xradionut

Why do I feel that the fonts and colours folks at MS won this round of "Welcome to Redmond, Let's Make a Change!". From a developer/admin viewpoint, my workflow is jacked in Windows 8.

"I just wish that the guy who did the browser did a better job."

Amen! Last night I watched an "expert" explain how the thirty lines of Node.js that reinvents a SQL Join statement on the server just to get a some simple data to a browser on a phone.

Biatch please! The web still hasn't replicated the desktop apps we had 20 years ago. It's busted when you have to glue stacks of APIs with 4 or 5 separate programming languages together just to get a simple app to work. It's enough to make me run from phone apps and stick to the CLI and "normal" desktop GUI.

"Programmers make horrible designers..."

Correction: Most programmers make terrible designers. I've met and worked with some that can handle both well and a few that are exceptional in many realms technical and design.

Now the "designer" that glued the Metro interface on to Windows 8 should stick to smartphones. I'm about to write shim to make the OS boot into a CLI interface, so I can avoid the "Tiles" and get somework done.

If the TA has a grasp of spoken language, that might work. (In the past I've dropped labs and classes when profs/TAs couldn't communicate clearly.)

Why Lisp?

It's fun to play with when I need a break from work or projects. In the real world work environment I need to write mundane code maintainable by coworkers and clients, so it's not there. In my hobby, C and assembly rule the tight memory spaces of embedded hardware, so Lisp exists in a shared dream-state with Smalltalk and Oberon...

In memory databases would be one good use for large amounts of system RAM even on ARM. You wouldn't suffer the IO cost of going to disk...

We had the fugly IBM terminals by the time I went to the university. Long lines waiting to key in your assignments, then even longer time awaiting the printouts.

Found a nice loophole that I could exploit. Modem users got higher priority on jobs. Plus the TRS-80 Model4P I owned was capable of terminal emulation and other nice tricks to speed up Fortran and JCL assignments. So I sat in the comfort of the dorm room and used the time I saved on EE assignments.

Much of older science fiction doesn't connect with readers that have read authors that are better technically in the writing craft. Also many of the themes and "science" hasn't aged well. The best vision of the Foundation universe is Donald Kingsbury's "Psychohistorical Crisis". It is more up-to-date and crafted well as a large novel.

As a side note, the one author that has built a multi-book "Future History" that I recommend is John Barnes. Not celebrated as someone like Ian Banks, but as well crafted and readable.

It was a different time. I was in highschool in '83 and was fortunate enough to have a father who taught at a technical college, an uncle that repaired everything digital, and friends with home computers. The true geeks then were the ham radio and astronomy folks. Steve Ciarcia and game programmers were heros. And computers were expensive and something we lusted after. Between game and role-playing, hours would be spent discussing what new system was featured in Byte...

There probably is a political motive that involves government or military contracts here. Or an political/economic motive if Apple wants to repatriate money back into the US.

You mean the Windows 2008 R2 server that I have at home? Or the Ubuntu server that I have at home? Can't be the DG/UX server, that's sitting in the garage awaiting the metal scrappers.

Or those in the first camp that expect those in the second camp to do their work. That's where the resentment may stem from.

Practice at your local user group. We have several national known experts in the our field at the NTSSUG and they all do their dress rehearsals for larger conferences at meetings and regional conferences. And a majority do virtual meetings, video blogs and teach classes.

The artist in me wants to smile, but the RF guy inside says, "Hey, they recreated the radio signal coverage map with fewer dimensions and less useful information!" (chuckle...)

China should focus on developing non-contaminated produce in China, so their elite doesn't have to import it.

I got burned out by the start up scene in the original internet boom in the '90s. Probably lost 200K in salary due to betting on the startups, only to have the founders make bonehead mistakes or shaft the programmers.

It's yet another rant, but there's a deeper problem with GUI "thrash" at Microsoft. One example is Outlook. The interface changed in 2010 and again in 2013. This causes confusion and doubt amoung users and distrust from IT and the folks that write the checks. Is the new software really better, or are the folks in Redmond just remodeling the interface to sell "new" versions?

Which Oberon system???

Genode would be useful, since it can run on the Pandaboard.

If you are already a programmer, you should know most of of the operators and keywords except for a few Python-isms.

Quote: "What's also important is to find out what you do not know so you can fix it later."

I don't want to juggle all the driver issues, etc... Hence the vitual machine for Linux amongst all the other guest OSes. Best of all worlds. Plus Linux isn't my primary working OS, I use it for testing and hobby programming.

Nice try but, dang the hardware is limited. I have XPS 17 that's heavy, but several times more powerful. I'll continue to run Linux on my Dell in a vitual machine...

Works of this ilk has been done in the past. Look at the original "Hackers" book or "Soul of a New Machine". And the jokes that she finds very funny are mostly bad puns to the folks that have been in the "culture" for decades.

The reason Outlook.com has 25 million users is that it's harvesting/transplanting users from the it's Hotmail user base.

I find it amusing that today I took 14 pages of code from a 20-something developer and reduced to it to a single query and a one line function.

In a good shop, experience is key, since there is still a lot of domain knowledge like tooling and jigs.

It's obvious when I go to conferences and user group meetings that the majority of us programmers, admins and managers can spot most recuiters and HR folks at a glance. And it's offense to have clueless people in those postions, even more so when they are hired for looks.

You have probably dealt with consumer or simple commercial systems. Military, government and even ham transceivers can be a maze of menus and modes. Not to mention the trunking, programming, dispatch, data modes, propagation, fading, interop, etc... One doesn't simply hand grunts and officers a COTS radio and expect success. Training is key.

"Not only that, from a technical perspective, it's an absolute bastard to administer, particularly if something goes snap. It requires significantly more meat popsicles to run than a similar sized Postgres or MySQL cluster."

Really? If you have some pro DBAs in charge you don't need mass quantities of warm bodies. (The problem is that 90% of the folks that claim to be experienced can't tell a clustered index from a cluster f__k.) You can automate 95% of the job and spend the rest of the time helping users do better.

"To be honest, it's cheaper to solve all the problems that SQL Server solves at an architectural level these days. It's no longer something special (was it ever?)."

Bullshit. I'm dealing with clients that insist on writing custom applications to do complex ETL instead of using SSIS or decent third party tool. Or wasting months writing code that reinvents SQL that's been around for decades.

There's plenty of MS SQL Server blogs, but the truly good ones are independent.

"We only expect one of the two groups of information to inform the life-altering (and potentially -ending) recommendations made by trusted physicians.

If we're in agreement about a general endemic of misinformation, though, that makes more sense."

Corruption and fraud are damaging in all aspects of society. Which occupation does more "damage" to a community/society/culture as a whole? A doctor? A banker? A programmer? A military leader? It depends on the situation.