Ray Ozzie To Step Down From His Role At Microsoft 229
denobug writes "Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, is stepping down. He is to remain with Microsoft until he retires, focusing his efforts 'in the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments,' based on a memo from Steve Ballmer. Also according to Steve's memo, the role of CSA was unique and it will not be filled."
I'm Ray Ozzie, (Score:5, Funny)
Bailing out from this exploding gas bag, before she burns down to the bare frame.
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I thought 3 digit UIDs were a myth....
D: It is a miracle.
Indeed, they are (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah thats what my script found too. Its up to ten million and it hasn't found any more one digit UIDs, just the first ten.
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Its up to ten million and it hasn't found any more one digit UIDs, just the first ten.
Have you checked to make sure that there aren't any in the vast space between two whole numbers? That sounds like it could be quite a complicated exercise.
Re:I'm Ray Ozzie, (Score:5, Funny)
Its up to ten million and it hasn't found any more one digit UIDs, just the first ten.
Have you checked to make sure that there aren't any in the vast space between two whole numbers? That sounds like it could be quite a complicated exercise.
Hey you are right. I found more low numbers right after 4294967296.
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Its not as funny as you think (Score:2)
Just because there are 90 2-digit ids doesn't mean there are anywhere near 90 still active slashdot users with 2-digit ids.
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You're right, we should reap the dead UIDs and auction them off for great justice.
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He stated the reason why (Score:5, Funny)
He's stepping down to spend more time with his baby, Lotus Notes.
Not filled? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also according to Steve's memo, the role of CSA was unique and it will not be filled.
This has Balmer sounding like Francisco Franco [wikipedia.org], who created a monarchy but put in no king, only leaving himself as regent. For decades. Somehow I don't feel that Microsoft's situation isn't going to benefit any more than Spains, for the same reasons.
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My mother worked for a doctor's office for decades. This doctor's office was, on and off, owned by McNeal hospital. Suffice it for this story to say "owned by an added layer of bureaucracy."
The doctor's realized that when somebody works for you for that long, it is nice to give them occasional raises -- not only as a retention policy but a thank-you. In her latter years there, they wanted to give her another raise but couldn't. The corporate structure of McNeal said that for her position, she was at t
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The title was created for Bill Gates, not for Ray. Ray is the 2nd person to have the position.
Huh (Score:3, Informative)
When did he step up exactly? He brought in Groove, which was another attempt to recreate notes within office, then fucked up live mesh trying to make it another Groove. He had little to do with Azure, didn't talk much at company meetings, didn't inspire, didn't do anything. Don't let the door slam your ass on the way out Ray
Re:Huh (Score:5, Informative)
He had little to do with Azure, didn't talk much at company meetings, didn't inspire, didn't do anything.
You sure about that? According to Wired [wired.com], Ozzie had everything to do with Azure, and spent his first two years on the job reorganizing the company to produce a services platform for the Web. He's quite clear about his intentions and the direction he was pushing the company in his original memo [scripting.com] to Microsoft senior management, which was sent out under Bill Gates's email address. And longtime Microsoft observer Mary-Jo Foley says [zdnet.com]:
As I discovered during the course of my Red Dog meetings, Ozzie was anything but uninvolved in Red Dog and Azure. In fact, I heard from team members time and time again, without Ozzie’s oversight and direct intervention, Red Dog and the broader Azure platform wouldn’t have come together as quickly or comprehensively as they did.
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What I count as fucking up Live Mesh is the neutering it received between beta and "Oh Christ, we'll rename Live Sync 'Live Mesh' because people like the name. It's not that they like the product - oh no" - as the outcry [windowsteamblog.com] when it was announced proves.
Was it Ozzie who did decided to cripple a fantastic product, and turn it into the steaming pile Live Mesh 2011 is? I'm honestly curious - I'd love to know who had the vision to create the original MOE.
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TRANSLATION: Ballmer will resign in 2011 (Score:5, Insightful)
For anyone who doesn't speak corporate-speak, or the variant they use at Microsoft, this really means the following:
Ray got fired, but at his level they don't fire you. He got fired because Microsoft is a mature business and doesn't really create anything new anymore.
