I'm forced to use IE8 at the office (thin client crap for internet access) and already there are some sites I cannot use, and others that degrade to basic versions. The sooner this happens the better IMO - the more sites that do not work in IE8 the faster my IT department will be forced to realise that they have to upgrade from Win2003 server and/or install a different browser. Oh, and that really, Internet Explorer isn't "secure" just because it offers an illusion of security lockdown...
This kind of setup is increasingly common here in the UK, except the pedestrian crossings are implemented with lights too. This comes as a shock when first implemented, followed by a feeling of anger at the stupidity and the risk it will put pedestrians under, followed by annoyance - but I've not heard of an accident involving a pedestrian on these junctions here, only involving cars rear-ending other cars because they weren't concentrating well enough or were driving too fast. That said bridges and subways are more inconvenience to pedestrians, not to mention more expensive.
These improvements often also go hand in hand with alterations to introduce spiral lanes on the roundabouts to assist the flow of traffic. Except that a lot of people completely ignore them (through ignorance, stupidity, bloody mindedness or "cos that's what I've done for the last 60 years") often making things more confusing and for people to concentrate a few yards ahead rather than brakingDistance++ ahead too.
In the UK a pedestrian has right of way (highway code rule 108 I think) so I'm not sure your comment about responsibility is correct. Perhaps pedestrians in the UK are more used to idiotic driving (we are king of chav culture, boy racers, and breaking the speed limits after all) are more conscientious? That said, few pedestrians realise one has to place a foot on a zebra crossing before the traffic has an obligation to stop, so maybe not!
Incidentally, my short commute to work (7 miles) involves 9 roundabouts and 5 sets of traffic lights. Fortunately none of them have crossings on the exits.
Mod parent up. It really sucks to take any technical notes on an iPad. Hell, it sucks for taking notes period - whether thats using an onscreen keyboard, a drawing app and a stylus, or whatever. A laptop is better, but is far from adequate.
The best lecturers I've had (admittedly this was last century, before tablets were commonplace but still totally impractical for notes) gave the class partial notes for the class. Nobody had to worry about writing the boiler plate stuff - instead they could concentrate on the topic and start to understand it. The lecturer would then ask someone in the lecture what the blanks should be - and we all filled in the important bits (so we got to write it down to help reinforce it, but also got a decent amount of time to THINK rather than writing as fast as we could, missing the important bits, and spending hours trying to catch up. I learnt a LOT in that style of lecture.
However, I do wish that we had permission to record the audio in lectures, and that tech such as livescribe pen existed back then! (on top of the boilerplate notes)
VS.NET has "Express" editions that are free to download and use (including for commercial use) and are quite powerful, so I'm not sure the "pay pay pay" argument holds up unless you mean development costs. I've used VS Express to develop COM components to bridge ESRI ArcGIS applications with other applications (eg in Java), and they are relatively powerful (certainly as much as VB6 was).
Can you detail the things that don't work? I'm curious, and it might provide a catalyst for my friend to rewrite his app.
I also run XP in a VM occasionally, but I (and my friend) would rather be working on Windows 7 (caveat: I use Macs and Linux on my machines and have Windows 7 in a VM) - mainly because the app connects to remote database servers over the Internet. While I could also host the database on the VM and avoid that, I can't have any real data in there for testing due to regulatory constraints. I suppose we'll have to host the VM at the client site and RDP into it. Meh.
In this case, the result was the organisation stayed on Windows 2000 for nearly a year after its end of life, with an eventual minor upgrade to Windows XP fairly recently. Windows 7 is nowhere near ready to being rolled out.
Your comment about webapps is irrelevant. Yes, many companies have done this. The GP and my friend have not, so I was asking for the strategy for maintaining that code when (supposedly) the IDE doesn't run properly on Windows 7, but from the other posts this might not be the case. In any case, web applications were also frequently written in VB classic and many still have not been migrated to.NET or other things yet.
I agree with your assessment of Microsoft development technology - I attempt to stay well clear of it. While I'll probably learn Metro (purely so its on my CV for contract work), I won't be building any of my own projects with it...
I thought there were major compatibility problems with the VS98/VB6 IDE on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (caveat: I heard this from a large desktop consultancy that were brought in to provide new systems for a large organisation - I haven't validated it myself). If so, won't this stop you developing once XP is unsupported, unless you want to be developing using an un-patched OS? I'm genuinely interested in your strategy going forward, as a friend maintains a VB6 application that is going to be a nightmare to port to VB.NET, so it might as well be rewritten in something else.
You only get 4 years before you're expected to go off and be able to work on any reasonable system.
