yuuuuup.

A couple of articles in the media indicating the big decline in PC sales. Part of the reason is the Win 8 flop according to the articles. Probably so and the Win Blue follow up is coming. I'll post links later.

Are you teasing me for my broad brush, semi-bombastic posts in that one thread

He's a little bit more of a pragmatist than that, I've seen him use jquery drag and drop in a project before. not sure if he's the one who introduced it or not.

Same except it's Chef for me.

today I learned something about C++:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/.../10397976.aspx

From the comments:

No, just a reference to an old joke.

Why not use http://www.githubarchive.org/ to find coders?

I've put up a few pilot gists on the subject.

I think its fairly simple to:

1) pick a group of projects you use, respect or like in the language you're looking to hire for

2) filter by location

3) return a list of the screenames that are contributing and forking those projects

4) Become familiar with their coding ability and target a few of them with reasonable offers

5) Profit?

yuuuuup.

When it came down to puppet vs chef, I just closed my eyes and chose one. I hope chef isn't that much better than puppet.

That's pretty much what I did as well. Saw there were some videos on Chef and saw that opscode provides some prebuilt stuff for many common cases that you can build on so I picked it without even investigating Puppet any further.

No clue if either is better but it's one of the cases where just picking any is good enough anyways. Pretty sure Puppet and Chef are roughly equal especially for my meager use cases

Thanks for this post, I keep meaning to try this, I'll actually do it now thanks to your gist.

I'm not convinced it is strictly over Win8. Isn't Apple PC sales down too?

I think the reasons are:

1- Everyone sort of knows that Moore's Law is over with, even if they can't express it. Years ago, you could buy a Win7 with an i7 w/ 6g RAM and today, you can buy a Win8 with an i7 w/ 6g RAM. There is no feeling that you can upgrade and there is no one drooling over the newest computer. Same argument goes for Apple. They obviously knew the writing is on the wall or they would have came out with a new OS or a new line of PC's by now. Go to Best Buy and try out a new computer, but think along the lines of someone who doesn't know anything: What is really new?

Think of all the problems that existed even 5 years ago that aren't an issue today: low memory (500 gigs is standard now), ample speeds, no need to upgrade RAM, and all that stuff. The cheapening of the product allowed people to live on an even keel to each other, but it also created an ecosystem where you can install a web browser, perhaps MS Word, store 10 years of music, and three lifetimes of photos. This is efficiency and "good enough" not matter what else is rolled out. It's classic utilitarian economic thinking.

2- Win8 came out way too soon. People are still using XP and I think the adaption of Win7 is fairly recent. It stinks of money grabbing. What did Win8 do that Win7 couldn't do? The timing of Vista was fairly poor because people weren't sick of XP yet. History is simply repeating itself.

3- The only way that Win8 makes any sense is on a touch screen device. That was critical. The press was given a bunch of machines that were not touch-enabled, so the effect of using Win8 is hard to grasp. I've used touch-screen and non-touch screen versions, and the difference is beyond anything I could explain outside of the fact that it totally blows without touch screen and it is emersive and wonderful on a touch screen.

4- Surface. Oops. The bad press from that device was enough to push upgrading or buying anything new out of anyone's mind.

5- I think the average PC user, by rote of its ubiquity, is less educated about the product now than they were 5 years ago. This is an extension of the effect that the product tends to always work. There is no need to learn about upgrading the disk drive from 20g to 100g to improve performance, etc. Apple and MS can hang the carrot on the stick, but what use is it to do so if the average user can't even recognize a carrot? Why does a user care about improved security via admin users and other vague terms (if they even get what an Admin is in the first place)?

Apple and MS are facing the same problems, IMO. There has been nothing particularly revolutionary for a few years now. Nothing that is exciting enough for people to run out and buy the latest and the greatest. What gadget has came out that makes me want to run out and buy it? Grant it, I could use a better tablet that is 10" but that isn't really a new thing, just buyer's remorse. I'm going to hold off on this because I think that Lenovo Yoga and similar style of computers is a better buy: I get a computer and a tablet rolled up in one. I think MS should seriously consider taking a page from that book and pushing for the computer / tablet cross-over market.

puppet vs chef boils down to:

do you think writing your configs in ruby is the most efficient? choose chef.

do you think writing your configs in a DSL designed for writing configs is worth it? choose puppet.

do you want the one with the longer history and larger user community? choose puppet.