Ballmer refuses to split the company up (tax reasons) so he's been given a grace period of a year to find a replacement for himself.
Here endeth the lesson.
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I LIKE it. Microsoft is officially throwing in (Score:3, Insightful)
the towel on any further attempts at, ahem, innovation.
They've been flailing around and failing to imitate Apple since the creation of the Macintosh.
Apart from "rousing the giant" long enough to kill Netscape through illegal anti-competitive moves in the nineties, Microsoft has finally realized that they suck at innovation, suck at integration and suck at being anything but exactly what their big (140k+ desktop per) clients want them to be.
Look for Windows to stay on the desktop and stop being an embarrassm
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MS could have owned the cloud (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:MS could have owned the cloud (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft never did understand Lotus Notes.
Neither did any of the users who were forced to try to use it.
It's not a leap forward if nobody actually leaps (Score:5, Insightful)
I used Lotus Notes for many years, starting with version 3, and I got the impression that there was some sort of philosophy behind it, but I just couldn't figure out what it was; I admit I got tangled up in the interface. A good friend of mine was a Lotus Notes admin, and while I believe he "got it", the hoops the interface made him go through to do various tasks (backing up a database by copy-n-paste because it was the only "reliable" way?) negated whatever deeper benefits the platform provided.
Ultimately it comes down to execution; the web has its shortcomings, but it's simple enough that people "get it" and can use it effectively. Being relatively simple and text-based, it encourages experimentation without needing to worry that the underlying database can somehow can be corrupted or external links permanently invalidated. It doesn't hurt either the the web itself is basically "free", while Notes was (is still?) quite expensive.
I don't want to get all Godwin here, but I think a decent analogy is that Notes is a Tiger tank; sophisticated and extremely powerful, but ultimately done in by the cheap and plentiful Sherman. It doesn't mean that the Tiger wasn't better than the Sherman, it's just that the Sherman won by sheer volume.
Ozzie may be a brilliant guy, with an IQ of 100!, but if he can't execute his ideas in a way that people nowhere near as smart (say, 2!) as him can use, what's the point? History is littered with people who had brilliant ideas but are forgotten because they botched the execution. Having used both Notes and Groove (as I understand it the only other actual piece of software Ozzie actually worked on), he took a serious leap forward, just down the wrong evolutionary path.
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Ozzie may be a brilliant guy, with an IQ of 100! ... wrong use of brilliant or iq ...
I was reading that "!" as a factorial operator. Like that, it makes some sense, not much though given that even plain old 160 is supposed to be hyper-smart...
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Notes degrades badly when used with infrastructure which is not up to the task.
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i spent 40 years designing software and I find the concepts of Notes (and now Azure) second to none. I guess you don't have a mind for it.
Lotus Notes: the new Linux.
*looks at UID*
Wait Mr. 40-year developer.. are you Ray Ozzie? I'm assuming of course that I'm not talking to the Boliver Shagnasty.
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Microsoft never did understand Lotus Notes.
What do you mean, are you saying they did or did not understand it?
It was like a alien language.
What do you mean, it was like a language, but not one from this planet, as if no one was able to communicate in it?
They just didn't get it.
Oh, OK. You need to say it three times for me to figure it out. Thanks.
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That's my problem with the cloud. Someone else owns it...and I have to trust my data to them.
Microsoft want to do fat OS, Office and dabble in media because that is their bread and butter and because these are capabilities that are needed on the desktop under the user's control.
microsoft had an architect? (Score:2)
wow. I thought it was just vms-retreaded; I mean I didn't think anybody would do that on purpose. I wonder what his next victim will be...
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I still rate VMS as the overall best OS I've ever used, including various Unix variants and Mac OS X/OS X Server. From an administrator's perspective, VMS had the same degree of user-facing consistency that Mac OS has, along with a fine-grained protection model that I'm appalled has never been deployed since. This is what Mac OS X Server should evolve to. And there are times when I really miss VMS' file versions.
