And not even the kind used to tally prisoners to be executed by genocidal psychopaths, like IBM has. Of course, IBM is friendly to open source so their *actual* crimes against humanity don't count I guess?
Could be IE syndrome... that is, Microsoft doesn't even bother to attempt to be competitive if they have no competitors (or perceive that they have no competitors.) Once browser competition started up again, Microsoft ramped up the IE team and now they're releasing on-par with the rest of the industry.
The point of the Mobile 7 re-write, though, is to integrate all the progress they've made with Zune and also unify the two platforms, so it might turn out really good. Even if it should have been out a year ago.
And if you want good Microsoft products, compete with them.:)
Yes, but it's the first post that doesn't say "first post", therefore it must be insightful instead of nonsense! That's how moderation works! You can't expect mods to read or understand a post before rating it, that's just crazytalk.
RME might do better if he learned to write like an adult. Right now, whenever I read an article from him, it feels like a combination of paranoid rantings and a childrens book. He doesn't give any indication that he's actually considered the topic or understands the viewpoint of his opponents. Plus, in this case, it just seems like he'll never, ever be satisfied with anything- so why bother to cowtow to his beliefs?
A large portion of the point of Mobile 7 is to integrate it with Zune. Since Zune has te UI down, and Windows Mobile has the apps, it should be interesting. Of course, there's no guarantee it'll be any good. But it's too early to dismiss it.
Oh man. I had an English teacher who loved Great Expectations. And, yah, it's an ok book, but she was crazy about finding symbolism in it. Absolutely nutsoid.
One day she kept going on and on about how Pip escaped London on a boat on the Thames river because the river's course has lots of right angles, goes up and down and back and forth and that represents the course of Pip's life-- rich, poor, rich again, etc.
I raised my hand and said, "maybe Pip took the Thames because it's the ONLY RIVER IN LONDON." She was so mad.
I don't think they actually suck. I think they are simply pressurized to produce results in the quickest time possible. I think part of the blame goes to the commissioning clients.
You just haven't worked in enough offices. Believe me, we have people working for our company, producing software, who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. And they're not under any particular time pressure. (We also have a guy who does really good work, but he's so slooow... in that case, you're right, but from my experience that's the minority.)
And part of the blame goes to the "simple is best" mentality in some schools of thought. Simplicity is NOT elegance.
Possibly; but if you know that your shop has coders who won't understand the elegant code, you're better off writing simple code to accomplish the same task. Otherwise, they'll fuck up your elegant code and produce buggy, bloated results. Joel wrote an article about this recently: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html making that very point.
Personally, I don't think elegance should be the goal. Who cares if it's elegant? The finished product is the important part, not the code and the UI is what people judge. I'm sure a lot of products with extremely elegant code have godawful UIs.
Also, opinion is NOT fact.
Shocker!
Surprisingly, I see Cobian Backup, Avast! antivirus, and some other software being rather multi-user aware. Cobian v8 is open source, Avast! Home is freeware. These little attention to details impressed me a lot.
Being multi-user aware isn't "a little detail", it's an industry standard! If they weren't previously for the NT series, they should have been patched to be multi-user away for Windows 2000 Pro, which was mainstream.
That's not "impressive" that's just par for the course. That's like being "impressed" that it uses menus and buttons, or being "impressed" that it lets you switch which language the UI is in.
Then what do they rely on? Their IDE's ability to suggest methods and properties when they type?
That. Or Googling it. Or yelling, "hey Bob, what do you use to sort a list?" over the cubicle top. Or they keep an extensive collection of code snippets and they just copy and paste those in randomly until something works, or appears to work at first glance.
... Except Windows *did* implement proper administrator privileges, starting with NT3, hitting the mass market in Windows 2000 Pro (1999), and becoming the standard for everybody with XP (2001). And believe me, system administrators have been ragging on developers to fix for for a long, long time. I can't be the only one who spent like 5 hours a weke just manually tweaking permissions on folder and registry entries until some shitty third-party app would run.
There's no excuse for this, and there hasn't been for a solid decade. You're acting as if Windows 2000 Pro was released yesterday. It wasn't.
