xradionut

"I sincerely wondered if this was not a deliberate tactic by Microsoft : while developers are busy learning their newest "next great thing", they can't invest time in anything else."

Bingo!

The majority of users don't live in a Ubuntu world, they have to deal with Microsoft at their job or school. Corporations are demanding Windows 7 over Windows 8.

And Linux users have a full spectrum of distributions to choose from. If Ubuntu acts like an ass-hat, I can easily switch to Mint when the LTS version is no longer supported. I have a choice of desktops environments that all run the same services and applications. I'm not locked in, nor is my data. Squeeeeeee!

Here's the deal: Despite having some awesome tech and many talented employees, Microsoft as a corporation has a history of shitting on developers, smaller companies and independents. There's a history of threatening OSS, monopoly abuse, abandoning APIs, bad certs, crapware, gross mismanagement, ignoring constructive requests and a very bad case of Not Invented Here. And they do have an history of astro-turfing and aggressive social media promotion.

Disclosure: I've primarily worked as a MS stack developer and admin for over two decades. But I've also used a full spectrum of other technologies over the years, too. I've been agnostic and objective when it come to the industry, but I've eaten enough excuses from Redmond. There's good alternatives, I'm exploring more of them.

Most of us weather/radio nuts in the US have been doing something similar for over a decade or more. There's several scripts written in Perl or Python that grab data from NOAA. (Or you can just program your ICOM with the local frequency and script it to respond to the CLI...)

Last time I checked, twitter programmers don't have a record of destroying economies nor deep capturing regulators.

I think much of the effort is wasted. When you hire embedded designers to program FPGAs and ASICs just to be a few nanoseconds faster in your rent-seeking, it's a bloody shame.

VS 2010 is the last one I got for personal use. Not enamored with the changes in VS 2012, Windows 8.* nor the cyclical abandonment of APIs. Add in the increased license cost we face on all Microsoft products at work and any announcement from Redmond gets a "meh" from me.

I've already contacted the Koch brothers for money to bribe HN members, just in case this happens. :)

When you to want reform an institution, you need to make sure you don't replace the bad with the worse.

The main asshat in Congress stirring the pot and helping cause this dissention is a first term senator: Ted Cruz. What we have is a bunch of new regressive "reformers" that are actually being funded by the Koch brothers and people of their ilk, that think destroying the government is a good thing.

It's easy. I learned it three decades ago by this innovative method. Sing the phonetics to the rhythm of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy".

Yes it was. But in the 90's we didn't have any great personal operating systems competing yet, and no one got fired for buying Microsoft products.

"When was the last time in living memory that a person could read most works of science fiction and say "Yeah, with the right kind of funding, we can have that in 10 years""

Depends on which works you are reading. Iain M. Banks' Culture is probably several centuries or more out of our lifetimes...

If you're an older native Texan, you might remember the days when the majority of the residents were actually born in the state and also had parents born in the state. Fast forward a couple of score of years and if you're not a farmer and don't live in the sticks, odds are that you are surrounded by people from the surrounding states, from the coasts and around the world.

So culturally and demographically the state has changed tremendously over the last two censuses. The urban sprawl and traffic is starting to remind people of California. And the people from California remind people constantly they are from California. And the neighborhoods could be from California. (Sans the climate since we have earthquakes here now, too...)

Plus the growth is fueled by short-sighted policies of the modern slick version of the good-ole-boy, fake Christian, supposedly conservative state government. (Don't blame me, I didn't vote for them...) In the long run, lack of water resources, too many damn people and a stupid government will crash the state hard. The area around Austin is as flammable as SoCal, the traffic is DFW is becoming a monster and the social net is non-existent except for federal money.

But hey, my house would be worth 9 times as much if it were in San Francisco. :)

I'm reminded of Brain Burn's "Welcome to Texas": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPQHghD3Ddw

There's more structured material for MIPS than AVR. Plus the AVR has some funky memory maps and modes.

I'm not as experienced with outsourced programmers, but I've met a large gamut of technical people, both good and bad, native and not over two decades in the field. The best are the best, doesn't matter what the background.

