hardly true. If you want 100% bug free code then expect the devs to take twice as long to provide the solution (and that's being optimistic). If you don't want the tested-to-death solution, and want to take a pragmatic approach where you assume some bugs will fall through the dev process, then you'll get the solution quicker overall. (obviously there are some devs to whom a bug is a way of life, I assume you will not hire them again)

BTW good for you, not wanting devs to work weekends. Do they get national holidays off too? You are just the kind of empathic boss Dilbert would die for.

One of the big changes is increased support for voice and and gesture input. You can turn the console on by voice, and it will recognize you and automatically login

and will it recognise "what? fuck off bloody xbox crap, no I do not want ads, I was trying to watch the flipping tv, you damn pile of crap, bugger off, off. no off. fucking thing. OFF."

But think, if its sitting there in an "always on" standby listing to your voice, do you think it'll also be watching you via the kinect camera? I'm sure it will eventually if its always online too.

you really have no clue if you think anyone does currency computation with IEEE754 floats.

As for premature optimisation - that refers to writing your code regardless of its performance and then making the slow bits (or the most heavily used bits) fast. What it does not refer to is writing your code in a slow system by default so you have few places to go. You see many people talk about their PHP web sites wanting them to scale or simply go faster with the existing hardware and they simply cannot do it. If they'd started with a better idea of how to improve it (eg services that could be migrated to native code later) then they'd be in with a chance, as it is, the answer is always going to be "time to rewrite", which puts them pretty much where they started - nothing premature about considering more than very short term gain right from the start.

no, in the real world programmers are so cheap you can hire hundreds of them. India, China, eastern europe... more than you can shake a H1B visa at.

In the real world we are already suffering extreme weather due to pumping lots of heavy "energy-storing" gases into our atmosphere. Im not sure we can continue to do this indefinitely, so it makes sense to do what we can about it sooner rather than later, and even if you don't believe that, the cost of electricity is booming (not to mention the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, now the politicians have realised they can tax it). So making your code more efficient is a sensible thing now matter how you try to deny it.

So the simple answer is to stop technology churn and start training programmers so they become good at coding, then we wouldn't have such crap classes and over-engineered systems.

As for "switch to floats", if you're using a decimal class, its precisely because you cannot switch to floats. A fixed point class is a better option though, and simpler, and faster.. so why not use it in the first place?!

I can afford 10, maybe 20 failures for the 1 project that succeeds

yeah, but not everyone can work for Google.

Apparently that is the C# decimal datatype class.
And it is 1/27th the speed of a double, this kind of thing is pretty normal in the .NET world - make a complicated class and use it where you'd normally use a primitive type and don't worry about speed or memory usage.

But then, us old timers wouldn't bother with such a way of doing things where performance is necessary (I'd except every time when using a decimal class), no we'd do something like this. 27 times slower... progress :-(

and his solution is to mail the IT department at the company, like the PHB there gives a fig (or possibly even understands the problem)

When he should do is mail the legal department instead, or failing that the CEO or CIO. They might not understand the situation either but they'll understand the words "privacy" and "violation" and sit up, then they'll pass the blame on to the IT PHB and he'll have to "just fix it" in some way. Which he will do by getting an underling to remove most if not all of the personally identifying information from all emails in a overly-broad way, until the Marketing department decides it needs to put your address on every email all over again.

ah, but your plumbing can be fixed by an Elbonian who has immigrated to your country.

That said, many corporates are looking at increasing the number of H1B visas for this very reason - so they can keep the bosses in nice offices in the US, whilst still getting the cheap workers too.

... of the arguments over which FOSS office suite had got most users, people should recognise that there have been at least 65 million users of them not using Microsoft Office.

This is a good thing.

mind you, Microsoft says there are 750 million Office users worldwide, so we have a little way to go yet.

its often not so easy - they need the power because of modern inefficient programs running on supercomputers - your web app goes slow, just add a dozen more cores and a hundred gig of RAM, and then wonder why the cost of hosting is so high.

As a result, you can take your business elsewhere, but they'll be charging as much. That power is not cheap in the first place.

It is time to reduce the requirements of our programs, I understand that datacentres are 2nd only to the airline industry for co2 emissions.

True, .net is much better than Java, but I think much of that is down to the tooling - try writing C# code in notepad!

They're both still pretty inefficient though, I've played a couple of games written in C#/XNA, they're ok, but there's a lot of grinding at startup and a lot of sluggishness after you've played for a while. Could be just general poor programming practice from games devs, but there's a fair amount of language "assistance" there.

except the little problem of major component updates coming in v3.51 and the server OS being released with v3.5 on it,so many of your bleeding-edge programs wouldn't run.

I think they fixed this by simply reducing the amount of development going into .NET, thereby reducing the frequency of .net releases.

Oracle... we don't care. Please just donate Java to the trash.

TFYFY.

Oh wait, you mean they already did that?!

but you're wrong.

The plugin is simply the vector that a great number of attacks use to infect your system, the flaws are still (mostly) in the JVM.

Don't stick your head in the sand and say "blah blah no flaws in java", as you're doing everyone a huge disservice. There are bugs in the JRE that are exploited all the time (check the security fixes Oracle publishes to see what these are)., and understand that removing the plugin simply means the attackers have a harder, but not impossible, time to hack you.

true, if you looked at the business you'd see the accounts and then panic you'd not earn enough revenue to pay your workers... then you might have a different appreciation for why management wants stuff to sell.

Microsoft's problem is not about that, its more like 2 different managers pulling the company in different directions, expecting incompatible features added so they each can build themselves up over the other team.