O____________O

Leveraging our deep virtualization experience, Microsoft will now offer containers with a new level of isolation previously reserved only for fully dedicated physical or virtual machines

Uh. I don't understand how that sentence has any meaning. Particularly the "a new level of isolation previously reserved only for fully dedicated physical or virtual machines" bit. I mean, isn't that what a container is, a virtual machine? And if so, why is 'container' even involved here?

I don't know much about the container scene. I thought they were literally just virtual machines, with presumably some standardized way of spinning them up programmatically. Maybe someone can correct me.

Then I realized that this is what it must be like to live in poverty.

That's also what it's like to live in depression. Everything about your comment sounds like depression to me.

What is CI?

People who offer free help typically do so because they like to work on interesting problems

That's pure conjecture on your part. I rarely see newbies asking for help on interesting problems, yet I see plenty of people willing to answer their questions.

It's basically the equivalent of, "You just waste your time in that soup kitchen anyway, why not come cook me a meal in my mansion instead?"

No it isn't. It's the equivalent of, "you just waste your time in that soup kitchen anyway, why not allow me to come to the soup kitchen as well?"

There are at least two other people in my city who have my name

I'm presented with information to parse about technology topics daily. Sometimes, I have to search for them and have all sorts of name collisions.

I never, ever search for information about you.

people just can't resist commenting endlessly and upvoting this content-free bikeshedding at the expense of actual discussion

One man's bike shedding is another thousand men's irritating trend. Personally, I very rarely see anyone called out for the trendy names and awful, buzzword-laden non-descriptions that infest projects.

The UI colorizer is what I thought of immediately, too.

If we took a poll I suspect the majority would be thinking of the Amazon service

That's just personal projection, and is as irrelevant as an argument beginning with, "I think most people would agree that..."

Personally, regardless of Amazon vs UI hack, I'm really tired of ambiguous naming in tech projects.

you'll have done all you can on your own

But you'll never reach that point.

If you're abusing other people's time because you can't be arsed to put in effort on your own, you should feel anxious about it.

Why? What's the better thing they have to spend time on, and why aren't they already spending time there? You're talking about people who spend time on some forum because that is, essentially, a hobby for them. You're not "wasting" someone's time when their time has no particular value in the first place.

You know, I used to be subscribed to a technical mailing list, around the time that .NET first came out. One guy started abusing the mailing list like mad. Asking extremely simple questions that he could have answered with a brief skim of the published documentation, or a web search.

After awhile, people started to berate him for this behavior. He apologized, but kept doing it. He kept getting answers, and kept learning.

Last I heard, he'd gone on to be a team lead, then run his own, successful company. He didn't let fear of public annoyance or seeming stupid hinder his own progress.

I'm not saying everyone should gleefully annoy others, but I've met far, far too many technical people who spend more time on their anxiety than they spend on actually learning and doing. You have to find a balance, and obsessing over the theoretical time expended across a group of people is probably not productive.

Oh, I see, no true Scotsman. Great argument.

not only signals that you're not subject to some sort of onerous dress code imposed by your employer

If anything, that signifies low status. The vast majority of people in hoodies and tees are not six figure engineers and designers.

but also that you can afford to spend money on what most people could consider leisurewear.

Oh, come on. Hoodies and tees are cheap. Really cheap. And versatile.

Give me a couple of basic color tees, one hoodie, and two pairs of jeans, and that's my wardrobe. I don't need to cycle my shirt colors and patterns, monitor my tie usage, iron my clothes, etc.

I don't buy your argument at all.

Now that I'm a white collar software developer on a solid middle class income mixing with middle class folks

Are you in the Bay Area? The Bay Area is obsessed with travel. Not that there's anything wrong with that, since I do feel that travel is great, but many in the Bay Area have no idea what it's like to come from a background where it's not even considered a possibility.

When I lived and worked in Arizona, the only "travel" anyone was interested in were weekend trips to Mexico, or maybe visiting an iconic American city (e.g. SF). If I'd brought up Thailand, they wouldn't even have known enough to make ladyboy jokes.

That's why everyone wears hoodies and tshirts: to show that they're different from MBAs and the suits and the bankers.

That's a really weird conclusion to come to. I wear hoodies and tee shirts because 1) my job doesn't require more, 2) my hoodie and tee are comfortable and easily adaptable to changing temperature, and 3) clothing shopping is a chore, an extreme annoyance.

Well-fitting "slob" clothing looks better than poorly-fitting mid-range "nice" clothing, particularly when one doesn't fit the body type of the target audience for the latter.

Sort of bugs me that some basic clothing that's good for outdoors and daily life in the northwest gets co-opted into a fashion thing

So it's the 1990s again? Cool, cargo pants must be coming back, too. I wonder if it has anything to do with the rise of Portland in pop culture. Portlandia's got it right: it's still the 90's in Portland (I'm from the area, it's pretty much true).