My attitude was that I had 4 years to learn enough to be in a position where I could start to learn how to work on a reasonable system. 12 years on and I still feel like a rookie.
Maybe I should just give up and pick grapes instead?
I have owned both (and used a number of ICS devices) and feel far more comfortable in iOS. Maybe that is familiarity, but most of it is fluidity. I have to use crappy Windows and Linux environments all day. Something that feels more fluid, consistent, and integrated is most welcome when I finish work and am reunited with my mobile devices.
I actually find it works quite well (caveat: I have a 1920x1080 and 1280x1200 monitor side by side at work).. You can have two source files open side by side just fine along with other auxiliary views. Sure, 1920x1200 would be nice, but its ok.
That said, I've got a 2048x1152 monitor at home, and the extra height comes in useful from time to time, Not sure I could justify spending another 300 quid for an extra 48 pixels though.
The iPhone. The summary even explains that... The article and video demonstrate even more. It loads alternative firmware onto the device and uses that to crack the passcode stored on the device. Most of the time is spent loading the code onto the device, not cracking the code.
I wonder how well it works with a complex iPhone passcode though (if at all?) - I confess to not watching all of the video or reading the article properly.
Yeah! Err. Oh yeah. Down with DC! Except the single AC supply into the building is already a single point of failure. There is no reason you can't have all the redundancy you have with AC phases / UPS / circuits, and have n redundant efficient PSUs powering m-racks, whatever works most efficiently.
The vulnerability is in the protocol, not that it is a remote GUI protocol. The fact it is a gui protocol is moot in this case - the attack allows someone (using a terminal, a gui, whatever) to send crafted packets to the RDP service (note, service) on a Windows machine that may allow them to run arbitrary code remotely, in just the same way that someone (using a terminal, a gui, whatever - see the consistency here?) to send crafted packets to XYZ service (note service) on a Linux/BSD/whatever machine that may allow them to run arbitrary code remotely.
The nice thing with this attack failed attempts supposedly result in a BSOD too:-)
My last employer, a UK civil service dept, sent me (and various colleagues) to Exeter University and Oxford University for data-mining / statistics / pattern recognition courses. They sent me on Oracle University courses. They sent me to conferences. They sent me on high quality developer courses hosted on the premises by skilled professionals, with other similarly minded candidates - I learnt a lot.
While Quark->InDesign training might have been offered to publishers internally, it certainly wouldn't have been offered to "technical" staff. Training was proportionate to their role.
I left because for numerous reasons - but partly because they offered 30-50% less than local market rates, and much less than working as a contractor for them. I've learnt far more since I've been in the real world too (a large part of this is because I no longer have to use the productivity sap known as "ClearCase").
In response to your last question: there are plenty of trainers offering high quality training. They just tend to offer it in highly specialised subjects at high cost.
Those generalisations work both ways: I wouldn't want most SQL developers to go near real programming languages. To be fair, I probably wouldn't want them to go near the SQL queries either, though.
You miss out the key fact that they need people with the skills that the training would provide. This means they either need to recruit them, outsource, or do a bodge job. The latter two options seem to be the preference.
Outsourcing is an attempt at managing costs which nearly always increases overall cost to the business - have a look at the John Seddon "Rethinking IT" talk for a reasoned rant about this.
Bodging is the only other option. The IT industry (in this I include IT, software development, networking) really likes bodges. It helps them manage their costs. Their managers are happy. Then it all goes wrong and costs more than it would have done to do it properly in the first place. Managing costs. Sigh.
The summary also makes the point that staff are receiving training that isn't relevant to their job. This seems like the biggest issue - waste money on fluffy business/management crap (that the managers should be doing rather than delegating down to their tech staff) rather than spending money on useful training that the staff would actually use to be more productive.
Of course, the department that came up with the idea of making the rest of the staff do the fluffy business/management crap as well as their own jobs (HR, bid centres, whatever) is doing great - they've increased their productivity, decreased their costs, and probably reduced their staff numbers. In terms of the bigger system (the entire company) this has just increased the costs for the business however. But that's fine - the targets look great!
The sooner businesses stop trying to "specialise" and "outsource" (whether that means out of the company or within it) as a means to manage costs (why else do you outsource?) the better. They should be concentrating on value, wherever that may be gained. Managing costs seems to always result in costs going upwards...
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I'm forced to use IE8 at the office (thin client crap for internet access) and already there are some sites I cannot use, and others that degrade to basic versions. The sooner this happens the better IMO - the more sites that do not work in IE8 the faster my IT department will be forced to realise that they have to upgrade from Win2003 server and/or install a different browser. Oh, and that really, Internet Explorer isn't "secure" just because it offers an illusion of security lockdown...
