Being frugal is not a virtue. For the very rich it is often a disease.
Mr Buffet once said that he does tip waitresses because a 2$ tip with compound interests overs 25 years is a huge amount he just cannot let go.
Now compare this with Rockefeller, who on a yearly basis was giving away at least 1/3 of his profits and who was always carrying cash when he walked around town to give to the kids a dollar here and there so they could start an investment plan...
I agree on this one but I would say this is something recent.
A good friend of mine is working for some AIDS-related NGO in Africa and she told me that the Gates foundation is using the same nasty methods than made Microsoft what is is today, crushing the "competition" and using their big bucks to do some arm-twisting and whatnot so things are done their way. Knowing that Warren Buffet pledged to give billions to that charity (while refusing to put his own children in his will) is not good news for her.
However some insanely rich people did some good in the past. Think about Rockefeller, who had cut-throat business practices but also gave billions for science and education. The research centers he built and financed were responsible for eliminating a lot of diseases in the south of the USA (such as the ringworm). Also his money was crucial for the development of the University of Chicago. The Rockefeller foundation was created in a way that prevented interference from Rockefeller business and it was managed by consensus, so one single guy could not run the show. It is still active today.
In the case of Rockefeller it was possibly a religious thing; for many baptists it is a virtue and a lifestyle to make a lot of money, to save every cent, and to share a large part of this money with the needy. As for Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, seeing how they gave nothing until very recently, one could wonder if they are not simply trying to buy themselves a good name or a good conscience.
The best purchase I ever made was a Dell V13, which, including an upgraded SSD drive, cost me around 500$. It is about the size of a MacBook Air but it still feel very sturdy, actually much more than my Dell Inspiron (which is heavy and not so great).
I have bigger and stronger machines but the V13 is so light and well-built that it is the one I use most of the time at home, and it's the one I carry when I travel. It is so small I don't even need to bring a laptop case, I simply put it in the side pocket of my carry-on luggage.
Dell products are usually not top of the line, but they offer a lot for a low price tag. I don't think any PC manufacturer can offer a service as good as Apple (with the Apple Stores and friendly staff) but Dell is pretty good.
It might be a good technical solution, unfortunately the price of a retail Windows license is higher than the price of a cheap laptop with an OEM license of Windows included. Which cannot be transfered to another piece of equipment. So installing Windows on this old laptop would be expensive and suboptimal.
An OEM license is tied specifically to one piece of equipment and the license is granted by Microsoft (not the distributor). You can get an OEM cd to replace a damaged or lost media but it does not come with a license.
> Apple is kicking the crap out of every manufacture on price Wrong.
> and you call them greedy? Correct.
> No one can touch Apple's price points because the factories don't yet exist.
This is above and beyond absurd. If someone says: Apple chinese workers commit suicide, then fanboys go apeshit and say: they use the same factories as every other manufacturers. But when you talk about price, then fanboys go apeshit and say that Apple has factories that other have no access to.
Now here is a bit of reality: Apple products ARE expensive. Often the same crap will cost twice as much if it's white and it has an apple logo on it. So keep talking about brand image, alleged innovation and quality, but as far as price go nobody needs to study economics to see that Apple stuff is not cheap.
> The man unfriended his first wife on the social network before marrying his second wife, but unsurprisingly that wasn't enough
Reminds me of an episode in The Office where Michael Scott screams "I declare bankruptcy"... The accountant had to tell him that it was not enough to just say it.
> So get off your high horse already, oh and go fuck yourself.
Hugely impressing to see a self-professed humanitarian telling people to go f*ck themselves. You remind me of Jesus in the temple losing his shit with all those nasty merchants. (Had to be there, I guess).
This being said, I am not mad at you. I understand that after spending so much money on overpriced Apple sweatshop-built cancer machines it must be distressing to look at reality, so I would guess this whole fanatism and rudeness of yours is some kind of subconscious protection mechanism. Maybe you could buy a book on this topic (from the Apple Store of course, then Steve Jobs can cash in another 30% cut from Amazon that hopefully he will use to build more nets so his affordable Chinese workers stop dying when they jump in despair from the roof of his sweatshops).
It's just like SSL certificates. You can visit a website using SSL but your browser will (should) tell you if the certificate is not valid. Invalid or missing certificate won't prevent you from using the website but you get to choose and to make it work you need a cross-browser standard.
