Information Technology Discussions

[Rorschach]

Too late...
for both of them.

SN what did you think of the open architecture drive re Unix a decade or two ago... where I worked it was driven by a new IT manager fresh out of UNI with no real IT experience except that he used Unix based boxes at Uni.

[Aussie]

Too late...
for both of them.

SN what did you think of the open architecture drive re Unix a decade or two ago... where I worked it was driven by a new IT manager fresh out of UNI with no real IT experience except that he used Unix based boxes at Uni.

Dunno about SN.....but personally, I thought it sucked big time, and I have no problem buying a keyboard. They cost SFA...yet you ......IT Wonder Boy of 30 years.....could not afford one.

[IQS.RLOW]

Why did it 'suck big time' IT boy?

[Super Nova]

SN what did you think of the open architecture drive re Unix a decade or two ago... where I worked it was driven by a new IT manager fresh out of UNI with no real IT experience except that he used Unix based boxes at Uni.

My opinion is:

Open architecture has many benefits as a principle and is becoming even more important today with the introduction of Phone and Windows Apps and the introduction of App Stores by the big 3.

A decade or 2 ago there was a big push for Unix as an alternative to proprietary OS and software. I hated unix. The principles of the core OS was great the implementation of using Argv and Argc in the "C" language to pass comment line parameters excellent. A bunch of nerds writing shit code and no standard command line standard was just bloody awful. Unix bufs claim piping was fantastic but we could do that shit on VMS through logical name assignments. Bif deal.

"C" is a great language and has influenced programming practices and I love it. Unix then tried to adopt a windows feel as it tried to move from just being a backend server.... bloody failure.

So much for open source. Redhat, Qnx and others built their own variants to market. A mess.

The problem is that while open source around Unix is great in principle the real step changes still come from the traditional proprietary players who really innovate for industry and corporations. Unix has been great for a cheep platform for websites and simple things.

The core of Unix was good enough for Apple to dump their own and build on a unix core so it's good technology at the core it's all the shit built on it. They have taken the core and turn them into proprietary OS'.

Firefox is the only real major success of open source that comes to mind.

So to answer the question. Shit software built by nerds that don't consider the end user and don't have the real resources to take an engineering approach to solving problems is not a success. Unix core is well engineered and simple. The shit built on top is not.

Some of the big players are opening up their proprietary software stack to promote adoptions and more application interfacing to them. This is to secure a greater free developer pool to develop and interface to their proprietary solution because they have to.

[Super Nova]

RS,

Just to add. I have developed a near real-time keno system under QNX and C.

In this team of 6 we took an engineering approach and produced a bloody great system. QNX was very robust and had everything you needed for a back end. We relied very few of the tools that come with QNX and wrote everything we needed our self including our own communications terminal protocols and 2 phase commit transaction engine..... we did using the internal messaging capability as that was fine and the share memory and memory management never let us down. The core worked and worked well. However when you think about scalability, clustering ...etc.... no way.

The UI was done to a windows PC that we designed ourselves rather than use what unix came with. We did this because at the time 20 years ago, this was the only way to have a cheap platform if you wanted to productise a solution. Reduce costs. Since we were engineering the lot.... it was OK. We had proper standards since we were all ex-Fortran commercial programmer/engineers. These standards have not changed to this day even though the tooling and environment are more complex.

[Super Nova]

Now to the present.

I think Google Maps and Street View to be one of the most useful services on the web. Now look at what they are doing.

Google to add the Galapagos to StreetView

A team has visited the remote Galapagos Islands to capture footage for Google Maps.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/trave ... tView.html

[Jovial_Monk]

For once I can agree with SN. Google Maps rules!

[Rorschach]

Ha ha ha... Good to hear I agree completely with your views on Unix. It was a poorly thought out fad brought to wider use by Unibods because that was what they were used to. The IT manager I mentioned was just a few years out of Uni and was an Electrical Engineer. Got the job by presenting a certificate. LOL.

In the end we still had the 2 Fujitsu mainframes for the heavy lifting and a whole lot of unix boxes doing minor functions. The Fujitsu machines could have been partitioned and had separate domains to do the same things.

Personally I hated Unix and found it an unnecessary expense, the original idea of being able to source any hardware (least expensive) to run in an open architecture environment under Unix was flawed and found to be incorrect.

Personally I liked C and it's functionality, didn't mind Fortran but hardly got to use it. But my favourite language to play with was Assembler... not sure why maybe I had a thing for the opcode mnemonics, but I preferred it to the more English language friendly languages of the time.

Been away from the nitty gritty of programming for quite a while, but thinking I might like to dabble again. What do you think is the best language/software to use to create websites these days and in a commercial environment what programming language offers the best opportunities going forward?

[Super Nova]

Been away from the nitty gritty of programming for quite a while, but thinking I might like to dabble again. What do you think is the best language/software to use to create websites these days and in a commercial environment what programming language offers the best opportunities going forward?

2 hard questions.

the best language/software to use to create websites these days

I cannot answer this question. There is so much out there. There are plenty of software solution for doing this. It depends what you want to do and what you want to learn. You can create excellent site with no programming today or you could go for an IBM, Google or Microsoft stack and write your own.

in a commercial environment what programming language offers the best opportunities going forward

Today I would probably learn HTML 5. It's what the phones use and now Windows as a portable language for phone type Apps. A skill you can utilise for your custom web site.

If you want to build a commercial grade system I would probably look to C# and defer to C or C++ for those things that really need to be fast. (C for those things you would have done in assembler)

[IQS.RLOW]

For most generic sites, Wordpress is the standard with so many plugins available...but depends on what you need to interface with. SQL with php also has its uses depending on application