pling

Medium for OSX. Unlikely for Linux - they'd be laughed out of the building.

They shipped IE5 for Unix a long while back believe it or not!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

I actually tripped over a solitary installation of it about 5 years ago as well!

As for IE for Mac - that was around forever ago.

That means your stuff probably doesn't work on IE properly.

Not joking (and I know this sucks) but there are a shit ton of IE users out there still and I'm not willing to hang our product for convenience.

Vendor specific code is a reality we're going to have to live with for a long time yet.

This is damn annoying. We downloaded a whole set of them and after a bit they all died so you have to download them again periodically.

Not a viable solution.

In the end we just set up an activated VM (using MSDN licenses) with RDP enabled for each config on a Win 8.1 HyperV machine that sits in the corner of the office.

If the objective is to gain by winning then losing players aren't happy. If playing it is the point then it matters less.

However most of the rip off games are chance based so playing it isn't relevant.

Well you're in the same club as most of us.

Reminds me of: http://youtu.be/-PSeAfSKQe4

Well Twitter is where everyone goes now when something is broken. I'm not sure its the right solution but it's part of the way there.

IRC has always been wonderful in times of trouble. I'm really surprised that people have abandoned it over the last decade.

I had to hit IRC when Sept 11th went down because I was stuck in a facility with no television reception and even news sites were down due to load. The only things that were still shifting data were slashdot and a couple of IRC networks. We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio worldwide including from ham and shortwave.

Yeah it wasn't far off that.

If the human race grew out of this disrespect for itself and utmost respect for self-gain, things would be better for everyone.

It disgusts me.

I actually laughed hard at that. Tea nearly came out of my nose.

That appears to be how all journalists deal with science these days. It gets views after all. The BBC health news section is the worst with headlines like:

Eating broccoli 'makes you more intelligent'

(Note the subtle quoting that gets them out of actually making the claim but adapting it from the source significantly enough to be total bullshit).

Real paper is something like 'mice are less stupid after eating broccoli versus big macs for 6 months'.

Spot on.

I did a contract a few years ago for a startup 'gaming' company. They were extracting cash out of people for plays in their games I.e. you buy credit and throw that into nonrefundable plays. In the end if you built up enough virtual credits, you could trade them for expensive consumer electronics.

I was hired to fix their infrastructure.

Well it turns out most of their infrastructure was used to create fake players that these people were pitted against. The odds were fixed and the fake players win nearly every time. Occasionally they'd send someone a MacBook or something by pulling a number from a hat. They were fixed so short term wins were possible but it tailed off in the form 1-e^x.

So basically they were forcing people to toil with no return.

This crossed my ethical limit, so I reported this to ASA (Im in the UK too) and trading standards and immediately quit. The company scurried away with no one ever to be seen again. Turns out their op was running from Gibraltar and everyone was dodgy.

A couple of weeks later I got a narky letter threatening to sue me big time, so I wrote a 'fuck you assholes' reply and folded my limited company and started another one.

If any of the assholes, and you know who you are, are reading this, I'm still armed to deal with your shit.

That's my experience too. Keep losing belts, motors hoses on dyson uprights. Got fed up and bought a Numatic Henry which has been bomb proof.

Dyson are full of shit like that. Its all wordplay.

Another fine example: http://youtu.be/MBEkP_zKKcg (EEVblog)

Probably a rather geeky thing to say but Star Trek TNG promoted honesty, morality and a strong sense of ethics to me.

That IMHO is no different to classic moral stories as the basic premise is the same in some episodes.

I think it was appropriate. We were violated forcibly without consent or warning.

We're a chunk of glue that aggregates and monitors financial data. Not related to trading and not real time.

We're basically the people who say 'it was him' when someone fucks up.

What I'm saying is that your product is a fit for the platform when it is an MVP. When you grow, you're locked into an expensive platform. In the short term there is no option of escape because the cost to port it becomes increasingly more expensive.

Then before you know it, you're at that 200k.

I've seen it happen at so many companies:

"We'll build it on the MS stack because they gave us a great deal on MSDN or we used the PAP to get cheap licenses." ... after a few years ... "We got screwed by SQL 2012 and had to buy £50k of SQL licenses because the terminology between cores and CPUs changed on a whim and it's the ass-end of the SQL 2005 so we've got to make a big jump."

I'm not saying it's an invalid approach (hell I make my living out of keeping these sorts of cogs spinning) but it's not a great foundation to run a startup on. Unpredictable costs or sudden price-jacking after a partial buyout really sours the shit out of the deal. Especially when you ask for a budget you can't get from your new investors who now are worried that their short term return is going out of the window on your platform and software license costs.

Well we were stuck in this...

http://blogs.gartner.com/kyle-hilgendorf/2012/03/09/azure-ou...

The SLA would have been fine if it was accurate, which it wasn't.

Just remember that back then your computer was unreliable and your light bulb was reliable.

Now your light bulb is unreliable as well as your computer :)

I would do. There's a sweet spot somewhere and Azure isn't it.

We have two people who handle all our infrastructure. We still needed two people available to handle all our Azure infrastructure even though they'd spend less time doing things (N+1 failover).

Also Microsoft doesn't give a shit if you're down past a status page and profuse apologising and perhaps a pro-rata refund if you complain like a bitch and wave a big "fuck you, AWS next time" at your licensing contact. That's not how to do business.

Our guys actually get up at 2AM and drive to the DC and fix shit if it goes wrong, which it inevitably does (less often than Azure I will say).

Downtime costs you more in reputation than you can gain from the cost savings of not having your whole world under your control.

I would agree there. There are plenty of API compatible alternatives to AWS services.

In order of cost: SQL Server, MSDN, Windows Server, Office.

We got utterly raped by the SQL 2012 upgrade with the core licensing changes as we have a few 48 core machines. (enough to make us consider PostgreSQL as a serious option now)

We're not public facing either.

We're not using it other than for internal failovers. We tried to build version two of our product on it. The costs increased rapidly until it was cheaper to buy a 42U and stuff it with HP kit and pay for a fat pipe. The storage was expensive, the per transaction costs are expensive, the bandwidth is expensive, the IaaS machines are expensive and the support is expensive when it goes wrong which it does occasionally and violently.

This was all financial data aggregation and archival stuff.

In test it was 23% more expensive than our own kit over 3 years.

It is very hard to decouple yourself from the tooling and the platform specific features. The PaaS offering literally requires half of the additional services ad the basic deployment is simple and the IaaS offering is expensive and you need the latter to decouple effectively.

Either way you also hang yourself with a vendor tied product and the ball and chain of licensing. The latter of which escalates pretty quick when your business grows.

Our 8 man startup in 2005 now spends £200k a year on licensing because we're that tied to the damn platform.

This could also be titled "how to enslave your MVP to increasing costs in the future".

Azure isn't cheap by any means when you need to scale up our out.

I think shell performance stopped mattering the moment I dumped my 50MHz SPARC LX for a Sun Ultra 2.

Yes that's the one. It's perfectly fine. I found that if you have to push it past the limit it's probably the wrong tool for the job and it's time to use Python or Perl or pick something off the shelf and think about more structure to whatever you're doing.

Shell scripts really don't scale development-wise over time.

Definitely agree with the rest of the points though.

Mode 7 FTW along with all the artists who worked with its limited graphics support. The Mullard SAA5050 will have a special place in my heart forever.

I still prefer "sh" on BSD (particularly OpenBSD). It doesn't have as many knobs to turn nor as many surprises.

Proprietary radio stack. Nope.

Never should your product be at the mercy of such things.