This kind of setup is increasingly common here in the UK, except the pedestrian crossings are implemented with lights too. This comes as a shock when first implemented, followed by a feeling of anger at the stupidity and the risk it will put pedestrians under, followed by annoyance - but I've not heard of an accident involving a pedestrian on these junctions here, only involving cars rear-ending other cars because they weren't concentrating well enough or were driving too fast. That said bridges and subways are more inconvenience to pedestrians, not to mention more expensive.
These improvements often also go hand in hand with alterations to introduce spiral lanes on the roundabouts to assist the flow of traffic. Except that a lot of people completely ignore them (through ignorance, stupidity, bloody mindedness or "cos that's what I've done for the last 60 years") often making things more confusing and for people to concentrate a few yards ahead rather than brakingDistance++ ahead too.
In the UK a pedestrian has right of way (highway code rule 108 I think) so I'm not sure your comment about responsibility is correct. Perhaps pedestrians in the UK are more used to idiotic driving (we are king of chav culture, boy racers, and breaking the speed limits after all) are more conscientious? That said, few pedestrians realise one has to place a foot on a zebra crossing before the traffic has an obligation to stop, so maybe not!
Incidentally, my short commute to work (7 miles) involves 9 roundabouts and 5 sets of traffic lights. Fortunately none of them have crossings on the exits.
Mod parent up. It really sucks to take any technical notes on an iPad. Hell, it sucks for taking notes period - whether thats using an onscreen keyboard, a drawing app and a stylus, or whatever. A laptop is better, but is far from adequate.
The best lecturers I've had (admittedly this was last century, before tablets were commonplace but still totally impractical for notes) gave the class partial notes for the class. Nobody had to worry about writing the boiler plate stuff - instead they could concentrate on the topic and start to understand it. The lecturer would then ask someone in the lecture what the blanks should be - and we all filled in the important bits (so we got to write it down to help reinforce it, but also got a decent amount of time to THINK rather than writing as fast as we could, missing the important bits, and spending hours trying to catch up. I learnt a LOT in that style of lecture.
However, I do wish that we had permission to record the audio in lectures, and that tech such as livescribe pen existed back then! (on top of the boilerplate notes)
VS.NET has "Express" editions that are free to download and use (including for commercial use) and are quite powerful, so I'm not sure the "pay pay pay" argument holds up unless you mean development costs. I've used VS Express to develop COM components to bridge ESRI ArcGIS applications with other applications (eg in Java), and they are relatively powerful (certainly as much as VB6 was).
Can you detail the things that don't work? I'm curious, and it might provide a catalyst for my friend to rewrite his app.
I also run XP in a VM occasionally, but I (and my friend) would rather be working on Windows 7 (caveat: I use Macs and Linux on my machines and have Windows 7 in a VM) - mainly because the app connects to remote database servers over the Internet. While I could also host the database on the VM and avoid that, I can't have any real data in there for testing due to regulatory constraints. I suppose we'll have to host the VM at the client site and RDP into it. Meh.
In this case, the result was the organisation stayed on Windows 2000 for nearly a year after its end of life, with an eventual minor upgrade to Windows XP fairly recently. Windows 7 is nowhere near ready to being rolled out.
Your comment about webapps is irrelevant. Yes, many companies have done this. The GP and my friend have not, so I was asking for the strategy for maintaining that code when (supposedly) the IDE doesn't run properly on Windows 7, but from the other posts this might not be the case. In any case, web applications were also frequently written in VB classic and many still have not been migrated to .NET or other things yet.
I agree with your assessment of Microsoft development technology - I attempt to stay well clear of it. While I'll probably learn Metro (purely so its on my CV for contract work), I won't be building any of my own projects with it...
Right. Which is what my friend does now. However, XP becomes unsupported in the not too distant future, so I'm wondering what the strategy is then.
That's what TFA is discussing, and not what I asked.
I thought there were major compatibility problems with the VS98/VB6 IDE on Windows 7 and Windows 8 (caveat: I heard this from a large desktop consultancy that were brought in to provide new systems for a large organisation - I haven't validated it myself). If so, won't this stop you developing once XP is unsupported, unless you want to be developing using an un-patched OS? I'm genuinely interested in your strategy going forward, as a friend maintains a VB6 application that is going to be a nightmare to port to VB.NET, so it might as well be rewritten in something else.
You only get 4 years before you're expected to go off and be able to work on any reasonable system.
My attitude was that I had 4 years to learn enough to be in a position where I could start to learn how to work on a reasonable system. 12 years on and I still feel like a rookie.
Maybe I should just give up and pick grapes instead?
For $99 a year you can publish to the app store for a year, so you can give it to any number of people. After which the apps disappear of course. Boo.
