" when it comes to criminal investigations.
Something has been taken from them in the same way that I have taken your ability to appear intelligent.
The only thing lost is theoretical profits. For which you can take someone to civil court over, prove damages, and get your money back.
I'm not opposed to the existence of IP in general. I am opposed to grossly vague patents, and copyrights that extend for more than 7-20 years. The point of IP is to drive the creation of inventions and art to further society. Not to create model within which people defend an idea from use for decades or prevent media from ever entering the public domain.
Funny story, Dick Cheney and the like don't make decisions at this level.
When it comes to actual implementation projects with open bidding, there is a selection committee that handles the decision making. With scoring criteria based on measurable metrics.
Those selection committees contain a variety of stake holders. Typically you have someone from the brass, a couple of middle managers from the primary departments involved, an engineer, a business area expert, and management from IT.
Do you really think Cheney came up with an idea for a secondary email system to allow the Bush administration to get around the open records laws? No, it was a group of middle managers, brown nosers, political hacks, and someone from IT.
Now, there are serious issues when you wind up with no-bid contracts where senior political figures side step process and implement crap without regard for the law. But there is a lot of heat and pressure that comes along with those moves (as my own Governor has discovered).
But in other cases, IT leadership in state governments has a lot of pull on implementations. So yes, I do have the ability to shape the direction of our ATMS selection.
So if you want to do something about it, get off your pessimistic duff and get involved in government. If you don't trust others to do it right, then do it yourself!
I work for the State. I am involve in our "advanced traffic management system", part of which will include systems to interact with the new SRCR systems the feds are mandating on 2017 model year cars.
There are other people on this project who have proposed all manor of things like, "We should be able to turn off a car that is speeding excessively", and "We should be able to track a vehicles movements and tax them based on miles driven", which basically just hearing makes me feel like I need a shower.
But since I am involved in the process, I can push back on these things, I can point out that we shouldn't be tracking vehicles, that we should be tracking rotating GUIDs that make it virtually impossible to identify an individuals travel patterns should our system be compromised. That we shouldn't be enabling a system that would kill power steering and power breaks on a vehicle traveling 100 mph. That we should be focusing the ATMS efforts on systems that have proven trends to reduce accidents and prevent fatalities.
Believe it or not, your government is nothing more than a collection of citizens. And while politicians are generally the scum of the earth, there are many great state and federal employees who are doing their best to make the country a better place.
Also an IT Manager. I try to keep my team capped out at 42 hours per week. Every once and a while we'll have some sort of emergency, but that's where comp time comes in.
As an IT manager, my week starts at 42 hours and grows from there. I'll be pushing 50 on this week by the time I leave for the night.
And my day today included interviews for an additional permanent BA/PM, 6 mainframe developers, and I was told by my boss that we were going to "load balance" from the C#/GSI team onto my Java team, that I would be getting at least 4 more projects, 2 FTEs, and probably half a dozen contractors.
So if there is any change to over time reqs, please let them include us!
It's a mixed bag, salaries tend to be a bit lighter, but you get an honest to goodness pension. Depending on what State and what department, there are other goodies as well. Where I am I get 3 weeks of vacation (starting), 3.5 weeks of sick time (unused sick time carries over year to year and can be cashed out at retirement to pay for health insurance), 4.5 days of "personal time" each year, along with all of the state holidays. Makes the work-life balance a little more easily managed;)
To add to this, I work for the State these days. Coming from a private sector shrinkwrap software company where the median age was ~28 and the average tenure was ~2 years, to the State where the average age is probably closer to 35-40, and the average tenure is 10+ years, it was a huge shock.
There is good and bad that comes with it. I've seen more complacency with jobs/technology. People aren't interested in making a jump to newer technologies and patterns because they don't feel like they have to. But on the bright side, you get to skip out on the vast majority of the junior dev shop drama.
But if you're north of 35, look at your local state agencies, no one would blink an eye at a 40-something applying for a job. And certs, while useful for getting you through the resume screening, are dramatically less valuable than networking and having someone in the department that will recommend you for an interview.