The problem with current ad-blocking technologies is that there is no definitive authority on what should/could be blocked or how it should be blocked, and many plugins will block everything. All that does is hurting website owners that need ad revenue.
Ads are not a bad thing; if you read a specialized trade magazine you probably are interested by the ads because they usually are relevant to the purpose of the magazine. The problem is generic ads that are not really relevant to whatever website they are displayed on; they are basically like spam that marketing people still use because they are cost-effective. Now if there was a way to filter them out, they would become less attractive and advertising money would be better spent on ads targeted to people that will read them.
This does not seem possible, however remember how crazy was the domain name trade before Google; it was so hard to gain some visibility on the internet that people were paying insane amounts of money to get catchy domain names. Now with Google you can have a lousy domain name, you could even host your stuff on Geocities if it still existed and people could find you easily if your content is somehow relevant. The same kind of paradigm shift is now required with ads, and I believe this can be done by proper tagging.
Ad tracking reminds me of scanning a printout. It is suboptimal and error-prone.
Because dogs have a hard time sniffing explosives such as Semtex, the manufacturers are legally bound to inject a chemical in the explosive so the dogs can detect them. I know the internets cannot be tamed like explosive manufacturers, but if some ad tagging standard was published by the W3C or some other organization, real, efficient, cross-platform ad-blocking could happen.
Until then, ad tracking is an amazing field for data-mining enthusiasts, but not much more.
> Don't let any of that get in the way of a good Apple bash though.
No worries, I'll do my best, until everybody watching the "IBM is Big Brother" video realize which one of IBM or Apple is really a bunch of totalitarian buffoons.
> I hear Fox News are hiring, btw. With your inability to look up facts, you're assured of the job.
Of course Fox News is pure evil and/or plain stupid, just like everything you don't like or agree with. And since you don't agree with me, I'm definitely "one of them". Life is so simple when people are with us or against us (reminds me of a former President).
> it is pretty counter productive if you don't educate yourself enough to know you're attacking Apple on the one criteria where they are clearly ahead of the rest of the industry
Obviously by "educating" you mean reading Apple's PR material, which dogmatically establish the company as "ahead of the rest of the industry" in all regards. A bit rich, but nothing those phonies will do can surprise me since I saw them using Einstein's photo on their "Think Different" posters... which was totally b-s as E=MC2 could never have been discovered by using Photoshop or any of the other 6 software available on a Mac (unless you also count the zillions of iPhone Apps, or as I cheerfully call them "half-baked Objective-C regurgitations of cross-platform web pages").
> If you really want to help you should buy a Mac and write to all the other major computer companies and tell them you did so because they are not conducting and openly publishing regular audits of their suppliers with details of abuses
You really made my day with this one. Yes, I should definitely buy overpriced white shiny vestiges of a 2008-ish fad from a monopoly-driven company that does not see its huge market capitalization as an incentive to pay its Chinese workers more than 51 cents an hour. That would be a bold and convincing statements that would definitely make all those non-industry leaders such as Dell or HP shake in their blood-soaked boots.
Now go cleanup the oily screen on your iPad because I think you don't see reality as it is (but be cautious while you clean your flash-challenged toy, you don't want to get chemical poisoning like those Chinese workers that are so lucky to work on Apple's assembly lines)
> one made by a company whose business model isn't razor-thin margins and cheap-as-possible components, and slipshod engineering
I'm sure the Chinese workers in Apple sweatshops appreciate the benefits of working for a company whose business model is so awesome. And by "Chinese workers" I mean those that did not commit suicide.
Work in peace with your fancy white machine, knowing that the guy who bolted the keyboard is now swimming in cash with potential earnings of up to 368$ a month (that surely will help him recover from its chemical poisoning).
The Air Force does not want classified documents on unclassified computers so now they have to block access to websites where classified documents are available. It actually makes a lot of sense from the Air Force perspective.
What does not make sense is that some buffoon is publishing stolen classified documents (while himself using encrypted communication with his cronies) and is receiving lots and lots of sympathy for his brave actions aimed at embarrassing democratic countries (not much from North Korea or Libya, but it's probably just a coincidence).
Now let's see if Wikileaks will publish the details of the movie deal that Assante will get when this is all over. Seriously, this guy is a bigger joke than Mafiaboy.
