eckyptang

12mb :) It cost more but the time to market was much lower and it was multi user so I think the trade off on cost was quite good.

apart fron the editoe problems, It was used to write a control program for a cnc mill which talked to an Isa card that controlled stepper motors. The program took a basic description of the part to be milled and converted it into tool movement steps. this was all 2d but the parts were quite complicated as were the calculations. Tool movements is what killed it. We started with a list of lists structure but that took up too much ram so we moved to a skip list implementation. That also took too much ram so it was back to a singly linked list and an external preprocessor. So it turned from an elegant tool into a few chunks of ugly which had to be chained. That really doesn't work well on DOS. This was before EMS etc so 640k of segmented vomit it was. It was moved to a dedicated 68k SBC eventually with the ui in turbo pascal (over a serial line) which worked well and we could throw 4mb at it and write the control program in c using a cross compiler on unix (plus no segments=bliss).

I love 32+ bits these days :)

I was thrown at turbo Pascal at university. Horrible language to be honest as it was utterly painful to produce any reasonable data structures in it. The verbosity usually broke the memory constraints of the machine just before you finished what you were doing meaning hours of search and replace on identifiers to shorten them to clean up ram for the editor. Ick.

It made me actually long to get back to a m68k based sun 3 with a c compiler which took literally 2 minutes to compile hello world if some asshat wasn't running emacs on the same box which was swapping to disk 100% of the time...

However what they managed to cram in was impressive.

Definitely.

I've been doing it for years. You can use a WebDAV share in Apache and mount it from Windows XP and above. That's pretty much DropBox with COTS software there.

I switched to Skydrive in 2009 though as it's just easier and it (at the time) supposed machine->machine replication with Live Mesh.

European finance, insurance, banking, news agencies, e-commerce and market research companies. We're talking large companies on the same scale.

Exactly that.

I'm genuinely surprised at some of the things people haven't quite grasped about Windows 8. To put it simply:

Windows 8 is the same as Windows 7 but it has a new interface layer (Metro) which replaces the start menu and adds an app store for Metro and normal apps. Everything you did in Windows 7 is just the same bar the start button.

The best Microcontroller is the one that works for you and does what you need. In my case I bought a few of these and they rock:

http://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/353

(I also don't have to piss around with C+RTOS for what I need - it's just a C# program!)

I didn't suggest they were broken. The semantics are different between UNIX and Windows which is the same point you are making. The issue here is when something decided that proceeding was dangerous and stops it.

The issue here is that compared to SVN/Git, which fail late, SkyDrive fails early and refuses to function which has a number of advantages including no nasty surprises when some awkward individual uploads Test.cs and test.cs after using it for 6 months.

They did test it and decided that it was better to fail up front rather than lead the user down a path to certain destruction.

That's the difference between good code and shit code.

As a footnote, NTFS is case sensitive via the POSIX subsystem but not via DOS VM/Win32 subsystems. HFS+ is both case sensitive and not as well. Interesting eh? No technical superiority either way.

Now, regarding patching or forking Git or Subversion, I don't want to any more. I have sent a few patches to the SVN to fix merging bugs to no avail (they are still there and regularly fuck up our mergeinfo properties). Forking is just a waste of time as we have to fork the entire dependency chain up to the end software which is pretty much up to TeamCity and VisualSVN.

As for NTFS, we had an issue with mounting junctions on volumes greater than 2TiB back in 2004. It took one phone call and 4 days to get a hotfix to us from the NTFS team and it was included in a patch cycle a few weeks later. Same with NHibernate profiler - fix in 2 hours.

Commercial software is not the root of all evil. Shitty management is and that exists both in open source and commercial markets.

Indeed. We basically wrote our own version of jQuery, backbone.js and a whole functional toolkit with 150 functions and 30 client side controls and a validation framework about 5 years ago and it even worked on IE 5.5...

This is correct and very common knowledge. However traditional apps can be linked from the store and regularly are already so no one is missing out.

