I also love the new trains. They feel a lot roomier. Part of that is because they really are roomier, but part of it is the more open design that feels less claustrophobic.
I always thought it would be interesting to try to create "perfect" compression of English (or any language, really). You create an encoding such that every possible message is a semantically and grammatically correct message. Then each and every decrypted message is equally valid.
Of course, this goal is impossible, but I bet we could get reasonably close. Close enough that a human would be required to check each decrypted message, making brute force attacks unrealistic.
A one time pad is simpler, of course, but where's the fun in that?
The gadget geek in me really wants this tablet. But the truth is that my year-old tablet, though not nearly as performant as this new toy, is perfectly fine for the only thing I actually use it for: reading e-books. The processor and memory don't make any difference. The screen is kind of tempting, but would mean more to me if I did real work on my tablet (I care a lot about my laptop screen resolution).
Tablet makers are going to have to come up with something pretty innovative to get me to bother upgrading.
I started my professional career developing for Sun workstations, then various Unixes, and for the past 14 years, Linux. Initially, it was just easier to use Linux as my desktop development environment, as my toolchain is here and I'm more familiar with the Unixy way of doing things. Besides, Windows was unstable and not very pleasant to use.
Nowadays Windows seems a lot more stable, and there are better tools for working cross-platform and/or over a network from a Windows desktop. But Linux GUIs have improved too, and I pretty much hate it when I occasionally need to use OSX or Windows machines. They're ugly, difficult to use, and generally less functioanal than my Linux environemnt. I could probably tweak them to make them friendlier, but why bother?
A lot of developers seem to use Macs, but the single-menu interface drives me crazy. It really doesn't work if you have multiple monitors.
I think Shuttleworth has just decided (probably correctly) that he can't make any money on the desktop, but mobile is still a possibility. The Unity interface and now this are an attempt to compete with Android.
I abandoned Ubuntu for my desktop when Unity came, but I think I might actually like it on a tablet or phone. Anyway, I'll try to keep an open mind when the devices actually come out. I hope one of non-Android Linux phone efforts finds a niche, whether it's Ubuntu, Jolla, Tizen, or Firefox OS. If Shuttleworth can pull it off, then more power to him.
There's still a need for the "gamer" PC, and that niche will continue to exist.
But for most of us, there are better alternatives. I just bought one of the Intel Next Unit of Computing systems a couple of days ago. I'm thrilled with it so far. It's totally quiet, mounts discretely on the side of my desk, supports two monitors, and is plenty fast enough for my software development needs.
I don't develop games, but I imagine that most users will be playing games on tablet-like devices in the near future, so a system like mine probably has more gaming horsepower than the average tablet as well.
It also suggests that GMail is pretty close to being a complete replacement - the only thing missing is the DRM-style features. And obviously if you're an AD-centric shop then AD integration has some value.
I'm actually really interested in this. I've worked at a lot of places that insist on using Exchange, but I've never figured out the attraction. It's not even a lock-in issue, really, since replacing your email server is dead-simple.
What is this secret sauce that keeps people using Exchange?
(And yes, I see it as an email and calendaring solution in the same league as GMail - if it does more than that, can you point me to summary or something?)
I find younger programmers don't know how computers actually work. They've never used assembler or C for anything. They can't use SQL properly. They don't have the range of experience that lets you attack a problem from all angles and find the best solution.
That's not to say that I use assembler or C for anything nowadays, but the understanding I gained way-back-when gives me a feel for what's actually happening behind the scenes when write in Javascript, Python, etc. And the addiction to application frameworks among young programmers seems to have inhibited their ability to come up with creative solutions to unique problems. They just apply their favourite framework to everything, regardless of how well it actually fits the problem.
Sorry for the rant, but the lack of technical breadth in younger developers is a real pet peeve of mine. I guess part of the reason I get annoyed by it is that experience isn't given that much weight in hiring decisions, so you have inexperienced people in roles of responsibility that they're not ready for. Us old farts who do know better end up having to deal with with the mess afterwards.
They need to make a clean break from Microsoft. That means get rid of Elop and the board that hired him. Beg some of the respected execs who fled, like Anssi Vanjokio, to come back. If they're not willing to come back to manage day-to-day operations, at least put them on the board to give a sane strategic direction.
