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thanks! 
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Having worked on desktop, mobile and web apps I can see the attraction of desktop apps.
I think perhaps the biggest advantage I have found if the stability and slowness of 'innovation' on the desktop side.
It means that you can get quite skilled at working in a particular framework or area and make more stable applications.
My experience with mobile and web applications is that the modern response to most problems is "there's an npm/git package/library solution for that" and before you know it you are battling with side-effects and problems introduced by that "solution".
But from a programming point of view there is not too much different between the three platforms - the difference that is probably most prominent is having to understand areas like security and 'defensive programming' when doing web and mobile development.
Super Lloyd wrote: humongous calculation in your UI thread
that's just plain poor design whatever platform you are on.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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GuyThiebaut wrote: Super Lloyd wrote: humongous calculation in your UI thread
that's just plain poor design whatever platform you are on.
Well that was my point!
An awful web app coded by stupid developers will be less painful than an awful desktop app coded by other stupid developer!
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The apparent advantage of web apps (where crashes are concerned) is because the client side of the app is interpreted, not compiled. All this means is that the interpreter was written properly, and allows breaking at (almost) any point.
The server side can still be written so as to crash, perform long calculations in the servicing thread(s), and all other things that we know and "love".
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I had those same problems with Adobe Acrobat Reader.
After I installed a new version (or just reinstall?) it works fine again though.
I usually use Chrome or Edge to read PDF though.
One of the things I love about web development is that it's way easier to deploy.
You don't need to deploy secrets to users, no copy/pasting files for every user (they can't use installers), no VPN connections (unless the app is hosted on-premises) and you're sure everybody is on the latest version!
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I installed the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader (which I didn't installed for many years now) opened 4 PDF documents, 300 pages each, went to play some Assassin Creed Odyssey for a while...
And now I am back on the desktop, clicked on Acrobat Reader, clicked some bookmarks, boom, instant response!
I like it!
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So what you're saying is that you can pretty much get away with writing crap code without trashing the user's machine...
Web dev is actually harder than desktop dev.
0) There are FIVE languages associated with most (ASP.NET) web sites:
- HTML
- CSS
- C#
- Javascript
- SQL
1) CSS is probably the hardest thing to get right. You have to be careful selecting 3rd party libs because of possible incompatibilities.
2) Javascript is the same everywhere, but selecting a framework is a nightmare, simply because of the sheer dirth of options.
3) SQL presents its own challenges because writing a query is kinda like writing code backwards.
4) Deployment can be a minor nightmare if you store connection strings in the web config file, and you have to "deploy" to different environments in the course of preparing code for production.
5) Web dev is stateless, and unless steps are taken, variables are not persistent between requests.
6) You have to be cognizant of memory consumption, especially on a website that gets a lot of traffic.
With desktop apps, you have few if any of those considerations.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Yeah, instead of crashing the user's machine, you can take down an entire server.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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About time someone pointed that out.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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#realJSOP wrote: So what you're saying is that you can pretty much get away with writing crap code without trashing the user's machine...
Any particular web app won't necessarily trash the user's machine, but a browser on its own most certainly is more than capable.
Fire up any browser today and watch memory usage go up. You don't even have to load a page. I just launched Chrome on a freshly rebooted Win7 machine - 8 instances of chrome.exe showed up, chewing up at least 120MB of RAM - it hasn't even loaded a page; I always default to a blank one. Firefox launched 5 instances; one of them used up 245MB of RAM, then slowly backed down to 165. Edge (the Chromium-based one) also launched 8 instances, eating up at least 120MB. Any Chromium-based browser (and most of them today are) should show similar results.
I have a number of old laptops. I like taking one of them out in the backyard and browser for a while. With 4GB of RAM or less, this is getting into an exercise in frustration--it's constantly paging. I have older relatives with a system with 2GB of RAM - I don't know how they tolerate it. A friend-of-a-friend showed up recently with a "dead-slow" laptop with 8GB of RAM. I was appalled at its performance; it was constantly paging because...all the memory was going to the browser.
So while browsers themselves are heavily threaded and you hardly ever see a browser's main window turning white and its caption saying "unresponsive", you now kinda have to guess as to whether anything is ever going to spring back to life, as click events can take a long time to register and do anything in response.
And none of this is something the average web developer can do anything about. Have we really solved anything? "Throw more hardware at it" is such a cop-out.
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Super Lloyd wrote: Any PDF reader recommendation
SumatraPDF. Looks old, performs really well. Fast to start, does all I need from a PDF (and CBZ and MOBI and EPUB and ...) reader.
Super Lloyd wrote: However, if you write ugly bad desktop code, with humongous calculation in your UI thread, your app can easily freeze. For example I wouldn't trust one of the developer here where I am to work with me on any app... this guy... makes me sad..
Concurrency's still not easy enough for a lot of desktop developers, even with things like tasks in C#, futures in C++ etc. I think the Qt integration of concurrency & GUI programming is the easiest one I've used, with their QFutureWatcher class, which fires off a GUI event when a concurrent task (packaged in a QFuture) completes.
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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I find async so easy and convenient!
But yea, I have met many developer who, for some reason, are very slow on the uptake.. almost like they don't want to do it, and don't understand the benefits and don't understand where it is actually useful... 
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+1 for Sumatra. I've hated Adobe Reader with a passion from the get-go, put up with FoxIt until it became bloatware (why does a PDF reader need a plugin for Facebook, and why do I have to re-disable it every time I download an update?), and couldn't be happier with Sumatra. It does exactly what a PDF reader should do, and doesn't even pretend to try to do anything more than that.
It's rather ugly, but then you'd supposed to focus on the PDF content, so who cares about the menus around it.
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And the source is available on Github if it does turn into an a-laden behemoth...
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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I did not realize that. Nice.
But, I'm not into compiling other people's code. As long as the version I have runs on the OS I happen to have...that's what I'll keep running.
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I thought this post was about desktop vs. web apps.
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The biggest difference in writing web apps vs. desktop apps is dealing with state. Leave that desktop app open overnight...it'll be ready in the morning. Now try that with a web app.
I've been doing both for 20 years. The first 10 was mostly desktop development, nowadays it's mostly web.
As for PDF readers, I still prefer Adobe Reader.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Quote: As the IRS hurried to process direct payments to Americans reeling from the coronavirus outbreak, the Government Accountability Office said the tax agency didn’t use Social Security death records to filter out payments to the deceased.
somebody forgot the:
join SSN on SSN.ID = Person.SSN_ID and SSN.Deceased = false
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Somebody forgot the importance of skin in the game.
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One guy who has been living in Norway for the last 17 years. He is a US citizen because his mother is, but he is born and grew up in Norway. He went to a US college 1999-2003, but hasn't been back to USA since. He received a "personally signed" check. Another guy became a Norwegian citizen four years ago; he received USD 2400 in financial support.
Both these guys say that they consider it to be part of the reelection campain.
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Member 7989122 wrote: part of the reelection campain
Yup.
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"Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods." --H.L.Mencken
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I hope he's been filing US tax returns every year. If not, he could be in for a nasty surprise one of these days.
/ravi
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That was discussed in the newspaper article I read: Both these guys had to submit tax return forms, even though they do not pay a single cent in taxes to the USA. They found it quite crazy.
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