That is, until your company is using Gmail and you are the one in charge of IT. Even when you pay Google instead of using the free service, frequent outages of a few minutes are excluded from Gmail SLA (and they happen often!) and as the IT guy you end up being overwhelmed by angry people asking you what is going on... while having no control at all, except refreshing a blog page on some Google server to see if there is more info regarding the duration of the outage.
Gmail is ok for a small business that does not rely on email, but the support model is not ready for bigger environments.
> Never met a software architect that went beyond upgrading the server rack or adding yet more virual machines to compensate for bad design decisions (made by the previous sw architects).
Well maybe you met people that did some hardware upgrade or created virtual machines, but those people were not software architect. They would be called "sysadmins" or something like that, perhaps with a "Senior" or "Team Lead of" prefix. So you either misread their business card or you worked in a company where people picked job titles from a box of Cap'N Crunch.
> You don't need "software architects". You just need a small number of developers who can actually code
Clearly you do not have a lot of experience in big environments, where people come and go because the workload is not the same all the time. In that type of workplace, where contractors are part of the landscape, design patterns and architecture orientations are a must, otherwise each time you bring in someone new you go again all over the same sterile discussions about PHP Vs Perl, Web Vs Fat client, Plain DAL Vs ORM, and whatnot. Not having a clear set of design patterns will lead to a mess, quick.
Faced with this problem, typical core developers usually come up with overkill rules, such as very detailed naming conventions and flowerbox documentation requirements, and quickly you end up with reams of paper wasted and no improvement. Then someone brings up an idea of using a common library, and from there it's a sure path to Yet Another Framework.
Software architecture is a trade, a specialized one, and maybe small companies can't afford one (usually the same that won't pay for a good DBA) but it does not mean there is no need for this skillset. Being able to establish efficient guidelines and avoiding the pitfalls of frameworks and other common mistakes requires a specific expertise.
> and that are using a sufficiently-expressive language to not need "design patterns".
When you work on relatively complex systems, design patterns are not bound to the programming language, especially since the said system can require more than one language. And even if you are lucky enough to work on a software solution that can be done with a single language, there are usually more than one way to do something - so you still need design patterns.
> I know, I know. You'll claim it's difficult to find developers like that. In reality, it's not. You just have to offer them a good salary. Sure, you could buy 450 shitty Indian developers with the same salary as three or four good developers, but those three or four developers will be tens of thousands of times more productive than your shitty Indian developers.
I don't agree. Remember a few years ago when everything was about code generators and whatnot? I remember being amazed by JBuilder and TogetherJ where all I needed to do was draw a class diagram in UML, and automagically the stubs were created in the java source files.
Well guess what: reality won (again) and the cheapest and more efficient code generator there is Southeast Asia. At some point it is more cost-effective to have a good analyst write specific requirements (even maybe executable requirements) and have the code done somewhere in India or China. Sounds silly, but it beats the shit out of all those scaffolding solutions. Does it mean you can outsource everything? Of course not, but don't underestimate the economics of expandable code monkeying.
It's just like the Y2K madness. With mainframe and proprietary locked code that could not be updated in time, one of my biggest customer had a big team of engineers working around the clock to find a way to move data out of the mainframe before the crash. And the most efficient solution they came up with was "Marge Protocol": bring in shitloads of data-entry clerks to read on one machine and type on the other one. Did the job pretty well. Cheap labor 1, software engineering 0.
> Does this mean MS is killing the Azure platform?
It would surprise me. Azure is not that great so far, but recently I had to deploy an application and the money that my client saved by using SQL Azure instead of traditional hosting is huge.
Same goes with BPOS (Exchange online and other stuff, offered by MSFT). It's only about 5$ a month per 25GB inbox to have Exchange, connected to your own Windows Domain. For people who make the decision to go with Exchange this is pretty competitive. No more backups, no more DR, no more administration mistakes or forgotten critical patches. Of course there is always the alternatives, such as Google or Linux hosting, but some business are not ready to let go of Exchange, and with the features that they keep adding (such as voicemail integration) very often the business case to switch is just not there.
> Instead of developing useful software products that improve the efficiency of their customers, such companies spins their wheels developing "frameworks"
To the contrary, most decent software architects will prevent the idle developers from writing YAF.
> that are rife with "patterns", "inversion of control", "service-oriented architectures", "clouds", and all sorts of other nonsense.
