As a person who seems to defend Microsoft quite often on HN, I can't shake the feeling that if they get to first place in anything, they'll become massive tools once again.
I like seeing them as the underdog, it forces Microsoft to be kinder and more free, but I think innovation and progress would be seriously hindered (once again) if they grabbed the crown in a particular space.
They used to mock Oracle with their licensing depending on what kind of CPU and how powerful it was.
Latest SQL Server? Yep, you pay depending on the CPU vendor (AMD or Intel) and the type of chip.
I never understood why some people prefer to buy licensed stuff from Oracle or Microsoft. Do you like pain?
[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/oh-you-wanted-aweso...
The moment Postgres has the feature range of SQL Server (SSIS, SSRS, SSAS), supports the same HA features without hassle, and is generally even half as easy to manage, I'll switch. Meanwhile, life's too short for me to want to become a "real" DBA.
I've found that the main difference is how you work as a developer. If you're happy using a clicky interface to get your work done, more power to you. I need to be able to script everything I do, because I don't like to repeat myself. The rigmarole of restoring a db from a backup in SQL Server is just insane compared to the 4 second command I could issue at the terminal for postgres.
I know it's going to sound like a total exaggeration but I literally can't use MS products for more than a few hours at a time because of the pain I get in my arm from using the mouse. And trust me, it's not just because I don't know my way around - I spent years developing on that platform (and will never go back).
Your example is particularly odd: RESTORE DATABASE bla FROM DISK = 'file.bak' The docs are quite comprehensive, with lots of useful examples[1].
MS deserves some flak for UI-only, but SQL Server isn't one of those products (at least since 2005). MS products in general are also becoming much more scriptable, as Powershell access is becoming a requirement for new products.
I prefer a clicky interface for things I'm not going to do often (like configure a new cluster) or things I don't want to commit to memory or have to look up. Anytime I need to repeat, I either read docs and construct a command, or if it's a complicated thing, I'll use the wizard to generate a base script and modify as needed.
Probably not.
Which is why we use Spring Integration...
At times it's frustrating how often you have to use the mouse, but other times it's so great compared to any alternative ways (that I know of).
Except maybe for that everything is already integrated and "just works".
What I'm asking is if you can specify some elements of the stack you mentioned, that is hard to replicated or unique to SQL Server?
They might not be "hard to replicate" or unique, but having great options in-box, that are extremely simple to configure - that's worth a ton. If I was running a large-scale operation and SQL Server was costing me millions a year, things might be different.
"nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment"
So people "buy IBM" because they don't like pain.
All in all though, it is a very solid offering from MS that nobody really talks about. One of the main pain points from the past is that everyone thought it was a CMS when really it was a document management system. Now it actually can be both. There is a talk on YouTube from the unveiling of 2013 that is well worth a watch (although it is over an hour long)
.net, Azure and javascript are supported and documented best, but you can use any language and run SharePoint apps on any platform.
Why is this the top comment, it is just a rant/whine? What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web?
Microsoft has given customers a choice on whether to update their browser or not, and by in large they haven't. Then it becomes Microsoft's fault for not forcing them to upgrade. I don't think people need all their choices made for them. Why is it not web developer's fault for continuing to develop for outdate browsers? or computer manufacturers' fault for not loading a different, more consumer oriented default browser? or the users themselves for not taking a few minutes to update or download an alternative browser?
Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then unless untold amounts of time was wasted and untold amounts of pain experienced to get it to work. When Microsoft got the market leadership they just stopped every investment in it until forced to get back in the game, and GP fears the same will happen again if they're allowed to gain dominant position again.
I think you're mis-remembering a little. Or maybe you had a different job than I did.
Back then, the web WAS IE6. There was nothing else. And it really was, for a time, a popularly-praised relief from the previous browser wars. I didn't have a standard but then again, at least I had a standard. You can design for IE6 and be sure it would "just work" everywhere because IE6 was the only option. Market share in the mid 90's IIRC.
The real crime is, as you went on to explain, the utter stagnation. And of course insult was added to injury when Firefox was released. For years then we DID legitimately have the trouble of designing for one modern browser and one curmudgeon who just happened to still have 4/5th's of the market. Lame.