Hell yes. This is where all my ideas and inspiration come from. Its a place where lucidity is common. I actually keep a notepad and pen next to me in case so I don't forget it if its interesting when or wake up.

Better than anything mind bending and more healthy too.

Odd it loads in 2 seconds for me even on ie9.

Every browser suffers this occasionally. In fact every piece of software does. To suddenly throw it all out is childish. Look at the SQL injection vulnerability in rails recently. Has that killed it? Looks at the java vulnerability. Has that killed it? Look at the number of ssh worms - has that killed it?

I could reverse that and say how horrible git and svn are on Windows for the same reason (have you ever dealt with a repo that has a file Test.cs and test.cs ?)

It's just an incompatibility you have to live with.

Fair point - I agree there.

No not at all. Most of the LOB applications you see these days work very well in most browsers. Ours works in Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari perfectly and is entirely plugin free. I've not seen an ActiveX for about 5 years and that was a file upload control. All our fugly desktop integration is done with a broker application which runs on the user's machine and talks to local COM objects via web services. You see an occasional fugy J2EE page or a WebForms page but mostly, it's pretty spankingly good looking and works well. This is financial sector stuff as well which is the worst market for heel-dragging.

Corporations fear things breaking. Retraining is rarely an issue for a browser upgrade. However, if someone pushes out a crap Chrome update like this and an LOB application goes pop then heads roll. Chrome is entirely out of band from their normal operations and skill sets so it just doesn't even get considered. It also has dubious unpredictable support lifecycles and a rate of change which would scare anyone. To use a car analogy: they want a 3 year old Volvo, not a 6 month old Tesla.

I think it's more correct to say they tail end what still works and is supported, which is why our baseline is IE7.

You'd be surprised. The amount of CSS/HTML that goes into your typical LOB application is quite large and the applications are typically orders of magnitude more complicated than "sites" as you mention. The piece of kit I work with has approximately 900 ASP.Net MVC views...

I just ran CLOC. We have 6.2 million lines of code in 14 different languages!

Without wishing to piggy back on this thread I feel its a good time to point out that this is exactly why enterprises stick with IE. People are risk averse in businesses.

I get the feeling you haven't used IE, hotmail and office for a while. They're definitely not rotting.

Because the majority of the userbase are on windows?

I've been using SkyDrive for a couple of years. It's great. I use it to sync my desktop, laptop and phone (lumia). The main powerful thing for me is OneNote which just works transparently.

There is literally nothing out there as good. I've tried everything. Google drive is Just crap - it doesn't leave real files on your disk and its buggy. Dropbox is better but has no application support.

I think why no one has noticed is that a) the SkyDrive proponents as per much of the userbase isn't that vocal and b) everyone is blind to Microsoft these days.

As for the risk if account shutdown and them peeking at stuff, this is a risk for any 'cloud provider'. If its a problem, keep a backup (which SkyDrive does as it mirrors everything rather than providing links) and don't use it for anything dodgy. I've had 9gb of mp3s up there for two years with no problems.

To be honest, I too used the same toolset as you for a long time, but since Office 2007, it's just not been worth it for me. I have to share a lot of documents and information with people who don't understand the UNIX tools so it's not practical.

Yes I probably should have added postgres. I like the fact that they keep the documentation nicely versioned as well. The quality is fantastic too.

This times a million. Microsoft, OpenBSD and Golang are the only things I've found that produce good quality extensive reference documentation these days that I can take offline.

Python documentation, while extensive, is crappy.

I still miss my Sun Ultra enterprise 2. That was documented to bits.

Not at all. I'm saying that it works for me versus buying another device to consume with. To me it doesn't matter what the medium is - it's still the same thing.

And likewise nobody cares that you disagree with me, including me.

It's an opinion. Chill.

That's irrelevant. I used to work quite happily on a 25MHz ARM machine years ago (Acorn A5000).

The issue is that the environment and model are entirely unsuitable for software development.

I don't have any feeds or Facebook. That was a far better solution if you ask me.

Clarified - thanks :)