Two Camps. Open Source vs M$

I had an interesting debate in the office this morning about different database types and the pros and cons of both, a subject i knew little about so i listened in for some information. MySQL came into the debate which turned the conversation towards the title of this post: Open Source vs M$.

I was very shocked to hear that several developers in the office are AGAINST open source, they say that allowing all to update a piece of software provides it with instability, little support and errors that are annoying to fix.

Some people in the office actually prefer M$ dominating software development technologies as everything would be ‘the same’ and ‘easy to use and find answers to questions’.

Some other developers argued for open source saying that support is plentiful, updates are quicker and bugs are easily fixed or avoided due to a massive community of developers updating the software continually.

So it seems from my limited time in the IT industry you are either FOR or AGAINST open source, there seems to be none without an opinion in IT.

Linux in russian schools

I just read a news article that told me Russia is planning to use Linux in all its schools from 2009. Absolutly brilliant or a risky move?

My answer: Absolutly brilliant. Using Linux teaches people how to us Computers, not how to use a specific piece of software, therefore in educatuion Linux should definently be used.

<rant speculation=’true’>In coming generations if everyone knows how to use computers, what wonders could be achieved? If we can send man to the moon with the aid of a computer less powerful then a pocket calculator… You see the potential for human development? </rant>

Negatives? May take a little while for teachers to get up-to-speed using the software with enough precifienty to teach… but the long term benefits of this small spurt of effort far outway the costs.

Talking about costs… I would rather the publics’ tax dollers/pounds contribute to better teaching and opportunities for children and students rather then paying licencing fees to multi-billion pound coorporations who get enough money milking businesses anyway!

Thank you Russia for taking this risky bold move, hopefully people will follow once the success has been quantified in years to come.

See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7034828.stm for further details.

asp.net breaking the ‘rules’

coding today at work I came accros a data control you can place on a web form that contains properties. These properties are used to connect to a data source (sql, xml… etc…). You can then link this control to a grid and hay presto you got a 3 (or n)-tier application architecture, in dangerously potentially 1 or 2 tiers… tut tut tut.

A layered architecture is there for a reason, to make it easy to extend code, read code, modify code amongst many other useful reasons. Although this method of data access is easy to code at first, in the long run (90% of the time) this will not be very benefitial and you wiull have to recode or make things difficult at a later date.

naughty naughty.

msn messenger observation

I was talking to a friend online using msn a moment ago, he signed out of msn and I had not noticed this and kept on talking away (i was watching a youTube vid @ the time)…

just an observation… but wouldnt it be easy to grey the speaking area (lower pane) or send a message to the sent messages panel that ‘John has signed out’ to alert users instead of the small message on the top of the panel which you wouldnt easily notice if you were ‘appear offline’ as it wouldnt pop up as it would just change text…

just a thought