The fact that that bending resulted in IE6 still being able to mostly display websites today is not any sort of testament to IE6's quality as a browser.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is in a position to fix everything for the consumers, and they so far choose not to.
These days I am still wary of that browser because it is Windows only and they have poor support for their legacy OS releases.
No. MS links new browser updates to OS releases. You can still run plenty of modern browsers on XP... just not one made by MS. How sad.
That was spectacular and joyful to read and I agree wholeheartedly. The sad thing is that when I was "designing for IE" as a young lad, I had no idea that's what I was doing. "The browser" was what came with the computer and that was Netscape and later IE. It took a while to wean myself off of :
if (document.all) { }
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD9FAOPBiDk&hd=1
Interesting and funny video, regardless of if you think anything changed.
http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6825830/8-types-of-karao...
My past experience says it will likely be the Old Faded Glory for Firefox and The Unironic Ironic for BB10 with The Clown for Chrome.
Great. Now we have 4 more standards thanks to Microsoft!
I'd be willing to put the past behind me if they Just Stopped with all of this crap.
There's a reason seasoned nerds do not like Microsoft and it is not just because the nerds are raging Linux fanboys. It is because of actual experience dealing with MS over a couple of decades.
Sometimes MS comes out with something good but at a point (usually within 3 years) marketing will take over and run it into the ground.
As someone who's been doing web development since 1995, I have wasted an enormous amount of my life dealing with IE-specific bugs. This is enough for me to feel uncomfortable even thinking about Internet Explorer and has tainted me against Microsoft products in general...
They fixed a load of stuff, threw new versions out and spun it as marketing.
It's not cool if you have to pay for it at a rapidly growing pace.
Unity is now a first class citizen for development of games on Windows.
Windows 8.1 brings quite a few new APIs, better interaction with .NET projections.
JIT, GC and ASP.NET improvements.
The message is, they could have thrown a RSS Reader attitude to .NET, instead they are paying developers to fix those issues.
As for paying for stuff, welcome to the commercial world. Microsoft is not the only vendor selling developer tools, although it looks like that when reading HN.
With MSDN subscriptions you get lots of those things for "free" for the timeframe the subscription is valid.
Really don't care about Windows 8.1 APIs. The only thing that concerns me is web and WPF Desktop apps in C# as that's what powers my industry.
Compare to the Java EE ecosystem. Costing:
IDE - free (Eclipse/NetBeans)
Server - free (GlassFish/Tomcat on Ubuntu)
Database - free (PostgreSQL on Ubuntu).
Not only that, your profiler, code review, automated build, version control and testing platforms are also 100% free compared to DotTrace, TFS etc.
It is a matter of scale.
The type of companies I work for, the MSDN subscription is done at enterprise level. Sure it is expensive, but still cheaper than buying individual products, and gives the liberty to access new software versions.
It feels as if it was free, hence my quotes around free.
> Compare to the Java EE ecosystem.
True, in many things the Java ecosystem is more open source friendly, because the money comes from consulting or selling books, not from direct sale of tooling.
Ever tried to develop Eclipse Ecore plugins without buying the books from Eclipse Foundation?
I am fully aware of it, my employer was a Java/C++ shop until 2009, date when we started delivery .NET solutions additionally.
On the world consulting world my employer targets, there are lots of commercial tools to chose from,
Websphere, Weblogic, Oracle DB, Informix, DB2, Rational Rose, Clearcase, Intel C++, Intel VTune, Portland Group Fortran/C/C++, InteliJ, Delphi, Together, Sybase, HP-UX, Solaris, ...
But I'm no Microsoft developer.
And then the iPad and post-PC era happened, killing Silverlight in the process and PC sales are still in steady decline.
Didn't we get that? Wasn't that ie6. What went wrong was the internet didn't go away and we didn't all want desktop software.
No I think we should all know how that story ends by now. The answer has got to be open source or open standards at the very least. We need to be in a place where your browser doesn't matter, there's 50 out there choose the green one if you like green.
As an ex-'softie I can tell you that the engineers from IE were generally not happy with this situation. Or with all of the acrobatics to support non-standard crap. But I have yet to meet anyone who really understands how the winds of decision-making at Microsoft get their first breaths. Basically, it was situation == nobody happy, even most folks at the borg.
I apologize if my response isn't full of data. I don't understand how a troll post hit the top of the discussion page and thought it deserved a response, even a fluffy one full of hearsay.
