unicron

I did the same. Plus the education was an expensive proposition that had no return as just about everyone I studied with now understands.

I know a qualified BSc mechanical engineer who works in a supermarket for wage scraps.

I'd rather build it and see - it's more fun.

Perhaps they do not wish to be educated? That is my impression.

Don't sort out education, sort out the social stereotypes and cultural issues that turn people into pieces of shit. Education will fix itself then.

Hence why all my family members who work in construction have very cheap Nokia phones. The problem is solved.

They work in crappy environments, cost $20 to replace (my father in law has 5 of the things in his truck) and last days on a battery. They also tend to still work if you drop them lots.

Also, technology doesn't really help construction that much really unless it's on a large scale (which actually makes up a very small proportion of actual work done).

Just use a Java EE 6. They got rid of all the horrible bits. It's actually really nice now.

Host on Glassfish v2.

I viewed the comments just to write what you have.

It's like reading CNet.

Someone should write an app that turns shitty articles across lots of pages into one page!

Two reasons:

1. It's bloody slow. Well it is here in the UK. Even Bing is orders of magnitude faster.

2. It's now expensive.

> forced by a family member to be a Windows support desk, you have my pity....

Thank you - it's nice to know there are people out there thinking about us :(

I reckon that "drug induced microkernel" was a stab at Tanenbaum :-)

> Being able to have non-techies run Fabric tasks is definitely a goal that's passed me fleetingly in the night.

Isn't that equipping monkeys with guns? We all know what happens when you do that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AabGdnTxqD0

Tempted to stick it inside my BBC master case and run BeebEm on it :)

It's good but it's hard to skip large spans i.e. years.

Well we should obviously NEVER EVER use any LISP derivatives (car/cdr/cons).

These sort of articles make me sigh. They are narrow minded and miss the point that everything is a compromise and choosing the right compromise is the art, not a bunch of explicit rules.

On the subject, I don't think a real native LISP machine would have cache locality problems. An x86 perhaps which brings in the question that doesn't the architecture define what is good and bad and isn't it a compiler's job to make this issue go away (not ours).

Take Trac, stick that in jpython on top of the JVM and you're done!

> Let me finish on some faint praise: they are by FAR the least worse of all the 'enterprise' software we use :-)

That's like saying "they're the least bad rapist".

I do agree though!

Four words: "You shouldn't have to".

Unfortunately, due this responsibility being approximately 5% of my time, I don't have time to invest in to-and-fro with Atlassian. I expect something to work (ironically like Trac did - its predecessor).

On the positive side, we're upgrading to latest versions soon.

I wouldn't want to be saved by them :)

Adn they ruined it hence my original point.

Hm I bed to differ. Have you ever used C#?

I've seen this many times. Mainly due to burnout.

Some of the more fast paced "big consultancies" in the UK tend to do this to their staff (I'd name names but I'd get sued) resulting in resentment towards employment. They literally beat every last drop of energy and life out of their staff every day, threaten their jobs constantly with outsourcing and then chuck them on the street when they get wise or ask questions (usually protecting themselves by threatening to sue them if they didn't sign a legal wavier). One outfit I had the misfortunate of contracting some work for informally described their team leads as "whipmasters".

We had a couple of guys on from one of these outfits and they're doing well "in rehab" with us.

Unfortunately yes.

Someone please save me (I'm serious there!)

Crucible/fisheye - slow. I mean really slow. Unusably slow both with respect to the UI and back end. Half our team use IE which it just doesn't work in at all. Chrome is the only thing it just about crawls along in. Incredibly difficult keeping it alive with 50 users. Crashes once a week entirely and sometimes refuses to start with no error messages at all.

JIRA - workflow crash took our team of 30 devs at the time out entirely for 2 days. Overcomplicated administrative mess especially with respect to plugins. Reindexing takes out the entire JIRA instance until complete. Permission schemes and workflow is an epic mess of cludges.

Both products: Null pointer exceptions galore, scary memory ceiling. Integration sucks - all the horrible mappings to maintain.

They feel like bloated, slow and badly designed products which is worrying considering the cost.

TBH their support are good but I shouldn't have to use it on a product suite that costs that much.

Another product about to be ruined...

(I'm not an Atlassian fan)

WRT scalability - it's scaling UI components over time. I build large complicated metadata driven applications and it's quite hard to compose an application on the fly.

Agree with performance. I hope WinRT is better. I have little faith based on my experience with Win8 so far but it's not RTM so I shouldn't comment on it yet.

Doesn't scale up as well as win32/GDI. Requires much faster kit with graphic hardware acceleration to run (we had to bin about 200 Matrox Parhelia cards and replace with hefty NVidia cards to make use of hardware acceleration where GDI was fine on Matrox). Can't ILmerge thanks to XAML loader problems. Editor sucks. 5-million casts required in your code. BUGS! Hard to do trivial things. Virtually impossible to produce a scalable composite application. Grinds an 16 core Xeon to a halt inside VS2010. Learning curve from hell (this hurts on a 20 man team).

It's not good progress - it's just a deeper abstraction.

Similar!

I was using Debian on a compaq dual 200MHz Pentium Pro desktop until about '02. I was pretty much 100% of the time on the shell so I really didn't need anything more.

Mutt for email, irssi for IRC, links for browser, vi for the editor and a 512k ADSL connection. That was about it.

The whole machine cost me 10GBP (about $15). It replaced an old Sun machine I found in a skip in 1997.

I bought my first new computer in 2004 :)

The console rocks.

That's because your MacBook Pro is poorly designed. I had the same problem with mine. One reason I sold it - impossible to sit with it on my lap.

Another example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AZzPZ0kjyk

I now had a ThinkPad X220 which is roughly the same CPU as the MacBook Pro and has twice the memory and it never even gets warm.

It's just a fancy thread pool/task queue with a fugly syntax extension not some magic unicorn that poops rainbows.

Java/C# don't need a language extension - the functionality exists outside the semantic boundary of the language. Another cludge in Objective-C.

C# (ThreadPool/async framework/Windows workflow) and Java (ExecutorService/lots of 3rd party frameworks) have had them for years with well-known communication, thread safe data structures, concurrency and locking semantics.

Most of the verbose mess you see in Java threads is because the person writing it doesn't know much.

I've put together a few things with Objective C over the years dating back to OSX 10.1 (yuck PB sucked then) to iOS. Most ended up being ported to Java or C#.

The syntax IS absolutely horrible if you ask me as it results in crazily verbose ways of expressing stuff. Everything is "too meta" and there are very few first class parts of the language. It still FEELS like it's hacked together with C macros (which was what it originally was).

Add to that the reference counting implementation (when GC is not enabled which you can't do on iOS) and it's just painful. Also the lack of any decent threading abstraction - ick.

I think there is a lot of hype around it. It's not where we should be in 2012. Android does better with bastardised Java if you ask me.

That's down to WPF which is a total pile of shit to be honest (having spent the last 3 years with it).

It's nothing to do with the language.