Then buy up Jolla as a long-term investment, while producing Android phones to pay the bills.
The Kindle hardware is just a channel to sell e-books. If Kindle hardware sales dry up due to competition from other tables, it's not a problem as long as the other devices that people buy support the Kindle App.
Well, there's always Chrome-OS if Google ever really gets serious about it.
But I don't really expect casual home users to flee Metro. They spend 80% of their time in IE/Firefox/Chrome, 15% playing games, and 4% in Word, and 1% in misc other stuff (Excel, Turbo-tax, whatever). (Yeah, I just made those statistics up, but I bet they're not far off the mark.) Having six or so big tiles that they click on to get to those apps isn't really that different from having six icons on the desktop that you have to double-click on.
Really? I know Apple has done amazingly well in recent years, but 50% of the home market? Do you have a link for that?
Agreed that nobody every really liked Windows. But most of the regular (non-techie) people I know don't hate it either - they just use it because it's there and don't put much thought into alternatives.
The MS strategy (which will probably have some success), is pretty clear...
They figure they've got a few years of desktop monopoly left, and they want leverage this to protect their core business from iOS and Android. The plan is to get home users used to the Metro UI so that they'll be more likely to buy Windows-powered phones and tablets. Home users are far less conservative than enterprise users, and most of them will just go with whatever is loaded on their machines.
Within a three years the vast majority will be comfortable with Metro. That's about the time enterprise customers will be looking to upgrade from Windows 7, and in the meantime, everybody will be familiar enough with Metro to be immediately comfortable when they pick up a Windows Phone/Tablet.
It's really not a bad strategy. I don't think it will crush iOS and Android by a long shot, but it might just prevent MS from becoming totally irrelevant.
Ah, true enough. Though I think the case for default opt-in for organ donation is very strong and clear-cut (this should be done everywhere), while I'm not really sure about do-not-track. In the case of organ donation 1) there's a clear public interest, 2) the people who refuse to donate are essentially free-loading off of the those who opt-in.
The argument is that most users don't really mind being tracked, but certainly aren't going to go out of their way to enable it. The majority just doesn't care enough to actively turn DNT on, even if it's easy to find in the settings.
That's very different from pop-ups, which are immediately obnoxious and swear-inducing.
From my own experience, I suspect this is in fact true. Regular people just aren't up in arms about tracking, even though everybody knows it happens.
It's sad to see clueless MBAs come into tech companies and try to cut their way to profitability. It never works, but they keep trying it again and again (cue famous quote about the definition of insanity...).
About time somebody tried a different approach: take care of your people, and build great products. And remember that nobody does great work with an axe hanging over their head.
Time to buy some Yahoo! stock - they've found themselves a CEO with a clue.
No arguments about the Qt and Meltemi guys. That was my point about Elop killing off the last bits of talent that remained. I was also hoping that the Meltemi and Qt guys would outlive Elop's reign and help the company recover from that idiot. I've never worked for Nokia, but I've worked for a supplier, and spent a lot of time in Espoo. I was rooting for you guys.
I can't really prove that the best people left when the Windows announcement came, but a lot of people did (and I kow they were good). Ok, they didn't quit that day - they started brushing up their CVs and shopping around, and were gone within a few weeks or months. At the top there's obviously Vanjoki, but the people I knew were much lower level and more technical.
I've seen the same pattern at other companies. The employees see where the the company is headed, and the ones who will have the easiest time finding new work start disappearing quickly. When people around you whom you respect start leaving voluntarily and on mass, you know the company is in trouble.
There's no longer any point in buying Nokia except for the patents. Eventually they'll be bought by Apple or Google, and everything except the legal department will be shut down.
It's very sad to see this happen to Nokia - I've worked with them a lot and they used to have some top-notch engineers (and a lot of incompetant management too, which is how they got into this mess). The most talented engineers fled as soon as the Windows announcement was made, and the Elop has been systematically stamping out the remaining pockets of talent since then. Qt and Meltemi were the last hope for turning the company around.
Worst thing is that it was totally predictable, and was predicted by everybody close to Nokia as soon as the Microsoft alliance was announced.
