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Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category

Xcode 4

09 Mar

So today, out of nowhere, Xcode 4 finally landed as an official release. After seemingly forever in beta, and me quipping more than once about it’s similarity to Duke Nukem Forever, Apple finally pulled the trigger and released it. But something changed.

Xcode now has a price. And that has left me, as both a Mac user and a Mac developer, with a lot of questions.

It’s either $4.99 if you’re not a registered, paid Apple developer, or free if you are a registered, paid Apple developer (with all its $99 per year price tag glory). Supposedly there’s some crazy accounting reason that they have to charge for it. This, of course, leaves open the possibility that Xcode will soon be free again once OS X 10.7 arrives. But, it also leaves open the possibility that Xcode will no longer be distributed with OS X and will always have a price tag. It may not even stay $4.99. It may be $49.99 or $499.99.

There are additional questions, too. Does this mean that Apple is still distributing Xcode as a bundle with GNU GCC? Because there are things (such as MacPorts) that rely on the underlying foundation provided by the developer bundle that don’t actually use Xcode. Before, those were completely free. Now, they cost $4.99 unless they have split the underlying compiler from the IDE. And if they are still distributing it with GCC, that leads to all kinds of crazy interesting licensing questions.

But I think the worst part is that there is now a barrier to entry, however low, to being a developer on a platform that is already a minority in market share. I can’t understand how Apple potentially believes that it is good and right to trade short term profits for long term growth in the number of potential developers. For the future of the Mac platform, I sure hope this isn’t their line of reasoning.

So, let me tell you a little story.

My first dabbling in programming came courtesy of QuickBASIC back in the MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 days. This was the late 80s or early 90s, so I would have been 10 or 11 at the time. I stumbled across the Qbasic environment included with MS-DOS by accident and found Nibbles. And, after playing it, I discovered that I could change things by making changes to the strange text presented on the screen. I could change colors and speeds. But it would be a couple of years before I really understood what I was doing.

When Windows 95 came out (and along with it, Visual Basic 4), I talked my parents into getting me a copy. I don’t remember how much it cost but it was probably a lot because it was one of the few Christmas presents I got that year. But boy did I run with it. I’ve periodically felt guilty over that expense because I didn’t actually make anything really useful with it, but it was instrumental in furthering my education. Now I could do things on my computer far beyond what poor ol’ Qbasic was capable of. So I wrote lots of silly little programs. I put together a “family newsletter” one year that was installed and ran as a piece of software. I was pretty proud of that. I even wrote some software for my high school as part of a software development and AP Computer Science courses.

Eventually, I would move on to other things. Other versions of Visual Basic, Java, C, a brief foray into LISP and Forth-based languages for programming MUDs, and eventually web programming. First in Perl, then in PHP. I even landed my first paying programming job while still in high school, writing applications for a local transit contractor. At first, these were Visual Basic applications. But by the time I left (August of 2000) everything was going to the web and so were we.

But I can trace everything – my entire career, and my consuming passion for software engineering – back to Qbasic and Nibbles. A silly little game about a block snake, and a free development environment included with the operating system. Had I not stumbled on Qbasic and Nibbles, there’s a chance I would never have been a developer.

This is not about $4.99. I spend more on coffee in a week than that. My worry is about that 11 year old kid out there somewhere who may never get the opportunity to stumble across Xcode or the sample applications in /Developer and realize the raw power they possess. This is an area where Apple, a company with billions in cash on hand, should be happy to show a loss. It would be to the benefit of their platform, both now and in the future.

One of the great benefits of the Mac platform has been it’s low barriers of entry to developers. Sure, one could argue that the hardware is more expensive (and I could counter-argue that, for the quality of the equipment you are getting a bargain), but the development tools have always been freely available online and included with the machine. You could dabble in programming to your heart’s content. Sure, if you want to put something in the app store(s), you had to pay for admission, but there was nothing stopping you from getting all the way to that point, or even distributing your creations on your own.

But this new trend of charging for the development tools – even if it is a paltry sum – sends, to me, a worrying signal about the course Apple intends to tread. They’ve now moved the gate from the last step to the first step. It’s a course that Microsoft, as above, once tread.

Microsoft? They now give away a version of Visual Studio for free.