I heard that kind of statement a few years ago... where was it... oh yeah I remember, it was the mainframe guy at his retirement party, he was also talking about the good ol' days of CICS and hierarchical databases, and how nobody needs a GUI, textmode 80x25 was optimal.
A good software architect is someone with experience that will define the orientations and overview the selected design patterns; as such he is instrumental in improving the quality and avoiding useless complexity.
I agree with you, however as far as funding is concerned when you do an actual TCO the answer might not be that simple. Hardware evergreening, technical support and new features (such as Managed Service Accounts or built-in virtualization) are all important elements that must be part of the business case.
This being said, one of my client has 500+ workstations still running Windows 2000 and the company is making money. As a side benefit: having Internet Explorer 5 as the target intranet browser prevents software developers from trying the bleeding edge stuff and to stick to proven stuff.
Here in Canada my ISP used to have no cap for 75$/month. Then it switched to 100GB with a maximum penalty of 30$ for unlimited extra GBs, so virtually unlimited was 105$/month. Then the maximum penalty was raised to 50$, so my bill went up to 125$/month.
It was not enough for them. Now there is no limit for the penalty (8$ for each extra GB) but I have the wonderful option of "purchasing" a bundle: 12$ for 30 more GB.
Basically I end up paying more for less every year, and there is no alternative, the telco is even more expensive. There used to be cheap unlimited DSL providers but the telco (which owns the phone line) has put a cap on their lease so the speed is lousy.
So I can get screwed by the cable company or get screwed by the phone company.
> there's enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need to be exploring the boundary conditions -- asking ourselves when is it good for users, and when is it bad, to reveal their personal information
For some reason I suspect that this guy would not be so cool about "giving up some privacy" if the proposition came from the Department of Homeland Security.
Seriously, it's a dangerous path and being edgy, 3.0 and Apple-ish does not make it right.
Slashdot Mirror
Being frugal is not a virtue. For the very rich it is often a disease.
Mr Buffet once said that he does tip waitresses because a 2$ tip with compound interests overs 25 years is a huge amount he just cannot let go.
Now compare this with Rockefeller, who on a yearly basis was giving away at least 1/3 of his profits and who was always carrying cash when he walked around town to give to the kids a dollar here and there so they could start an investment plan...
> Their "charity" is a sneaky form of hubris.
I agree on this one but I would say this is something recent.
A good friend of mine is working for some AIDS-related NGO in Africa and she told me that the Gates foundation is using the same nasty methods than made Microsoft what is is today, crushing the "competition" and using their big bucks to do some arm-twisting and whatnot so things are done their way. Knowing that Warren Buffet pledged to give billions to that charity (while refusing to put his own children in his will) is not good news for her.
However some insanely rich people did some good in the past. Think about Rockefeller, who had cut-throat business practices but also gave billions for science and education. The research centers he built and financed were responsible for eliminating a lot of diseases in the south of the USA (such as the ringworm). Also his money was crucial for the development of the University of Chicago. The Rockefeller foundation was created in a way that prevented interference from Rockefeller business and it was managed by consensus, so one single guy could not run the show. It is still active today.
In the case of Rockefeller it was possibly a religious thing; for many baptists it is a virtue and a lifestyle to make a lot of money, to save every cent, and to share a large part of this money with the needy. As for Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, seeing how they gave nothing until very recently, one could wonder if they are not simply trying to buy themselves a good name or a good conscience.
The best purchase I ever made was a Dell V13, which, including an upgraded SSD drive, cost me around 500$. It is about the size of a MacBook Air but it still feel very sturdy, actually much more than my Dell Inspiron (which is heavy and not so great).
I have bigger and stronger machines but the V13 is so light and well-built that it is the one I use most of the time at home, and it's the one I carry when I travel. It is so small I don't even need to bring a laptop case, I simply put it in the side pocket of my carry-on luggage.
Dell products are usually not top of the line, but they offer a lot for a low price tag. I don't think any PC manufacturer can offer a service as good as Apple (with the Apple Stores and friendly staff) but Dell is pretty good.
It might be a good technical solution, unfortunately the price of a retail Windows license is higher than the price of a cheap laptop with an OEM license of Windows included. Which cannot be transfered to another piece of equipment. So installing Windows on this old laptop would be expensive and suboptimal.
