OT: Data Smog

[Fyron]

But new MS products that are poor copies of years old (if not decades old) products produced by others are always hip and exciting!

[AgentZero]

Instar said:
Part of this problem I think is of computer UI. I can describe a task in 10 seconds that would take me 30 mins of work to do on a computer. The new Microsoft Shell looks cool (MSH or Monad). It might speed tasks up a lot.

Ah, but tis always a case of 'easier said than done'. Very few tasks can be explained in more time than it takes to do them, unless one describes a simple task in exhaustive detail.

And people always have, and always will, tell you that it was better in earlier generations. People in today talk about how much better it was in the '50s, people in the '50s talked about how much better it was in the '30s, etc ad nauseum. Following this logic, the best time was when we all wore loinclothes and lived in caves. But obviously it wasn't that great, since the unrelenting march of progress is powered by a desire to make things better. And if you look at it historically, things in the '50s were better than they were in the '30s, and things today actually are better than they were in the '50s. So I say to anyone who says otherwise, 'Right now is the best time in history to be alive. Deal with it.'

[Baron Munchausen]

aiken said:

Holy dead cow, they invented /bin/bash! Again.

With 'special features' of their own devising, of course. Embrace and extend, though it will suck anyway. I saw a hilarious sig on Slashdot a few days ago: The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

[Instar]

Baron Munchausen said:

With 'special features' of their own devising, of course. Embrace and extend, though it will suck anyway. I saw a hilarious sig on Slashdot a few days ago: The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

Well, frankly, I think you're quick to judge. Have you watched all the videos on Channel9 and the .NET show? Monad looks killer. The shell is no longer a text stream so much, it can treat the output or input as objects which can be reflected against to expose internal members; also, access to the .NET framework is exposed too, IIRC. MSH looks 10x better than anything out today (and I've used a lot of systems, Solaris, Wintel, Linux, Apple 2e )

[Aiken]

I've read the presentation transcript on msdn. I'm not a professional programmer or sysadmin, so my opinion probably worths a little, but it doesn't look 10x more powerful than *sh+perl+gnu utils combination for *nix. And without winfs and 100% .net enviroment it even will be no better than cmd.exe. I just learnt to be very sceptical about "groundbreaking tool with new exciting features" fluff. SE5 is one of the exceptions

[Instar]

aiken said:
I've read the presentation transcript on msdn. I'm not a professional programmer or sysadmin, so my opinion probably worths a little, but it doesn't look 10x more powerful than *sh+perl+gnu utils combination for *nix. And without winfs and 100% .net enviroment it even will be no better than cmd.exe. I just learnt to be very sceptical about "groundbreaking tool with new exciting features" fluff. SE5 is one of the exceptions

Well, to me, a programming and IT pro, the fact that it treats the input and output as streams of objects instead of just text is really innovative. You are right though, without the .NET framework, I can't do much with the exposed members via reflecting. .NET will ship with Longhorn as it is; and I really like the .NET framework. Really amazing how some people brush it off as if sucked, but it beats the pants off of J2SE.