The way they described it was similar to how my German friends described it. After high school you have to do something; college, apprenticeship, peace corps/community service, or military. You can't just graduate and keep flipping burgers.
Every Canadian I know is either former Mounty or Army. There may be some nuance to it that I'm not aware of, or perhaps I am ill informed.
To be fair though, both Canada and Switzerland have forced conscription. So all of their native able bodied gun owners have completely weapons handling training at the military level.
Here's the thing, there are some forms of nerve damage that we currently don't have a cure for, there are far more that we don't even understand well enough to have an idea for a cure, and there are some that are so poorly understood, even significant swaths of the medical community doubt that they are real and accuse patients of being drug seekers.
For example: Fibromyalgia. It isn't a disease in it's own right, it is a classification of a set of symptoms that have not been able to be attached to a source. There are lots of theories and progress is being made in the field. But when the causes could be genetic, dietary, environmental, psychological, or even sleep related, any step forward could be helpful for some subset of FM sufferers, but leave the rest without aid.
If this approach can be made to work, it would mean that virtually all of the FM sufferers in the world could lead a normal life, while at the same time research continues on the underlying causes of their conditions.
When you wake up every day and have to see your spouse, your child, or your friends in agony because for no meaningful reason their brain decides that they should feel like every joint is coated with sandpaper, that every muscle is strained and torn, that every tendon is inflamed, then any option, even one that profits some greedy ass in a suit, becomes a miracle.
I'm not opposed to the continued use of nuclear power.
I'm in favor of moving to modern nuclear power facilities in place of the old ones. Yes, a 60 year old reactor can keep on chugging for another 20 years, but I'd much rather have a reactor designed with the safety of graphite or thorium running in their place for the next 80 years.
My opposition is not to nuclear power in general. My opposition is to saying that "we could have a Chernobyl every year..." without catastrophic repercussions.
Of the resumes, numerous were of quality. Of the applicants, I still have 8 more on my interview list, but 2 appear to be of high quality so far.
If I am unable to fill the remaining positions from my current list, I have the other resumes from people who like to write novels to go through.
Similarly, for a slew of mainframe developers I received 60 some resumes, about the same for software PMs, high 40s for a handful of BI/ETL/DBA/Reporting positions.
Filling a couple of spots for a modern technology really isn't hard to find quality folks. Filling 9 mainframe spots is rough though.
I don't care about killing >a fish. I care about killing off fisheries. I don't care about killing off some bacteria. I care about killing off significant swaths of bacteria that allow other more resilient strains to take over and negatively impact our agriculture industry.
This isn't me being some high and mighty tree hugger. This is me being concerned that there are dramatic indirect impacts on our environment that aren't included in a 'direct human casualties' metric.
Coal and oil are also highly concerning. This isn't a free pass for them either.
There are safer nuclear options, as mentioned in previous posts, thorium salt reactors seem like a huge step forward in the safety department. Even with traditional uranium reactors, as you point out, massive improvements have been designed over the last 50+ years. But we are still depending on reactors that were built in the 50's and 60's that had an original planned lifespan of 40 years, but keep getting extended.
"Most of it's green. Like most northern areas if you take pictures at the right time you can get very dead looking terrain."
The problem isn't the green, the problem is the growing mass of dead tissue that is decomposing at an incredibly slow rate due to the lack of (or greatly reduced population of) bacteria, fungus, and molds that aid in the decomposing process.
As stated previously, a single incident like Chernobyl can be isolated and mitigated. A 'Chernobyl event every year' on the other hand, can lead to a cascading effect where microbial life is so effected that the standard processes our ecologies depend on shift dramatically.
"I suggest you check your research. They've been testing/developing pebble bed reactors, but they've run into issues such that they're not replacements for rod type reactors yet."
Fair point, I was under the mistaken impression that France have taken a pair of pebble bed reactors live many years ago. That's what I get for trusting my recollection of a 30 year old news story;)
"My point has always been not that nuclear is harmless, but that it's less harmful than the alternatives while still remaining affordable(minus political stuff)."
Nuclear without incident is less harmful. A single incident is still less harmful. But a sustained practice that leads to a significant incident each year can have a much larger impact by means of cascading ecological change.