The problem is when MS gimp Windows to hell - they know the workarounds, so Office runs OK.
Oh come on! You can't just say stuff like that without providing any evidence. Do you have any? At all?
It seems to be that Windows performance, in general, is at worst on-par with the competition. Even Vista, if your computer meets the hardware specs. Now you're telling me that the only reason OpenOffice runs slow is because all of Windows is "gimped", and Office contains some kind of cheat code that "un-gimps" it? Seriously?
Live Messenger might be drawn by kindergartners, but at least it works with voice recognition and tablet input and has a normal Open dialog. Pidgin's UI looks like it was designed by some alien being who was only described the Windows UI over a bad cellphone connection.
Whether or not that's true, either way this is a non-story. The point is that the OS makers already address this exact situation with technology X, and since he's not using technology X he has a program that no longer runs. That's not Microsoft's fault any more than it would be Linus' fault if his buggy application ran on Linux.
A thing that a LOT of Linux programmers (and a lot of programmers in general) seem to miss is this simple fact, bolded for emphasis:
Most programmers suck.
The very fact that you're here reading Slashdot means it's likely that you do not suck. Most programmers do. For most programmers, "cargo cult" programming is a way of life. The majority of programmers do not, and never will, fully understand pointers to the level where they would be able to re-create the C++ STL by themselves. Relevant to this discussion: most programmers don't know how linking works, they just hit the "Play" button on the IDE and off it goes. Most programmers have zero knowledge of user permissions or fast user switching, and see nothing wrong with writing their application data in the Program Files folder.
Most programmers never, ever read the API documentation. Not only do they have no problem using deprecated functions, but they don't even know what functions are deprecated.
And when their programs break because of this? They blame Microsoft! It's Microsoft's fault, always Microsoft's fault!
Now the open source community might be lucky enough that it has no bad programmers. (I doubt it, but let's play along.) Good for you. Microsoft, unfortunately, isn't that way: one of their biggest challenges is to keep terrible programmers from constantly breaking their own apps and/or Windows itself.
What I'm getting at here is that Microsoft's goal is to make programming for Windows as easy and hands-off as possible. Any solution to this problem that requires the programmer to fix their application is far inferior than a solution that works "automatically."
The programmer who posted this topic didn't read Microsoft's documentation, and screwed up his application's installer so that it links directly to a specific library version DLL instead of to the version-agnostic DLL. He's one of the bad programmers I've been talking about, but to be fair: considering he's actually posting here, it's probably one of the best of the bad. Hopefully he'll take something away from this and Slashdot won't spend the entire thread bashing Microsoft for no reason, but I doubt it.
And yet Office still boots twice as fast as OpenOffice on a typical computer, IIS and MS SQL are completely neck-and-neck with their competitors, and Outlook completely trounces its closest competitor, performance-wise.
I mean, I completely understand what you're saying: having multiple copies of the same function/code block in memory is inefficient. But in practice, it doesn't seem to be hurting them anyway.
Amazon is big, so they don't have problems with this... if a product is badly reviewed, Amazon almost certainly carries the competing product with good reviews, so they still make the sale. Plus they get the free press from posters like you lauding their honesty. It's a win-win for them.
If you try to use it for just email, and your company isn't writing good applications on it, then its like trying to use an 18 wheel tractor trailer to go grocery shopping.
I've yet to see a single Notes application worth running. The email client, as bad as it is, seems to actually have the *best* UI in the Notes ecosystem-- the whole product is so amazingly bad, I literally think it's impossible to make a good UI, no matter how much effort you put into it.
Kind of like Java, in that respect. Sure, it has tons of fans who constantly rave about how you can make completely native and good UIs, and maybe it is *possible* with an extreme level of effort, but in reality I've never actually seen one.
Then they get switched to Exchange with Outlook as the front end and they get shocked by how bad that is, and how little it does in comparison -- and then when there is downtime, the exchange servers are down for a LONG time as databases have to be rebuilt.
Oh please. Nobody's ever experienced that with Exchange.
