Rant: Microsoft

[Jocephus]

i got an asus laptop in dec of 2011 and it still runs well. really enjoy it. though thats not relevant to the OS stuff here.

[ghostrunner]

Macs (and all the included software) are great and I love the build quality of the MacBooks, but I'm getting a little frustrated by the fact that my 2009 MacBook Pro is extremely slow running Mavericks. It just seems like they are constantly bogging down the OS (in iOS as well) to get you to buy new hardware. .

If you don't have an SSD drive, I recommend it highly. More expensive but worth every penny. That probably goes for any OS, but I don't think you'd ever have this complaint again. Any computer shop that works on Macs should be able to swap the drive and clone your data over.

[jim]

I have a SSD drive, and it is faster. I love how it boots instantly basically. Open the lid, and it's up and running right where you left off. I also have a Thunderbolt monitor, but again I don't pay for any of this.

I have found that Windows far more than any other OS suffers from what I call "bitrot". Over time, it just decays and gets sluggish. I don't find that with other OS's. For one thing there is just so much obnoxious crap you have to have running - virus stuff and the like on WIndows.

I have 16GB Ram, a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i5, and a 500 GB SDD drive. It's snappy. And no obnoxious updates. "Please dont' touch your computer DON'T TOUCH YOUR COMPUTER OH MY GOD WE ARE INSTALLING UPDATES DON'T EVEN LOOK OR YOU WILL DESTROY YOUR COMPUTER OH MY GOD HAIR ON FIRE WINDOWS...".

None of that nonsense.

I also have the vi editor, the dc calculator, LaTeX, and all sorts of my "antiquated" tools available to me that are so ingrained in how I work that I can't do without them. I love the package manager - Homebrew. I have Postgres installed on my Mac, it's a no-frills database that I use all of the time for testing and what not. Plus I have Office and all of that crap that I also need, and all of the modern day stuff. Also - no 300 digit product codes to enter in.

I just really like it, and I'm not saying that saying that as a fanboy. It just works, and it's familiar, and I go to a command line and run all of my favorite Unix commands and they work (mostly).

[Fat_Bulldog]

I have a SSD drive, and it is faster. I love how it boots instantly basically. Open the lid, and it's up and running right where you left off. I also have a Thunderbolt monitor, but again I don't pay for any of this.

I have found that Windows far more than any other OS suffers from what I call "bitrot". Over time, it just decays and gets sluggish. I don't find that with other OS's. For one thing there is just so much obnoxious crap you have to have running - virus stuff and the like on WIndows.

I have 16GB Ram, a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i5, and a 500 GB SDD drive. It's snappy. And no obnoxious updates. "Please dont' touch your computer DON'T TOUCH YOUR COMPUTER OH MY GOD WE ARE INSTALLING UPDATES DON'T EVEN LOOK OR YOU WILL DESTROY YOUR COMPUTER OH MY GOD HAIR ON FIRE WINDOWS...".

None of that nonsense.

I also have the vi editor, the dc calculator, LaTeX, and all sorts of my "antiquated" tools available to me that are so ingrained in how I work that I can't do without them. I love the package manager - Homebrew. I have Postgres installed on my Mac, it's a no-frills database that I use all of the time for testing and what not. Plus I have Office and all of that crap that I also need, and all of the modern day stuff. Also - no 300 digit product codes to enter in.

I just really like it, and I'm not saying that saying that as a fanboy. It just works, and it's familiar, and I go to a command line and run all of my favorite Unix commands and they work (mostly).

This sounds like a mac fan narrative jim.

[jim]

It just works really well (it should for what it $$). A guy I work with is a fanboy - he's already talking about the watch coming out, he gets the new phones the day they come out etc... Me? I've had days where I've said out loud that I want to open the casket of Steve Jobs and stab his dead cancer infested pancreas over and over and over because something Apple related - usually related to iTunes.

[Bo Hart]

This statement might bring out some hateraid, but I think one of the things MS is actually getting right is SQL Server. They have made HUGE improvements in their database offering. Now, they're going to f that all up by adopting a much different licensing scheme, but as of now, SQL Server competes very well against Oracle as far as performance goes.

I'm actually blown away by how well Microsoft nailed the .NET framework and C# language. C# is, by far, the most intuitive language I've ever written software in (for context, I've had appreciable experience with C, C++, JavaScript, Python, Java, Perl and PHP). Visual Studio is superb as well. It's stable, it's incredibly helpful, and it's very powerful.

Before my current job, I came from a Unix background. All of our workstations and servers were FreeBSD; we used MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. I didn't use an IDE -- I thought they were for script kiddies. During my interview, my now-boss told me that all of their development was Microsoft-based. I almost laughed out loud. I couldn't even take them seriously. Microsoft has such a negative reputation -- oftentimes deserved -- but I cannot stress how much C#/.NET has impressed me. I saw recently that there are plans to open-source .NET, so there will probably be ports sooner than later to other environments.

A lot of things with Microsoft suck though. Things tends to be very GUI and especially wizard-based, which often times feels like a hindrance when you want to get something done quickly. Having to constantly restart is very frustrating -- I hate having 25 programs open and coming back the next day to an empty desktop because an auto-update kicked in. Windows usually has second-rate versions of the cool cross-platforms tools (e.g. probably only 10% of available Perl libraries will run on Windows because of missing dependencies). There's also the money factor -- a per-workstation licence cost adds up, plus they really push SaaS stuff (I really feel like MS development is much more rapid, though, so I think the costs may be justified. I feel way more proficient with C# despite having a fraction of the experience that I have with other languages).