And when you get back to the root issue, $/kW, we wind up in an interesting position. http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a... has a nice breakdown of what we can look forward to. And the question then is, if Nuclear is no cheaper than wind/hydro, and comes with dramatically more risk, why aren't we investing in more wind/hydro solutions instead?
Slashdot Mirror
"It's ridiculous that we have to have a conversation premised on "ZOMG Republicans are racist" every time there's a news story about Democrats saying something racist, but I guess we're in to this."
Actually, we weren't, at least, not until you decided to have this conversation.
The only thing I said was that there is a correlation between racism and conservatism. That doesn't mean that every Republican is racist, or that any specific Democrats isn't racist. That means that if you take a random sampling of people who identify as having conservative ideologies, they will be statistically more likely to also hold racist beliefs.
"Thanks to Ben Shapiro at Breitbart.com, whose list of "crazy shit Sharpton has said" I have cribbed from liberally. You can find his original piece here."
Seriously, Ben Shapiro and Breitbart are your best sources? That's like deciding what college to go to based on National Lampoons movies.
If you would like some actual scientific reading on the association between ideology, intelligence, and race views, might I recommend:
Furguson, M.J. & Hassin, R.R. (2007). On the automatic association between American and aggression for news watchers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 1632-1647.
And
Hodson, G. & Busseri, M.A. (2012). Bright minds and dark attitudes: Lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice through right-wing ideology and low intergroup contact. Psychological Science, 23, 187-195.
-Rick
"But you also know that when you're in a MS shop you end up--because of support and tools such a VS--end up being a 100% MS shop. It just happens"
Actually, I don't know that. I have worked in 100% MS shops. And I have worked in blended shops. And seeing as how you point out that you haven't worked in a MS shop for over a decade, I'd wager that YOU don't know that either.
"I doubt MSDN is going to give you oodles of pointers on how to configure .NET and solve esoteric problems on Postgres, MySQL or Oracle."
True, If I go to the MSDN I will find information on connecting TO Postgre, MySQL, and Oracle, but I won't find information on solving esoteric problems within those platforms. Just as I wouldn't go to the Oracle knowledge base expecting to find details on the SQL Server query optimizer.
"So, bottom line, the decision to become an MS shop is a higher cost point "
That's a neat statement for which you have offered no proof. VS Pro is more expensive than MEB, but MEB has an annual license where as VS Pro is a 1-time purchase. VS Pro also includes many tools that allow for more rapid development (Entity Framework + LINQ destroys Hibernate for development speed). If using VS saves me even just a handful of hours in a year, it is the cheaper option. Similarly, if you compare the Oracle and SQL Server licensing, it is easy to see that the vast majority of LOB scenarios will have a lower cost using SQL Server's license structure than Oracles, especially with the advent of multiple-core VMs.
That isn't a MS trumps all endorsement, for just as I can point out numerous actual real world examples where MS is cheaper, I can also point out numerous real-world examples where .Net/SQL Server are NOT the best tool for the job.
"fewer and fewer shops are choosing that"
You realize that this statement is factually incorrect, right? I can show you code repository scans, job indexes, market index, education trends, etc... that all show the same thing: .Net has been gaining popularity consistently over the last 14 years while Java has been losing popularity consistently.
"The last product I worked professionally on that came from Microsoft was VB6 and it constantly fucked up."
So you're justifying your choice in cool aide based on a 17 year old platform that has been deprecated for a decade. I hate to break it to you, but 17 years ago Java was just as fucked up. Heck, even just 10 years ago it was incredibly painful to use. Not to mention the half dozen different 'varieties' to navigate.
Listen, Java is a solid platform. But it isn't the end-all-be-all solution. I would seriously recommend spending some time doing some fun projects in C# (there are plenty of open source C# opportunities out there!) with the FREE edition of Visual Studio. It will take some time to learn, and it will take even longer to learn all of the powers that the IDE presents you with, but you will likely walk away from it as a more well informed developer.
