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It’s easy to wax nostalgic about old technology--to remember fondly our first Apple IIe or marvel at the old mainframes that ran on punched cards. But no one in their right mind would use those outdated, underpowered dinosaurs to run a contemporary business, let alone a modern weapons system, right? Wrong! While much of the tech world views a two-year-old smartphone as hopelessly obsolete, large swaths of our transportation and military infrastructure, some modern businesses, and even a few computer programmers rely daily on technology that hasn’t been updated for decades. Yester-year's article about running yester-era's computer systems.
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If it ain't broke, but is ancient, then break it so you can get a new one.
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For many of us, maple syrup is an essential part of breakfast—a staple accompaniment to pancakes and waffles—but rarely do we think about the complicated and little-understood physiological aspects of syrup production. Each spring, maple growers in temperate regions around the world collect sap from sugar maple trees, which is one of the first steps in producing this delicious condiment. However, the mechanisms behind sap exudation—processes that trigger pressure differences causing sap to flow— in maple trees are a topic of much debate. In a paper published today in the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, authors Maurizio Ceseri and John Stockie shed light on this subject by proposing a mathematical model for the essential physiological processes that drive sap flow. Bacon is the constant in solving this equation.
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Flapjack Fred here: T'ain't never needed one o' dem dee-greez ta serve up breakfast by the numbers.
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But since Microsoft announced the end of life of Silverlight 5 in 2021, we need to find a replacement some time within the next 8 years. We'd like to share some progress we've made towards our goal of moving to HTML5 video.
Well, eventually they will move. Unless. You know. Something happens in the next 8 years that stops them.
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Hhhhmmmmmm... another nail in the coffin.
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You've got to hand it to Microsoft. How many other companies would dig the grave, provide the wood and book the pall bearers for a technology that was proving popular?
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I am still amazed by their brazen ways. I really feel in limbo land. Not that HTML 5 with the JS libraries are anything bad, in fact I quite like angular, node etc but, its just when have had the taste for something good and its taken away it just feels odd.
I am hoping WPF will continue to burn brightly otherwise I take drastic measures and learn PHP 
Anyway, hope you you Pete? Long time since I spoke to you. Liked the blogs on Perceptuals!!!
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Thanks Dan. I'm fine. How about you?
I've just opened up CodeStash in VS2012 to see about upgrading the extension to run in VS 2012. What a complete PITA it's being.
Next steps for me are to investigate the cloud services that Intel are working on, and to write an article or two on perceptual computing for Code Project.
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Nice. I look forward to it.
you did say initially that creating the addin for 2010 was not pleasant. But you did. I would hope 2012 would have been better but I am sure you will succeed.
Cloud services from Intel? sounds like fun. Been looking at the Azure stuff recently. Mainly their VM's and cloud based services which look great. They have just increased the price too which is nice 
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I hope you mean decreased the price.
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alas, I am the lowest form of wit!
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Microsoft has announced general availability for Windows Azure Infrastructure Services with a promise to match any price drop from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
[...]
Hilf that they will also offer new high memory instances of up to 28 and 56 gigabytes to accommodate applications such as Microsoft Sharepoint that just need more memory.
TLDR: Some Windows Azure features (virtual machines, virtual networks) are no longer in beta, and prices have been dropped for other services (e.g., compute instances) to match Amazon's offerings.
I also find it funny that they actually needed beefier machines to support their own product, SharePoint 2013 (which requires 24GB of RAM).
EDIT: Scott Guthrie's blog describes some technical aspects of the release.
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Assuming I already have an existing web site or web application deployed, running, and working great for desktop browsers, my decision tree for getting the site working on mobile devices looks something like the following.... Like everything else in software, the decisions are all about tradeoffs and where the software has to go in the future. Reuse, rewrite... contract out.
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Simple: Just remove all the image & media tags.
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There are various metrics that can be calculated for source code. These can help to determine its complexity, readability or maintainability. When you are involved in code reviews, it can be useful to determine such metrics for the code being examined. This can help you to identify problem areas and rectify issues before they become too embedded in the software. Visual Studio 2008 introduced a set of five automatically calculated metrics, which continued to be present in Visual Studio 2010 and 2012. The most important code metric of all: Build succeeded.
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I would disagree. If it is difficult to maintain afterwards, the cost can be extremely high. If the code does not do what it needs to do, who cares if the build succeeded.
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No, the most important metric is: Is the customer happy enough to give you more money?
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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The way browsers work today has changed in many ways thanks to jQuery. Just a few years ago DOM parsing was rather complicated, jQuery made that easy. DOM manipulation was not straight forward, thanks to jQuery developers can manipulate with little effort. Today 96%+ browsers in use today support document.querySelectorAll, which accepts a CSS selector and returns a list of matching nodes. In many ways thanks to jQuery, jQuery itself is no longer needed. There I said it.... I encourage you to give it a shot. Write your next application, library or just code for fun without jQuery. See what you can do. How much could you do without jQuery today?
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: document.querySelectorAll
assuming that you are only using jQuery for the functionality of a DOM selector then maybe this argument holds true. however, there is more to jQuery than just DOM selection.
there is of course no doubt that jQuery is evolving because of brower modifications and one only has to look at jQuery 2.0 as proof.
as if the facebook, twitter and message boards weren't enough - blogged
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Meh, it *might* be useful to avoid jQuery if you are doing some very serious client-side stuff (e.g., canvas games). For most things, the benefit isn't all that great.
Quote: Even the minimized jQuery is 91kb today
It's even smaller gzipped (jQuery 1.9.1 gzipped and minified is around 30KB). According to the speedtest.net app, my iPhone downloads at 4.5Mbps (> 500KB/s), which means 30KB would take a fraction of a second. And if you use a common CDN, the cost from one site to the next is zero.
Quote: While the 2.0 release promises to be smaller and faster its really not something I feel I can wait on any longer.
For most, I suspect that won't be true. And there is some value in using an API (jQuery) that can change under the hood (e.g., it can deprecate support for old browsers and start using the newer browser functions to speed up its implementation, without me having to change my code other than pointing to a new version of jQuery).
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Gather round young coders while I tell you a little story. Way back when, far before you were born, we were building programs just like you are. After we trudged uphill barefoot in the snow, we went into a scorching hot room and we hit the plugboards with boundless enthusiasm, plugging switches in to “portable function tables” and doing arithmetic as it was meant to be done… slowly. We didn’t have any “stored programs” like you spoiled brats, we had blueprints! Punch cards! Stuff written on napkins! You kids download and app to your phone to calculate your food budget but we really earned our keep. Old programmers had to be more resourceful and inventive.
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It is true that we can now use Google to help find solutions, but a lot of the technology that we have today is a lot more difficult since the concepts need to be understood, and that takes time. The old time programmers only had a few tools to learn. Basically just a few statement types. Now programmers have to learn the concepts of OOD, design patterns, SQL, LINQ, and a whole bunch of other things. Also programs were single threaded without events like have today. Things were a lot more linear. Dealing with threads and their complexities is not very easy.
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Contrariwise, the lesser number of tools and options available to them required theyo be ever more clever in order to implement solutions.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I do not agree. It is a lot more work, but understanding complex tools requires more understanding. It is very easy to use a shovel, but a backhoe is more complex. However the you are much efficient. If you do not have good tools, you have to go more brute force. That of course leads to the possibility of many more errors and inefficiencies. But that is another story. Just like it is much easier to make a straight cut with a table saw than a hand saw, but the table saw requires more knowlege to operate.
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