And, frankly, even if I had... having to use Notes every day for two years, or have 3 days of downtime every year? Give me the downtime, NO QUESTION ABOUT IT. Even if you're right about the downtime (and again, you're in a fantasy-world right now), it's still better than having to use a client that bad all the time. Hell, Exchange's yearly downtime is probably less than it takes Notes to just load every morning.
The biggest thing that Notes users suffer from, is that Notes is a very different kind of tool and they (users) get stuck with bad in-house applications that are ugly, poorly performing, and not well matched to business processes. No wonder people are frustrated.
What really annoys me is that it's not like Notes is cheap to make up for it. IBM charges through the nose, companies pay, and nobody's happy. WTF!
Someone else posted this to a similar complaint above, but Twilight Zone was never sold as science fiction. Most episodes do rely on some kind of supernatural element, but that doesn't *necessarily* imply that it's science fiction-- many of the best episodes are about things that occur only in a person's mind, and how reality differs.
Look at, for example, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" which is a faithful adaptation of a short story with absolutely no science fiction elements at all.
Compare that to The Outer Limits, which *was* science fiction by editorial mandate-- not only that, but each episode had to feature a monster.
"The Arrival", a DC-3 lands at an airport with no crews, passengers, or luggage-- and despite being a normally-scheduled flight, no family members of the passengers inquire about the status of the flight. An FAA investigator, assisted by the airline's PR guy and ground crew, tries to figure out what happened.
About 20 minutes in there's a scene that's just amazingly mind-blowing. (The last 10 minutes or so, unfortunately, are kind of wasted. But alas.)
Slashdot Mirror
Crimes against humanity?!
They sell fucking COMPUTER SOFTWARE.
And not even the kind used to tally prisoners to be executed by genocidal psychopaths, like IBM has. Of course, IBM is friendly to open source so their *actual* crimes against humanity don't count I guess?
I was typing that on an iPhone. Leave me alone. :P
Could be IE syndrome... that is, Microsoft doesn't even bother to attempt to be competitive if they have no competitors (or perceive that they have no competitors.) Once browser competition started up again, Microsoft ramped up the IE team and now they're releasing on-par with the rest of the industry.
The point of the Mobile 7 re-write, though, is to integrate all the progress they've made with Zune and also unify the two platforms, so it might turn out really good. Even if it should have been out a year ago.
And if you want good Microsoft products, compete with them. :)
A map. Is that wrong, as you seem to imply?
Yes, but it's the first post that doesn't say "first post", therefore it must be insightful instead of nonsense! That's how moderation works! You can't expect mods to read or understand a post before rating it, that's just crazytalk.
RME might do better if he learned to write like an adult. Right now, whenever I read an article from him, it feels like a combination of paranoid rantings and a childrens book. He doesn't give any indication that he's actually considered the topic or understands the viewpoint of his opponents. Plus, in this case, it just seems like he'll never, ever be satisfied with anything- so why bother to cowtow to his beliefs?
A large portion of the point of Mobile 7 is to integrate it with Zune. Since Zune has te UI down, and Windows Mobile has the apps, it should be interesting. Of course, there's no guarantee it'll be any good. But it's too early to dismiss it.
Except the whole point of Windows 7 is that it's being re-written from scratch to compete with the iPhone (and other multitouch phones.)
I'm with him on 6.5, but that doesn't necessarily mean 7 will also be a huge failure.
Oh man. I had an English teacher who loved Great Expectations. And, yah, it's an ok book, but she was crazy about finding symbolism in it. Absolutely nutsoid.
One day she kept going on and on about how Pip escaped London on a boat on the Thames river because the river's course has lots of right angles, goes up and down and back and forth and that represents the course of Pip's life-- rich, poor, rich again, etc.
I raised my hand and said, "maybe Pip took the Thames because it's the ONLY RIVER IN LONDON." She was so mad.
What does the M and R stand for?
I don't think they actually suck. I think they are simply pressurized to produce results in the quickest time possible. I think part of the blame goes to the commissioning clients.