-Rick
"Even Microsoft has orphaned you by going with HTML5 and JavaScript for Metro interfaces. "
Microsoft had Silverlight, which was designed to compete against Flash. When the mobile platforms exploded, and both Apple and Google said, "Fsk Flash!" Microsoft saw the writing on the wall. Why continue to invest in a platform that wasn't going to be supported on the fastest growing market segment? If Microsoft had continued with Silverlight/WPF for Metro it would have been a ridiculously dumb technical decision. Going to HTML 5 and JavaScript libraries was the logical choice.
".NET is the Zune "
I believe the Zune platform was primarily C/C++, which currently blows Java out of the water for popular programming languages.
"Java is the iPod"
Lol, no. The iPod is C/Objective-C. Even the new stuff is Objective-C and Swift. Java is nothing to the Apple platform.
"Can't you see the writing on the wall?"
No, but I can see the Tiobe index: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php...
Which sure seems to point out the exact opposite. Java is losing ground, .Net framework languages are gaining. Not 1-for-1 mind you, but the trend is opposite of your bemoaning.
As for the CEO you quoted, he doesn't appear to understand what it is that the .Net framework and the JVM are actually doing. Either that, or he is expressing an opposition to all high level programming languages (.Net and Java included). In either case, it doesn't really make your point for you other than noting that someone has drank the anti-MS coolaide and is making irrational decisions based on it.
-Rick
I'm thinking you may want to take a look in the mirror on accusations of denial.
Java is a good programming language, but seeing as how it has lost almost 50% of it's market penetration over the last 12 years while C# and VB.Net have both increased their market penetration significantly over the same time would imply that factually speaking, Java is not "taking over". If anything, it is being replaced.
Not necessarily by .Net languages, with the transition to mobile platforms Objective-C/Swift are taking the place of what would have historically been Java apps.
And even as you mentioned, PHP and Python are also replacing Java.
The point I would make is that having multiple programming languages available to us is GOOD! I prefer working within Visual Studio, but I am glad that Java exists. Because if Microsoft ever does go belly up, I'm going to need another mainstay to jump to. Likewise, if Java goes through yet another fragmentation, I like knowing that I can drop an increasingly convoluted support structure and switch to the .Net framework.
Options are good. We don't need, nor do we even want a "winner" in this market. If going open source opens another option to compete with Java on the LAMP stack, AWESOME! If Open.Net put's Java at risk, LAME!
Put the coolaide down, go share a beer with your fellow developers, C# and Java alike, and sit there ragging on the Fortran/Cobol programmers :P
-Rick
Most of our problems with MEB have been tied to the WebSphere and SVN integration features. The devs have been working with the tools team to get it worked out, so I'm not in the details on each issue. But I was getting reports of "delayed for 2 hours due to MEB" pretty much daily from multiple projects and teams. The department as a whole, across ~40 developers, has viewed the upgrade as severely negative and it has sparked talks of switching to Eclipse and other tools.
I'd agree with you on the databases being orthogonal. I was just pointing out that the parent's point about .Net requiring SQL Server was factually incorrect. While I strongly prefer SQL Server because the tools that are included, and the 3rd party tools available, make certain aspects of software development, release management, and debugging sooooo much easier. Oracle has many similar tools, but again, the price is a tough pill to swallow, and in my experience, they don't have the same UX polish that MS has put together in the SQL Server tools. When the Free Toad fork went out of active development 10 years ago and it's still considered one of the better tools to work with Oracle through, it kinda says something about the quality of tools available to Oracle.
I believe you are correct on SharePoint, at least I've never implemented it on anything other than SQL Server, and giving it's reliance on in-document searching and the MS text search engine, I'd be very surprised to find out that it could run on a different back end.
There is an affinity as well between IIS and .Net. I believe you can run .Net sites off of Apache on Windows, but I would wager you would have a much lighter support community.
And while Mono and the MS Open initiative are breaking the affinity between .Net and Windows, that relationship will always exist. At this point though, I'm much less interested in WPF. Not because there is anything wrong with it (Honestly, a true vector based layout engine is soooo much better than dealing with flow based layout of HTML), but because the war is over, Web killed the desktop app. There are very few scenarios where a desktop app is still necessary, especially in the LOB environment that the majority of development is involved.
