csmithuk

Yes and no. Some notes:

* Experimentation doesn't make it into production twice unless you're doing something wrong.

* There are proven solutions off the shelf both open source and commercial.

* They should be value driven rather than innovation driven. We aren't paying them to be a research agency.

* There is an ongoing maintenance cost and in-house only knowledge when you do an NIH job of something. That is not efficient.

I'm not trolling. I've watched them build their own stack, throw it away, build it again, throw it away. That's waste.

Probably but that's moot.

They're pissing away profit and investor's cash in private companies.

In public organisations, taxpayers don't get to choose if that money is spent or not.

Don't forget aerobraking which can knock a big chunk off that delta-v.

I'll be more interested when he unleashes his "arse kicking" on the company and starts pushing roadmaps out. That's a make or break moment for a lot of us involved in Microsoft's ecosystem.

Depends. In the UK we just wait for the minister in charge to resign. That's cheaper than a bug bounty :)

Who said the X-37 has to survive though? That can do a 180 and decelerate using the main AR2-3 at the cost of a decaying orbit then drop the payload at 4km/s.

Yes it is capable. There's a 2.1m x 1.2m payload bay[1]. Various nefarious things that go boom on a large scale will fit in that hole.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37#X-37B_2

I am and I'm not impressed.

Whilst the outcome is positive, the technology churn isn't. In fact, it's a right mess. They've ended up with a huge stack that doesn't need to be there. They're there to provide content efficiently, not redesign the infrastructure. They're using tech because it's cool and fun rather than suitable for the task and cost effective.

I know people are going to compare them to EDS and say "look how far we've come" etc but they are still spending public money and are not beyond scrutiny from us tax payers.

They're not a startup either. The ground they're standing on is different to what they think they're standing on.

Edit: downvoters, please at least have the honour to explain yourselves.

No. They shouldn't. They are publicly funded so efficiency of cash flow is important. No reward should be required in this circumstance apart from perhaps an acknowledgement.

They should operate an open submission policy though i.e. a bug report form and actually feed back to people.

No-one sane writes parsers any more. People use parser generators.

Surprisingly, we've been doing this on the Microsoft side of things for years with ADO and csv data sources!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms974559.aspx

(article dated 2004)

If that happens, I'm in :)

From my perspective, there is no source code to review so we have to trust you to have made sensible security decisions, which at least I don't.

UX isn't a big win. KeyPassX is good enough i.e. works with keyboards entirely, is open source, is reviewed, goes to extra lengths not to leave stuff floating around in RAM as well. Oh and works across all platforms I use.

It gets booted up every 3 months or so to apply windows updates so it's ready to roll if this one fails. If it does, I'll repair this one as they're pretty easy to fix even with massive failures. I've got another T61 running FreeBSD which gets used regularly as well.

The battery is removed and placed in a box. It's a second hand 9-cell battery with 12 recharge cycles (Paid £20 for it!) so it's been charged to 80% and will be maintained at that where possible. I've investigated rebuilding the packs as well in the future and it's not impossibly difficult.

I'd definitely go for it. There is a vacuum of quality hardware now. Even the latest Lenovo T/X series are cruddy machines.

I'll go back to desktops if the situation doesn't improve by 2020.

Yes. Not much.

Dangerous ports are already turned off with group policy (USB, removable media etc), BIOSes are locked down, hardware is still available that will support XP, the networks aren't directly connected to the Internet so they will either be airgapped or have massive edge content filters and firewalls. There aren't many infection vectors for nasties. In fact most of the machines probably don't even have latest updates on them already. Possible not even SP2.

Microsoft probably won't be paid other than through their select agreements which allow XP use indefinitely. 3rd party consultants will swarm to help any issues for a fee which is still cheaper than upgrading.

The world will still spin and lots of "meh" will be chanted as Windows 7 boxes slowly trickle into production with an old ancient IE9 build on them as and when they feel like it...

This really isn't a big issue for companies and governments despite technology news panic stations and sensationalism.

To be fair, I consider that I'll be using Windows 7 until possibly after EOL as it does what I need. I'm sitting on a second hand 2008 circa Lenovo T400 and have a spare one in the cupboard. It'll do me fine until 2020 - progress hasn't exactly been rapid in IT in the 6 years.

A lot of assumptions and hype in the article.

Usually a bad sign.

Well when it works properly for more than a week at a time (export is currently randomly broken) and has turn by turn navigation, yes.

So no.

xoring something with itself is a common idiom in ASM. Been doing it since the Z80 (XOR A). Not sure that meaning is enhanced at all.

This. Microsoft MASM is the canonical example of one.

Born in 1981, still being updated today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Macro_Assembler

A lot but it's not perfect by any means and it's very time consuming as the test suites take 8h+ to run.

This really doesn't bother me. What bothers me is how much of my RAM is likely to page out to disk somewhere because it's oversold and if the CPU is being hammered with context switches and cache waits. If that's zero, this argument is moot as my datasets will run entirely from RAM and I'll pick a VM that has the capacity to do this.

Perhaps I'm just rusty but age has only made me cautious. I'm responsible for a rather large and complicated UI framework that we use internally. The thing I've discovered over the last 5-6 years is that APIs are volatile as are JavaScript libraries, browsers and security concerns. It's terribly hard picking something that you can rely on. Even jQuery has enough breaking changes for me to have a week long task getting past 1.4.2 on our product. We have over 400 complicated web app pages that need testing to make sure we haven't broken any edge cases.

The learning curve is tough, the maintenance is tougher and the churn is terrible. It's a living hell on a large project. It makes me long for WPF or even Win32 where 20 years without significant reengineering is a good bet.

On the web, the basic DOM API is the most stable. Sacrificing convenience for maintenance these days is what I'm for. Screw the frameworks.

Can block, will block. I will advise people to block where possible as well. Why?

The Internet experience is universally shit when there are adverts. The 2% exception to the rule isn't a valid discussion point. Neither is the people delivering content and surrounding it with shit.

My children battling through adverts galore and pushing apps on them using dirty ad network tricks on their iPads is a fine example. Browsing on the devices is fucking horrible to the point they only want to use a desktop with an adblocker. Their school has adblockers. The local library has adblockers. Everyone I know has adblockers.

The model is over. No turd polish or new strategy will help. Advertisers ruined it.

I'd rather go back to gopher and dialups than saw a new paradigm appear.

If its the government, there is no *BSD experience anywhere. I doubt they'd recommend it. Everything is purchased based on the ability to fill the purchaser's pocket on the side. Yes I have witnessed this - I did contract work for NHS and one of the PCTs had taken on a vendor for a cash back promise.

I've lost a payment in a similar fashion before. The accounts team took the written paperwork and misinterpreted a 6 for a 0 (I didn't write the form) and it just happened to be a valid destination account number. It took me 2 weeks to get the payment back.

Doesn't always come down to technology.

In fact, when it comes to technology it's usually pretty good. Humans on the other hand always err on the side of incompetence as there's usually someone else to blame...

If you do not believe this about humans, work in or for the public sector in the UK for a bit!

I think the only irritation I get is gimp startup time on windows.

Need a replacement for Adobe Lightroom and I'm sorted then :)

The news here in the UK is just as selective. The BBC are the worst believe it or not.

Inkscape and gimp.

This. I used Fireworks MX (released 2002) until 2 years ago