You just haven't worked in enough offices. Believe me, we have people working for our company, producing software, who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. And they're not under any particular time pressure. (We also have a guy who does really good work, but he's so slooow... in that case, you're right, but from my experience that's the minority.)
And part of the blame goes to the "simple is best" mentality in some schools of thought. Simplicity is NOT elegance.
Possibly; but if you know that your shop has coders who won't understand the elegant code, you're better off writing simple code to accomplish the same task. Otherwise, they'll fuck up your elegant code and produce buggy, bloated results. Joel wrote an article about this recently: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html making that very point.
Personally, I don't think elegance should be the goal. Who cares if it's elegant? The finished product is the important part, not the code and the UI is what people judge. I'm sure a lot of products with extremely elegant code have godawful UIs.
Also, opinion is NOT fact.
Shocker!
Surprisingly, I see Cobian Backup, Avast! antivirus, and some other software being rather multi-user aware. Cobian v8 is open source, Avast! Home is freeware. These little attention to details impressed me a lot.
Being multi-user aware isn't "a little detail", it's an industry standard! If they weren't previously for the NT series, they should have been patched to be multi-user away for Windows 2000 Pro, which was mainstream.
That's not "impressive" that's just par for the course. That's like being "impressed" that it uses menus and buttons, or being "impressed" that it lets you switch which language the UI is in.
Then what do they rely on? Their IDE's ability to suggest methods and properties when they type?
That. Or Googling it. Or yelling, "hey Bob, what do you use to sort a list?" over the cubicle top. Or they keep an extensive collection of code snippets and they just copy and paste those in randomly until something works, or appears to work at first glance.
... Except Windows *did* implement proper administrator privileges, starting with NT3, hitting the mass market in Windows 2000 Pro (1999), and becoming the standard for everybody with XP (2001). And believe me, system administrators have been ragging on developers to fix for for a long, long time. I can't be the only one who spent like 5 hours a weke just manually tweaking permissions on folder and registry entries until some shitty third-party app would run.
There's no excuse for this, and there hasn't been for a solid decade. You're acting as if Windows 2000 Pro was released yesterday. It wasn't.
The problem is when MS gimp Windows to hell - they know the workarounds, so Office runs OK.
Oh come on! You can't just say stuff like that without providing any evidence. Do you have any? At all?
It seems to be that Windows performance, in general, is at worst on-par with the competition. Even Vista, if your computer meets the hardware specs. Now you're telling me that the only reason OpenOffice runs slow is because all of Windows is "gimped", and Office contains some kind of cheat code that "un-gimps" it? Seriously?
Live Messenger might be drawn by kindergartners, but at least it works with voice recognition and tablet input and has a normal Open dialog. Pidgin's UI looks like it was designed by some alien being who was only described the Windows UI over a bad cellphone connection.
What did you do to break it?
Also, what do the errors look like?
I'm curious... I've supported gobs of XP machines, and I don't think I've ever seen that before, or maybe I saw it and confused it for something else.
IPv4 Exhaustion is expected approximately 734 days from today's date. That is just about 2 years.
Remember the story about the boy who cried wolf? Yah. This is that.
Whether or not that's true, either way this is a non-story. The point is that the OS makers already address this exact situation with technology X, and since he's not using technology X he has a program that no longer runs. That's not Microsoft's fault any more than it would be Linus' fault if his buggy application ran on Linux.
A thing that a LOT of Linux programmers (and a lot of programmers in general) seem to miss is this simple fact, bolded for emphasis:
Most programmers suck.
The very fact that you're here reading Slashdot means it's likely that you do not suck. Most programmers do. For most programmers, "cargo cult" programming is a way of life. The majority of programmers do not, and never will, fully understand pointers to the level where they would be able to re-create the C++ STL by themselves. Relevant to this discussion: most programmers don't know how linking works, they just hit the "Play" button on the IDE and off it goes. Most programmers have zero knowledge of user permissions or fast user switching, and see nothing wrong with writing their application data in the Program Files folder.
Most programmers never, ever read the API documentation. Not only do they have no problem using deprecated functions, but they don't even know what functions are deprecated.