Don't get me wrong, Java is a great language. Not drinking the coolaid here. I'll jump to PHP or C++, or Java as the project requires. But Visual Studio is by far the strongest, most stable, and feature rich IDE available on the market.
-Rick
This is only true in an extremely narrow scope of costs analysis.
Yes, Eclipse is free, unless you are using My Eclipse or any other paid tool for additional functionality. At $150 a year for a subscription license, it's still not as expensive as Visual Studio Pro's $680 price tag.
And across a team of 20 developers, I'm going to blow $10k on licenses (assuming I'm not getting a volume discount or maintaining a Silver/Gold partner status).
But there are other costs. For example, my team just upgraded to the latest version of MEB. To call it a cluster-fuck would be an understatement. All told across the team, between the upgrade itself, and issues with the new IDE we spent 200+ hours of labor. We took 1 guy off of his project and had him become the "MEB issue guy" and he spent 2 weeks just walking around helping other devs when they ran into issues with the IDE and build. Figure it costs the company on average $50+/hr for labor on my team. This one upgrade has cost us even more than the $10k in additional license costs I would have paid for VS2013.
And that's not even getting into the data side of the house. Our Oracle license cost an arm and a leg compared to our SQL Server licenses. And .Net apps have no problem what so ever connecting to any data source you have. If there is a connection driver for it, .Net can connect to it. SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Lotus, almost all of the NoSQL databases. And with Entity Framework I get the power of persistent objects without the hassle of crap fest of Hibernate.
Java is a great tool. And it blow MS/.Net out of the water for cross-platform development, no questions asked. But when it comes to LOB applications, working with the .Net stack is just so much easier.
Now, if you're getting into super high performance stuff, ditch Java and .Net and move back in to the realm of C. Although, I'd still rather use VS2013 for C development ;)
-Rick
"EVERYONE WHO SAYS ANYTHING RACIST IS A REPUBLICAN."
This is not an accurate statement.
It is however accurate to say that individuals that are racist are statistically more likely to vote republican.
I would like to believe that the majority of Republicans are not openly racist. But the fact that the majority of open racists are Republicans isn't really up for debate. I'd link a bunch of research studies that show it, but I'm on the work network ;)
In addition to the racist issue, there is also the privilege issue. And with lower minority participation, the Republican party definitely skews in favor of those with privilege.
-Rick
75 C = 167 F.
"17 degrees" in this case means a 30 degree F jump. And while 138 F is survivable for short durations with a lot of hydration, 167 F would not be anything to attempt to live in.
We're not talking about an air ship where you can take a leisurely stroll on the pool deck admiring the Venetian sunset. We're talking about a space ship that is suspended in a convection stove.
-Rick
"But law enforcement can get that history quite easily whether or not that have my phone" ... With a warrant.
-Rick
"Looking at your phone here it appears that you had a 5 minute call with the deceased on the night of the murder. Also, looking at your GPS log, it appears that you were in the vicinity of their apartment and then drove down some country roads near where we found the body."
Never mind the fact that you are a friend of the deceased, live a mile away from them, and take the country roads to avoid the congestion of the main drag at rush hour. You are now suspect #1.
Your phone's existence in today's digital age is in itself "important" when it comes to criminal investigations.
-Rick
Something has been taken from them in the same way that I have taken your ability to appear intelligent.
The only thing lost is theoretical profits. For which you can take someone to civil court over, prove damages, and get your money back.
I'm not opposed to the existence of IP in general. I am opposed to grossly vague patents, and copyrights that extend for more than 7-20 years. The point of IP is to drive the creation of inventions and art to further society. Not to create model within which people defend an idea from use for decades or prevent media from ever entering the public domain.
-Rick
Funny story, Dick Cheney and the like don't make decisions at this level.
When it comes to actual implementation projects with open bidding, there is a selection committee that handles the decision making. With scoring criteria based on measurable metrics.
Those selection committees contain a variety of stake holders. Typically you have someone from the brass, a couple of middle managers from the primary departments involved, an engineer, a business area expert, and management from IT.
