The money simply gets sucked up and will never be returned. That's what we're working for these days. It sickens me.

That's bad enough, but to rub our noses in it, the accounts of the EU are not audited, and will never be - the EU commissariat have said as much. I think its because if it ever were audited, we'd see just where the money does disappear to.

it comes down to the accounting lure of a low monthly fee (operational costs) vs high one-time costs when you buy equipment (generally capital costs)

rent the servers then. Most server manufacturers will rent them either directly or on a 3-year rent-until-obsolete-and-replace contracts. It costs more over time (especially if you keep them running for decades) but it does what you want for the beancounters.

I think people want to go cloud because of all the hype and advertising. Your boss will have read lots of material pushed at him saying how wonderful the cloud is. Who's he going to believe - scruffy old you, or some very well presented glossy brochures and case studies?! :-)

I agree - and anyone thinking of investing, I'd recommend the "high yield portfolio" approach but that's a bit off-topic. Regardless of investment length, the investor always wants to know information, whether its short-term things that will cause swings in the share price, or the backing or sector the investment is in for the long term. I mean, even if you're a long term investor, you wouldn't invest in a company known for high volatility or less-than-reputable directors. You'd also want to know what kind of support there was for dividends. Then the market can float freely and be as efficient as it can be. The alternative is to encourage a kind of insider-knowledge base where you will not do well unless you know the people who are in the know. That doesn't make a good market at all.

So for all investment, information is key - all these places asking for money need to be fully open and transparent to those putting the money in. It should be mandated by law, if not peer pressure.

no, it is a contract - under UK law (and FD are in the UK) once money has changed hands you have some form of implicit contract, though you may have difficulty in court getting your cash back, or it'll cost you more to claim than most backed even in small claims court (£25 filed online)

Plus, the Kickstarter TOS explicitly say that it is a contract between the backer and the producer.

And when grown-ups invest in a company/fund/whatever they normally make sure that the information is available before they put any money into it.

but the information was available - it said there would be an offline mode.

Now they just changed their minds, but its ok, they said there would be offline mode when you invested so obviously that makes it ok not to have offline mode now?

Imagine I buy into an ethical investment fund, and later they decide "well, by ethical we meant drugs, tobacco and defence".. investors would be a bit miffed. We have regulators for this in investments, I think its obvious we need the same with Kickstarter - either privately or socially (ie sue them until they change their practices!)

nope, grep can parse other statements too, and you do not need grep to understand the output of ls.

That's the difference, ls and grep are independent tools that can use other tools as you like. Systemd doesn't work so well if you choose to replace any of its subsystems as they tightly depend on each other.

The unix way is to develop a tool that does what you say it will, according to its own rules. It can be more trouble to integrate but the power means you have a lot of reuse potential.

The Windows way (if you like) is to develop a tool that works very well integrated with the other tools, such that it is easy to make them work together but you lose the power to reuse the tools with other systems.

Systemd is going for the 'easy integration' route, but many people think they are over extending themselves into integrating many things that should not be part of an init system (such as logging, process management, console output, and notifications.

borrowing money and spending it should improve the economy *in the short term*. Strangely enough, in the long term it usually means you just have a lot of debt and nothing much to show for it.

Here in the UK when the last government left office, they borrowed so much that you'd think the short-term benefits would be massive, our economy should have been the best in the civilised world..... yet.....

Borrow and spend, like many other things is something best done in moderation. As a concept of simply "borrow as much as you can and spend it all" turns out to leave you with massive debts that still need to be paid off, plus so much interest you never really recover.

Systemd is monolithic - not built into a single binary blob, but split into several tightly-dependant binary blobs.

This is what people mean when they say monolithic - its not the build process they are concerned with but the architecture. You can have a single monolithic system built into a thousand binaries, its still monolithic.

For example, the Linux kernel is monolithic (famously, its not a microkernel!) even though every driver is a separate binary.

