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TwoSheds

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Windows-NT vs. CP/M 16 years ago

XP has the "windows rot" problem. After it has been in use for a couple of months, it slows down significantly and especially booting it takes forever. Some people claim that they can avoid this but I have never seen any hard evidence :)

AFAIK the code which makes the Swing UI use native OSX (Cocoa) instead of X is Apple proprietary. I wonder whether Apple will now give that to Oracle or release it as Open Source. Otherwise we're going to be stuck with X Server and ugly UIs for a long time :-(

[dead] 16 years ago

If Oracle decides OSX is important enough platform, this might be even a good thing.

In my experience (last 5 years in MegaCorporations) the problem is that the people who are actually hands-on managing the offshoring projects are different from those who make the decisions. The guys who decide to offshore are usually at least 2-3 layers of management above.

The urge to offshore software development at that level is strong, and the management sees it as a megatrend which "we'll have to follow because everyone else is doing it".

The feedback loop is broken, the decision maker who offshores a certain project is no longer there when a couple of years later it's clear that the whole thing was a disaster. He's busy offshoring some other project.

Last time I tried BitBucket it just didn't work over my employer's http proxy. Googled it and it was some unresolved issue back then, lots of people had the same problem.

Yet another article which claims that development is faster without Unit Tests. I used to be a cowboy-coder in the past for years, and now I always do Unit Tests. My experience is that it's always faster unless I'm just doing small API exploring which I throw away. Without tests I always end up debugging longer than I would have spent if I'd written the tests.

And the future maintainer has much better chance of determining whether whether certain behavior in my legacy code is a bug or feature - desired or accidental.

I don't think these guys have done any serious TDD or Unit Testing projects. They have just tried to write some tests and then they have given up because they just thought it's too hard and their tests were probably huge, testing too much and not really maintainable.

Yes, I agree totally that S60 as a programming platform is horrible. I hope Nokia has learned the lesson with Maemo. Because it's based on a Linux distribution which is not that far from your standard desktop Linux, maybe they just aren't able screw that up too badly. To Nokia's credit they are not the open software development freedom-haters that Apple and maybe Palm now too have become.

Why does everyone think Droid is the only hope? Nokia's Maemo-based N900 looks promising as well.

Their latest Symbian/series60 phones (e.g. E71, E75) are also pretty decent nowadays, although I would compare those to Blackberry rather than the iPhone.

I see a significant difference between the .Net and Java developer cultures. It would be hard for me to believe that a Java shop would behave according to your description.