spongle

I used an Apple one (one of the large ones) on a 2010 MBP. It was error prone and made my fingers numb after a while. Not only that, the full pad depression to click is awkward and configuring sensitivity for tap to click was never just right.

Possibly a shocking statement here but I went from a top end 2010 MBP to a 2009 T400 running windows 7 and am much happier as a whole, even though I have my head in UNIX machines a lot.

I'm a firm believer of "yet" there :)

I'd have agreed with you once, but I broke the trackpad on a ThinkPad a couple of years ago and out of apathy i switched to the nipple mouse and I haven't looked back. It takes more practice but it has excellent precision and infinite movement. The trackpad remains broken and unplugged.

Reasoning is sound.

however have you considered charity and socialism (particularly marxism-leninism)?

Spot on - yes you have.

You have to wait for them to turn up patiently. They do every month or so, usually when some corporation has a stock clear out.

That's always been the case.

I did think about what I'm saying. Not everyone has a useful function in society. It's a total fallacy that jobs are available for all and that it's a good metric for the success of a society.

Codeine rocks. I used it for a while after I broke my ankle but you're right: it is addictive.

After the doctor pulled the prescription, I had to come down off the stuff slowly and cocodamol was the only option. I decided to go cold turkey and was a grumpy asshole for a month in the end.

So fundamentally I agree entirely with you!

This happened in suburban London. The supermarket was king.

Then along came delivered groceries and everyone does that and just uses new "local supermarkets" to pick up a few impulse purchases and medicines.

As a result, every row of shops is saturated with takeaways. There are very few traditional local businesses left.

However, everyone is happier as they are not slaves to the requirement to drag stuff around themselves and can concentrate on more interesting things. No tears have been shed. We're all better off.

People just need to now get used to the fact that there isn't a job for everyone as we've reached a pretty good efficiency ceiling.

Isn't a better solution to live in a less populated area than stuff your face in a smart phone though[1]?

This is what I'm working on, slowly.

[1] I'm being a hypocrite there as I'm sitting in an ASDA car park on my smartphone at the moment.mm

So I should keep funding my local bookshop which I have to walk to, has no titles other than the paperback chart full of trash like fifty shades, takes weeks to get an order in (which I have to go and collect) and costs more?

I should also keep funding my publisher which does it's best to top slice cash, screws libraries with license agreements for texts, force DRM where possible?

I think people resent amazon in this market because it's stamped on their little castles they all built. That's business, regardless of what you sell or create.

I've not had any problems myself buying new machines for my company but personally I tend to buy 2-3 year old ThinkPads off a eBay. They are less than 20% of the retail cost and are in perfect condition always.

I'm typing this on a T400 Core 2 2.4 Duo, Radeon HD, 8GB RAM, 1440x900 screen, 9-cell unit with 3G card built in and windows 7 x64 pro license sticker purchased in absolutely perfect unused condition for £145 (!). The battery had done charge 11 cycles to give you an idea. Chucked a Samsung 840 Pro in it for £102 and it's a perfect machine.

I have 2 spare ones (T61's) lying around as well so I always have a spare handy.

This puts me in a better position than a new Lenovo or fruit purchaser.

I'm a firm believer of letting someone else pay for the immediate depreciation in value! :)

It works sometimes and not others.

For example, if someone put as much effort in .Net's original collections API as they did with Java JCF, many a facepalm would have been avoided.

To be honest the whole JSR process is usually hindered by shoddy implementations rather than fundamental problems.

It's actually pretty easy these days. I haven't seen a single machine since about 2008 that doesn't work straight away off a vanilla windows cd.

occasionally you get a missing graphics driver but windows update just pulls a WHQL driver.

As for recovery DVDs: these are the first point of call usually and are pretty good generally.

there are many paths and they are all navigable by an average user.

Well I'll bite on the whole anecdote thing.

My anecdote simply states that nothing is perfect and things do go wrong.

A more pertinent question is: is that less problematic as far as you are concerned or as far as the users are concerned? Also are you fully sure that you are qualified to judge this as a success based on the metrics you set out? Perhaps things take them ten times longer but they are ignorant to that fact?

I disagree. Ubuntu hosed our central devops MySQL completely on a 10.04 LTS update...

As with everything in IT, YMMV.

Indeed.

We have 6x 42U racks across three datacentres in the UK packed with network hardware, servers, san and other kit.