Do you really think Cheney came up with an idea for a secondary email system to allow the Bush administration to get around the open records laws? No, it was a group of middle managers, brown nosers, political hacks, and someone from IT.
Now, there are serious issues when you wind up with no-bid contracts where senior political figures side step process and implement crap without regard for the law. But there is a lot of heat and pressure that comes along with those moves (as my own Governor has discovered).
But in other cases, IT leadership in state governments has a lot of pull on implementations. So yes, I do have the ability to shape the direction of our ATMS selection.
So if you want to do something about it, get off your pessimistic duff and get involved in government. If you don't trust others to do it right, then do it yourself!
-Rick
Negative, the originator still has the right to decide to distribute, or not.
What you have taken from them is a governmentally enforced monopoly of a thought.
-Rick
There is a way to fight back though.
I work for the State. I am involve in our "advanced traffic management system", part of which will include systems to interact with the new SRCR systems the feds are mandating on 2017 model year cars.
There are other people on this project who have proposed all manor of things like, "We should be able to turn off a car that is speeding excessively", and "We should be able to track a vehicles movements and tax them based on miles driven", which basically just hearing makes me feel like I need a shower.
But since I am involved in the process, I can push back on these things, I can point out that we shouldn't be tracking vehicles, that we should be tracking rotating GUIDs that make it virtually impossible to identify an individuals travel patterns should our system be compromised. That we shouldn't be enabling a system that would kill power steering and power breaks on a vehicle traveling 100 mph. That we should be focusing the ATMS efforts on systems that have proven trends to reduce accidents and prevent fatalities.
Believe it or not, your government is nothing more than a collection of citizens. And while politicians are generally the scum of the earth, there are many great state and federal employees who are doing their best to make the country a better place.
-Rick
Also an IT Manager. I try to keep my team capped out at 42 hours per week. Every once and a while we'll have some sort of emergency, but that's where comp time comes in.
As an IT manager, my week starts at 42 hours and grows from there. I'll be pushing 50 on this week by the time I leave for the night.
And my day today included interviews for an additional permanent BA/PM, 6 mainframe developers, and I was told by my boss that we were going to "load balance" from the C#/GSI team onto my Java team, that I would be getting at least 4 more projects, 2 FTEs, and probably half a dozen contractors.
So if there is any change to over time reqs, please let them include us!
-Rick
It's a mixed bag, salaries tend to be a bit lighter, but you get an honest to goodness pension. Depending on what State and what department, there are other goodies as well. Where I am I get 3 weeks of vacation (starting), 3.5 weeks of sick time (unused sick time carries over year to year and can be cashed out at retirement to pay for health insurance), 4.5 days of "personal time" each year, along with all of the state holidays. Makes the work-life balance a little more easily managed ;)
-Rick
To add to this, I work for the State these days. Coming from a private sector shrinkwrap software company where the median age was ~28 and the average tenure was ~2 years, to the State where the average age is probably closer to 35-40, and the average tenure is 10+ years, it was a huge shock.
There is good and bad that comes with it. I've seen more complacency with jobs/technology. People aren't interested in making a jump to newer technologies and patterns because they don't feel like they have to. But on the bright side, you get to skip out on the vast majority of the junior dev shop drama.
But if you're north of 35, look at your local state agencies, no one would blink an eye at a 40-something applying for a job. And certs, while useful for getting you through the resume screening, are dramatically less valuable than networking and having someone in the department that will recommend you for an interview.
-Rick
Canadians ;)
The way they described it was similar to how my German friends described it. After high school you have to do something; college, apprenticeship, peace corps/community service, or military. You can't just graduate and keep flipping burgers.
Every Canadian I know is either former Mounty or Army. There may be some nuance to it that I'm not aware of, or perhaps I am ill informed.
-Rick
To be fair though, both Canada and Switzerland have forced conscription. So all of their native able bodied gun owners have completely weapons handling training at the military level.
-Rick
Here's the thing, there are some forms of nerve damage that we currently don't have a cure for, there are far more that we don't even understand well enough to have an idea for a cure, and there are some that are so poorly understood, even significant swaths of the medical community doubt that they are real and accuse patients of being drug seekers.