The point that people who say this are making is that "black people" aren't particularly similar to each other genetically, or in terms of any other biological characteristic except skin colour. Same with white people or brown people.
Having said that, I'm not opposed to using skin colour to differentiate people. It would be pretty stupid, if I want to point out the only white guy in a group of black guys, to try to avoid referencing skin colour (nobody is going to say "the tall guy on the left with the red shirt" when "the white guy" will suffice). But don't pretend that skin colour makes you more of a "race" or "breed" than hair colour, height, etc.
It sounds like you're just getting the benefit of having a set of libraries that you like and know well. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. I might look at the Zend stuff again if I end up doing any more large PHP projects.
Maybe the problem here is the definition of "framework". In my mind the whole point of a framework is to impose itself on the programmer. Typically along the lines of:
there shall be three tiers to your application;
we'll call them model, view, and controller even if your app just provides an API and doesn't require a "view";
we'll make using stored procedures really difficult;
we'll wrap SQL with an ORM that's less powerful, slower, takes just as long to learn, and isn't used anywhere else in the industry;
we'll replace mod_rewrite with our own request router that's less powerful, slower, takes just as long to learn, and isn't used anywhere else in the industry;
I feel the frustration level rising just remembering all this. But it sounds like you get my point quite well and, like I said, I'll take a second look at Zend based on your comments - thanks.
This has gone off-topic, but... the various caching solutions don't always work. Since PHP discards all of its data with each request, complex data-structures that are slow to assemble but fast to access aren't possible. In this case I've suggested C or Java (or even Python) because the data can be loaded into RAM and pumped out at a high rate by traversing some carefully constructed data structures. Something like memcache can help a bit, but traversing the a large linked data structure still ends up being slow. Memcache helps when you can look up your result using a single key - it doesn't do much to speed up complex multi-index queries.
This is obviously an edge case - SQL stored procedures or one of the caching solutions will do the trick for most applications - but really this job would be far easier with a different choice of tools. This complaint is only tangentially related to frameworks, though. The frameworks aren't the problem here, but more the one-size-fits-all attitude that seems to come with them.
Slashdot Mirror
I also love the new trains. They feel a lot roomier. Part of that is because they really are roomier, but part of it is the more open design that feels less claustrophobic.
I always thought it would be interesting to try to create "perfect" compression of English (or any language, really). You create an encoding such that every possible message is a semantically and grammatically correct message. Then each and every decrypted message is equally valid.
Of course, this goal is impossible, but I bet we could get reasonably close. Close enough that a human would be required to check each decrypted message, making brute force attacks unrealistic.
A one time pad is simpler, of course, but where's the fun in that?
Yeah, I'm with on this, sadly.
The gadget geek in me really wants this tablet. But the truth is that my year-old tablet, though not nearly as performant as this new toy, is perfectly fine for the only thing I actually use it for: reading e-books. The processor and memory don't make any difference. The screen is kind of tempting, but would mean more to me if I did real work on my tablet (I care a lot about my laptop screen resolution).
Tablet makers are going to have to come up with something pretty innovative to get me to bother upgrading.
I started my professional career developing for Sun workstations, then various Unixes, and for the past 14 years, Linux. Initially, it was just easier to use Linux as my desktop development environment, as my toolchain is here and I'm more familiar with the Unixy way of doing things. Besides, Windows was unstable and not very pleasant to use.
Nowadays Windows seems a lot more stable, and there are better tools for working cross-platform and/or over a network from a Windows desktop. But Linux GUIs have improved too, and I pretty much hate it when I occasionally need to use OSX or Windows machines. They're ugly, difficult to use, and generally less functioanal than my Linux environemnt. I could probably tweak them to make them friendlier, but why bother?
A lot of developers seem to use Macs, but the single-menu interface drives me crazy. It really doesn't work if you have multiple monitors.
I think Shuttleworth has just decided (probably correctly) that he can't make any money on the desktop, but mobile is still a possibility. The Unity interface and now this are an attempt to compete with Android.
I abandoned Ubuntu for my desktop when Unity came, but I think I might actually like it on a tablet or phone. Anyway, I'll try to keep an open mind when the devices actually come out. I hope one of non-Android Linux phone efforts finds a niche, whether it's Ubuntu, Jolla, Tizen, or Firefox OS. If Shuttleworth can pull it off, then more power to him.