The single biggest shortfall of VMS was that it was really hard to set up pipe-and-filter kin
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I like the versioning filesystem, and I like the idea that you have to use sysadmin-level commands to allow a program to listen on a particular port (along with being able to hard-limit how many connections the app will handle). The built-in clustering is also pretty awesome, considering how long it's been available. Having a unified help system is also pretty slick too.
That said, Unix presents the user with a filesystem tree that is entirely directory-based; no need to worry about the underlying disks them
Notice (Score:2)
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Funny)
That's ridiculous. We all know that Ballmer would be perfectly happy to dance around a giant empty building while clapping and shouting "Developers, developers, developers, developers."
Death metal (Score:3, Funny)
I loved ozzie's music. He should bite the head off balmer like a bat.
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"Step Down From His Role" Does that include no more wiping Ballmer spooge off his chin?
How's that for "imagery"?
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MY EYE'S!!
Wheres my bottle of brain bleach?!?
I must wash this before it sets!
I just got an image of Monca Lewinski (Score:2)
wiping her chin on her dress. (Ohhhh My ribs hurt. :-)
Ray's Real Job (Score:2, Insightful)
Was official "Do Nothing".
He was installed, to keep the board and principal shareholders mollified at the prospect of a Gates departure that left the Corporation in the hands of clueless Sales executives.
"Here, Ray! Stand here, hold this, and grin."
If BillG had gone without a Ray Ozzie in place, everyone would have seen the previous 5 years of Ballmer-led "performance" - then headed for the metaphorical exit. Microsoft, instead of trading in the lackluster mid-twenties, would have been an instant 9-dollar-
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Split the company in two, one the entertainment division based around MSN and XBOX which none of the existing board having much control over and especially which Ballmer can not influence in any way shape or form (medium and long term returns with a real future). The other the OS and Office, which MS stops developing and screw the customers over for as much as possible (maximum short to medium term returns with no real future).
That MSN lost every market to it's competitors and continues to lose money is
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God! is there nothing about Microsoft that is not some sad, hollow sham?
Xbox 360/Live/Kinect, Zune, Windows 7, Live Essentials, MS Office, SkyDrive... ? Should I keep going?
Re:Ray's Real Job (Score:4, Funny)
"God! is there nothing about Microsoft that is not some sad, hollow sham?"
I don't know. Notepad and freecell are pretty solid.
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Re:Ray's Real Job (Score:4, Informative)
That's not actually an issue with notepad.
It has to do with two different methods being equally correct in the standard. Microsoft requires both a carriage return and a linefeed(just like a typewriter), Unix only uses a linefeed. Which one you think is more correct is really a matter of opinion as both are fully correct according to the ISO standard. Historically there were reasons for the combo pair, and the ANSI standard requires it, but it is rather an anachronism in this day and age.
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That's not actually an issue with notepad.
It has to do with two different methods being equally correct in the standard. Microsoft requires both a carriage return and a linefeed(just like a typewriter), Unix only uses a linefeed. Which one you think is more correct is really a matter of opinion as both are fully correct according to the ISO standard. Historically there were reasons for the combo pair, and the ANSI standard requires it, but it is rather an anachronism in this day and age.
How many IBM Selectric Typewriters work with MS Word? Notepad, etc? Seriously, trying to reproduce the CR/LF combo for a tool that actually doesn't perform a electromechanical CR is absurd. LF all the way.
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CR/LF is the proper way (unfortunately), LF moves down a line, CR returns the carriage back to the start. It makes sense if you model your computerised stuff on electromechanical devices. it also makes sense when you realise the ctrl-l is 'move down' control key (like ctrl-h is move left).
The fact that 1 line-end character is easier to manipulate obviously didn't factor in the design though, progress sometimes means breaking with the past :)
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You are forgetting that the old standard printer was dot matrix. You can take a cr/lf document and feed it directly to a dot matrix printer's device and have it print. If you do the same with lf only text format you get a garbled mess as it reprints the next line on the current one.
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That's not actually an issue with notepad.
Really? Every other text editor I can think of deals with linebreaks sensibly, making an educated guess as to whether they're expressed as CRLF or just LF.
