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LiveScience's [^] e-mail newsletter has become one of my favorite take-a-break reads, while on-line, in the last months. I groove on stories of discoveries of ancient artifacts, prehistoric critters, and their other "weird" as well as "straight" science" content.
Today's story "Stampeding Dinosaurs Were Swimming" [^] describes a new theory that what was formerly thought to be the only tangible evidence of a dinosaur stampede, fossil footprints, is ... instead ... just a relic of a stream-bed: a major river-crossing for said dinosaurs.
The thought occurred to me that in five-ten years' time, the legacy of Windows 8 might also be analogous to one of these two theories. This type of analogy is one I am undoubtedly pre-disposed to: because, I, for many years, often described what many modern real-world programmers do as "dinosaur dentistry," by which, I mean: that for every one computer scientist working on the theory of search algorithms, for every one "systems' architect," using tools like Rational Rose, or whatever, to create UML diagrams which, like architect's blue-prints are passed on as templates for the mere mortals who "build them out" ...
Yes, I believe for every "one" of those rare elite: are a thousand programmers humping code to deal with the weirdness of interfacing some hardware api to some software api, or grafting some additional feature onto legacy code whose designers are long gone.
I'm not complaining here: I "love" C# and .NET, and I think there's been enormous progress in IDE's, like Visual Studio, that virtually "walk your dog for you," but I still see the rough edges at the fringes (which I'll spare you my "take" on, here).
I will never forget while I was at Adobe (in the late paleolithic, working as the PostScript-do-all for the application division products, and later deeply involved in the creation of what became Acrobat), when PhotoShop Mac was ported to the PC. Turns out the Adobe programmers who built PhotoShop Mac's later version used Apple's kind of newer semi-OOP uber-api, MacApp.
The Windows port-team at Adobe (exceptionally bright people, as you might expect; and, for their time, of course, absolute masters of Win programming down to the registers-in-the-cpu level) that was doing the port found deciphering what was going on in MacApp such an endless maze, that they decided to build their own functionally equivalent version of MacApp for Windows, and then port to that ! I used to hear their curses, and sometimes incredible shouting-match arguments, on implementation, when I left my office door opened (yes, somehow I rated an office with windows, not a cubicle).
But, to get back on topic: I am curious as to what you think will be the legacy of Windows 8 five-ten years out.
Fossil record of a stampede of Windows dinosaurs to HTML5, JavaScript, and j##### libraries ? Relic of a major river crossing where Windows programmers, all with their memories of .NET erased by advances in neuro-scientific manipulation of memory (yes, see the movie: "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," 2004) finally reach the "promised land" ?
yrs, Bill
"What do humans depend on: words ! We're suspended in language: we can never say what's up: or, down. We must communicate experience and ideas, but in ways that do not become ambiguous, and lose objectivity.
For parallels to quantum theory: we must turn to psychology, or to paradoxes thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu illuminated, examining reality, as both observer, and actor, in human life's small-scale micro-cosmic drama."
Niels Bohr, 1937
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It's just a tool. I'm not using it and I have no plans to. I didn't want to go to Win 7 either, but I already had a free copy from the roll-out so I did; it's just a tool.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: It's just a tool. This "just a tool" happens to be an integral part of the technical, and business, lives of god-knows-how-many ( millions ?) of people who make their living, pay their mortgages, send their kids to school, and survive: by programming for it; administering its deployment and usage; and, using it: in applications ranging from typical major apps (like Office), to highly-customized vertical-market mission-critical corporate software, yea even unto playing games, and watching YouTube, and endlessly tweeting
The investment of time in mastering programming for this "just a tool;" the investment in money for hardware, MSDN subs, software, devtools, etc. is, for many people, many businesses, very significant, and making a significant change in hardware and devtools would be very costly and difficult. Moving to a new hardware platform's gilded-cage (like IOS) could be not only extremely costly, but very risky.
If Windows 8 is as big a failure as Vista (which I consider possible), that has large implications for many of CodeProject's nine-million+ members.
Your "reductionist" response ... why'd you even bother to respond ? ... makes me think of a dialogue like this:
Person 1: "I have severe diabetes now; they're going to have to cut off my right foot, and I am going blind. I'm afraid the bank is going to foreclose on the house: we're so fare behind on the mortgage payments."
Person 2: "Oh my God, you must be going out of your mind with fear and worry, and your whole family must be in a state of panic ! But, you ... seem ... so calm ..."
Person 1: "Well, it's just a body; it's just a house."
Bill
"What do humans depend on: words ! We're suspended in language: we can never say what's up: or, down. We must communicate experience and ideas, but in ways that do not become ambiguous, and lose objectivity.
For parallels to quantum theory: we must turn to psychology, or to paradoxes thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu illuminated, examining reality, as both observer, and actor, in human life's small-scale micro-cosmic drama."
Niels Bohr, 1937
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"just" a major river crossing? Preserving footprints over millions of years!
Windows Eight legacy, in my opinion, will be one of two things...
a) the beginning of the end for the dominance of ms on the corporate desktop
b) just another windows release
Of course, I could be as wrong as those that thought (believe) that the dinosaur 'stampede' was slimy created 6000 years ago.
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I envision Microsoft as a huge steam[punk] engine, powered by the coal shoveled by thousands of developers. The conveyor at the end of the machine carries huge Borg[^]-like cubes with the labels "MFC", ".NET", "WPF", "WCF", "HTML5", ....
In 5-10 years, .NET will be a long-deprecated technology and the "W*F" packages will be obscure historical footnotes. Some of us may still be maintaining our HTML5/Javascript applications under the watchful eyes of the alien overseers and the Apple collaborators who let them in. My only hope is that somewhere among us at that time is a Sparticus...
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: I envision Microsoft as a huge steam[punk] engine, powered by the coal shoveled by thousands of developers. The conveyor at the end of the machine carries huge Borg-like (Star_Trek) cubes with the labels "MFC", ".NET", "WPF", "WCF", "HTML5"
In 5-10 years, .NET will be a long-deprecated technology and the "W*F" packages will be obscure historical footnotes. Some of us may still be maintaining our HTML5/Javascript applications under the watchful eyes of the alien overseers and the Apple collaborators who let them in. My only hope is that somewhere among us at that time is a Sparticus... Sensei Gary, I wish I could make for you the sound of one-hand clapping: in response to this eloquently apocalyptic fugue, but, while trying to kill a body-double of myself I met on the road who claimed to be both enlightened, and, had the nerve to claim he was the "real me:" well, he was quicker with sword than I was with metaphor: so both my hands were amputated.
He left me, bleeding in the road, waving the stumps of my arms, with this haiku:
waving his two stumps,
pine-trees' scent in forest winds:
what does blood matter
Yes, I had to type this using a prosthesis attached to my nose.
yrs, Bill
"There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago." J. Robert Oppenheimer
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