Correct, VS commandline calls MSBuild.

That seems like an inaccurate description of what's happening: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11932164/what-parameters-...

They're using MSBuild, they just don't know it.

Given the age of projects I've worked on, and that it's unclear whether MSBuild is involved in VS's C++ compilation, I don't think your assumption is correct.

Do you run VS on your production servers?

Why would I have any build system installed on a production server?

Despite being a Windows developer for 90% of my career, I have no idea why anyone uses MSBuild. I've created several automated build and deployment systems, but I always used the command line Visual Studio interface.

Honestly, I don't know why anyone wants MSBuild. Poking around, people cite not needing to install the VS IDE on build servers, but I see zero drawback to doing that. Why would I want to maintain project dependencies, build orders, and whatnot in two places, when I could just build in exactly the same way, using the same solution/project files, on my dev box and my build server?

It seems to me that this is actually vastly more meaningful to traditionally open-source LAMP developers who are considering C# and ASP.Net on Linux in the future.

I consider the Kinesis to be the keyboard that saved my career. Terrible tendinitis set in during my last year of college in 1998. Keyboards were generally terrible, and I'd started using a Microsoft Natural, which is probably the worst keyboard ever made.

At my first job out of school, I'd drive my stickshift car home and nearly cry from the pain. It was really awful. I got into physical therapy, and started looking into better keyboard options. I tried the Kinesis Maxim first, since it wasn't too "weird". It was a big step up. I later tried the Classic (same style as the current Advantage) and never looked back.

Cons: horrible rubbery function keys.

Pros: literally everything else. The layout is, in my opinion, dramatically superior to the classic 104-key layout. It makes more use of your thumbs. It places the arrow keys where you can reach them without moving your hands from the home-row position.

I always keep a spare on hand and generally loan it out to friends and coworkers to try. I'd say there's been about a 50% adoption rate. Some people just can't get over the initial hump of learning how to use the thumb keys. The ones that buy a Kinesis are extremely happy with it.

By the way, the keyboards last for years. I've had a few keyswitches go bad (most likely due to my improper 'cleaning' attempts), but they can be replaced if you know how to use a soldering iron. Kinesis has even sent me several replacement keyswitches free of charge. They've got great customer service.

Good keyboards, chairs, and monitors are expensive, but in my opinion the interface between you and your computer deserves high priority on the expenditure list.

As a fellow Dvorak typer I'm a bit surprised that you've had such a negative experience with it.

I didn't have a negative experience with Dvorak, it's just virtually pointless when compared to the benefit of consistent, light key pressure, mechanical keys, and a physical design that suits your body.

Dvorak is more difficult in regular life but it can solve pain issues.

I don't believe this claim at all.

Yeah, and I never had a moment's back or neck pain, despite terrible posture habits, until a bulged disc put me out of work for a long time at the ripe old age of 34. I genuinely hope you never experience any work-related ailments.

I've never used anything but water and a paper towel to clean my screen

Why are you using a paper towel? I've always considered them to be moderately abrasive.

For every Carmack, there's 1000s of unspoken/unheard of people doing the same thing.

Well, okay, then, there must be millions and millions of programmers writing CRUD apps and for loops, because that covers probably 95% of the general value created in programming worldwide.

I don't see anything wrong with being impressed by the accomplishments and interests of others. I'm not Carmack. I'll never achieve anything like his level of productivity. I don't care, but I'm still vaguely interesting in reading about the guy.

I don't plan to climb Mt. Everest either, but I wouldn't mind hearing a story about it. And yeah, there are thousands of people planning Mt. Everest climbs, but that has zero bearing on my feelings about it.

The Kinesis wants my hands aligned with each other at a set distance.

I just looked at my wrists and hands on my Kinesis. While, yes, the keys are aligned along a single axis[1], my wrists don't bend at all. It's not like you have to align your wrists with the keys, your fingers do the aligning.

[1] for the inner keys on each side. The outer columns are dropped down to accommodate the shorty pinky finger.

Oh, that's fantastic news! I've been sending them emails every few years requesting it, and they always said vague things like, "yeah, we're thinking about fixing that."

As it stands, I keep a $5 105-key cheapo membrane keyboard behind my Kinesis. Works okay for function keys, and Windows happily accepts input from multiple keyboards simultaneously (e.g. key chording).

In my opinion, it's good preventative care.

The problem with tendinitis, carpal tunnel, bulged neck discs, and health issues that afflict programmers is that you don't know you're susceptible until you already have the problem. Then you're looking at months or years to fix it and learn techniques and equipment to avoid its return.

So you switched back to QWERTY, and/or now type Colemak, I take it?