An OEM license is tied specifically to one piece of equipment and the license is granted by Microsoft (not the distributor). You can get an OEM cd to replace a damaged or lost media but it does not come with a license.
> Apple is kicking the crap out of every manufacture on price
Wrong.
> and you call them greedy?
Correct.
> No one can touch Apple's price points because the factories don't yet exist.
This is above and beyond absurd. If someone says: Apple chinese workers commit suicide, then fanboys go apeshit and say: they use the same factories as every other manufacturers. But when you talk about price, then fanboys go apeshit and say that Apple has factories that other have no access to.
Now here is a bit of reality: Apple products ARE expensive. Often the same crap will cost twice as much if it's white and it has an apple logo on it. So keep talking about brand image, alleged innovation and quality, but as far as price go nobody needs to study economics to see that Apple stuff is not cheap.
> The man unfriended his first wife on the social network before marrying his second wife, but unsurprisingly that wasn't enough
Reminds me of an episode in The Office where Michael Scott screams "I declare bankruptcy"... The accountant had to tell him that it was not enough to just say it.
> So get off your high horse already, oh and go fuck yourself.
Hugely impressing to see a self-professed humanitarian telling people to go f*ck themselves. You remind me of Jesus in the temple losing his shit with all those nasty merchants. (Had to be there, I guess).
This being said, I am not mad at you. I understand that after spending so much money on overpriced Apple sweatshop-built cancer machines it must be distressing to look at reality, so I would guess this whole fanatism and rudeness of yours is some kind of subconscious protection mechanism. Maybe you could buy a book on this topic (from the Apple Store of course, then Steve Jobs can cash in another 30% cut from Amazon that hopefully he will use to build more nets so his affordable Chinese workers stop dying when they jump in despair from the roof of his sweatshops).
It's just like SSL certificates. You can visit a website using SSL but your browser will (should) tell you if the certificate is not valid. Invalid or missing certificate won't prevent you from using the website but you get to choose and to make it work you need a cross-browser standard.
The problem with current ad-blocking technologies is that there is no definitive authority on what should/could be blocked or how it should be blocked, and many plugins will block everything. All that does is hurting website owners that need ad revenue.
Ads are not a bad thing; if you read a specialized trade magazine you probably are interested by the ads because they usually are relevant to the purpose of the magazine. The problem is generic ads that are not really relevant to whatever website they are displayed on; they are basically like spam that marketing people still use because they are cost-effective. Now if there was a way to filter them out, they would become less attractive and advertising money would be better spent on ads targeted to people that will read them.
This does not seem possible, however remember how crazy was the domain name trade before Google; it was so hard to gain some visibility on the internet that people were paying insane amounts of money to get catchy domain names. Now with Google you can have a lousy domain name, you could even host your stuff on Geocities if it still existed and people could find you easily if your content is somehow relevant. The same kind of paradigm shift is now required with ads, and I believe this can be done by proper tagging.
Ad tracking reminds me of scanning a printout. It is suboptimal and error-prone.
Because dogs have a hard time sniffing explosives such as Semtex, the manufacturers are legally bound to inject a chemical in the explosive so the dogs can detect them. I know the internets cannot be tamed like explosive manufacturers, but if some ad tagging standard was published by the W3C or some other organization, real, efficient, cross-platform ad-blocking could happen.
Until then, ad tracking is an amazing field for data-mining enthusiasts, but not much more.
> Don't let any of that get in the way of a good Apple bash though.
No worries, I'll do my best, until everybody watching the "IBM is Big Brother" video realize which one of IBM or Apple is really a bunch of totalitarian buffoons.
> I hear Fox News are hiring, btw. With your inability to look up facts, you're assured of the job.
Of course Fox News is pure evil and/or plain stupid, just like everything you don't like or agree with. And since you don't agree with me, I'm definitely "one of them". Life is so simple when people are with us or against us (reminds me of a former President).
> it is pretty counter productive if you don't educate yourself enough to know you're attacking Apple on the one criteria where they are clearly ahead of the rest of the industry
Obviously by "educating" you mean reading Apple's PR material, which dogmatically establish the company as "ahead of the rest of the industry" in all regards. A bit rich, but nothing those phonies will do can surprise me since I saw them using Einstein's photo on their "Think Different" posters... which was totally b-s as E=MC2 could never have been discovered by using Photoshop or any of the other 6 software available on a Mac (unless you also count the zillions of iPhone Apps, or as I cheerfully call them "half-baked Objective-C regurgitations of cross-platform web pages").