There's still a need for the "gamer" PC, and that niche will continue to exist.
But for most of us, there are better alternatives. I just bought one of the Intel Next Unit of Computing systems a couple of days ago. I'm thrilled with it so far. It's totally quiet, mounts discretely on the side of my desk, supports two monitors, and is plenty fast enough for my software development needs.
I don't develop games, but I imagine that most users will be playing games on tablet-like devices in the near future, so a system like mine probably has more gaming horsepower than the average tablet as well.
Thanks, that was a very informative answer.
It also suggests that GMail is pretty close to being a complete replacement - the only thing missing is the DRM-style features. And obviously if you're an AD-centric shop then AD integration has some value.
Cheers,
Ami.
I'm actually really interested in this. I've worked at a lot of places that insist on using Exchange, but I've never figured out the attraction. It's not even a lock-in issue, really, since replacing your email server is dead-simple.
What is this secret sauce that keeps people using Exchange?
(And yes, I see it as an email and calendaring solution in the same league as GMail - if it does more than that, can you point me to summary or something?)
I find younger programmers don't know how computers actually work. They've never used assembler or C for anything. They can't use SQL properly. They don't have the range of experience that lets you attack a problem from all angles and find the best solution.
That's not to say that I use assembler or C for anything nowadays, but the understanding I gained way-back-when gives me a feel for what's actually happening behind the scenes when write in Javascript, Python, etc. And the addiction to application frameworks among young programmers seems to have inhibited their ability to come up with creative solutions to unique problems. They just apply their favourite framework to everything, regardless of how well it actually fits the problem.
Sorry for the rant, but the lack of technical breadth in younger developers is a real pet peeve of mine. I guess part of the reason I get annoyed by it is that experience isn't given that much weight in hiring decisions, so you have inexperienced people in roles of responsibility that they're not ready for. Us old farts who do know better end up having to deal with with the mess afterwards.
They need to make a clean break from Microsoft. That means get rid of Elop and the board that hired him. Beg some of the respected execs who fled, like Anssi Vanjokio, to come back. If they're not willing to come back to manage day-to-day operations, at least put them on the board to give a sane strategic direction.
Then buy up Jolla as a long-term investment, while producing Android phones to pay the bills.
The Kindle hardware is just a channel to sell e-books. If Kindle hardware sales dry up due to competition from other tables, it's not a problem as long as the other devices that people buy support the Kindle App.
Well, there's always Chrome-OS if Google ever really gets serious about it.
But I don't really expect casual home users to flee Metro. They spend 80% of their time in IE/Firefox/Chrome, 15% playing games, and 4% in Word, and 1% in misc other stuff (Excel, Turbo-tax, whatever). (Yeah, I just made those statistics up, but I bet they're not far off the mark.) Having six or so big tiles that they click on to get to those apps isn't really that different from having six icons on the desktop that you have to double-click on.
Really? I know Apple has done amazingly well in recent years, but 50% of the home market? Do you have a link for that?
Agreed that nobody every really liked Windows. But most of the regular (non-techie) people I know don't hate it either - they just use it because it's there and don't put much thought into alternatives.
The MS strategy (which will probably have some success), is pretty clear...
They figure they've got a few years of desktop monopoly left, and they want leverage this to protect their core business from iOS and Android. The plan is to get home users used to the Metro UI so that they'll be more likely to buy Windows-powered phones and tablets. Home users are far less conservative than enterprise users, and most of them will just go with whatever is loaded on their machines.
Within a three years the vast majority will be comfortable with Metro. That's about the time enterprise customers will be looking to upgrade from Windows 7, and in the meantime, everybody will be familiar enough with Metro to be immediately comfortable when they pick up a Windows Phone/Tablet.
It's really not a bad strategy. I don't think it will crush iOS and Android by a long shot, but it might just prevent MS from becoming totally irrelevant.
Ah, true enough. Though I think the case for default opt-in for organ donation is very strong and clear-cut (this should be done everywhere), while I'm not really sure about do-not-track. In the case of organ donation 1) there's a clear public interest, 2) the people who refuse to donate are essentially free-loading off of the those who opt-in.
