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My first plan is to see how much I can do on a raspberry pi. Plug in a 1TB usb drive, and I think it will do everything I need it to do.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Take a look at the new NVME hat for the 5. I am now also using macro pads on the Pi and Debian. Lazy man’s tool.
>64
It’s weird being the same age as old people. Live every day like it is your last; one day, it will be.
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"Starting next week, I'm moving to linux." Welcome to the club.
PS I still have to deal with Winders quite often, But not for my own stuff.
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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charlieg wrote: Starting next week, I'm moving to linux.
Linux is fine, I just hope you don't go in thinking it's not without problems of its own.
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By what you have said you must have started your career or at least invested some time of it to MS and MS technologies. So you are where you are today because of that experience. Something, I think, to be grateful for rather than just knocking MS.
MS are not perfect by any means and have made mistakes. I'm a long term desktop dev and I am frustrated by how MS seems to be turning it's back on us desktop developers, but none of that would force me into abandoning a technology (that I make my living from) for another just because they don't do things the way I like.
I too have thought about Linux, but only for fun and learning it's not a platform that I could make a living from as it's just not mainstream enough (do correct me if that's not the case). I'm pretty sure that using Linux and C++ is going to have it's issues too. The difference is that you are an intelligent guy and you will enjoy the intellectual load of learning something new, so you'll think it's better.
To your point of changing terminology, specifically, of COM, DCOM, COM+ and ActiveX. Well that's not strictly speaking true, it's more than a change in terminology while they are all based on the original COM, DCOM is distributed (so COM over the network), COM+ added security and performance enhancements and ActiveX added OLE to COM I believe (to support ActiveX controls, but still have COM interfaces). So you could think of it as COMv1, COMv2, COMv3 and then ActiveX, (this in a time before MS versioning by year!) so more than just renaming.
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Yes, I suffered. Yes, my customer paid. Yes, I came from a pristine Unix development environment where everything made sense. I also did VMS where there were no idiots allowed to f*** with the OS, and the documentation made sense.
Do I appreciate what the developers have done at MS? Sure. But clearly, Microsoft is run by marketing idiots and have thrown developers under the bus for decades. Is MS perfect? I'm not, and they are not. But I don't make evil decisions to f&&* with their developer or user base.
I happen to run my own consultancy. There are times when I need to run soak tests for MONTHS. I have a high end server running multiple machines. I need to talk to it over the network. Microsoft decides to force a reboot at 1am Sunday morning to install updates that I don't need. And I have to restart all of my tests. I run professional so I expect a bit less stupidity from MS. Do you know how old it gets when I have to say to a customer, "Sorry, Microsoft forced a reboot and killed the soak test." ?
Vitriol is not directed at you, I just disagree mostly with what you posted.
Have I made money? Sure. But I'm not giving Microsoft a pass.
As for ActiveX, yes it was based on com whatever, but the entire thing was an abortion. Or a train wreck, or a "hey what are goats doing up here in a cloud?" look up the last reference. When I got into it a long time ago, MS had already abandoned activeX as web tech moved on, and they left us poor embedded developers to suck air. What I should have done is rip it all out, but I was never given permission.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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All big companies are run by marketing idiots. A certain fruit company being a great case in point as they treat all their customers as idiots by convincing them they're spending 2 * as much on the equivalent PC, just to get the fruit logo.
I don't disagree with what you have said, I know MS can be a PITA but they do create mainstream OSs, so if there is a security vulnerability found, should they not patch it? (they'd certainly get serious backlash if they didn't), unfortunately that could mean a reboot. AFAIK servers don't automatically reboot, they just nag. If you have a Linux security issue first you have to know which one of the thousand or so distros that it affects. I'd like to use Linux but the sheer number of distros is bewildering. If I did use Linux for my development, I could give away my software or I could try and sell it to the 5 users that use Linux in a business environment (OK, I'm being flippant, but compared to a MS OS user base it's a no brainer really).
Anyway, besides the point, I was merely pointing out your comments on COM, DCOM etc. were technically incorrect and that everything has it's flaws. I make my living, and have done for the past 25years, using MS products. I agree they're not perfect and yes they're frustrating and yes they f&*k up sometimes (well often). What mainstream alternative is better and flawless?
FYI (not that you would be interested) but from memory there is (or was) a version of Windows called LTSB (Long Term Service Branch) or something like that, that didn't do updates (other than security updates I think) for 18 months. So no forced reboots. Never used it, I wanted to in a previous workplace but would have been a massive upheaval for their existing customers. That may help you if you're still stuck on some of your VMs.
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All big companies make mistakes. Microsoft triples down on them. I concur with your assessment of COM, DCOM, etc. I agree it was a natural development progression. But my anger and bitterness comes from the embedded world where NOTHING EVER DIES. Meanwhile, Microsoft routinely makes decisions that had huge consequences for customers, and they just don't care. I've lived through one - the abandonment of WinCE and .NET and associated development tools. Don't even get me started on their latest offering.