> If you really want to help you should buy a Mac and write to all the other major computer companies and tell them you did so because they are not conducting and openly publishing regular audits of their suppliers with details of abuses
You really made my day with this one. Yes, I should definitely buy overpriced white shiny vestiges of a 2008-ish fad from a monopoly-driven company that does not see its huge market capitalization as an incentive to pay its Chinese workers more than 51 cents an hour. That would be a bold and convincing statements that would definitely make all those non-industry leaders such as Dell or HP shake in their blood-soaked boots.
Now go cleanup the oily screen on your iPad because I think you don't see reality as it is (but be cautious while you clean your flash-challenged toy, you don't want to get chemical poisoning like those Chinese workers that are so lucky to work on Apple's assembly lines)
> one made by a company whose business model isn't razor-thin margins and cheap-as-possible components, and slipshod engineering
I'm sure the Chinese workers in Apple sweatshops appreciate the benefits of working for a company whose business model is so awesome. And by "Chinese workers" I mean those that did not commit suicide.
Work in peace with your fancy white machine, knowing that the guy who bolted the keyboard is now swimming in cash with potential earnings of up to 368$ a month (that surely will help him recover from its chemical poisoning).
The Air Force does not want classified documents on unclassified computers so now they have to block access to websites where classified documents are available. It actually makes a lot of sense from the Air Force perspective.
What does not make sense is that some buffoon is publishing stolen classified documents (while himself using encrypted communication with his cronies) and is receiving lots and lots of sympathy for his brave actions aimed at embarrassing democratic countries (not much from North Korea or Libya, but it's probably just a coincidence).
Now let's see if Wikileaks will publish the details of the movie deal that Assante will get when this is all over. Seriously, this guy is a bigger joke than Mafiaboy.
> They also charge for that feature.
> I am sure for enough money google could do the same.
Can't argue with this. If Google did what Microsoft is doing, they would definitely not do the opposite.
> Life is easy with Gmail.
That is, until your company is using Gmail and you are the one in charge of IT. Even when you pay Google instead of using the free service, frequent outages of a few minutes are excluded from Gmail SLA (and they happen often!) and as the IT guy you end up being overwhelmed by angry people asking you what is going on... while having no control at all, except refreshing a blog page on some Google server to see if there is more info regarding the duration of the outage.
Gmail is ok for a small business that does not rely on email, but the support model is not ready for bigger environments.
> Never met a software architect that went beyond upgrading the server rack or adding yet more virual machines to compensate for bad design decisions (made by the previous sw architects).
Well maybe you met people that did some hardware upgrade or created virtual machines, but those people were not software architect. They would be called "sysadmins" or something like that, perhaps with a "Senior" or "Team Lead of" prefix. So you either misread their business card or you worked in a company where people picked job titles from a box of Cap'N Crunch.
"Confusion will be my epitaph"
-King Crimson
> You don't need "software architects". You just need a small number of developers who can actually code
Clearly you do not have a lot of experience in big environments, where people come and go because the workload is not the same all the time. In that type of workplace, where contractors are part of the landscape, design patterns and architecture orientations are a must, otherwise each time you bring in someone new you go again all over the same sterile discussions about PHP Vs Perl, Web Vs Fat client, Plain DAL Vs ORM, and whatnot. Not having a clear set of design patterns will lead to a mess, quick.
Faced with this problem, typical core developers usually come up with overkill rules, such as very detailed naming conventions and flowerbox documentation requirements, and quickly you end up with reams of paper wasted and no improvement. Then someone brings up an idea of using a common library, and from there it's a sure path to Yet Another Framework.
Software architecture is a trade, a specialized one, and maybe small companies can't afford one (usually the same that won't pay for a good DBA) but it does not mean there is no need for this skillset. Being able to establish efficient guidelines and avoiding the pitfalls of frameworks and other common mistakes requires a specific expertise.
> and that are using a sufficiently-expressive language to not need "design patterns".
When you work on relatively complex systems, design patterns are not bound to the programming language, especially since the said system can require more than one language. And even if you are lucky enough to work on a software solution that can be done with a single language, there are usually more than one way to do something - so you still need design patterns.