Actually I'm Canadian, but in any case I don't see your point. How did I equate DNT to donating organs? And is this a good thing or a bad thing?
The argument is that most users don't really mind being tracked, but certainly aren't going to go out of their way to enable it. The majority just doesn't care enough to actively turn DNT on, even if it's easy to find in the settings.
That's very different from pop-ups, which are immediately obnoxious and swear-inducing.
From my own experience, I suspect this is in fact true. Regular people just aren't up in arms about tracking, even though everybody knows it happens.
Touché.
Hear hear!
It's sad to see clueless MBAs come into tech companies and try to cut their way to profitability. It never works, but they keep trying it again and again (cue famous quote about the definition of insanity...).
About time somebody tried a different approach: take care of your people, and build great products. And remember that nobody does great work with an axe hanging over their head.
Time to buy some Yahoo! stock - they've found themselves a CEO with a clue.
No arguments about the Qt and Meltemi guys. That was my point about Elop killing off the last bits of talent that remained. I was also hoping that the Meltemi and Qt guys would outlive Elop's reign and help the company recover from that idiot. I've never worked for Nokia, but I've worked for a supplier, and spent a lot of time in Espoo. I was rooting for you guys.
I can't really prove that the best people left when the Windows announcement came, but a lot of people did (and I kow they were good). Ok, they didn't quit that day - they started brushing up their CVs and shopping around, and were gone within a few weeks or months. At the top there's obviously Vanjoki, but the people I knew were much lower level and more technical.
I've seen the same pattern at other companies. The employees see where the the company is headed, and the ones who will have the easiest time finding new work start disappearing quickly. When people around you whom you respect start leaving voluntarily and on mass, you know the company is in trouble.
There's no longer any point in buying Nokia except for the patents. Eventually they'll be bought by Apple or Google, and everything except the legal department will be shut down.
It's very sad to see this happen to Nokia - I've worked with them a lot and they used to have some top-notch engineers (and a lot of incompetant management too, which is how they got into this mess). The most talented engineers fled as soon as the Windows announcement was made, and the Elop has been systematically stamping out the remaining pockets of talent since then. Qt and Meltemi were the last hope for turning the company around.
Worst thing is that it was totally predictable, and was predicted by everybody close to Nokia as soon as the Microsoft alliance was announced.
Not poppycock, but a matter of semantics.
The point that people who say this are making is that "black people" aren't particularly similar to each other genetically, or in terms of any other biological characteristic except skin colour. Same with white people or brown people.
Having said that, I'm not opposed to using skin colour to differentiate people. It would be pretty stupid, if I want to point out the only white guy in a group of black guys, to try to avoid referencing skin colour (nobody is going to say "the tall guy on the left with the red shirt" when "the white guy" will suffice). But don't pretend that skin colour makes you more of a "race" or "breed" than hair colour, height, etc.
CGI and FastCGI aren't the same. CGI is indeed very slow. FastCGI is pretty good.
I vaguely remember seeing some benchmarks that claimed Nginx+FastCGI/PHP has roughly the same performance as Apache+mod_php.
It sounds like you're just getting the benefit of having a set of libraries that you like and know well. There's certainly nothing wrong with that. I might look at the Zend stuff again if I end up doing any more large PHP projects.
Maybe the problem here is the definition of "framework". In my mind the whole point of a framework is to impose itself on the programmer. Typically along the lines of:
I feel the frustration level rising just remembering all this. But it sounds like you get my point quite well and, like I said, I'll take a second look at Zend based on your comments - thanks.
This has gone off-topic, but... the various caching solutions don't always work. Since PHP discards all of its data with each request, complex data-structures that are slow to assemble but fast to access aren't possible. In this case I've suggested C or Java (or even Python) because the data can be loaded into RAM and pumped out at a high rate by traversing some carefully constructed data structures. Something like memcache can help a bit, but traversing the a large linked data structure still ends up being slow. Memcache helps when you can look up your result using a single key - it doesn't do much to speed up complex multi-index queries.
This is obviously an edge case - SQL stored procedures or one of the caching solutions will do the trick for most applications - but really this job would be far easier with a different choice of tools. This complaint is only tangentially related to frameworks, though. The frameworks aren't the problem here, but more the one-size-fits-all attitude that seems to come with them.