Funnily enough... I have worked for a number of US multinationals (Cisco, Dell, ACS Inc) and have often found that if you wanted something done, rather than just talked about, Gantt charted, etc. then you engaged the Irish IT crew. I have even had IT directors come to me to "do an end run" around bureaucracy to get essential infrastructure done.
One large Europe wide Oracle 11i project I was involved in was done in 18 months, whereas the US based equivalent was going on for years (ended up having it's own building!).
There is a significant amount of IT talent in Ireland, and Dublin is seen as a "young persons" city, so it tends to attract more and more young professionals from all over Europe.
Some disclaimers: 1) I am Irish, so I am sure to be biased. That said, some great colleagues, and friends were / are American. I just feel that they are sometimes "defeated" by the business environment over there. 2) I am not saying that some of the project management / admin stuff was not worthwhile, but I can't count the number of hours of my life that I can not get back due to wasting away on conference calls to the US
Discovered CD WOW just before christmas, and it saved me a packet. Normal, if you want to call it that, price for a CD here is in the region of 17.50 Euro+ or about $22.25 per cd. CD-WOW were selling for 13.95 Euro including postage.
The local RIAA, IRMA, www.irma.ie, took CD-wow.ie to court as well. The public is not pleased, as we are already the most expensive country in Europe, and the culture of the fast buck, and ripoff is prevalent everywhere. They are forcing CD-WOW to add 3 Euro.
I for one will never buy a cd from an Irish shop that I can get in www.cd-wow.com.hk... just watch those little packets fly!!
I worked briefly for {Insert Name of Very Large, "Horseman of the Internet" Network Company here}, and while there got to hear some interesting stuff - like the fact that early routers were compiled on SUN & Solaris - and that an engineer once discussed this in a newsgroup - fired & NDA'd so quickly, he didn't know what hit him!!
Solaris based routers - you don't know how close!!
(BTW - every SUN system I run now (Hundreds, say going on 500, including 3 F15K's) has a minimum of 9 NIC's, two production, management, backup, a few others for fun, yada, yada - the whole Linux on enterprise hardware is getting tiring, all though, I would like some more tools in Solaris by default...)
Try a 140 mile round trip every day of the week (Commutting from Limerick to Cork in Ireland to work as a Sun Sys Admin for a Major US multinational). The funny thing is EVERYTHING I support is in the US, and I have to VPN in from the office to connect anyway. I can do the same at home (often have too).
After taking most of the journey this morning at 30mph due to ice, I say roll on telecommutting!!
Man, I can't believe I am reading this. Deja Vu all over. I used to work for an eCommerce company in Ireland, when I witnessed the Marketing manager (how strange) ask one of the developers for a list of ALL unregistered domains.
His reply:
...that's like making a list of everything that isn't green!
Obviously this wasn't sinking in:
... so you just won't do it! Is that it?
Prompted my first ever email to Scott Adams, one of many while there.
Too True!!! I wanted to buy an IPOD for my girlfriend, but baulked at the www.apple.com/iestore price of Euro399 for the 10Gb one, especially with the exchange rate of Euro1:$1.15. This was working out at $460 for what can be ordered on apple.com for $299. Extortion or what!!!
So I just 'happened' to be in the states for three weeks, and attempted to order an engraved IPOD for shipping to a US address - NO JOY!! They cancelled my order because my VISA wasn't american. Ended up buying one in the Dallas Apple Store, and it's working beautifully with USB2 on XP (even if Music Match is one of the worst pieces of software ever!!)
I like the apple stuff, would probably buy more, but they make it difficult to buy something. It's not as if I am from one of the countries known for major fraud - Ireland.
Not so in places like Doolin. While I am living in Sydney, Oz at the moment, Doolin is not far from my home town. While the laws state pubs must close at 11:30p.m. Sun-Wed, and 12:30p.m. Thurs-Sat, most pubs take a flexible view of this (i.e. you will still be singing into your beer at 2,3,4 or later....). Depends on how close the pub is to the nearest Garda (Police) station....