Stuff doesn't really go wrong that often. Our ops guys probably go there once a quarter. Most of the time, you can manage it remotely. The only main failure point appears to be disks but you can just mail them to the DC and get them to stick it in for a small fee.

That doesn't quite work for us. All our front ends/service and infrastructure nodes are virtual but databases are all dedicated.

This is because no virtualization tech likes handling large nodes (FCAL, 48 cores, 256Gb RAM). We lost 20% throughput by sticking our SQL Server primary and replicas on ESX versus physical when running our trials. That's a big hit when you run 150million queries a day.

If they sorted all that shit out (which i entirely agree with) they might even pull some enterprise customers in from the Microsoft direction as well. The Cocoa framework is pretty nice compared to MFC and comparable to WPF. We played with the idea of knocking out desktop integration on OS X for our product as there is a huge uptake of apple stuff in our sector. We canned it in the end and suggested parallels as there just weren't many good resources out there to get over the learning curve and you just can't get anyone in the UK who can do it.

Despite all their warts otherwise, Microsoft do a pretty good job of this via MSDN.

Agree but we don't have much of a choice. The cost and risk associated with cleaning it up is actually more expensive than leaving it.

Visual Studio would do fine if it was a 64-bit binary. The memory ceiling of 32-bit processes is the problem. People have been calling for 64-bit Visual Studio for a long time.

That is their fault.

And by the lack of comments here, it looks like about as much of a shit is given about this one as the last.

Which is what I'm stuck with (I'm not junior staff either btw - been doing this lark for 26 years). We don't load all the projects at once.

This is actually the debugger failing to load all the symbols into the vshost process because of the memory ceiling being 3.5Gb for 32-bit processes rather than the IDE failing itself. Unfortunately due to poor isolation in VS, it takes out IIS Express and VS IDE.

Release binaries don't blow it but debug ones with pdbs do. This is a shit when your project is large with long dependency chains.

Our product is very non-trivial! That's just one deployable endpoint. We have 131 projects in total.

some of our application silos are more complicated than other companies entire businesses are. One subsystem has 450,000 LOC in just c# alone and the domain model has 122 classes.

Stuff gets complicated in some sectors...

You sometimes get good support. I've spent too much time on the phone to then (as a gold partner) and got sod all back on most occasions. If you're lucky you get a workaround but most of the time it's denial.

The first outsourcing disaster I experienced was view state related. Back in 2003, a membership management app I inherited managed to hang of view state. Each page would throw 2.5Mb across a LAN. It sucked. It also had numerous bad patterns like UI driven SELECT N+1 hell. This is the norm for your average cheap custom build asp.net app.

We rewrote the entire thing in php (nice php!!) in three days and it's still used to this day without modification (even managed to get through a couple of security audits unmodified).

None whatsoever. We killed R# and VisualSVN. Do without the former and use TSVN for the latter.

We have 34 projects loaded in the solution so it hits VS's limited 32-bit process restrictions pretty quickly causing the debugger to break miserably. When this fails it's a restart job.

Sorry signed up to say this - been lurking a while but this one infuriated me terribly.

The only reason ASP.Net MVC looks good is because you were a WebForms user before. If you've come from other tech, it's still a stinking pile of crap.

1. The API is totally broken and consists of tonnes of barely testable wrappers (HttpResponseWrapper etc).

2. The attribute model is a pain in the arse. How do you test filters based on attributes effectively?

3. Razor is horrible. I mean really horrible. The semantic difference between inline C# code and JS/HTML is so weak that you end up having to hint the view engine as to what is what. Not only that, the Layout system it uses basically stuffs RAM full of string buffers. If you have a complicated page and thousands of users (like we do), memory goes sky high. Please give me something like Jinja2.

4. The ASP.Net pipeline isn't thread safe at all. It's scary actually. You can't guarantee one module won't set global thread state on another thread. This only happens under heavy load. That is one absolute fucker to debug.

5. MS11-100 broke absolutely fucking everything from downloading Excel files in IE8 and below over SSL, knackering caching etc. This is the norm. Stuff just does this all the time. One day it works, next it doesn't.

Now I could spend all day writing this list but I'll surmise it as the whole .Net (web stack) is a stinking shit crock which pains me every day I have to use it.

I LONG for the days someone will hire me based on other skillsets but the market is saturated with people who thought it was a great idea and are stuck with it now.

(For ref the .net desktop / WPF stuff is wonderful in comparison, apart from Visual Studio which crashes on me so often it's just ugh..).