I will add one more thing. They have to make the browser not just for Windows platform, but for all major platforms (Mac and Linux).
Opera is/was known for its standards support, .
Google Service Drops Support for Opera https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298
G+ doesn't support Opera... why? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738099
Gmail sometimes shows "Gmail too slow? Switch to Chrome, a faster browser." for Opera uses and a similar message shows up on Youtube Google Docs.
Chrome and Firefox started their own take on HTML beta and experimental features and led to a race of broken standard support. Too many standards are half baked, and are implemented by some browser makers in a half baked manner and are frequently rolled back in an incompatible way, HTML5 storage being just one example.
From "Judgment Day Arrives: Opera Implements the CSS3 Webkit Prefix" http://www.sitepoint.com/opera-css3-webkit-prefix/ "In February 2012, we reported the minutes of W3C meeting where Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft discussed implementing -webkit prefixes in non-webkit browsers. The reason: some developers use only webkit prefixes — their sites look good in some browsers, but broken in others even when they offer the same level of CSS3 support. The issue is especially prevalent on mobile browsers and many developers fail to look beyond their high-end Apple or Android devices." "Opera analyzed stylesheets from 10,000 popular websites to determine which CSS values/properties would receive -webkit aliases:"
Final result? A browser engine known for speed, leanness and standards support killed, because it couldn't keep up with the big browsers' incompatible beta standard support, and the number of websites that go for the latest and greatest and don't care one bit about standards support over cool features.
Take a look at this HN thread about a broken Google site and you see a lot of people defending non-standard HTML because it works on their choice of browser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594913
These things are evidence of a currently broken web regardless of IE's involvement, with webkit being the new IE. And it actually explains how some of IE's features and bugs came about in the early 2000s resulted in pain for alternate browsers. Prime example of a great thing: XMLHTTPRequest was not part of a web standard.
Though Webkit is open source, I am a bit wary of Chrome's dominance as Google spends a ton of money to bundle it with everything and promote it at every chance over Firefox/Opera since they don't have to continue paying them hundreds of millions for being default and building a big moat for their search engine in the process against competing and future search engines.
Personally I'm quite happy that Mozilla is engaging in this feature race, as Google lately is in the habit of pushing technologies that have the potential to fragment the web and break the fragile standards that we do have - and I'm talking specifically about replacements for Javascript, like Dart, PNaCl, but also about things like Web SQL Database [1]. This is why Mozilla is doing an awesome job in bringing balance, with things like asm.js or IndexedDB [2].
If you think about it, this is quite good, since standards aren't development in the vacuum, as you need experiments and prototypes released to the public for useful feedback. XmlHttpRequest itself started as an ActiveX extension. How can you make a standard out of something if you don't experiment? Also WebKit is the new IExplorer, that's why Firefox is so important.
[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/webdatabase/
[2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis...
> Final result? A browser engine known for speed, leanness and standards support killed, because it couldn't keep up with the big browsers' incompatible beta standard support, and the number of websites that go for the latest and greatest and don't care one bit about standards support over cool features.
It's regrettable really, but on the other hand they were also killed for not being open-source. Really, in this day and age, non open-source browsers don't make sense, unless you're Apple or Microsoft.
Not that Microsoft (or anyone for that matter) cares what I think, but that's the price I've set in order for MS to pay off the debt it's worked up over the years as I wasted weeks, possibly months of my life getting things to work in their turd of a.... a.... a looking-at-the-web-kind-of-application-thing. I wont even call it a browser.
Or better yet, I wish IE was thrown away and forgotten about, and like Voldemort, it's name would only ever be heard in hushed whispers lest it's evil spirit be awoken. It would become a ghost story web developers tell their web developing kids; "Be standards compliant, or IE6 will come and get yoooOOOOU!".
But then I'm old and cranky. The kids will probably love IE19b Custard Pro Home Edition and they'll rally behind it to get IE back to the number 1 slot because it's somehow retro and cool, and I'll laugh in their spotty faces when IE regains it supremacy and Microsoft turns around and shits in their stupid faces all over again, and the internet becomes a desolate wasteland where Bing is the only search engine and the top hit is always an Encarta entry.
Wow, I'm in a special kind of a bad mood today.