As with many things. The most exciting advances come from the slick integration of two disciplines. Rather than seeing advantages people tend to choose a camp and then play war. It is human nature to compete with other groups. I think ultimately neither will win outright. We will just get an even richer mix of set ups. MMO's (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) need the best of both world, they will take advantage of a thick client and the interactivity of serving linked data from the cloud. Also there are still huge issues in scaling applications for use in the cloud. To keep things responsive we need better hardware. Multi cores to allow parallel processing, and faster ways of storing persistent data.

Steve O'Brien A successful person isn't necessarily better than her less successful peers at solving problems; her pattern-recognition facilities have just learned what problems are worth solving. - Ray Kurzweil www.newicon.net

It's quite shocking the number of people who only trust in themselves. This really doesn't do you any favors in the long run. For a start it kinda suggests you need to work a little your social skills! I once felt exactly the same. Then I realized that my dreams were far to big to become a reality relying only on myself! I came to the conclusion that unless I code up an intelligent being, I'm not going to get very far by myself. Trust is earned you don't have to trust everyone, be frank if they don't do it to standard then tell them. Processes above tools any day thats an easy one. AS for people, they should be trusted to develop the processes with you. The guys following the process should feel responsible for improving and maintaining them with support from their managers. The guys doing the work should also be working on how they do it! Managers should facilitate this, they should get their hands dirty and understand things from the bottom up. This rarely happens how many times have you had to follow a really dumb process? But don't moan too much the coding world is far more advanced in terms of processes and standards than many other industries. This comes with the job a good coder secretly get all excited by the idea of standards.

Steve O'Brien A successful person isn't necessarily better than her less successful peers at solving problems; her pattern-recognition facilities have just learned what problems are worth solving. - Ray Kurzweil www.newicon.net

Hi Billy, No problem at all. This is an interesting and sometimes frustrating topic. It requires large amounts of energy and you need management buy in. Sometimes training courses can inspire change. Alternatively start your own company with your own culture! One of the reasons Toyota is so successful is because they pay so much attention to their company culture. Plus processes and standards are not used appropriately in many organisations, where they become stuffy, and inflexible and even seems to inhibit work. On the other hand if used appropriately they can act as steps on the stairway to perfection. You end up getting so ahead of your competitors that their is oceans between you. As is the case with Toyota. If you find this all interesting i would recommend reading the E-Myth by Micheal Gerber (or the audio book) and/or the Toyota way, this is especially useful if you are considering starting your own business.

Steve O'Brien A successful person isn't necessarily better than her less successful peers at solving problems; her pattern-recognition facilities have just learned what problems are worth solving. - Ray Kurzweil www.newicon.net

The defining of a standard is more important than what the standard actually states. The end result is consistency. In large organisations it can be difficult, the key is to involve everyone in the discussions. You want to come to a common consensus and then implement it rapidly. It might take a long time to reach a consensus, but lots of interesting things will come up. Also it is important to make it clear that the guys doing the coding are responsible for defining the standards, the manaqers should act as trainer and enablers making sure new recruits are aware of their role to maintain, follow and help develop those standards. You must make it clear that you are not trying to tell people how to code! Any decent programmer should secretly love the thought of working with and developing standards even if they oppose resistance to it initially. The key is to highlight the fact that they are responsible for the definitions, its not going to be a management decision forced upon them. A good way to start is to have some collaboration perhaps on a wiki. Thus allowing flexibility in the generation of the standards and also to help get people involved. Ultimately 1 person has to be accountable and responsible for managing the "released" standards. Also it is good to start with something. Find a good general standard and get peoples feedback on it, then try to implement it. Well I hope that gives you a few ideas. It is more of a cultural shift you are trying to achieve. Working from, maintaining and constantly improving standards is a hugely powerful way of working. It is imperative for any company to focus large amounts of time working ON the way they do things rather than constantly firefighting - working in it. The "we just haven't got time now, we're too busy" scenario never ends. The key is to offset the short term, with a much longer term vision! Steve O'Brien A successful person isn't necessarily better than her less successful peers at solving problems; her pattern-recognition facilities have just learned what problems are worth solving. www.newicon.net

Perhaps people love apple because its such an innocent association, how can an apple be bad? I myself feel this love towards apple, their products are excellent, but they do have problems, my iphone has had to be completely wiped twice and once it took several days before the restore function worked, i was left with an inoperable brick. However for some reason i still love it. NOT TO MENTION how proprietary EVERYTHING they do is! Apple only works well with apple if they can help it. Microsoft do seem to be making efforts to make things more open. Perhaps its just the name. "Microsoft decide to take over the world and enslave humanity" headline fits but "the evil cooperation apple"?

I work routinely with very clever people, unfortunately true brilliance takes far more than academic qualifications. Some have it, some are too arrogant to realize they don't. In fact academia is a bit of a farce, it just proves your ability to learn facts, it does not by any means prepare you for a working practical environment. The most important quality is continuous self improvement!

Hi Everyone. I need to get the top position of a control relative to the form, regardless of which panel it is docked or placed on. I am finding that the top attribute of a control (in this case a tree view control) returns top values relative to its panel. Anyone know any magic to fix this? fall down 6 times stand up 7