dos1

You're totally right. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not a sysadmin by trade. I've had the misfortune of having to deal with sysadmin work because I was the only one willing to dive in. So you mention Puppet, Chef, the distro's package manager of choice. These are all great tools but they have a learning curve. My point was that hosting apps on MS requires much less in the way of configuration and learning. You can just get things working.

What part of hosting apps on Windows was painful to you? I actually prefer to host my apps in Windows when I'm able and the technology stack supports it. I don't need to set up new apps often, but when I do, it's many orders of magnitude faster for me to get an app running on Windows vs. Linux.

Linux works great as a server OS once I get everything set up and configured correctly. I never need to think about it again. However, I dread having to set things up on a new Linux machine. There's always some hardware that doesn't install correctly or some config file that needs twiddling. Sometimes it takes an odd sequence of commands that needs to be run in just the right order to get things going. Invariably I waste hours on the internet searching forums every time I do this, getting more and more frustrated the whole time.

As far as Windows hosting goes, I find IIS 7 to be much easier to set up and customize than Apache in terms of hosting web applications. I find the uptime of Windows Server boxes to be functionally equivalent to their Linux counterparts. I also find it's much easier to administrate large groups of Windows servers because of the nice tooling. Things like Active Directory, SMS and SCOM make things pretty easy.

This was the first decent GUI text editor I ever used. Prior to using it I had only ever seen Notepad and pico. I was amazed that you could interact with the terminal right from the app's user interface! To this day I still have a soft spot in my heart for Kate.

I looked at your past comments. You are very critical of Microsoft. Is it possible you only support this rather sensationalist story because it fits with your viewpoint?

Sorry, wait - how is this different than the RoR magic. Where you can do stuff like MyObject.findByArbitraryProperty and it just works? That's PFM if you ask me. Django, RoR, and Node all have lots of magic bits. You don't have to use any of the magic, which also goes for MVC.

(I do agree with you though - just because other frameworks have magic bits doesn't mean I like it in MVC. I would also prefer it not be there. I just don't think you can really pick on MS in this case.)

Looks around guiltily - I still use their site too when I need something quick and I know they have it. Sure, some of the info is old. But some of the stuff doesn't change and is just as relevant now as it ever was. If they come up first in a google result and it's for a query I know they have the answer to, you're darn right I'll click it :)

Do you write lots of security fuzz unit tests? Cause I don't. I write tests that hit the edge cases I can think of, but invariably, I can't think of everything. I really don't think the security argument has much to do with unit testing.

How is the A stuff wrong when thousands of people have used it successfully(presumably for its intended purpose) thousands of times? I understand where you're coming from. But the longer I do this, the less dogmatic about testing I get. If the code works for its intended purpose then it's probably all right. Now, adding features and having confidence in refactoring is another story with untested code.

In my mind, the MPAA is certainly the best choice to pay these costs. They're the ones with the problem, they should be the ones to bear the burden. Especially considering Megaupload offered to take the data and they explicitly forbade it. If the MPAA didn't like the solutions offered, but can't come up with something better, then I think Carpathia should get to do what it wants.

Edit: The opinion above has NO legal basis whatsoever. As many have pointed out, it's not even legally possible. I made this comment solely from a "In a perfect world..." standpoint.

Node.js is becoming a first class citizen on Windows, so I'm not entirely sure what the point of this is. IISNode even allows you to host your Node.js apps in IIS.

If you're desperate for some kind of evented web framework in C#, check out SignalR - https://github.com/SignalR/SignalR

Based on your comment I assume that you have the means of supporting your "More to life than work" lifestyle? That you're not on the government dole or living in your parent's basement? If my assumptions are correct, then I commend you and I'm envious of your ability to strike a balance.

I don't believe for one second though that the reason Gen Y suffers from a high jobless rate is because they share the same values you do. I believe they're lazy, spoiled and entitled. I have several cousins who are between 16 and 18 and have no jobs, nor have they ever. And it's not because there's no jobs to be had, it's because they don't want to work as a grocery story stock person or a cashier. Those jobs are below their upper middle class upbringing.

And because of Facebook, they don't need jobs. They can hang out with their friends all day online for free. Their parents provide them with food, shelter and clothing - so what more could they ask for? I don't believe this is sustainable though. Our society works because people produce things. We've seen what happens when we trend towards a service based economy rather than a manufacturing based economy. What happens when we transition to a sit on our ass and surf the internet economy?

I love posts like this. It's always great to get a healthy dose of perspective. I save articles like this to reread for when I'm getting terribly stressed at work. I think it's tremendously important to recenter priorities every so often. This was well written and I'm glad I read it.

Good for Egor Homakov. I don't necessarily agree with his methods in this case, but in the end, the net result of his actions was positive for web security. And as so many others have pointed out, when the proper channels aren't working, sometimes a little spectacle is just what you need to instigate change.

In other news, I'm not sure why the rails core team was so against this in the first place. Making things safe by default is usually a good idea. This change doesn't seem to add too much additional ceremony, and people had been asking for this for some time.

