What's with the obsessive focus on clouds from Danny?
I just took a quick look at his story list here at the Reg. He's done nothing but talk about the cloud since March. There are other aspects to technology, you know. :-)
Are your applications well managed? Many companies get it right for part of an application’s lifecycle but few excel at all of it. Putting an application into a private cloud can help you to manage it more consistently from cradle to grave. Software applications need different resources at four main stages: development, …
Didn't you know it is called a 'Bandwagon'?
IMHO, this obsession with 'always being connected' is a passing fad. Not everywhere on this planet or even this country or even 500yds down the road from where I'm typing this can be connected to the internet.
When we have that connectivity PLUS the bandwidth to make it happen then I might just be interested.
But hey, someone has to be first to crash and burn. Can we hope that is Danny?
A good point about the private cloud. But how long until some PHB decides that connecting via a VPN from his Castle in the Country is also going to use the private cloud?
That IMHO is not a lot of difference from using Amazon EC2 or a similar service.
The prospects of a huge loss of data is frankly frightening. It is inevitable that sooner or later a large company will be forced into bankruptcy simply by someone deprovisioning the wrong cloud server and wiping the companies account and tax records in one go. Then they will find that their backups are useless.
Mines the one with a 'get out of jail free' card in the pocket.
Clouds are great... for sharing videos of kittens, ripped DVDs, blah-de-blah.
When it comes to business, any tech with an ounce of integrity will want to know: where the data is, where the backups are, how often the backups are made (and if there was a failure), in what jurisdiction the data is held (admittedly, lower on the priorities for a geek but ought to be a consideration for management) and most importantly who has access to the data (when, and why). The cloud can only pretend to answer those questions...
Write it in badly structured (preferably slightly non-standard) COBOL or FORTRAN (preferably 77 or earlier, none of the new-fangled 90 stuff).
It might not be pleasant, but you can be sure such code will live on long past its sell by date, whether you want it to or not. Especially if the original developement team have all left the company.
Nice troll, but...
Note for younger programmers: Correlation is not causation.
*If* a program has a long life, it will eventually outlive the careers of those who first wrote it, it will originally have been written in a language that is not now fashionable, and it will have been continuously modified to meet evolving requirements. By the time *you* review the code, it will be spaghettified crap in an arcane language with no written spec, let alone documentation. However, this is not "best practice for new projects".
You treat it as if it were a baby.
So give the program plenty of rest (don't use it, its resting!), feed it with juicy updates; who cares if the updates do nothing as long as the program is happy, provide your software with a safe environment to play in; so make plenty of backups.
And the most important tip of them all: give it a cute name so that others will grow a liking to it too!
When you follow these simple guidelines then success is guaranteed. Don't trouble yourself with old fashioned stuff such as user friendliness, usability or paying attention to what your user base (if any *lol*) tell you. You don't need them!
(hey, stop making fun of me... You know, even Microsoft believes in me! Crap, that was suppose to be a secret...).
PLEASE NOTE COLON PARAGRAPHS IN ENGLISH ARE ALLOWED MORE THAN TWO SENTENCES STOP
Honestly, reading this piece was like following a (rather uninteresting[1]) tweet stream, with a gasp of vertical whitespace after every sentence or two. It's not as bad as writing without paragraphs, or with ones that stretch on for pages (I'm looking at you, Henry James), but it's still damned annoying. Try developing an idea for a bit - that's my advice.
[1] In other words, typical.