Good programmers (should) do both. It's one thing to develop something and put into into a live system but it's another thing to spend the extra little bit of time to optimizing flow, queries, etc.
I agree, but with the way schedules can be nowadays, getting an app out the door quickly is more important than having the thing run efficiently when it ships. I can see both sides, and I try to find a happy medium.
While I don't have the technical background that Mike has, I've been using PCs since 1983, when I started out on a dual-floppy IBM PC that my boyfriend had. I was one of the first people at my college to turn in papers typed on a computer. In any case, there was a point at which Macs could have overtaken PCs in the business world. Keep in mind that Excel was originally written for the Mac, as was Word as we know it. I worked at a couple of different places that actually migrated from PCs to Macs because Macs simply did things PCs couldn't do and they did them better. I'm firmly convinced that what finally did in the Macintosh was Windows 3.1, as well as the release of Excel and a Windows version of Word. All of a sudden, whatever small advantage Macs had for business users flew out the er, window. I hated to see it because I'd been in love with Macs since they'd come out but try as I might, I couldn't make a good business case to my bosses for why we should spend extra money for Macintoshes.
Exactly. I use XP at home and 2000 at work, and honestly, if you're coming from Win2k, XP was not that revolutionary. They futzed around with some UI stuff that you can switch back fairly easily, but other than that, it was more of an evolutionary change, like going from 95 -> 98 -> Me. Of course, if you were coming from the 9x series, yeah, XP was a Big Deal. MS has yet to give me a reason to upgrade from XP to Vista. They're only now starting to give people reasons to upgrade from 2000 to XP.
I'll give a reason...(the only reason ): DRM. When the studios finally produce a viable movie downloading service and television networks allow streaming of "shows" as opposed to "clips", the content won't run on XP machines or earlier (and plenty of other anti-copy, anti-transfer stuff). It doesn't appear to be about consumer choice. Let's hear it for the NGSCB and the Pentium-D!
I don't know if anyone has said this explicitly yet, but Apple paid Xerox to tour their facility twice and view the GUI so they could engineer it for the Lisa then Mac. Such an arrangement is much different than MS being privy to the Mac technology b/c they were working on Word for Mac and then ripping it off to create Windows 1.0 before the Mac was even released, IIRC.
That's not true. Xerox bought Apple stock and agreed to share SOME of their ideas with Apple. The Mac didn't even exist when Jobs toured Xerox PARC - Apple was still working on the successor to the Apple II, which was to be the Apple III. Unfortunately for Apple, IBM and IBM clone PCs were putting a major dent into Apple's bottom line - the IBMs and IBM clones were much cheaper than the Apple II and Apple III. Both Wozniac and Jobs with friends with Jef Raskin, who worked at Xerox PARC. Raskin was excited about the stuff PARC was working on, and invited Jobs and Woz to take a tour so he could show some stuff off. Jobs was most impressed with the GUI (with a mouse), Smalltalk and ethernet cards. Apple hired Raskin away from Xerox to create a GUI-based computer for Apple. Jobs kept demanding more and more features, which would've cost nearly $10,000. Apple forced him off the project, and began work on the Lisa 2, which evolved into the Mac. Jobs was forced out of the company soon after that. Microsoft did not rip off Mac technology to create Windows. They technologies had nothing to do with each other. In fact, the Apple v Microsoft lawsuit made no mention of technology. It was all about "look and feel."
Actually from what I remember from way back, Windows 286 and 3 took more from OS/2's PM than anything else. Personally, I just went through a round of XP to XP SP2 upgrades where I work and moved my family off 98/etc. to XP. Painful experience at work and a hit to my pocketbook at home. I will probably stay on XP (and 2000, and my developer's version of 2003) until I'm forced to upgrade. Long gone are the days when I could afford the operating system, office tools and the developer tools.
a typical linux fanboy's blah blah blah. don't bother reading it. this steve whatever is just a plain dumb idiot.
You are right on that point. However, Xerox's investment of $1 million netted them $16.6 million within a year, so it's not like they weren't getting anything in the deal. My point that there was a business deal that benefited Xerox in return for Apple visiting the facility still stands. My understanding is that Raskin was never an employee there, just a visiting scholar. By the time the visits were made he was an Apple employee. Also that Jobs thought Raskin was an idiot and had to be convinced to go by Bill Atkinson. Finally I didn't think Woz was part of those visits. And did. In exactly the same way that the Lisa/Mac technologies had nothing to do with the PARC techs. Apples lawyers were clearly outsmarted, but that Gates wanted to imitate the Mac against Apple's wishes has never been denied. That is the main thrust of the argument, contrasted to Apple's arrangement with Xerox - not whether specific lines of Mac code were implemented in Windows.
Fair enough. But in the long run, Xerox looked at the Mac as a ripoff of the work done at PARC without fair compensation, which is what led Xerox to file suit against Apple in '90 or so. I wasn't sure if he was an employee at Xerox or not. Back then, the computer biz wasn't really considered a business - more like a bunch of hackers (in the original sense of the word) who would get together and share cool ideas they had come up with and pretend they knew how to talk to girls. Jobs thought a lot of people were idiots. IIRC, he was trying to get rid of the "idiot" Sculley when Sculley turned the tables on him and got rid of Jobs. I'm not sure if Woz went to PARC or not. I thought he had. But I'm pretty sure the three were all friends before Raskin did come on board at Apple. Whatever the case, Woz knew what was going on at PARC too. Yep. That's one thing that Jobs never really understood. People weren't (and still aren't) willing to spend thousands of extra dollars for a computer that doesn't do a whole lot more than the alternative. That's one of the things he never figured out when he was at NeXT either. They had incredible machines, but they cost a bloody fortune. Jean Louis Gassee was just as bad as Jobs when he was at BE. For all of Jobs' and Gassee's insistence that people in the industry were "idiots," when it came to business sense those two were far worse than just about anyone else in the industry. Fair enough. Windows did imitate the Mac, but at the same time there really are only so many ways you can create a GUI that is usable. At least Gates had enough sense to copy the Mac and other interfaces that were similar. I'd hate to think we'd be talking about upgrading to Microsoft Bob XP or Microsoft Bob Vista.