Sure, that was my knee jerk reaction too. Of course they should suspend the account! But I think that was the wrong choice.

Shutting down the one account will do nothing. He can create a second account in a matter of seconds. They fixed the code that permitted the exploit, right? So the fix alone should be plenty to prevent any more malicious attacks.

And now, because of the suspension, they have a wave of bad PR (justified or not). This guy is clearly infatuated with Github. He got a tattoo of the Octocat for crying out loud. Why would you punish this guy for loving your service and caring enough about it to warn you of a security vulnerability?

Seems like there are only minuses to suspending the account, not a lot of pluses.

I think that's the key piece. Yes, Google can operate the way they do because they have world class talent. Literally some of the best developers in the world. If you find yourself in that situation, then yes, you too can do things the way Google does.

Being a contractor and working in the bowels of Fortune 500 software divisions has taught me that this is a pipe dream for almost every other company. The methodologies (Agile, Waterfall, whatever) were no doubt created in order to help teams of poor to middling developers actually accomplish something while fighting through the corporate red tape and their own stagnation.

I've seen the kind of "Bad Agile" he talks about work at big inflexible organizations, and I've seen the "let everyone work on what they want" style of development go catastrophically wrong. Yegge's post seems to be more about him congratulating himself on how awesome he is for working at Google.

So do you work at Google or are you just a fanboy? IE is not being nefarious in this case. IE is following a standard that Google is actively abusing. Not sure why you have such an infatuation with Google, but I dare say: Everything in moderation.

I disagree. I work on an app that is entirely client side rendered. We use the JSON data approach. Step 2 is trivial. There are many JS templating engines out there. It takes almost no code. The part that's hard is step 1, figuring out if you have the right data or whether your data is stale. And then, to figure out which part of the UI needs to be redrawn. This is where frameworks like Backbone can come in handy.

In my head it's much easier to imagine manipulating a UI based on objects and their state, rather than partial snippets of HTML. It seems like it would get complicated to track the pieces of html you needed to request in order to redraw only portions of the UI. Wouldn't there still be a lot of javascript involved with that logic?

I don't even think I'd use the word journalist to describe Gruber. I really can't even read his stuff any more. I got one paragraph in to this one and was disgusted. How is he so popular? I get the whole Howard Stern shock value thing, but seriously, who can actually get through one of his Apple love stories?

The author read Steve's biography and came away thinking Steve was some kind of superhero. He argues Steve used his weaknesses along with his strengths to become some kind of miraculous management guru, successfully motivating his top talent despite being "prickly".

That's not the same book I read. I was a big Steve supporter, but I've lost most of the respect I had for the man after reading his biography. The book I read showed an immature, volatile, rude and cold man who had more luck than he deserved. Sure Steve was smart, and he was by all accounts charismatic. But at the end of the day, he wasn't a very good human being. Steve acted like an impetuous child. He was an orphan who in turn abandoned his own children. He sounded like a terrible husband and an even worse friend. His management style to me sounded like that of a three year old. Screaming, crying, pitching fits and generally caring only about himself.

I think the author is giving Steve too much credit for the way he handled his top employees. There were plenty listed in the biography who left, disgusted by him. If Steve had even an ounce of empathy for others, I imagine he could have gone even farther than he did.

Agree with your first sentence. Being an expert takes loads of effort. For some that effort is work, for others it's fun, but no matter what it takes time and determination.

What I see more and more of these days is (in the Midwest of the U.S. anyways) parents are not teaching the value of effort to their children. Their children end up being lazy and entitled, never knowing what it truly takes to be good at anything.

Regardless of the reason, I think this is the right thing to do.

Looks like you were wrong chief.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/115264064268941645500/posts/WfAL...

My experience mirrors yours exactly. I'm not sure how or why Google garnered an untouchable status but I find it frustrating.

And I've tried to honestly reply to every comment that points out a flaw in my argument. I did think carefully before using the word apologist, but I've had too many downvotes to really believe that people are thinking critically. What I'm saying is NOT that Google is evil, but rather they're increasingly heading in a direction I don't like, for the reasons I've outlined.

Wow, you're just being contrary to be contrary aren't you? While no one is obligated to follow standards, they certainly help adoption. Without standards we wouldn't be able to just buy a consumer electronics device and plug it in to our standardized plug with standardized voltage would we? Standards are part of our daily lives and without them we would not have progressed nearly as far as we have.

Further more, the reason standards are nice here is because a 3rd party is the one who blessed the technology, not the biased producer of the technology. And changes to that standard need to go through the standards body and the producer is not the single owner.

Really? When Microsoft "broke away" and created ActiveX, you were in support of that too because it was innovation? Or how bout Adobe and Flash?

Dart, native client, Gears was in there for awhile.

So to summarize: You agree that my comment was on topic, since clearly there are some who believe Google is in the wrong. Just because YOU don't agree with them doesn't mean my comment was off topic.

I agree, they do a great job following the standards. I love that. What I don't love is when they break away. That's my whole point - work with the standards body to get your new cool tech introduced. Don't just go rogue and do whatever you want, that's when problems arise.