And when their programs break because of this? They blame Microsoft! It's Microsoft's fault, always Microsoft's fault!
Now the open source community might be lucky enough that it has no bad programmers. (I doubt it, but let's play along.) Good for you. Microsoft, unfortunately, isn't that way: one of their biggest challenges is to keep terrible programmers from constantly breaking their own apps and/or Windows itself.
What I'm getting at here is that Microsoft's goal is to make programming for Windows as easy and hands-off as possible. Any solution to this problem that requires the programmer to fix their application is far inferior than a solution that works "automatically."
The programmer who posted this topic didn't read Microsoft's documentation, and screwed up his application's installer so that it links directly to a specific library version DLL instead of to the version-agnostic DLL. He's one of the bad programmers I've been talking about, but to be fair: considering he's actually posting here, it's probably one of the best of the bad. Hopefully he'll take something away from this and Slashdot won't spend the entire thread bashing Microsoft for no reason, but I doubt it.
And yet Office still boots twice as fast as OpenOffice on a typical computer, IIS and MS SQL are completely neck-and-neck with their competitors, and Outlook completely trounces its closest competitor, performance-wise.
I mean, I completely understand what you're saying: having multiple copies of the same function/code block in memory is inefficient. But in practice, it doesn't seem to be hurting them anyway.
Amazon is big, so they don't have problems with this... if a product is badly reviewed, Amazon almost certainly carries the competing product with good reviews, so they still make the sale. Plus they get the free press from posters like you lauding their honesty. It's a win-win for them.
Smaller shops aren't really the same way.
If you try to use it for just email, and your company isn't writing good applications on it, then its like trying to use an 18 wheel tractor trailer to go grocery shopping.
I've yet to see a single Notes application worth running. The email client, as bad as it is, seems to actually have the *best* UI in the Notes ecosystem-- the whole product is so amazingly bad, I literally think it's impossible to make a good UI, no matter how much effort you put into it.
Kind of like Java, in that respect. Sure, it has tons of fans who constantly rave about how you can make completely native and good UIs, and maybe it is *possible* with an extreme level of effort, but in reality I've never actually seen one.
Then they get switched to Exchange with Outlook as the front end and they get shocked by how bad that is, and how little it does in comparison -- and then when there is downtime, the exchange servers are down for a LONG time as databases have to be rebuilt.
Oh please. Nobody's ever experienced that with Exchange.
And, frankly, even if I had... having to use Notes every day for two years, or have 3 days of downtime every year? Give me the downtime, NO QUESTION ABOUT IT. Even if you're right about the downtime (and again, you're in a fantasy-world right now), it's still better than having to use a client that bad all the time. Hell, Exchange's yearly downtime is probably less than it takes Notes to just load every morning.
The biggest thing that Notes users suffer from, is that Notes is a very different kind of tool and they (users) get stuck with bad in-house applications that are ugly, poorly performing, and not well matched to business processes. No wonder people are frustrated.
What really annoys me is that it's not like Notes is cheap to make up for it. IBM charges through the nose, companies pay, and nobody's happy. WTF!
They must have the best sales staff in the world.
Either way, I'd leave it off your list if you're trying to get people to try Perl.
Someone else posted this to a similar complaint above, but Twilight Zone was never sold as science fiction. Most episodes do rely on some kind of supernatural element, but that doesn't *necessarily* imply that it's science fiction-- many of the best episodes are about things that occur only in a person's mind, and how reality differs.
Look at, for example, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" which is a faithful adaptation of a short story with absolutely no science fiction elements at all.
Compare that to The Outer Limits, which *was* science fiction by editorial mandate-- not only that, but each episode had to feature a monster.
It's not your fault, it's the site's. No accusation or insult intended.
"The Arrival", a DC-3 lands at an airport with no crews, passengers, or luggage-- and despite being a normally-scheduled flight, no family members of the passengers inquire about the status of the flight. An FAA investigator, assisted by the airline's PR guy and ground crew, tries to figure out what happened.
About 20 minutes in there's a scene that's just amazingly mind-blowing. (The last 10 minutes or so, unfortunately, are kind of wasted. But alas.)