> I know, I know. You'll claim it's difficult to find developers like that. In reality, it's not. You just have to offer them a good salary. Sure, you could buy 450 shitty Indian developers with the same salary as three or four good developers, but those three or four developers will be tens of thousands of times more productive than your shitty Indian developers.
I don't agree. Remember a few years ago when everything was about code generators and whatnot? I remember being amazed by JBuilder and TogetherJ where all I needed to do was draw a class diagram in UML, and automagically the stubs were created in the java source files.
Well guess what: reality won (again) and the cheapest and more efficient code generator there is Southeast Asia. At some point it is more cost-effective to have a good analyst write specific requirements (even maybe executable requirements) and have the code done somewhere in India or China. Sounds silly, but it beats the shit out of all those scaffolding solutions. Does it mean you can outsource everything? Of course not, but don't underestimate the economics of expandable code monkeying.
It's just like the Y2K madness. With mainframe and proprietary locked code that could not be updated in time, one of my biggest customer had a big team of engineers working around the clock to find a way to move data out of the mainframe before the crash. And the most efficient solution they came up with was "Marge Protocol": bring in shitloads of data-entry clerks to read on one machine and type on the other one. Did the job pretty well. Cheap labor 1, software engineering 0.
> Does this mean MS is killing the Azure platform?
It would surprise me. Azure is not that great so far, but recently I had to deploy an application and the money that my client saved by using SQL Azure instead of traditional hosting is huge.
Same goes with BPOS (Exchange online and other stuff, offered by MSFT). It's only about 5$ a month per 25GB inbox to have Exchange, connected to your own Windows Domain. For people who make the decision to go with Exchange this is pretty competitive. No more backups, no more DR, no more administration mistakes or forgotten critical patches. Of course there is always the alternatives, such as Google or Linux hosting, but some business are not ready to let go of Exchange, and with the features that they keep adding (such as voicemail integration) very often the business case to switch is just not there.
> Instead of developing useful software products that improve the efficiency of their customers, such companies spins their wheels developing "frameworks"
To the contrary, most decent software architects will prevent the idle developers from writing YAF.
> that are rife with "patterns", "inversion of control", "service-oriented architectures", "clouds", and all sorts of other nonsense.
I heard that kind of statement a few years ago... where was it... oh yeah I remember, it was the mainframe guy at his retirement party, he was also talking about the good ol' days of CICS and hierarchical databases, and how nobody needs a GUI, textmode 80x25 was optimal.
A good software architect is someone with experience that will define the orientations and overview the selected design patterns; as such he is instrumental in improving the quality and avoiding useless complexity.
I agree with you, however as far as funding is concerned when you do an actual TCO the answer might not be that simple. Hardware evergreening, technical support and new features (such as Managed Service Accounts or built-in virtualization) are all important elements that must be part of the business case.
This being said, one of my client has 500+ workstations still running Windows 2000 and the company is making money. As a side benefit: having Internet Explorer 5 as the target intranet browser prevents software developers from trying the bleeding edge stuff and to stick to proven stuff.
Maybe archive.org should start to offer its content on tape backup sent with Fedex. Might end up cheaper than my ISP.
I can picture the ads: "Weekly internet: 7$, delivered with a smile".
Here in Canada my ISP used to have no cap for 75$/month. Then it switched to 100GB with a maximum penalty of 30$ for unlimited extra GBs, so virtually unlimited was 105$/month. Then the maximum penalty was raised to 50$, so my bill went up to 125$/month.
It was not enough for them. Now there is no limit for the penalty (8$ for each extra GB) but I have the wonderful option of "purchasing" a bundle: 12$ for 30 more GB.
Basically I end up paying more for less every year, and there is no alternative, the telco is even more expensive. There used to be cheap unlimited DSL providers but the telco (which owns the phone line) has put a cap on their lease so the speed is lousy.
So I can get screwed by the cable company or get screwed by the phone company.
> This is funny. Anyone that can't see that is suffering from a severe lack of humanity
This might be funny to some people, but is really Slashdot the place to post that kind of content?
There is youtube and the cheezburger network for that.
> there's enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need to be exploring the boundary conditions -- asking ourselves when is it good for users, and when is it bad, to reveal their personal information
For some reason I suspect that this guy would not be so cool about "giving up some privacy" if the proposition came from the Department of Homeland Security.
Seriously, it's a dangerous path and being edgy, 3.0 and Apple-ish does not make it right.