 
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Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Objective-C, Ramblings, Windows, Xcode

 

Why Bing Sucks

25 Jun

So I see Microsoft’s is attempting to rebrand the old Windows Live Search as bing.com. The commercials on TV are advertising it as a different type of search engine – a “decision engine.” Yeah, when I heard that, I, too, wondered exactly what a “decision engine” was. But the commercials are clever and somewhat funny to anyone who has ever spent time searching through hundreds of results for a single missing piece. But where’s the meat?

My coworker Brian, a few weeks ago, provided a great example of how this claim of being a “decision engine” is kind of a joke. And it can be summed up in a single sentence: “How big is the sun?”

Maybe now you’re confused about what I’m talking about. What does the sun have to do with search engines? Well, try plugging that sentence, word for word, into your favorite search engine. Our of curiosity, I ran this search on a number of top and up-and-coming engines to see what they returned.

  • Google is obviously the 900-pound gorilla in this space, so they’re a logical place to start. When you ask Google “How big is the Sun?” Big Brother Google replies, right at the top “Mass: 1.9891 ×1030 KG 332 946 Earths,” with most of the results relevant to the question at hand. In fact, all but two of the results were directly relevant to the question asked.
  • Yahoo didn’t return a nice little piece of math like Google did, but all but one of the search results is directly relevant to the question asked. The only result that wasn’t relevant was that VH1 has some videos by a band called Big Sun, but that was torwards the bottom of the SERP.
  • The newcomer Wolfram Alpha, which bills itself as a “knowledge engine” gives you a simple result, 432,200 miles, along with a handy formula for conversion. Not a traditional search engine, but closer to a “decision engine” than Bing …
  • And finally, the “decision engine” Bing. So how does the vaunted “decision engine” handle knowing how big the sun is?It doesn’t.

    The first result is a garden furniture store in Austin, Texas. The second result is an Equine Product Store in Florida. The third was pictures of the sun from the Boston Globe – okay, that one was close. The next results are a realty company in Florida and an athletic conference. Only then, six results down, do we get into the meat of the question.

Look, it’s easy to hate on Microsoft. It’s no challenge anymore. I, personally, am not exactly a fan of Microsoft, but I’m hardly an enemy either. At worst, I’m indifferent.

And, as an aside, I really feel sorry for the poor guy they send to the OSCON keynote every year who literally gets hammered for no good reason by what can only be described as nerd rage from the questioners. And yet every year, they come back with more money and more people. I almost posted an entry about it last year. It was really kind of sad to watch.

Anyways, the point is, there are some things that Microsoft has done well. Office? Great productivity suite. Windows 7? From what I’ve seen, it looks pretty good. The XBOX and gaming units at Microsoft do gangbusters. But it just seems like they’re irrationally pursuing this search thing, out of spite, at this point to the detriment of the rest of their business. Considering that bing doesn’t appear, at the surface, to be any different from Windows Live Search in terms of its usefulness (that is to say, not), Microsoft is throwing tons of money in the form of development and marketing to something that just isn’t very good when they could be focusing on the core parts of their business.

But, then again, I’m not Ballmer.

 
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Posted in Microsoft, Ramblings

 

Benchmarking Vista and XP: Apples and Oranges?

27 Nov

Tags: , ,

This article posted to C|Net got me to thinking. In the article, they talk about vaguely defined “benchmarks” showing that Windows XP with the beta of Service Pack 3 outperformed Windows Vista with Service Pack 1.

I can only say one thing: duh. Quite frankly, I would have been more surprised if Vista had outperformed XP.

This really is an apples and oranges comparison because Vista is a newer and more complex operating system. And I’m not exactly a Microsoft fanboy, either – I’m typing this on a Mac, using a Java journal client. Of course it is going to run slower on the same equipment than an operating system that was released six years ago. I’m sure Windows 98SE will beat the pants off of XP on the same equipment, too. Leopard, released a few months ago, won’t even run on hardware circa when OS X first came out and will almost certainly run slower on machines that were top of the line when Tiger was released. Hey, while we’re at it, we could compare Doom to UT3 to see which runs faster!

If they wanted to do a more fair comparison, they would have compared them on different machines – top of the line machines when their respective operating systems were released, using adjusted benchmarks. Being that machines are much faster now than they were in 2001, I wager that the difference between them would be a lot less.

 

 
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Posted in Microsoft, PC, Windows