Though TBH I don't think notepad is a text editor. I think it's intended as a quick, dirty example to show "this is the kind of thing you can throw together very quickly using nothing but very basic MFC code".
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't think a software company needs a chief software architect?
Re:End of Azure (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, what's left that we can yet copy from iTunes, Sony, OS X, Java, VMware and Amazon?
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Insightful)
I think its more like having a single technical lead in a powerful position is a bad thing for management because they keep asking hard questions. So lets split the role into smaller project based positions, leaving the strategy to management and marketing.
Re:End of Azure (Score:4, Interesting)
I think its more like having a single technical lead in a powerful position is a bad thing for management because they keep asking hard questions. So lets split the role into smaller project based positions, leaving the strategy to management and marketing.
Having a single technical lead across a company as diverse as Microsoft possibly is a bad thing -- should SQL Server, Word, XBox Live, and Phone 7 all be managed by the same technical lead? Is that one person really going to have a deep understanding of all the technical, business, and user issues across all the products, or are they inevitably going to skew towards their favourite area, or not have enough time to devote to all the areas to be both effective and timely? I suspect Ozzie just found there wasn't enough time in the day anymore. For Gates, being across everything probably worked better -- the whole company was his baby; for Ozzie, coming in from the outside and trying to be across everything might have been harder.
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Having a single technical lead across a company as diverse as Microsoft possibly is a bad thing -- should SQL Server, Word, XBox Live, and Phone 7 all be managed by the same technical lead? Is that one person really going to have a deep understanding of all the technical, business, and user issues across all the products, or are they inevitably going to skew towards their favourite area, or not have enough time to devote to all the areas to be both effective and timely? I suspect Ozzie just found there wasn't enough time in the day anymore. For Gates, being across everything probably worked better -- the whole company was his baby; for Ozzie, coming in from the outside and trying to be across everything might have been harder.
Obviously not, that's what delegation was invented for. At the same time, I think you do need someone - very probably just one person - at the top leading the software development.
I don't mean for one minute that they should be cutting code, but they should certainly be looking at the various products and asking "Are we doing this the best way possible? Are there obvious things wrong with that product that we should be fixing? How can we make it better?".
Re:End of Azure (Score:4, Funny)
I think its more like having a single technical lead in a powerful position is a bad thing for management because they keep asking hard questions. So lets split the role into smaller project based positions, leaving the strategy to management and marketing.
I think it would be cheaper and more effective to leave the strategy to Paul the Octopus [wikipedia.org]. He's probably nicer too.
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"Well, what's left that we can yet copy from iTunes, Sony, OS X, Java, VMware and Amazon?"
Yeah, that amazon one-click was the killer app of the 90's. Java? Meh. And iTumes... who'd a thought you could set up an on-line store where you could buy songs for .99 per... AND PEOPLE WOULD ACTUALLY PAY IT. (Any sane actuarial accountant or social economist will tell you the real value of digital pop media is much less.)
THAT'S INNOVATION. Oh yeah.
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Don't bitch at me. These are all other people's money makers, that MS slavishly copied, without any profitable revenue coming back to them.
When I mentioned Amazon, I was specifically referring to EC2 and S3.
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Meh on Java? Where do you think .NET came from?
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Delphi.
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Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Insightful)
"Software architects" are by far one of the worst things that can happen to a company that develops software products.
Instead of developing useful software products that improve the efficiency of their customers, such companies spins their wheels developing "frameworks" that are rife with "patterns", "inversion of control", "service-oriented architectures", "clouds", and all sorts of other nonsense. Yet somehow these frameworks end up being hugely complex piles of shit. The original software products end up being ignored or remain undeveloped, since so many resources went into developing these cock-awful frameworks.
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I suppose it depends on how these things have worked for you. I would love to see a software architect in my company who would put a stop to just these problems.
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Interesting)
The GCC, LLVM, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux communities, for instance, do a fantastic job of keeping "software architecture" in check, while still developing amazingly complex, practical and very high-quality software.
Yeah but at enormous cost (if you count the labour involved) because it is basically a test of strength on the mailing lists and forums with the last man standing getting to make the decision.