The second is their anal retentive insistence on forced reboots. Sure, I want to fix security issues - AT MY DISCRETION. As a developer, nag me, but to reboot a test environment? That's criminal.
I'll tell you a story from 20 years back. I was having an early morning discussion with the buildings IT manager. The issue of OS updates came up (we were on Windows 2000, so the current lunacy wasn't there). We mainly used our PCs to run an X-Windows client to access all of the Unix machines we supported. This manager happily explained that he could break into any of my team's Pcs. I said, please explain. He says, oh, we just cycle power.... I explained to him that was not business acceptable, he was going to get beaten and then fired after a trip to the VPs office.
Power cycling on machines is what MS routinely does. This is not marketing (going back to my original grip of function pointers being relabeled by MS), this is sheer stupidity.
I agree to disagree with some of your comments, but MS is another issue, and I won't give them a break.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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"Meanwhile, Microsoft routinely makes decisions that had huge consequences for customers, and they just don't care" - agreed.
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But backwards it's even more stupid.
Yeah I'll get my coat...
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I been click-baited!! Help, I been trolled!
Why did I click that? Why? 
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And so fast too 
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I like to keep my reaction-time extremely fast.
I've accidentally bought dozens of products I don't even want because they were on sale.
And, I've also released numerous viruses (virii?) onto my computer because of this, but I just keep coming back for more. 
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"Life is too short not to take chances."
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raddevus wrote: I've accidentally bought dozens of products I don't even want because they were on sale.
True story.
An aunt of mine has always been a big spender. It's a disease. My uncle is always looking at the budget and trying to rein her in.
I'll always remember one story he told. She'd buy these big watermelons from the grocery store, but she was the only one eating them, so literally half of them would go to waste because they'd be sitting in the refrigerator for so long.
So he suggested she instead buy half of a watermelon at a time (you can buy them in halves).
So the next time she want grocery shopping, she came back home with two halves. Because they were on sale.
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You know where you go to weigh a pie?
Somewhere over the rainbow!
...♪ Weigh a pie ♪
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There are certain things that are not appropriate in 192KB of SRAM.
Garbage collection is one of them.
There are certain things that are not appropriate on an 80MHz CPU.
Running an interpreter is one of them.
So why in the world is MicroPython so popular?
It's ridiculously slow, and just recently I've been trying diagnose what looks like (but can't be?) a heap frag issue in some MP firmware.
You can also write poor C and C++ code, of course. But the difference is you can also write *good* C and C++ code.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Worse - non thread safe memory allocation that c++ does at a whim. That drove us crazy for months until we figured out what was going on.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I don't even use the STL on embedded, mostly because I've run into incomplete and/or non-compliant implementations and I don't want to keep track of which platforms I need to fork for. Secondarily, the way it uses the heap is shameful out of the box. Utterly irresponsible unless you have gobs of RAM to where heap frag is never an issue, so you're usually stuck creating your own custom allocators and your own management scheme, but aside from that, many devices have multiple heaps with different sizes and performance characteristics, and getting The STL to handle that gracefully is just more trouble than it's worth, IMO.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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The shop I'm leaving cannot spell STL. There were hopes, but design went into a different direction. All of the base code is written in pure C, the HMI - when one is needed is all JavaScript gobbly gook. Company just got fed up with MS bullshit.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Yeah. As far as I can tell Microsoft didn't truly straighten out their C++ compiler until VS 2022. That's when my standards compliant code started compiling for it, and it wasn't even using the STL, though it makes heavy use of templates.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I could draw metaphor for choosing js over msft but none would be appropriate for posting here... too vulgar.
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The context of my comment goes back 10 years or more, when Microsoft abandoned the embedded devices market and threw an entire industry under the bus. Where once I used WinCE and WEC7, my customer said "f&&* this" and moved to devices that run on "we don't care just give me a modern browser." Microsoft erred in trying to port their OS and desktop to embedded devices, but they did a great job marketing it.
Then they abandoned the entire platform, tools, etc. After a few years they came back with their new offerings. No traction. No one in the embedded space I work in is using anything Windows, and as a professional I would seriously question your decisions if you wanted to push that crap. The bus left the station a long time ago.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I remember that.
I don't do embedded aside hobbyist stuff.
I still think choosing js if anything else is at all possible is a bigger mistake than any I made in that post.
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5 years ago I would completely agree with you. But, these days I can drop a gigabit ethernet device on a board along with a 400MHz+ ARM process that services a dirt cheap touchscreen running a current browser, and I don't have to worry about the touchscreen's OS. I can then pull up a browser on my phone, or my desktop and talk to the device.
Touchscreen maker gets funky? Next maker.
As gnarly as JavaScript is, I hate looking at it (my personal problem), it works. And I don't think MS can f with JavaScript. Or a browser. It represents a stable platform relative to Microsoft. My customer switched, there's a whiz kid in the s/w group that pounded out a framework, and they aren't looking back.
The application uses JavaScript, Web sockets and more - all of it open source with people that understand you cannot break what you released before. Would I use JavaScript for a desktop application? Unlikely, but then again....
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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