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Collin Jasnoch wrote: I see a lot of manufacturing jobs that have a need for employees that know PLCs and have a lot of C# experience.
The PLCs themselves don't need to be programmed in their own archaic language anymore.
At least, not if you are using products like the one from Steeplechase System (sold to someone else so it has a different name; Google for it if you need to know).
You just draw the flowchart for the control network and that is treated as the program and compiled into code. Runs on PCs.
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I looked at Steeplechase software in 1995.
I think at that time 120 MHz Pentiums were top of the line.
The claim was made that such a PC could replace 2700 PLCs.
Steeplechase software was located in Ann Arbor, Michigan and sold its software to the likes of GM, Chrysler and Ford.
One would think those companies would have evaluated the stability and reliability of the product before installing it in their assembly lines.
But I have no first-hand experience with its use in any manufacturing facility I worked in.
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Collin Jasnoch wrote: Really the only the the PC offers in replacement is a bigger pool of software developers. But that is not necessarily a good thing. A company wants to hire a talented software engineer and has to filter out the numerous candidates. If
their tools are so common that people in high school understand them enough to be dangerous they have difficulty filtering. Where as if some of the tools are simple while some are complex they are assured the candidate is good simply by having the skill set.
Interestingly, Steeplechase used a flowchart to describe the logic and its code generator would generate code from the flowchart! Talk about eliminating programmers altogether!
By your logic, we should ban not just VB but all frameworks too and force people to code in assembler. That should severely restrict the number of people willing to do the drudge work of writing programs!![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
PS. I see your viewpoint but I think we have seen orders of magnitude improvement in reliability and performance of PCs.
By the way, as early as the early 1990s, companies were offering small form-factor boards with an Intel microprocessor and memory and I/O (slightly larger than credit cards) for industrial purposes.
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Not to say that MS might of handled VB6 backward compatibility better - there were oh-soo many projects that instead of being ported to .Net got ported to Java just because VB.Net and VB6 compatibility issues.
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Yep, zero information there, no number no nothing.
Wout
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"It was supposed to destroy Java, extend the Windows platform, and secure the Microsoft monopoly for another decade or two."
The deuce you say.
"Microsoft did many things right. It hired the smartest experts on language design, compilers, and virtual machines. But it also did some things terribly wrong."
Yes, like hire the smartest experts on language design, compilers, and virtual machines.
As for me, .net came around at exactly the right time -- when my OpenVMS career ended.
Yes, I now have a Java for Android book, but C# is just so much fun I've barely started it.
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A unaddressed bug in Apple's Mac OS X discovered five months ago allows nefarious hackers to bypass the usual authentication measures by tweaking specific clock and user timestamp settings, granting near unlimited access to a computer's files. That feeling you're experiencing? That would be schadenfreude.
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An ambitious project means anyone can now track the movements of almost 50 sharks in realtime. "The calls are coming from the house!"
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Back when Windows Phone launched, developers had to fork over $99 a year for access to the Dev Center (then it was called App Hub). However, at the beginning of this summer, Microsoft slashed the price to just $19, or as they aptly put it “the cost of a pizza”. That special offer was to expire yesterday, but Microsoft’s Todd Brix has taken to Twitter to announce that the price is staying for the near future (he actually announced it yesterday, but we missed it). Please, please, please, will you please write some apps for us?
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Well if they didn't purposely try to alienate a massive section of developers by not allowing the Phone 8 SDK to run on Windows 7 then they would probably have a lot more people interested in it.
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Yeah, and I'm still waiting for them to pull out a, "Here's Windows Phone New. Sorry, not backward compatible. Please buy new devices and rewrite your apps."
--------------
TTFN - Kent
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Clickety[^] [CNN]
In other news: Intel threatens to sue over trademark infrigement. 
/ravi
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The Google/Microsoft YouTube dispute tells you more about the way software for the mobile internet is being developed than you might have thought. Welcome back to the days of "Works best on..."
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You're not as big a target as the NYT, but that doesn't make you safe. Step 1: Don't be The New York Times
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Hey that is where my Domain name is registered, but is is so locked down I can't even transfer it.
I can change the DNS though.
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The article gives fairly short shrift to registry lock down, but I think it's very useful. It keeps you from transferring a domain until you pass a key between the two registrars (at least that's what I remember when I moved everything off GoDaddy). It might be a hassle, but how often are you going to move registrars, and it prevents something like this hack from working.
--------------
TTFN - Kent
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I can't rember exactly what I had to do when I was "Forced" to move from the Microsoft Small Buisness portal (when they shut it down) to the Office 360 portal but I know I had to change the DNS for it to the new Office 360.
Now I still have a Domain Name and someday will have a hosting provider again.
I think it Cost a few extra bucks but is worth it.
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The pack lets developers write once and deploy them locally in Windows Server 2012 R2, as well as in Microsoft's cloud. "Every silver lining has a cloud."
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Isaac Asimov has detailed countless visions for what the future could look like, most with a clear label of "fiction" on them. But in 1964, while reflecting on that year's World's Fair, Asimov described in The New York Times what he believed the 2014 World's Fair would really look like. "Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs."
Can we bring him back in exchange for Dan Brown?
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"Isotopes would serve as batteries."
What was this guy smoking?
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Lloyd Atkinson wrote: What was this guy smoking?
Plutonium.
By the way, plutonium was used as a "portable" power source not only in space craft, but also for heart pace makers decades ago. And some patient still live with them.
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The technology is out there and used in space/military, but because people are irresponisble idiots nuclear batteries are considered to be not fit for mass consumption.
Plutonium was in the 50's seriously considered to be made available to public households by the US government. You could use it to heat water, insulate your house and to make batteries that deliver power for a lifetime.
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Today, in partnership with the Bing team, we’re excited to release the first of several features that will make your SkyDrive photos smarter by using OCR (optical character recognition) to extract the text from photos in your camera roll when you view them on SkyDrive.com. 1T l0Ukz l1kE ¥ov arë p05ting a p8ot0?
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