I have owned both (and used a number of ICS devices) and feel far more comfortable in iOS. Maybe that is familiarity, but most of it is fluidity. I have to use crappy Windows and Linux environments all day. Something that feels more fluid, consistent, and integrated is most welcome when I finish work and am reunited with my mobile devices.
I actually find it works quite well (caveat: I have a 1920x1080 and 1280x1200 monitor side by side at work).. You can have two source files open side by side just fine along with other auxiliary views. Sure, 1920x1200 would be nice, but its ok.
That said, I've got a 2048x1152 monitor at home, and the extra height comes in useful from time to time, Not sure I could justify spending another 300 quid for an extra 48 pixels though.
Awesome paper on password patterns - http://www.usafa.edu/df/dfe/dfer/centers/accr/docs/schweitzer2009a.pdf
The attack boots an alternative firmware onto the device. I doubt an unsuccessful attempt lock is much use...
The iPhone. The summary even explains that... The article and video demonstrate even more. It loads alternative firmware onto the device and uses that to crack the passcode stored on the device. Most of the time is spent loading the code onto the device, not cracking the code.
I wonder how well it works with a complex iPhone passcode though (if at all?) - I confess to not watching all of the video or reading the article properly.
Sorry, I wasn't concentrating! :)
Yeah! Err. Oh yeah. Down with DC! Except the single AC supply into the building is already a single point of failure. There is no reason you can't have all the redundancy you have with AC phases / UPS / circuits, and have n redundant efficient PSUs powering m-racks, whatever works most efficiently.
Like the single, bottle-necked, AC power supply then?
The vulnerability is in the protocol, not that it is a remote GUI protocol. The fact it is a gui protocol is moot in this case - the attack allows someone (using a terminal, a gui, whatever) to send crafted packets to the RDP service (note, service) on a Windows machine that may allow them to run arbitrary code remotely, in just the same way that someone (using a terminal, a gui, whatever - see the consistency here?) to send crafted packets to XYZ service (note service) on a Linux/BSD/whatever machine that may allow them to run arbitrary code remotely.
The nice thing with this attack failed attempts supposedly result in a BSOD too :-)
I got a 12 week gig (with paid overtime!) and all the latest Microsoft buzzwords to add to my resume.
Ouch. How's that going? Has your doctor been able to cure you yet? ;-)
My last employer, a UK civil service dept, sent me (and various colleagues) to Exeter University and Oxford University for data-mining / statistics / pattern recognition courses. They sent me on Oracle University courses. They sent me to conferences. They sent me on high quality developer courses hosted on the premises by skilled professionals, with other similarly minded candidates - I learnt a lot.
While Quark->InDesign training might have been offered to publishers internally, it certainly wouldn't have been offered to "technical" staff. Training was proportionate to their role.
I left because for numerous reasons - but partly because they offered 30-50% less than local market rates, and much less than working as a contractor for them. I've learnt far more since I've been in the real world too (a large part of this is because I no longer have to use the productivity sap known as "ClearCase").
In response to your last question: there are plenty of trainers offering high quality training. They just tend to offer it in highly specialised subjects at high cost.
Those generalisations work both ways: I wouldn't want most SQL developers to go near real programming languages. To be fair, I probably wouldn't want them to go near the SQL queries either, though.
You miss out the key fact that they need people with the skills that the training would provide. This means they either need to recruit them, outsource, or do a bodge job. The latter two options seem to be the preference.
Outsourcing is an attempt at managing costs which nearly always increases overall cost to the business - have a look at the John Seddon "Rethinking IT" talk for a reasoned rant about this.
Bodging is the only other option. The IT industry (in this I include IT, software development, networking) really likes bodges. It helps them manage their costs. Their managers are happy. Then it all goes wrong and costs more than it would have done to do it properly in the first place. Managing costs. Sigh.
The summary also makes the point that staff are receiving training that isn't relevant to their job. This seems like the biggest issue - waste money on fluffy business/management crap (that the managers should be doing rather than delegating down to their tech staff) rather than spending money on useful training that the staff would actually use to be more productive.
Of course, the department that came up with the idea of making the rest of the staff do the fluffy business/management crap as well as their own jobs (HR, bid centres, whatever) is doing great - they've increased their productivity, decreased their costs, and probably reduced their staff numbers. In terms of the bigger system (the entire company) this has just increased the costs for the business however. But that's fine - the targets look great!
The sooner businesses stop trying to "specialise" and "outsource" (whether that means out of the company or within it) as a means to manage costs (why else do you outsource?) the better. They should be concentrating on value, wherever that may be gained. Managing costs seems to always result in costs going upwards...