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It doesn't do that. I clicked "not now" and never signed in. That was weeks ago.

No but it says something about the quality I can expect from the black boxes that Apple provide me with. And its not a good thing.

Indeed, but the experience is not one you'd want.

Unless you invert the relationship and install biztalk which we dub in the office "Unix done wrong". Both are useful. One is painful :)

Comedic derision appreciated :)

However this is a pretty damn serious oversight.

I've just shut down my MacBook and picked up my ThinkPad.

I was nearly the victim of a situation like this in the late 90s. There was a power failure site-wide and the generator failed to start in time (water in the fuel). There were three of us in the machine room at the time of the power incident. Unfortunately due to some insane security requirements, the doors lock in a failsafe situation (this was a UK MoD facility) voiding all health and safety laws.

One of the idiots decided to light up a cigarette whilst we were sitting in there in the very dim emergency lighting. Turns out the power system for the halon was still active and the 60 second alarm went off.

Fortunately we hit the stop button on the wall to prevent it being dumped on us.

New pants all round that was.

Depends. If you have a ThinkPad with a TrackPoint-style mouse, it's actually really convenient having a mouse in the home row. Hold the middle button and scroll up/down easily.

Yes same here. However this is still utterly painful compared to Unix platforms.

Is it just latent paranoia, or can I just see evil uses for this?

Well it did have if you dragged in Workflow Foundation and Silverlight. To have that yanked from under us was a massive and really expensive pain. If we'd picked a Java BPEL solution and WebStart with Swing, we'd have been better off.

Not only that, Java talks to AD via LDAP and SQL Server via Microsoft JDBC driver. The same is not true the other way round for a lot of things though which means you are stuck in the Microsoft ecosystem the moment you put one foot in it.

Glad to see you here. I used some bits from Subsonic a few years back to ease some pain - would like this opportunity to thank you, so a big thank you :)

Java syntax is usually pretty irrelevant when it comes to actually solving problems.

C# is a minefield for issues. Linq memory ballooning, null refs, O(WTF) LINQ expressions, tri-state logic caused by nullables, spinlocks from hell (ReaderWriterLockSlim), missing symbols and more sourceless black boxes than anything. Oh and three different subtly broken XML APIs.

More language features don't make it better.

No - go Java. ORMs, document generation, reporting, integration, architecture, deployment, tooling, devops stuff. Literally everything is ready to roll out of the box for $0. And it all works.

C# - half of this is available for a fee and the rest is available for a larger fee. And none of it works particularly well. And if anything breaks it's $200 a go to get it fixed.

I had a background of Unix and Windows NT. I did both ASP.Net and PHP and switched back and forth between contracts for about 6 years depending on who offered the most cash. I now sit at a Microsoft consultancy, on a Mac, doing all the high level technical design work and Unix bits the company needs (and occasionally digging the company out of the crap when they screw stuff up and the normal staff don't know what to do and Googling it is beyond them).

Did I do the right thing? No. I should have skipped Microsoft stack entirely. I say this after 12 years of .Net and a previous 6 years of COM/C++/Win32. It has been the universally most stressful platform to work on. The technology is terribly complicated, obtuse and non-orthogonal and full of dead-ends and surprises. It's also virtually impossible to cleanly automate anything which means you need thousands of hands to push the buttons in the right order[1]. However this pales in comparison to the culture which almost universally (90%+ of outfits I've worked at) contains solely grim factory farm programmers who don't actually care what they are doing or understand what happens outside the ecosystem and outsourcers who whilst technically superior to the on-site staff, march around with loaded guns ready to shoot their own toes off (and anyone else dancing with them).

The only good bit was the cash.

I'd rather have picked up a 2003 OsCommerce site than do it again.

Now I'm learning Objective C and Cocoa to solve a few real world problems in another non-technology market that IT rarely penetrates. I'm doing that on my own.

[1] This has finally improved, but a little too late with PS and PS DSC for example.

Remove the keep calm bit and you're there.

Actually they do that. Don't forget that GCHQ steal a lot of stuff as well and then retrospectively classify it as well.

For the moment...

Agree with your middle point however there are other laws in which he could have been stopped under which relate directly to the crime. Terrorism laws were picked selectively because they can hold suspects longer. This is the problem - everything looks like a target when a gun is handed to powerful people. This power was no accident either.

The courts are inconsistent in general. There is no law of the land any more -- it's down to the prosecutor's opinion unless it is trial by Jury. Consider the post-riot sentencing system that appeared to process suspects overnight without a fair trial. Many people were issued criminal charges and a prison term for civil issues that would have usually resulted in a fine or community service.

See my comment "portable to mono".

I agree with you but I wouldn't do it myself.

The BBC however have very selective reporting.

It probably isn't. I was hoping WikiNews would end up being that to be honest.

Actually as a resident of the UK, it was a "meh" thing. The word terrorist was still an extreme word used in rare circumstances even back in the height of the bombings.

And no one really actually cared about it that much.

Now it's a label for every crime. "The defendant is a terrorist unit proven otherwise".

My father, an East German now living in the UK, was saying the other day that he sees parallels between the rise of the Stasi in the 1950's onwards and the UK government's behaviour over the last two decades. I'm inclined to believe him.

The legal system was pretty much the first thing to fall there as well as the criminalisation of literally everything. We have so much legislation now that deals with criminalising people that people don't have a chance if they get in trouble even for something trivial.

Everything is less evil than the Daily Mail so that's not much of a comparison.

I've given up reading the news in the UK. It's either biased towards the agenda of the paper or terribly depressing. Both unfortunately sell very well. I've even got rid of my television. Life is good.

They haven't abandoned any of them. We still have ATL, MFC, Win32, WPF, WinForms and now Metro.

Not that I want to use any of them myself :)

I really don't want them to port it. I want to see Java 8!

Mix of both. The killer on the server-side is always stuff like missing WCF features, odd bugs with DI containers, missing API calls, slight behavioural differences etc.

Client-side. No WPF and WinForms is dreadfully incomplete.

It's a no go. If you start on Mono and deploy to .Net I imagine it'd work but no-one realistically does that these days. If they were going to do that, Java would be a better choice for the product.

The answer to your latter question is: no. Only pretty trivial stuff is portable to Mono. I've tried it on every project I've worked on over the last 6 years to no avail. Show stopper every time.

We pay people for robust solutions, not to write code. It's a whole lot more complicated than "just programming". In fact we'd rather they wrote less code and did more thinking.

Experienced engineers will trade off a COTS solution against build. Inexperienced engineers will machine 2000 M3x12 screws by hand.

Just because you're an engineer doesn't mean we want you to sit in front of a lathe/mill all day.

Libraries wouldn't exist if we didn't want to reuse work. With respect to more bugs in libraries, this is rarely the case for established products. In fact by writing our own code with similar intent will almost certainly incur more test effort, more odd edge cases and more $$$.

Final point: I wrote some code a few years ago in Java that spoke to .doc files, databases, a SOAP API and a service bus. It was (excluding blank lines and bracketed lines) 2900 lines of code with 850 unit tests. It handles over a million insurance contracts a year. This would have not been possible if I'd written ANY component myself.

I was paid to solve the problem, not write those libraries again.

No we don't want competent people showboating and pissing cash up the wall reinventing wheels that have a high maintenance cost because it's fun.

We hire engineers.

An analogy: would you hire the electrical engineer who knocks up an ASIC for every task or the one who designs in a COTS part for a predictable unit cost and manufacturing lead time?

Not really. We want people to solve the problem, not invent something that needs maintenance. In some cases, from scratch is important, but for most it's not.