You gotta be joking?!

At work, I have a dual core i7 and 4Gb RAM and you know what - I spend my whole day staring at the damn applications while they think about swapping back in to run. I click Visual Studio and it thinks for a couple of seconds then pops into its usual full-screen view, then I click on SQL Server's management studio and ... it thinks for a bit before popping into view.

As a developer I usually have 1, sometimes 2, VS instances open plus SQL plus firefox with the application services and client app open. 4GB just isn't enough to run these monster programs.

And maybe that's the point, where I would easily have said 4GB is loads... that was before people started saying 4Gb is loads and therefore it doesn't matter how much of it I use up in shitty, inefficient data systems. Your program might run fine, but often I have to run 2 of them and that's when you see the problems.

There's one thing about efficiency, and then there's another about not caring and stuffing your programs full of layer after layer of abstractions to the point where it performs like a dog and sucks up all the RAM there is available because "developer time is more important than user time". Pah.

na, it'll be because they just aren't good enough to understand the C code. Tell the developer to grow a pair and start using the right tools rather than the only thing he understands. (and frankly, I doubt he'd be able to understand the complex algorithm anyway).

doubt it, a lot of it is chosen by developers buying into the hype of the coolest new technology or language or framework... which invariably turn out to be a pile of shit.

For example, a few years back all the talk was of Biztalk and some people developed their "this time it'll be great" tech products using it, and now some poor sods are lumbered with a steaming piece of legacy poo that they have to maintain and that costs them a fortune. Before that there was so much talk of functional languages (which are ok in themselves) that would be a silver bullet that solved all problems, and Ruby after that, and .NET before that, and ... well I could go on but its depressing.

I think sharepoint is the main technology chosen by non-techies but the techies are way worse for jumping on the du jour bandwagon.

Our industry embraces technology churn far too easily. Change might be good, but only in evolutionary steps, making things better. I think a lot of it is driven by people who either don't have the experience or simply can't handle the current tech and so see anything different as a chance to avoid being found out.

why would that happen - you'll have to implement a Resident's parking scheme where residents get a badge to display in their windscreen.

You'd think she could come back for this one-off Christmas special edition. Finding out what the legally-enforceable terms and conditions of the GPL are in court is of principal importance to the whole open source software community (and the proprietary one too!)

true, same here - I just wish they'd made the distinction between then better - C# for RAD tooling, C++ for performance/efficiency/"heavy lifting" like it used to be with VB and C++ but instead it seems C# was designed to be "the new Microsoft language" by one division so they wouldn't have to work with the other division :-(

If you want to see a better benchmark for performance, look at MSDN magazine's article on WWS, where the Windows division wrote a compatible version of WCF using C so you can see a good comparison of 2 things that do *exactly* the same thing, but written differently.

My bet is that their own command and control code is completely native.

mine too. See Herb Sutter's speech at Build 2011, (Here's a transcript)

and

So they're thinking of their dollars - more efficient programs means fewer servers for the same workload, means less cost and bigger bonuses for the bosses.

This is why Microsoft picked up C++ again after practically killing it off, or at least keeping it around as a niche product solely for the Windows and Office teams that still used it. Its also why the dev team are going all-in on the native .NET, using the C++ backend compiler to create native code from .NET programs, which will help but won;t solve the fundamental efficiency problems of .NET like GC that effectively encourages inefficient use of memory.

only the shitty stuff they don't care about - all the good code is kept locked away, for good reason. Its only the crap that isn't so bad they don't want you to look at, but they do want you to maintain that they open source.

IIRC all the cloud goodness they have went C++ a while back, as they looked at how much it cost them to run .NET code on all their servers, when you have a million servers the loss in efficiency of running .NET everywhere adds up to a significant amount. Hence their "C++ Renaissance" of a few years back.

and to remember smoking in TV shows... there was one called "Between the Lines", about 'internal investigations" cops. One of the actors was told he should smoke as it was part of his characters... only the actor had just given up smoking. So he said "sod it" and smoked... famously continually smoking throughout the show. It gave the show a really "grittier" look about it.

That show already has a theme park - Portmeirion in west Wales. Go visit it... (yes, I know, its a real village first, but I think it only exists now due to the tourist trade)

No, its tru - most of MP isn't very funny at all, its just that we forget the crap bits and remember the good.

What's most important about Python is that they did it at all, before them there was practically no surreal style comedy, it was all made by men who used to be in the military and were used to entertaining the troops or Victorian variety music hall type stuff. That Python changed the comedy landscape was probably more important than their hit-and-miss show, but that's what you get when you push so far past the boundaries of the times.

Take a look at Spike Milligan's stuff, a lot of that was so weird as to be unwatchable, but the good stuff was great.

Same could be said of every evolution of comedy - in the 80s when Ben Elton and Alexei Sayle were basically shouting "down with Thatcher", they only had some stuff that was funny, but it changed comedy for the better as it settled in. Today, League of Gentlemen or Little Britain's stuff has a lot of crap in it too, but you remember the good sketches.

Don't forget, it wasn't just ok to smoke around children - it was actually good for you.. or at least, that's what the doctors in the adverts told us

See if you can spot the cigarette advert featuring the babies in there!

As for the Disney-fied theme park, you should watch "Churchill: the Hollywood Years", where a (US marine, of course) Winston Churchill first appears with the Enigma machine that's he's single-handedly (well, with his black sidekick's assistance) captured from the Germans, but then visits London's East End which, as every American Hollywood person knows, was populated entirely with happy, singing, Irish Cockneys.

true, but most people crave the Microsoft solution because its branded well, or its just hyped, or they're just sheep who do what their masters tell them to do.

In most cases the product is poor, and I find the poorer the solution the more vociferous some people are about adopting it. Like every Sharepoint installation, or Biztalk (that a dev team at my place bought into... and now some poor sods have to maintain the PoS that was developed using it that is costing the company a significantly large sum), or the poor sods who had to go with Silverlight just because it was by Microsoft.

In the automotive situation, going with Microsoft was more about brand awareness (or plain old corruption maybe) than any amount of due diligence into the actual better product for Ford's customers.

but I use Windows 8 you insensitive clod!

oh, no.. the .NET code is in the GAC and is just as crufty as COM. Even their best plans soon turn into old habits at Microsoft.

(if you really want to worry, take a look at the "I have no clue which assembly is actually loaded" way .NET decides what dlls to run using Probing heuristics