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GCC? Stallman didn't even believe in precompiled headers according to a NeXTStep employee, and he refused to add the feature to GCC. His GPL policy regarding linking with GCC is one of the reasons Clang/LLVM has so much support in the first place.
Linus has also done shitty things to hold Linux back, like when he refused and criticized someone's VM scheme...until it was cloned by another kernel developer he was used to working with.
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Insightful)
> Instead of developing useful software products that improve the efficiency of their customers, such companies spins their wheels developing "frameworks"
To the contrary, most decent software architects will prevent the idle developers from writing YAF.
> that are rife with "patterns", "inversion of control", "service-oriented architectures", "clouds", and all sorts of other nonsense.
I heard that kind of statement a few years ago... where was it... oh yeah I remember, it was the mainframe guy at his retirement party, he was also talking about the good ol' days of CICS and hierarchical databases, and how nobody needs a GUI, textmode 80x25 was optimal.
A good software architect is someone with experience that will define the orientations and overview the selected design patterns; as such he is instrumental in improving the quality and avoiding useless complexity.
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To the contrary, most decent software architects will prevent the idle developers from writing YAF.
Yet to see this happen in practice. In practice you get a know it all architect who insists on doing things the hard way for future reuse, but that reuse never materialises either because it's too hard to make the code truely reusable and test it for reuse, or because the framework needs to be very specific to the project.
I heard that kind of statement a few years ago... where was it... oh yeah I remember, it was the mainframe guy at his retirement party, he was also talking about the good ol' days of CICS and hierarchical databases, and how nobody needs a GUI, textmode 80x25 was optimal.
CICS and mainframes did the job brilliantly, so much so that they are still used under the hood in a lot of places, with a thin web developed veneer.
A good software architect is someone with experience that will define the orientations and overview the selected design patterns; as such he is instrumental in improving the quality and avoiding useless complexity.
Again, I'm yet to see this in practice.
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I think you are right about design patterns and software development models but, well, let's take an example. Let that example be me, which is my favorite subject :)
I've been writing software over 10 years for living and plenty more as hobby. I've been using development models which I don't recall all anymore and design patterns that even didn't know had a name. These days I'm in a lucky position that I don't have anyone above me (in corporate hierarchy) who comes and tells me how to do my job. I can use wh
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I think you were lucky to find an architect that actually provided guidance. Probably an ex developer that knew what he was doing. Too often good programmers try to hoard their knowledge.
Now so that my comment wouldn't be moderated too high I slip something about my feelings towards software development models here: Waterfall rules! Agile sucks! You just need to plan your projects beforehand! ;)
The reason Waterfall works is that it can be applied bottom up or top down very well, and the goal posts aren't shifting.
Agile in contrast is a mess. Define your test cases up front, but don't have your actual goals defined. It just doesn't work. It's bullshit. Like trying to make a cake by applying the icing first, then fi
Re:End of Azure (Score:5, Interesting)
> You don't need "software architects". You just need a small number of developers who can actually code
Clearly you do not have a lot of experience in big environments, where people come and go because the workload is not the same all the time. In that type of workplace, where contractors are part of the landscape, design patterns and architecture orientations are a must, otherwise each time you bring in someone new you go again all over the same sterile discussions about PHP Vs Perl, Web Vs Fat client, Plain DAL Vs ORM, and whatnot. Not having a clear set of design patterns will lead to a mess, quick.
Faced with this problem, typical core developers usually come up with overkill rules, such as very detailed naming conventions and flowerbox documentation requirements, and quickly you end up with reams of paper wasted and no improvement. Then someone brings up an idea of using a common library, and from there it's a sure path to Yet Another Framework.
Software architecture is a trade, a specialized one, and maybe small companies can't afford one (usually the same that won't pay for a good DBA) but it does not mean there is no need for this skillset. Being able to establish efficient guidelines and avoiding the pitfalls of frameworks and other common mistakes requires a specific expertise.
> and that are using a sufficiently-expressive language to not need "design patterns".
When you work on relatively complex systems, design patterns are not bound to the programming language, especially since the said system can require more than one language. And even if you are lucky enough to work on a software solution that can be done with a single language, there are usually more than one way to do something - so you still need design patterns.
