My point still stands. MS paid Epic and was the official publisher of Gears. No one bought PC Gears because it came out a year later with no marketing or improvements. MS was for a while, trying to kill its own PC gaming lead in order to support XBOX sales. Want to play Gears? Want to play Halo? Get an XBOX. Otherwise stfu. The verdict: MS PC gaming strategy is run by a bunch of XBOX marketing choads.
Gaming is the only clear advantage that Windows still holds over OS X and Linux. That's why it's so surprising that MS has been trying so hard to kill its own PC gaming lead. What do they really expect to happen after that? I still love Windows gaming and I love XBOX, but for all other uses I will go for my Mac or Linux computers. How do I mean MS is trying to kill gaming on Windows? Easy. MS doesn't even release it's own games on Windows anymore! No recent Halo games on PC. What? No Gear of War 2 on PC. Why? Add to this lack of any serious innovation in Direct X besides prettier water in every release. Then MS allows themselves to be curb-stomped by Steam. IMO Windows Live always felt like more of a bug than a feature. It just crashed and annoyed more than it worked.I guess they are really giving up now. It's other companies that are really keeping PC gaming alive now. MS you really blew it you losers.
I think what is happening is that people are suddenly demanding Macs at work. They use them at home and can't stand using their PC at work any more. I live in Sweden. As I look around I see way more Macs than PCs. At my wife's company it's the same. Could it be that Mac has already won the enterprise in some countries? People I talk to refuse to use Windows because of domain controllers, active directory, painful software installation, cheap hardware in PCs, and poor performance in mission critical applications. Not many users given a choice would choose a PC over a Mac. Bottom line: it's prettier and it works better.
This is surprising news for me as I have been a SilverStripe developer for a couple years now at my primary job. In case anyone is wondering, SilverStripe is a wonderful little enterprise class CMS. Miles ahead in my opinion of the usual suspects in this area ( Drupal, Joomla, WordPress). The real story here is why a small BSD licensed CMS written on the LAMP stack wants to be certified by Microsoft! I guess they want the publicity. But seriously, If you are a php developer looking for a good Object Oriented CMS written is PHP5, you should really take a couple days and check it out. You might really like it. It's not perfect by any stretch, a tad over-engineered, but did I mention it's miles ahead of everything else which calls itself a php5 CMS? Miles.
Really? A score of 5 for a post recommending teaching teaching kids Basic and Pascal? How about teaching them something useful like PHP or JavasScript? Something they can actually use to make something cool. I see kids learning Basic and Pascal as a definite path to them doing something other than IT as a career.
They should replace Ballmer with the guy who's running the Taliban in Afghanistan. I hear they're doing well lately.
This is a good point. The problem is that programming is like gardening. You can't expect a garden you plant one year to be as beautiful the next year without a little work. You need to weed, prune, replant, and fertilize it.
In programming we need to patch and refactor. It's all for the best really. The way to sell refactoring to a customer is to tell them that sooner or later, without it, they are heading for a meltdown. It's not because the program was bad when you wrote it, it's just that entropy is the way of the universe.
No application, especially a web app, can withstand time without maintenance.
Also no web programmer can survive on new projects alone. Eventually maintenance and upgrades come into the picture.
If your clients don't understand that, then you need new clients more than your current clients need you. And you can quote me on that. I've been building web apps for 12 years. None on the sites I built 12 years would still be relevant or working today without upgrades.
I think it comes down to... I know language x... so I will do everything I need to do in language x, even if there are better choices available. The mantra of software engineers used to be 'Right tool for the job'. I think it applies here.
Wow is all I can say to that comment.
I agree that English should be the language for IT.
But how do you expect students to learn it?
In case anyone is reading this article and interested, there is free elearning program I built at
Just use Linux to get stuff done and buy an XBox to play games. Problem solved.
"Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards." -- Soren F. Petersen