Nope. I still type Dvorak. One switch is enough.

I can type QWERTY, too. If I use a different machine, I'm able to switch over with surprisingly few errors. Also, strangely, I can't tell you where the keys are on a Dvorak layout without mentally typing the letter. I used to know the QWERTY layout by heart, but never reached the same level of mental mastery with Dvorak.

The only reason I suggest Colemak is that I've heard it's optimal for programming. I still don't think it's worth learning, though, if you already touch-type QWERTY.

Any significant keyboard change will require some adaptation time.

For example, I went from a traditional keyboard to a Kinesis Maxim, which was a traditional layout but split. That required a bit of typing adjustment, like what you mention.

Then I switched to a Kinesis Classic (old version of the Advantage, PS/2 port). Now that was a pain, literally. Having to interrupt decade-old touch-typing muscle memory was annoying, and I actually experienced slightly increased pain (tendinitis) for the first several days.

Within two weeks, though, I was automatically using the new arrow key position and thumb keys (Ctrl, Alt, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, Backspace, Delete, Enter, and Space) smoothly.

My change from QWERTY to Dvorak was even more troublesome and a bit painful. I would say it honestly took me about two weeks to become even barely functional, and a year to become completely proficient. I'm skeptical that I've ever hit the same WPM that I had on QWERTY, which I mastered while still an adolescent. Not that it matters, I just think a bit more and type a bit less now. :-)

Edit: for the record, I absolutely DO NOT advise learning Dvorak. Its ergonomic benefits pale compared to the mechanical keys, split wells, etc. Also, it means lots of key remapping for games, copy/paste shortcuts become kind of arbitrary, and so on. Stick with QWERTY, but use better keyboard hardware. Learn Colemak if you absolutely insist on the 1337-ness of 'superior' layouts.

Do the "wells" offer any real benefit over a regular split keyboard?

In my opinion, yes. The keys conform to your hands, rather than the other way around.

Also, the idea of a split keyboard was popular some time ago. Is it still considered important?

Again, in my opinion, yes. Absolutely. I'm sure this varies to some degree by body size, but I find it profoundly irritating to have to shove my hands together.

Mechanical keys are great (which the Kinesis uses -- Cherry brown or red -- aside from the previously mentioned, horrid F-key row), and a few keyboards royally screwed up by purporting to be ergonomic by shape, but using really awful keys. Specifically, the Microsoft 'Natural' was an ergonomic nightmare. Every key was a simple friction post-mount, including wide keys like shift keys. This meant that you'd type along and occasionally hit a really high resistance key. This flared my tendinitis up like you wouldn't believe.

So, yes, consistent, reasonably light key pressure is absolutely critical, but in my opinion the separation of hands AND the additional employment of the strong thumbs for more than space is a great idea.

Oh, and by the way, note that on the Kinesis the arrow keys are just below the primary keys (up/down are right hand, left/right are left hand). You don't have to move your hands from their home row position to use directional keys. In my opinion, this is the correct solution to the problem that vi/vim solved by using h/j/k/l for navigation, at least for non-gaming applications.

Is there some proof of this outside of this USA Today article?

I came here with the exact same concern as the GP comment.

“We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan..."

It just reeks of marketing double-speak that gets engineers excited, only to find out that they're stuck maintaining code for N + 1 browsers now.

Incidentally, Microsoft rebranding exercises infuriate me. Arguably, Spartan is a "new" product, but by that measure any product rewrite should get a completely new, unrelated name rather than a version number. I remember COM + DispInterfaces ==> ActiveX, Outlook Express ==> MSN Messenger, MSN ==> Bing. It's just irritating and confusing to both developers and consumers.

I like the hacking/DIY aspect, but IMO there is still no keyboard that has anything on the Kinesis Advantage (or the older Classic, same layout):

http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/advantage-lf-for-pc-mac/

The only flaw is the row of horrible, rubbery, membrane function keys. I don't know why, but they just won't fix them. That said, I just remap my common F-keys (Visual Studio user) to other key chords and get on with my life. The firmware allows on-keyboard remapping and macros, by the way, so my Caps Lock ==> Esc remap follows my wherever I go.

If anything, I'd rather that the separate key wells were even a bit further apart. I don't know how people can type with their wrists jammed so close together, even with the Atreus's angled halves.

By the way, on the Kinesis, the hand wells are actually dished. They achieve this using a flexible PCB that's split into separate 'fingers' for each row of keys. To my knowledge none of the 'hacker' keyboards are dished like this.

I'm getting the "old Microsoft feeling again"

Why? What are some specific examples you see?

Personally, I think they got slapped so hard by Windows 8 that I expect Windows 10 to be pretty great. They had me at "console window" (though likely I'll still be using ConEmu).