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My touch sensor on my phone fails if my finger is a bit damp. On the flip side, is the damn cat going to start turning on the oven or opening the door?
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It has been a long time since we have updated our strategy because our commitments to the languages that you rely on and how we think about them don’t change year to year. The maiden, the matron, and the crone
"Each .NET language is unique. C# is the most widely used language and the language most of .NET is written in. F# explores new language possibilities and the community provides a rich experience across platforms. We remain committed to Visual Basic and continue to invest in maintaining C# interop and Visual Studio features for folks that love Visual Basic or want a stable language." <-- As a (mostly) past VB dev, this makes me sad. But I guess as the wise man always said, "On Error Resume Next". :P
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Interesting read. I especially liked the links. As a VB developer I read the VB strategy, which boils down to if it ain't broke don't fix it.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: "On Error Resume Next"
You undid 5 years of therapy with a single line of code. I was living so blissfully without the usual nightmares, PTSD, shivers, cold sweat, fits of coprolalia and insane screeching.
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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A new report has uncovered the alarming figure that businesses are wasting every year on unused software licenses. I've got a license...a license to install
Double 0-sysadmin
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Yep - part of it is because businesses have a hard time keeping track of non-physical items. A bigger part is the way software licensing is handled and the penalties for "undercounting" the needs. BSA (Business Software Alliance) is notorious for taking companies to court for an honest clearical mistake and requesting huge amounts of money, to the extent that BSA (Business Software Alliance) should be considered a racketeering organization.
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Not just clerical errors. A major software vendor a previous employer used to use had a licensing system so badly designed that it only had 2 modes for confirming licenses, check with the server before every application start, or assign to a specific computer until their application on that computer explicitly released it. In the latter case if a computer died, or was wiped without the key being released there was no way to ever return it to the licensing server as available again meaning IT had to keep paying for those licenses indefinitely which made them feel really blue. (No there was no sane compromise like a 1 year key checkout or the like.)
The vendors support told IT when that happened to just edit the config files on the licensing server to increment the number of licenses the server thought it had by the number lost to dead systems. After a number of years of doing that, the vendors enforcement division audited my previous employer, sued it for doing what their own support said to do, and won a settlement which resulted in buying a much large number of licenses for a few years. That juiced the vendors lawyers wallets and the vendors for a few years; at the end of the period though my former employer chose to renew zero licenses with the vendor having decided the only rational move was to spend money migrating everything they had with the vendor to a competing platform.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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If the number of licenses managed by the licensing server is editable by the client, why bother having a licensing server in the first place? 
The licensing problem has been nicely solved by the DHCP protocol, among others. Why not adapt that code for distribution of licenses, rather than reinvent the wheel?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Daniel Pfeffer wrote: If the number of licenses managed by the licensing server is editable by the client, why bother having a licensing server in the first place?
Did any part of my description make you think I considered it a sane setup?
Daniel Pfeffer wrote: The licensing problem has been nicely solved by the DHCP protocol, among others. Why not adapt that code for distribution of licenses, rather than reinvent the wheel?
How well does DHCP work to establish a license between a computer not ever connected to a network, and a licensing server? I don't know how old the offending implementation was, but the software itself pre-dates DHCP and probably needed to work for companies using sneakernet because they didn't want to deal with fiddly coax systems.
But the only rational reason I can think of for not supporting x month license checkouts, optionally with the time limited keys transferred via phone/paper is incompetence or possibly greed.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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I wasn't criticising you, only the implementer of that miserable excuse for a licensing server.
I did not know that the licensing server that you described predated DHCP.
I didn't take into account systems that are never connected to the company network, but any such system would need a manual solution in any case. For systems connected to the company network, a DHCP-style protocol solves licensing problems very nicely:
- Server discovery
- Time-limited licenses (renewable)
- Permanent licenses
- License reservation
- Transferring additional configuration data with the license
- ...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Nearly 40% of teams using open source lack the internal skills to test, use, or integrate that software. "It's a world of laughter, a world of tears"
Not going to get that out of my head all week now, thanks me.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Nearly 40% of teams using open source lack the internal skills to test, use, or integrate that software.
But someone in SO / some cool blog told them that it would work  
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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A certain kind of software developer—or more often, businessperson— likes to talk about a hundred-year programming language, or even a hundred-year framework. That's a long compile time
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The hundred-year programming language will be something the global AI creates to program us. And it'll be an injection, not bits and bytes.
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And here we thought Java was a slow compile.
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Kent, that was an interesting article. Most of the time I skim opinion pieces (since I'm an old fart they tend to piss me off), but this one I read in its entirety.
Nice job. Thank you.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I get lucky sometimes
Thank you so much for the kind words, I'll try to find more stuff for y'all in the future.
TTFN - Kent
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Nickolas Sharp held Ubiquiti’s data ransom while posing as an anonymous hacker, but an internet outage that disrupted his VPN helped the feds catch on to his scheme. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that meddling himself
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Kent Sharkey wrote: but an internet outage that disrupted his VPN
Murphy's law?
Or just plain ol' "karma, b1tch"?
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Google announced plans to add more AI features and improvements to its products. Clippy's coming back, baby!
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Will it write the emails for me?
Or just scrap the content better for google?
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Microsoft is reassuring the public that it still is focused on mixed-reality products, including Microsoft Mesh and the HoloLens 2 headset. I suppose someone needs to be
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Nearly all of the newer programming languages are general-purpose. And that's a problem. Here's why we still need domain-specific languages. It's like you can use them for anything!
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