For example: Fibromyalgia. It isn't a disease in it's own right, it is a classification of a set of symptoms that have not been able to be attached to a source. There are lots of theories and progress is being made in the field. But when the causes could be genetic, dietary, environmental, psychological, or even sleep related, any step forward could be helpful for some subset of FM sufferers, but leave the rest without aid.
If this approach can be made to work, it would mean that virtually all of the FM sufferers in the world could lead a normal life, while at the same time research continues on the underlying causes of their conditions.
When you wake up every day and have to see your spouse, your child, or your friends in agony because for no meaningful reason their brain decides that they should feel like every joint is coated with sandpaper, that every muscle is strained and torn, that every tendon is inflamed, then any option, even one that profits some greedy ass in a suit, becomes a miracle.
-Rick
"The "we could have a Chernobyl every year" argument is just stupid."
YES! Absolutely! That's what started this whole chain off.
-Rick
Uhg, this isn't knee jerk opposition to nuclear.
I'm not opposed to the continued use of nuclear power.
I'm in favor of moving to modern nuclear power facilities in place of the old ones. Yes, a 60 year old reactor can keep on chugging for another 20 years, but I'd much rather have a reactor designed with the safety of graphite or thorium running in their place for the next 80 years.
My opposition is not to nuclear power in general. My opposition is to saying that "we could have a Chernobyl every year..." without catastrophic repercussions.
-Rick
Of the resumes, numerous were of quality. Of the applicants, I still have 8 more on my interview list, but 2 appear to be of high quality so far.
If I am unable to fill the remaining positions from my current list, I have the other resumes from people who like to write novels to go through.
Similarly, for a slew of mainframe developers I received 60 some resumes, about the same for software PMs, high 40s for a handful of BI/ETL/DBA/Reporting positions.
Filling a couple of spots for a modern technology really isn't hard to find quality folks. Filling 9 mainframe spots is rough though.
-Rick
I don't care about killing >a fish. I care about killing off fisheries. I don't care about killing off some bacteria. I care about killing off significant swaths of bacteria that allow other more resilient strains to take over and negatively impact our agriculture industry.
This isn't me being some high and mighty tree hugger. This is me being concerned that there are dramatic indirect impacts on our environment that aren't included in a 'direct human casualties' metric.
Coal and oil are also highly concerning. This isn't a free pass for them either.
There are safer nuclear options, as mentioned in previous posts, thorium salt reactors seem like a huge step forward in the safety department. Even with traditional uranium reactors, as you point out, massive improvements have been designed over the last 50+ years. But we are still depending on reactors that were built in the 50's and 60's that had an original planned lifespan of 40 years, but keep getting extended.
-Rick
"Most of it's green. Like most northern areas if you take pictures at the right time you can get very dead looking terrain."
The problem isn't the green, the problem is the growing mass of dead tissue that is decomposing at an incredibly slow rate due to the lack of (or greatly reduced population of) bacteria, fungus, and molds that aid in the decomposing process.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
As stated previously, a single incident like Chernobyl can be isolated and mitigated. A 'Chernobyl event every year' on the other hand, can lead to a cascading effect where microbial life is so effected that the standard processes our ecologies depend on shift dramatically.
"I suggest you check your research. They've been testing/developing pebble bed reactors, but they've run into issues such that they're not replacements for rod type reactors yet."
Fair point, I was under the mistaken impression that France have taken a pair of pebble bed reactors live many years ago. That's what I get for trusting my recollection of a 30 year old news story ;)
"My point has always been not that nuclear is harmless, but that it's less harmful than the alternatives while still remaining affordable(minus political stuff)."
Nuclear without incident is less harmful. A single incident is still less harmful. But a sustained practice that leads to a significant incident each year can have a much larger impact by means of cascading ecological change.
And when you get back to the root issue, $/kW, we wind up in an interesting position. http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a... has a nice breakdown of what we can look forward to. And the question then is, if Nuclear is no cheaper than wind/hydro, and comes with dramatically more risk, why aren't we investing in more wind/hydro solutions instead?
-Rick