[ale] First look at Winders 8

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

see inline below

Mike Harrison <cluon at geeklabs.com> wrote:

>Shapiro waxed poetic:
>> So heck, maybes this is the Way the World will Go, and us happy
>hard-workin' coders will merely be weird old fossils in a universe of
>> sunglasses-wearing HTML writers.
>
>In the real world, where bandwidth, CPU, memory,
>and -long term- reliability and maintainability are issues,
>fossils like us kick ass,
>

Yes, but some of the newbie 20 or 30 something year old's planning and managing things in the new world order don't understand the need for these virtues you mention.  They don't understand the need for individual and organizational character and integrity.  They don't know that their organizational structure doesn't have them.  They don't know they need them.  And, they don't know what will ultimately happen, badly, without them.

Our commercial world is now in an epidemic of political correctness, looking cool whether what's under the hood is cool or not, shipping the product whether it's done or not, short term thinking and planning, and failure to understand the dangers of inherently flawed product / service / organization design.  Historically, I'm a Windows user and have been mostly happy with it.  No more.  I'm upgrading my important machines to Windows 7.  Most likely, my journey on the Windows train ends there, unless they change course.  This new redesign is an epic example of looking cool, without being cool, at least for power users.  It sacrifices tons of functionality and essentially leaves people who actually use their WindowS (not Window) computer for productivity and development and who actually use multiple, perhaps, many "windows" on the screen out in the cold.

Here is an example of short term thinking from 20 years ago.  I used to manage a Netware network for my employer.  We had a scenario where the server's main hard drive, which I think was 300 GB, would run out of space.  Messages would start appearing on everyone's screen to delete unneeded files.  I would contact all the managers and reiterate the same thing.  Then, I would get into the management functions of Netware and  start looking for redundant, temporary, and obsolete files I could delete.  This would tie up an entire day for me, and inconvenience about 120 users.  Eventually, I would manage to erase or backup 20 GB of space or so, and office life would resume.  About 6 months later, this would happen again.  I begged and begged for a new hard drive, which would cost about $ 2000 at the time.  But, no, it wasn't in the budget.  However, they probably lost $ 20,000 in productivity every time this happened.  I eventually had to retask another hard drive we had in stock for another purpose, out of desperation, just so our employees in the department could get some work done without worrying about server crashes.

It's only gotten exponentially worse in the last 20 years.

Sincerely,

Ron

>I can get more done with just a shell on a far away linux system than
>most 
>"developers" can do using the latest IDE and kewl language of the week.
>
>10 lines of perl can be a powerful thing.
>
>Three weeks ago I tought a young man to not trust his IDE with all the 
>supported options and commands. His code would not connect. It did not 
>have: CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER and CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST as options in
>his 
>IDE, he did not RTFM. While the people that built the drop down
>pick-list 
>of PHP options may have had valid reasons for not including these
>standard 
>options, he had become so dependant upon these crutches he was limited
>by 
>them. He had to connect to an internal IP address with a self-signed
>cert. 
>Impossible he said.. He was not comfortable with a shell on the
>production 
>server, or scp.. or.. or.. and was cutting and pasting code chunks from
>
>Eclipse into a server side web based file browser.... But he was very 
>bright.
>
>A recent email from Antony exposes that he is playing with ssh, scp, 
>Geany, jEdit and vi and learning to "get naked with code" in his words.
>Antony is starting to understand where an IDE is useful, and that there
>
>are sometimes more appropriate options. It is A tool, it should not be
>your only tool.
>
>The role of us old fossils is to expose follies and teach.
>Sometimes with a clue bat in our hands.
>
>
>
>
>
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--

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Please excuse my potential brevity.

(To whom it may concern.  My email address has changed.  Replying to former
messages prior to 03/31/12 with my personal address will go to the wrong
address.  Please send all personal correspondence to the new address.)

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
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Ron Frazier
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linuxdude AT techstarship.com