Re:Brasilians do not have last names?
on
World Cup Final
·
· Score: 1
IT is claimed that Pele's nickname was given to him by an Irish Missionary Priest, based on the Irish word for a football, Peile.
I have implemented a few of these solutions, and guess what they work!!! And what's more there is still that lovely jaw dropping sound when you first demostrate the smart card bit. They are a great solution, but perhaps not for everyone.
Where I have found them to be very useful is College and School campus's (Sp?). As a student I would have loved the ability to do my projects, feel the need for a coffee an a bite to eat, stroll down the the cafeteria, and check up on my stuff from there.
Another way they are being used is providing a centralised Sun SPARC compute resource for Post Graduate & Doctorate students in labs and offices all over the campus. Check out http://www.bcs.ie/tipperaryinstitute.pdf.
I have never used SCO Unix but I have a lot of experience with OpenServer. IMHO "scoadmin", the tool administring everything on a sco box, was a work of art.
The transparent (to the user) method it had for Kernel compiles is something I would love to see Linux do. Not that I haven't cut a few Linux kernels myself, but it was very neat.
Another great thing was the software installer, and driver support from major manufacturers. Download drivers from Compaq, go to scoadmin/software, add the new software and it would recompile the kernel if needed. Sweet!!
Very true. I haven't downloaded StarOffice/OpenOffice in a while, but maybe that is something they should focus on, which might generate a true competitor to MS Office.
That said, I am not a technology evanglist(sp!) by any means, and am a MCSE and Sun certified engineer. MS Office is wining the desktop war by being quite reasonable to good. Of all the alternative mail clients / office suites, StarOffice is the first one I have seen in use in the wild in a long long time.
Some may think that this is off-topic, but choice of client seems to determine the backend in the vast majority of cases.
Having worked for a IT sales organisation as a Systems Engineer, you quickly become used to corrupt email stores, sluggish mail systems, due mostly ignorance of the Sales people with it comes to their mission critical application. Outlook.pst file sizes in the order of 1GB is not unusual. Try opening something like that in pine! And this is not going to change for the better with the advent of unifed messaging (1 information store for voice, email, Video??).
Exchange is still a reasonable mail system even if the database is Access. Where I am working now (Large network kit manufacturer, sssh!) a team is in the process of rolling out what will be a mission critical Exchange 2000 implementation. Their major gripe / concern: having to place the exchange db's on several machines / EMC storage array. Despite the mission critical nature of this, no clustering is involved.
Oracle have really latched on to the storage / manageability / reliability problems inherent in large mail systems (and these are only going to get bigger and bigger)and have a great system based on Oracle 9i. It's benefits - huge scalability and easy clustering, management etc. What it doesn't have: the online calandering and collaboration tools that exchange has.
Notes is db backended as well, and being based on views, it can be very quick. It's cross platform, has a very rich client, and all the collaboration tools you could need. I can't understand why it seems to be losing ground to Exchange (at least that's my opinion of the Irish marketplace)
If anybody out there is considering developing a new mail system, the things I would look for are: * RDBMS Back end (ala Oracle or notes, not exchange) * LDAP integration for user management (ala Exchange) * Bolt on interfaces, such as http / imap / pop3 / wap / voice, others can be added as necessary * Support for clustering, replication * Perhaps built in HSM, allowing users to migrate old email at the server rather than at the client. Never give the user the opportunity to store email locally, it will come back to bite you !!!
I have developed a web-based Contact Management System for internal user where I work. It is comprised of an Access Database of 25,000 records, ODBC, Tango Application Server, and Apache Web server running on NT. While not under huge load (3-5 full time users) it performs quite well.
Why I mention this is because Pervasive are due to release (any day now) a Linux version of Tango Application Server (also available for Solaris, and various other *nix's). Their database product is also due soon for Linux, P.SQL, which is the original Betreive, and is both relational and transactional.
Tango App's are a breeze to develop, no asp, no perl (if you don't want it, use it if you do!!), no cgi, hooks to any ODBC compliant database, Oracle, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Funnily enough... I have worked for a number of US multinationals (Cisco, Dell, ACS Inc) and have often found that if you wanted something done, rather than just talked about, Gantt charted, etc. then you engaged the Irish IT crew. I have even had IT directors come to me to "do an end run" around bureaucracy to get essential infrastructure done.