The reason that Indians get such a bad rap in the States is due to the large numbers and the cultural differences. Behavior that is required/acceptable to survive/succeed in India and much of Asia, is regarded as fraud in the States. Cheating and experience inflation on resumes is so bad, that my colleagues that conduct interviews, state that 80-90 percent of resumes have at least one or more blatantly false claims (This is for all candidates.)

The collective experience of non-Indians in the field is one of doubt and suspicion in many cases. It's so bad that qualified Indians face more barriers and mistrust. And that's sad. No individual should be judged by the actions of others, but it happens. (I know people make assumptions about me too...)

The profit is flowing to tax havens.

I've had a good 6 months of minimal personal electronics a few years back. Aside from work, I didn't connect at all. I had a new apartment in a complex which was being rewired for FIOS at a snails pace, my cell phone coverage was shitty and I didn't move in with a TV. Plus my PowerMac had a blown power supply which I declined to replace.

I spent more time at the gym, hiking, meeting people in person, exploring and reading books than ever. It refreshing, but compared to my coworkers, I felt like an alien species.

Windows has monthly security updates that need to be taken seriously. This is probably more of an issue on the desktop than servers, but it's still the reason we meet on Patch Tuesdays to discuss testing and rollouts.

PowerShell is awesome for Windows/Exchange admins and SQL Server DBAs. But as a developer/admin/analyst, I still bump into it's limitations and have to either turn to C# or Python to accomplish my tasks. And PoSh is not cross platform.

Increasing the problem we have with Microsoft isn't the core technology, but the stupid management decisions over the last decade. For our small clients, licensing costs become a issue and the lack of trust in Azure means that there is plenty of opportunities for OSS.

"As far as I remember it is definitely anti-noob."

If you are a noob, you probably shouldn't be delving directly into the SQLite documentation. You should be reading the documentation that explains the interface for your specific programming language. Python has sufficient documentation for SQLite.

GS probably resells it to unsuspecting investors as a "AAA" database engine. :)

I'm happy that Linux doesn't have MS SQL drivers. The increasing cost of SQL Server licensing is the driving force towards PostgreSQL for many of our projects. The larger clients can afford the costs and seem to enjoy being treated as cash cows by Redmond.

If they were embracing Python, they would replace PowerShell with Python. :)

I disagree with the OP.

It's never been widely claimed that "Work should be fun." There's a reason work is called work. :)

And there's a lot of "hard, boring work". In my lifetime, I've worked on the farm, in fast food, in factories, in the military, in wafer fabs, at desks, in school and at work benches in all sorts of crazy roles enduring all sorts of physical and mental strains.

Creating the same damn CRUD application over and over for years is just as dull as chopping weeds in a oats field. It pays more, but at a certain point a creative mind wants difference, a challenge, something to accomplish.

"You can't resist the FBI. We will find you."

Unless you are a Wall Street insider and then we will gladly help the SEC harass your detractors.

"Constitution? What constitution?"

"Well, Symbolics with its investors had more money and hired several of the best hackers from the Lab, and a year later they hired the rest of the hackers except for me and Greenblatt. And the result was that my community was wiped out. It felt like a ghost town. It was desolate, and I was grief-stricken."

"By then, Symbolics had given everyone at the AI Lab an ultimatum. They said: We demand that you choose a side. I had been neutral, I had been more favourable towards Greenblatt's company, but not particularly involved with it in any way. But at that point they demanded that I, like everyone else in the Lab, choose a side. And I said, in that case, my choice is obvious, I'm against you. "

Wow! It's interesting that arrogant actions by various corporations are still pushing people towards OSS and away from closed source.

I credit my realistic view of politics and military to my military background and life experience coupled along with a metric-shit-ton of non-fiction reading.

There were other books before his that used commandeered airplanes as weapons. Clancy was just a much more adept and educated thriller writer than most in the field.

Companies have been made and destroyed on the golf course. It's a reality that sucks.

Or you can run Linux in a VM for CLI goodness. Better yet, run Windows in a VM for security goodness.

Most kids in developed countries have plenty of opportunities and distractions that aren't crime. Give my 16-year old self the tools and toys that are available today, I would have been in nirvana.