I think there are pros and cons to either. I've developed software professionally for about 5 years now -- 3 in a Unix environment, 2 in a Windows environment. I really, genuinely do not believe one is superior to the other. There are things I love and hate about both.

[jim]

This statement might bring out some hateraid, but I think one of the things MS is actually getting right is SQL Server. They have made HUGE improvements in their database offering. Now, they're going to f that all up by adopting a much different licensing scheme, but as of now, SQL Server competes very well against Oracle as far as performance goes.

I'm actually blown away by how well Microsoft nailed the .NET framework and C# language. C# is, by far, the most intuitive language I've ever written software in (for context, I've had appreciable experience with C, C++, JavaScript, Python, Java, Perl and PHP). Visual Studio is superb as well. It's stable, it's incredibly helpful, and it's very powerful.

Before my current job, I came from a Unix background. All of our workstations and servers were FreeBSD; we used MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. I didn't use an IDE -- I thought they were for script kiddies. During my interview, my now-boss told me that all of their development was Microsoft-based. I almost laughed out loud. I couldn't even take them seriously. Microsoft has such a negative reputation -- oftentimes deserved -- but I cannot stress how much C#/.NET has impressed me. I saw recently that there are plans to open-source .NET, so there will probably be ports sooner than later to other environments.

A lot of things with Microsoft suck though. Things tends to be very GUI and especially wizard-based, which often times feels like a hindrance when you want to get something done quickly. Having to constantly restart is very frustrating -- I hate having 25 programs open and coming back the next day to an empty desktop because an auto-update kicked in. Windows usually has second-rate versions of the cool cross-platforms tools (e.g. probably only 10% of available Perl libraries will run on Windows because of missing dependencies). There's also the money factor -- a per-workstation licence cost adds up, plus they really push SaaS stuff (I really feel like MS development is much more rapid, though, so I think the costs may be justified. I feel way more proficient with C# despite having a fraction of the experience that I have with other languages).

I think there are pros and cons to either. I've developed software professionally for about 5 years now -- 3 in a Unix environment, 2 in a Windows environment. I really, genuinely do not believe one is superior to the other. There are things I love and hate about both.

All I know about the .Net framework is you have to pay a [expletive] load of money to them every year just get the documentation and libraries you need to build anyting. MSDN subcription or whatever. Maybe I was told incorrectly, but I had a couple of MS .Net guys for me (I transferred that out of my group last summer) who told me I had to buy them these damn expensive things or else they couldn't really do anything. God I hated having MS developers in my group, I really felt like everything they did took 20x longer than I would have expected, cost 30x more, and generally just felt like they were pulling the wool over eyes because they could. They just spoke a different language, and their brains were wired a completely different way. They seemed hard wired to look for the most bloated and complicated solution to everything.

By far the environment of choice where I work is Linux/Python/Postgres/Django. Python is now my native tongue, although I speak C and C++ well (I taught both at a community college for years but I'm rusty) and am familiar with Java. I'll take your word on the C#, but I have a strong bias that really makes me very very skeptical about this.

[Bo Hart]

God I hated having MS developers in my group, I really felt like everything they did took 20x longer than I would have expected, cost 30x more, and generally just felt like they were pulling the wool over eyes because they could. They just spoke a different language, and their brains were wired a completely different way. They seemed hard wired to look for the most bloated and complicated solution to everything.

One thing I'll say is this: I started at Company A (Unix) and moved to Company B (Windows). If the order had been reversed, I bet I'd be completely incompetent. It just baffled me how easy and intuitive C# was to pick up. Part of it was working with a true IDE for the first time since college, but the syntax and standard libraries are just so nice and convenient. Going from primarily Perl to C# was easy. Had I done the reverse, it would've been very difficult. In fact, I deliberately force myself to work in a Unix environment on my side projects at home because I'm scared of bastardizing my skills, or developing too niche of a skillset. I almost feel guilty with how effortless .NET development is.

[jim]

Going from Perl to anything is easy. We have one Perl-based application that I am responsible for, and as soon as I can find the time we are going to rewrite that piece of [expletive].

What's the deal with this MSDN licenses? I had these guys in my office telling me they needed the super-duper top notch platinum edition and all this crap, I ended up buying it because I couldn't understand what the hell they were talking about (and there was one person I trusted who told me they really needed it). Expensive as [expletive]. It just seemed like bull [expletive]. Coming from almost purely an open source background my entire career, I'm just baffled by this. They also [expletive] and moaned about their workstations - I hired this one guy and I bought him the standard development Dell (we have a contract) and it had 16MB of memory, and he and a couple of other guys come running in and saying he can't get any work done because he needs 32MB. WTF? It was .Net/SharePoint crap so for all I know he wasn't making it up. I told him I couldn't do it - because I spent all of my money on those god damned MSDN things. He was just going to have to deal with the sluggish machines. Now my Linux guys and gals, hell one of them has like a 6 year old machine with 4MB and wont' give it up because it works fine. And I understand that.

Again, it's just a cultural thing and a different way of doing things and I'm not good at adapting. Fully admit I am becoming or already am a dinosaur.

[GeddyWrox]

Nah, you don't have to buy MSDN subscriptions. You can buy the dev tools you need a la carte. However, there is a tipping point where the MSDN subscriptions become more economical. But they aren't REQUIRED.