Posts by MadMat

Rust never sleeps: C++-alike language tops Stack Overflow survey for fourth year in a row

Pinch of salt

While I do like reading these types of surveys, if only to learn about languages/platforms I've never heard of, they do miss out on a couple of critical issues that makes not really reliable as a good source of metrics.

1. As has been mentioned by a number of Registerites, the type of folk who complete these surveys perhaps skews the results somewhat.

2. The results are not correlated to the task. If I am writing a hardware driver or some bare metal code for an application specific chip I will probably go for C/C++ if a compiler exists for the CPU or assembler. However, if I am part of a team building the next big money spinning global solution using C/C++ or assembler would perhaps be quite low down on my list of language preferences. As there are many more high-level projects being built world-wide than, say, single-chip embedded devices the higher level languages will always show higher than the lower level ones.

What would really be interesting is if a PhD student looks to do a properly audited survey with proper controls etc. Now that would be an interesting survey to read...

iiNet to be scooped up by TPG for $1.4 billion

Step backwards indeed

The Internet in Australia does appear to be in a phase of degradation at the moment. Quite a few (me included) iiNet customers migrated from TPG due to service and quality issues; now it will be back to square one.

In addition, the current Federal Government has moved the NBN (National Broadband Network) goal-posts mid-rollout so that it is no longer FTTX (Fiber-to-the-premises) but the last couple of Km will remain copper. Seen by many as a step-back - argument being the main bottleneck is that copper - it kinda just adds to the bucket of issues Australia seems to be building to keep it from moving forward with the rest of the world.

Seems the technological future in Australia is getting a little dimmer....

Google Talk is dead, long live, er, Google Talk: Chat will survive app zap, flaps G+ chap

Google 'doing a Microsoft'?

You only need to read the cries of anguish on the search guru's own forums to realise we seem to be going down a burrow we went down 15 years ago.

Despite telling us otherwise, the big G does appear to have stopped listening to it's followers, and revenue sources. The general consensus seems to be that Hangouts is cr*p, GTalk is/was great - folk have been telling Goggle they don't want everything wrapped in a Chrome overcoat; they like separate apps. But brother Gee doesnt hear.. Another example is GMail conversation thread direction, the cries of 'we want the most recent at the top!' are ignored - or at least G's apologists jump on the requests and tell those asking they are being silly and using e-mail wrongly..

Only a few years ago I was one of the happy band being a follower of the search giant with a silly name; as I was with the PC software empire pre-Vista/W8-fiascos. Now, the affair is starting to sour as it did with my previous lover when I tried Vista....

I too have now gone back to an old flame and dug out IRC - who doesn't seem too upset at my straying, bless it.

Inside GOV.UK: 'Chaos' and 'nightmare' as trendy Cabinet Office wrecked govt websites

Quite agog. The 'Government Gateway' core was, and still is, a fine example of a well run software project that delivers. At the time, it was On Budget, On Schedule and simply worked.

Over 2 million lines of code and zero high/medium severity bugs from the start - despite implementing protocols that, at the time, were bleeding edge (SSO, SOAP etc...). It just got on with the job and did it well - even keeping o

So what has happened since 2007ish. Why are we seeing headlines like these? What has happened to all the lessons learned and knowledge/skills built during the time Gateway was designed & developed? It almost breaks my heart to see son-of-Gateway being stuffed up so much - what is going on?