Oh god! You just opened up a whole can of worms in my head.... I used to do OS/2 desktop support for a huge insurance company in the mid-90's... don't know why but the IT department decided OS/2 was the way to go.. OH LORDY that was a huge pain.
OS/2 was a horrible piece of crap, but it was 32 bit instead of 16 bit. So it had that going for it. I tell you what was a nightmare - Using C with the Windows SDK to write a 16 bit Windows 3.0 DLL that accessed data larger that 64k, which meant that you would have to cross an address segment boundary. I still don't remember how the hell it worked, but it did. IIRC, we had to also use a third party DLL that read image data off an optical disc drive, and the company that we got it from would not give us their source code. So I had to disassemble the damn thing and figure out how it worked. I drank a LOT of coffee on that project. Compared to that, programming is a walk in the park nowadays.
Sorry. Yup, insurance and banks, big OS/2 users and adopters. I might still have my copy of OS/2 Warp somewhere (probably next to Geoworks Ensemble). For everybody dumping on it, it did have some great things going for it. It's multitasking was rock solid which was a benefit to some of our users that relied upon numerous DOS applications. It also ran most Windows applications until Microsoft changed'em so they couldn't(like Excel upgrades would mysteriously quit working). Heck I remember a support call from someone complaining their computer was slow, turns out she had over 200 open applications running that she didn't know about. Fun stuff...
OS/2 4.0 (the second release of Warp) was awesome. OS/2 2.0 (the 92 Spring Comdex release) was buggy as hell, but 2.1 was really good. 3.0 Warp was better, but 4.0 rocked a good rocking. What really killed it for me was the new Windows apps (Excel 95 and such) that wouldn't run under OS/2. Bastards. I have to say that I've been very pleased with Windows XP Professional. The fact that it was nearly 10 years behind OS/2 in stability is pretty damning. I still have my "I want my OS/2" button from that Comdex. Somewhere I've still got the t-shirt that IBM was giving away that said N(ice)T(ry).
Two things i'd wish they'd change. 1) It seems odd that you have to click "start" to shut down the computer. Get rid of that. Doesn't Mac OS have a drop-down box with the shutdown option as well as a list of other users which ties into my second point 2) To change users, you have to click start->log off->user name, then it starts up. If you could click on the list of users, the screen would fade out with a "one moment, please" box popping up, then the other user's desktop would be right there. But i'd rather take a host of security improvements, speed, and reliability over those two minor things.
That article was brilliant, and completely, utterly, accurate. Windows Vista will utter, useless, bloatware providing zero compelling reasons for users to upgrade.
You consider that an innovation? Wow. Have you ever heard of a little thing called Java? Oh yeah, that other runtime language that compiles to intermediate byte code, and features garbage collection. Not to mention the plethora of scripting languages that can do similar things to .Net. Yes, VS is very easy to use - perhaps the best thing MS ever did, technologically. But .Net is not innovative. The fact about MS is that they have never innovated anything, ever. They have taken other peoples ideas (even stolen - they have been sued for IP violation more than any other company in the history of the world - they just settled with Sun last year for nearly $2 Billion), and made them their own, and perhaps refined those ideas. What MS has been very good at is business, marketing, customer lock in, and sometimes ease of use (for which they deserve kudos). But innovation - no way in hell. BTW - I started my career in programming and IT using Visual Basic, Access, SQL Server, Visual C++, and developing mostly for Windows. When I first started, I really did not like Unix, or anything Unix like (like Linux), nor did I care for Java (thinking it was too bloated). I thought Unix was too difficult and stupid. Then I decided, since there there are lot of jobs using Unix and Java technology in my area, to learn the stuff so I would not be stuck in an underpaid MS vacuum (MS programming jobs typically don't pay the highest, due to the floading of the market of VB programmers and MCSEs). So I started trying Linux, and learning Java. Plus at work I get to dabble in IBM AS400, as well as Mainframes, as well as proprietary Unix systems. Doing so, I learned how good those technologies really are, and I learned the weaknesses of MS products. About this time, XP came out, along with the new licensing. Firstly, I didn't like XP (hated the interface and the bugs and the registry), and I really hated the product activation. I found it appalling that you couldn't install it on your various home PCs (to me that's unreasonable - it's like being allowed to read a book in only one room of your house, or never being able to lend said book to a friend). Then there was all the anti-trust convction, as well as all of the IP theft, that MS was guilty of. So, even though I still use MS products in my career, I grew to really dislike MS - both their products and their business practices. It was nothing religious, nothing biased. I started out very much in the MS camp, then gradually woke up and preferred other stuff, the more and more I learned. So it saddens me when I see such a smart, experienced person as yourself seemingly blindly defending MS. There's nothing wrong with happily developing with .Net (other than being locked into MS). But do realize that MS is not the be-all to end-all. Oh yeah, Windows Vista looks amazingly unremakable: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1841067,00.asp yeah, the writer is a Unix/Linux guru/advocate, but he's no zealot, he knows his stuff, and the facts in the column are 100% accurate, with links to back them up. Please read it.
Returning to the matter at hand, I have to say that both Tiger and Vista are lightweight upgrades. Neither really bring anything major. I wouldn't pay to upgrade to either.