> I know, I know. You'll claim it's difficult to find developers like that. In reality, it's not. You just have to offer them a good salary. Sure, you could buy 450 shitty Indian developers with the same salary as three or four good developers, but those three or four developers will be tens of thousands of times more productive than your shitty Indian developers.
I don't agree. Remember a few years ago when everything was about code generators and whatnot? I remember being amazed by JBuilder and TogetherJ where all I needed to do was draw a class diagram in UML, and automagically the stubs were created in the java source files.
Well guess what: reality won (again) and the cheapest and more efficient code generator there is Southeast Asia. At some point it is more cost-effective to have a good analyst write specific requirements (even maybe executable requirements) and have the code done somewhere in India or China. Sounds silly, but it beats the shit out of all those scaffolding solutions. Does it mean you can outsource everything? Of course not, but don't underestimate the economics of expandable code monkeying.
It's just like the Y2K madness. With mainframe and proprietary locked code that could not be updated in time, one of my biggest customer had a big team of engineers working around the clock to find a way to move data out of the mainframe before the crash. And the most efficient solution they came up with was "Marge Protocol": bring in shitloads of data-entry clerks to read on one machine and type on the other one. Did the job pretty well. Cheap labor 1, software engineering 0.
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Faced with this problem, typical core developers usually come up with overkill rules, such as very detailed naming conventions and flowerbox documentation requirements, and quickly you end up with reams of paper wasted and no improvement. Then someone brings up an idea of using a common library, and from there it's a sure path to Yet Another Framework.
kinda disagree, as the above description is a Dev manager rols at my current place. Perhaps its terminology and experience we're talkign about here. I know so
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It's just like the Y2K madness. With mainframe and proprietary locked code that could not be updated in time, one of my biggest customer had a big team of engineers working around the clock to find a way to move data out of the mainframe before the crash. And the most efficient solution they came up with was "Marge Protocol": bring in shitloads of data-entry clerks to read on one machine and type on the other one. Did the job pretty well. Cheap labor 1, software engineering 0.
Off topic but that is hysterical. I have seen one mainframe migration project fail miserably from afar, and am now up close and personal with a company whose most valuable machines are their Tandems (ok not mainframes but close enough), apparently every couple of hours downtime is a million or something similar. This same company won't pay to upgrade the IP stack so we're stuck with X25, so as network techies we have to improvise this hilarious X25 over IP solution to get them WAN, backup and alarm monitori
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> Never met a software architect that went beyond upgrading the server rack or adding yet more virual machines to compensate for bad design decisions (made by the previous sw architects).
Well maybe you met people that did some hardware upgrade or created virtual machines, but those people were not software architect. They would be called "sysadmins" or something like that, perhaps with a "Senior" or "Team Lead of" prefix. So you either misread their business card or you worked in a company where people p
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Where I am the term sysadmin is almost never used (Australia). They're just server engineers, exchange admins, or whatnot. Funny how on /dot it seems to figure as a term of abuse.
Seems to me there is a big difference between 'creating a virtual machine' and designing, speccing, configuring and implementing an ESX cluster, yet I've seen both functions performed by guys whom I would just call server engineers.
Of course as infrastructure guys (I'm a network engineer) we do yes very often see that kinda behavio
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"Software architects" are by far one of the worst things that can happen to a company that develops software products.
Heaven forbid the software that these companies produce has some sort of coherent structure!
Microsoft does have a tendency to come out with major framework releases every few years. But part of that is that the newer frameworks and libraries are significant improvements over their predecessors - try writing software for bare Win32 without any framework layers and you'll see exactly why MFC was a big help. And then after working on MFC for a little while, you'll really appreciate what .NET brought to the tab
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"Old Crowd"?
Ozzie only joined Microsoft in 2005.
Rah-rah Cloud (Score:2)
According to the story on InfoWorld [infoworld.com], Ballmer says: "Ray has played a critical role in helping us to assume the leadership position in the cloud, and [he] positioned us well for future success." So I guess that's a vote of confidence for at least some version of cloud computing for Microsoft, and I suspect whatever form it takes it's likely to keep the Windows Azure branding.