Also people have tablets and cell phones that cover a huge chunk of the use cases for the average joe doe i.e. surfing the interwebs and mail. My guess is that enough of gaming moved away from PCs and towards mobile or consoles as well.

Outside of dedicated work stuff (programming, using an ERP, office software) the main reason people use PCs these days is
- they are still used to them, going to fade over time
- big monitors (might also be a used to it for many people)
- certain stuff like office

I know many users that would be totally fine not having a PC except for office. They can live without big monitors already. tl;dr: PC is a lot less of a "must own item" in the age of cells/tablets

This is a pretty lol comparison. But there's been a ton of stuff written about their differences elsewhere so I'll leave it at that.

I think the big monitor is actually really important to a lot of people (especially the older half of the population) but since the display is separate from the PC I don't think that's going to save the PC.

I also feel like you'll see more and more of the traditional "office stuff" being able to be supported by laptops/tablets/phones(?) connected to external peripherals.

There's also the possibility that as bandwidth grows you'll be able to offload a lot of the processing from the device itself and move some of the more traditionally CPU intensive activities off of PCs as well.

well, i wrote that off-the-cuff last night, so just in case i missed something, i did some googling.

here are two of the top hits for "puppet vs chef":

https://www.scriptrock.com/articles/...f-infographic/
http://bitfieldconsulting.com/puppet-vs-chef

both mention the criteria i stated, plus some other stuff that is, at best, equally important.

do you have a better comparison article or differentiating criteria?

"configs in ruby" vs "configs in a DSL designed for writing configs" misses so much (and isn't even a real comparison) that to call these 2 of 3 boiled down differences is silly.

You skipped over this whole aspect (which is one of the biggest differences imo):

Anyway, I don't want to get into it because its like emacs vs vim. There are pros and cons to each and the reality is that using either is probably better than so many other options.

I just thought your "boiled down differences" was silly and kind of dishonest.

Hey guys,

So I assume that knowing puppet and/or chef would make it super easy to, say, create a new EC2 instance on amazon and set it up with, say, nginx and unicorn, and a sinatra or rails app ready to go.

This sounds awesome, but from some quick googling I fear that actually getting to that point would be a good deal of learning and work. But I also saw this:

Does this mean that I could find a puppet or chef script online somewhere that does exactly what I want? If so, where?

Thanks!

I have to say reading everything here, I already know I'd prefer Chef.

I tend not to like as much things that try to be too clever.

I haven't done much of our chef setup/configuration but I know most common things have existing recipes here: http://community.opscode.com/

The DSL stuff is what gets me. Admittedly I don't know much about the latest version of Puppet but anytime someone has forced me to live entirely in a DSL (or even just made it hard to get out of it) I quickly get to a point that makes me angry.

With my now ancient PC, I am not the most suitable person to talk about it but from what I have seen on the web, nobody seems to agree about the end of Moore's law. Yet the most pessimistic predictions give it until 2020.

BL

I missed that. Yeah Moore's law is far from over. The emphasis on pure clock speed has ended though if thats something. And its probably true that CPU isn't the main blocker for what most people use computers for these days.

I think I'm discovering that I might be a good employee at a development shop vs a company. I like working on projects in small teams over bigger ones, and enjoy tackling different challenges.

I'd also love to maybe work at one down the road where I could take less pay and maybe finagle ~10 weeks vacation time out of it. I have some family money, and value not burning out over a 6 figure income. Not sure if that's feasible. But 7 weeks at my first job or so as a developer working ~50 hours week is leaving me kind of on edge. If I could take a week off now and come back refreshed I'd probably be good... but it's not realistic at the moment.