1. It worked - where are Borland, Lotus, Claris (ro Workperfect) now?

2. It worked - he upgraded so many times you forgot what your old documents were like.

See, in both cases he handed money to Microsoft, both for Office and again for more Office. It may suck to be him, but Ballmer has been wiping his butt on his dollar bills for some time now.

Ps. I doubt the gigantic VBA object model was intended to destroy the competition, it sure looks more like bloated incompetence from the part of all the people working on it.

quite the opposite - Windiv used to keep things rolling along, devdiv kept on trying to break the "Windows experience" with all kinds of crap under the pretence that developers were the most important thing to keep happy (ie fuck users).

Now the strategy ha changed for Microsoft, they've embraced the concept that they do not sell Window desktops, now they sell Azure services and a little bit of some mobile platform that's not doing so well.

So, the new direction is to get everyone working with their cloud offerings instead of trying to keep the dead duck of Windows desktop going (though, note you'll still need a Windows desktop to run Visual Studio....) and I think they feel that if the developer gets used to Windows for development, they'll want the same kind of experience when deploying their programs - even if the client is a html5-based webapp that runs on an iPad or
some Android device.

They have got this embrace thing down pat.

you also have an annual deficit of $564 bn

Your whole insistence of spending more than you take in tax is the reason the economy has had trouble recovering - mainly as when Bush left office the deficit was $1.3tn. Those election promises didn't come cheap!

This happened with the last X game - X:Rebirth, released with a lot of fanfare and expectation and hype and.... truly, truly dreadful. Not just in gameplay but bugged to hell and back again.

The forums on Steam and Egosoft were full of people either asking how to get a refund, complaining they had been told to "sod off" by Steam, or rejoicing that they had managed to scrape a refund out of Steam.

Incidentally, this game too was not available for review before it was on sale.

and this comment kids is exactly what's happening here.

Microsoft is being pushed out of the consumer market as the desktop is replaced with mobile platforms, Microsoft knows that they cannot take over this platform with WPhone and Surface, so are going to do the next best thing - leverage their development tools to attract the full attention of developers for these platforms - Ballmer understood the importance of 'owning' the people who create the applications. And so I think we will see more developers write code for .NET using Visual Studio and deploy it to alternative platforms.

Of course, this means those developers will ave to run Windows. That means they will understand Windows much better than the platforms they deploy to, and so you will see the creeping embrace of Windows to the preferred deployment platforms - you can see this in the current Microsoft shops, where any tool is ok as long as its Microsoft. I can't see these shops deploying to iPads as if they suddenly got the message, but will deploy to iOS because Marketing told them too, and they'll be happy to do so because they can remain in their Microsoft-walled garden.

Its a good thing all in all, and I hope it means people will see the benefits of the non-Windows alternatives, but I know human nature is lazy and I think this will serve to attract more Linux devs to the Microsoft way than the other way round.

it is on Linux and Mac.... (and we don't really count Mono as not being quite the same thing)

I think you need to read the awesome Chriss Brumme's blogs.

Have a look at SafeHandle - garbage collection is so fantastic in .NET that they had to create a reference counted smart pointer class.

Read the "I wouldn't do it like that again" about putting AppDomains into SQLServer and IIS. Oh dear, that was bad... quote: "Frankly, we gave the host and the application a lot of rope to hang themselves. In retrospect, we screwed up."

The blogs are brilliant, don't knock them - but it shows how complex the whole thing is, as he is a techie guy who will say all the things that are imperfect in a way that a marketing guy would not even understand.

As for WCF, WPF, WWF, APS.NET MVC.. my biggest issue with these is not the complexity (though turn on full tracing in WCF and be amazed at how a webservice framework can have so many frigging layers of code to pass a message to app code) but the 'black box; of them. They are all "you do this and this and it works", seemingly by magic. You can trace calls through in the debugger.. and suddenly it will vanish into a section of "it just does its own thing here" magic. Its fine if you're a programmer who is taught to just copy and paste the required code in.. which is I suppose the target audience. Don't think, just follow the rules.