Re:Rah-rah Cloud (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed, Ray Ozzie did play a pivotal role in helping keep Microsoft's leaders heads in the cloud.
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> Does this mean MS is killing the Azure platform?
It would surprise me. Azure is not that great so far, but recently I had to deploy an application and the money that my client saved by using SQL Azure instead of traditional hosting is huge.
Same goes with BPOS (Exchange online and other stuff, offered by MSFT). It's only about 5$ a month per 25GB inbox to have Exchange, connected to your own Windows Domain. For people who make the decision to go with Exchange this is pretty competitive. No more backups,
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Don't be silly.
For all his personal faults, Balmer has done for Microsoft what Bill Gates could not. He's made some very prudent decisions (or lack of decisions, maybe) which have had opposite results to what BG did:
* Windows has been steadily improving since Bill Gates left the helm. The last vestige of Gates' impact was seen in Office 2007 and Windows Vista, both of which were horrible.
* Stability, scalability, usability - name it, it's improved since Gates left and Balmer took over.
* Xbox was a huge fail
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Steadily improving?! The Vista debacle happened under Ballmer. Why do you attribute it to Bill Gates?
Some examples would be nice.
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Have you seen some of billg's leaked mails on Windows? He ripped XP to shreds. He was at the helm, and didn't like what they were doing. You think he was any happier with Vista?
http://gizmodo.com/5019516/classic-clips-bill-gates-chews-out-microsoft-over-xp [gizmodo.com]
He was the head of the company, not the guy who makes every decision. He disagreed with a lot of decisions. He should have replaced more people with any organism that could muster a coherent thought that persisted long enough to compare with the next
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Where are my mod points where I need them ? Sarcasm win!
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Thursday, October 18, 2010
Apparently somebody fucked up the Date handling code and Ray has to take the fall.
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Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2010
Are you implying everyone should use the same calender in the multi-universe?
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And chock full of DRM.
I tried it once on a computer that came with it, the moment it could not play a dvd without setting a region code on the drive I knew it was not for me.
I only even did that since dell refused to refund the OS cost. I ended up installing linux on it like I intended from the beginning. These folks seemed to think my computer belongs to the MPAA.
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Well, you can always do what I'm doing and just install the MacOS on a well-made Win7 machine. Then dual-boot when you have to.
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Dual boot? No sir, no windows in this house.
That was its once a decade test, and it failed that.
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Why would I pay the dickhead tax twice? I'd rather buy a well made Win7 machine and throw a decent linux distro on it instead.
Re:Let me entertain you (Score:4, Insightful)
And chock full of DRM.
DRM is irrelevant unless you have DRM-encumbered media.
I tried it once on a computer that came with it, the moment it could not play a dvd without setting a region code on the drive I knew it was not for me.
Every single licensed software DVD player on the planet requires a DVD region code to be set on the drive. This is hardly something unique to Windows 7, or even Windows.
These folks seemed to think my computer belongs to the MPAA.
Again, the DRM does nothing unless the owner of the copyright has DRM-encumbered their media. You're complaining about the wrong people.
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DRM is irrelevant unless you have DRM-encumbered media.
To have working DRM, you need to remove system capabilities. That's why the sound card driver model has been crippled in Vista/7, removing all paths that could be used to avoid DRM.
Every single licensed software DVD player on the planet requires a DVD region code to be set on the drive.
And that makes mplayer so superior :p
These folks seemed to think my computer belongs to the MPAA.
Again, the DRM does nothing unless the owner of the copyright has DRM-encumbered their media. You're complaining about the wrong people.
1. Crippling sound cards.
2. Burning lots of processing power for HDCP.
3. Monitors proportions: 4:3 -> 16:10 -> 16:9. Low screens are useless for anything but watching cinema-format movies.
You do suffer from these even if you don't do anything DRM-encumbered.
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Yeah, mplayer plays dvds just fine.
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I 'liked' him.
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I think this calls for some pithy 4chan meme, but right now I can't stop laughing for long enough to look one up.