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

and then there was Diablo 1. Very much a rogue game but with graphics!

To be honest it seems to me that the author hasn;t a clue what the real problem is.

He wants people to develop libraries that solve a problem... and then says that his cause is developing something new.

Our problem is that the established, mature libraries do not get enough use, there are too many people who think that they need to write a new thing to replace them.,.. and so we have lots of software that doesn't work well because its all reinvented wheels.

I'm sure if he did come up with a new HTML/CSS system, it'd be pretty much as bad as the existing one, just different. I'd rather he helped extend or evolve it instead, and build upon what we already have. Then we'd get out of this mindset that we must always be upgrading to something new, and not improving what we have.

I guess its a subtle difference sometimes as we do need some new things, but nowhere near the rate and disruption that occurs today.

Carl Sagan even had a chapter about it and a photo in the book Cosmos from 1980. That's where I first read about this as a boy.