One large Europe wide Oracle 11i project I was involved in was done in 18 months, whereas the US based equivalent was going on for years (ended up having it's own building!).
There is a significant amount of IT talent in Ireland, and Dublin is seen as a "young persons" city, so it tends to attract more and more young professionals from all over Europe.
Some disclaimers:
1) I am Irish, so I am sure to be biased. That said, some great colleagues, and friends were / are American. I just feel that they are sometimes "defeated" by the business environment over there.
2) I am not saying that some of the project management / admin stuff was not worthwhile, but I can't count the number of hours of my life that I can not get back due to wasting away on conference calls to the US
My > EUR0.02
Damn, and double damn!! It's a pain being screwed continuously...
Discovered CD WOW just before christmas, and it saved me a packet. Normal, if you want to call it that, price for a CD here is in the region of 17.50 Euro+ or about $22.25 per cd. CD-WOW were selling for 13.95 Euro including postage.
The local RIAA, IRMA, www.irma.ie, took CD-wow.ie to court as well. The public is not pleased, as we are already the most expensive country in Europe, and the culture of the fast buck, and ripoff is prevalent everywhere. They are forcing CD-WOW to add 3 Euro.
I for one will never buy a cd from an Irish shop that I can get in www.cd-wow.com.hk... just watch those little packets fly!!
FYI,
I worked briefly for {Insert Name of Very Large, "Horseman of the Internet" Network Company here}, and while there got to hear some interesting stuff - like the fact that early routers were compiled on SUN & Solaris - and that an engineer once discussed this in a newsgroup - fired & NDA'd so quickly, he didn't know what hit him!!
Solaris based routers - you don't know how close!!
(BTW - every SUN system I run now (Hundreds, say going on 500, including 3 F15K's) has a minimum of 9 NIC's, two production, management, backup, a few others for fun, yada, yada - the whole Linux on enterprise hardware is getting tiring, all though, I would like some more tools in Solaris by default...)
Try a 140 mile round trip every day of the week (Commutting from Limerick to Cork in Ireland to work as a Sun Sys Admin for a Major US multinational). The funny thing is EVERYTHING I support is in the US, and I have to VPN in from the office to connect anyway. I can do the same at home (often have too).
After taking most of the journey this morning at 30mph due to ice, I say roll on telecommutting!!
Too True!!! I wanted to buy an IPOD for my girlfriend, but baulked at the www.apple.com/iestore price of Euro399 for the 10Gb one, especially with the exchange rate of Euro1:$1.15. This was working out at $460 for what can be ordered on apple.com for $299. Extortion or what!!!
So I just 'happened' to be in the states for three weeks, and attempted to order an engraved IPOD for shipping to a US address - NO JOY!! They cancelled my order because my VISA wasn't american. Ended up buying one in the Dallas Apple Store, and it's working beautifully with USB2 on XP (even if Music Match is one of the worst pieces of software ever!!)
I like the apple stuff, would probably buy more, but they make it difficult to buy something. It's not as if I am from one of the countries known for major fraud - Ireland.
Not so in places like Doolin. While I am living in Sydney, Oz at the moment, Doolin is not far from my home town. While the laws state pubs must close at 11:30p.m. Sun-Wed, and 12:30p.m. Thurs-Sat, most pubs take a flexible view of this (i.e. you will still be singing into your beer at 2,3,4 or later....). Depends on how close the pub is to the nearest Garda (Police) station....
IT is claimed that Pele's nickname was given to him by an Irish Missionary Priest, based on the Irish word for a football, Peile.
Believe it if you like!!!
I have implemented a few of these solutions, and guess what they work!!! And what's more there is still that lovely jaw dropping sound when you first demostrate the smart card bit. They are a great solution, but perhaps not for everyone.
.
Where I have found them to be very useful is College and School campus's (Sp?). As a student I would have loved the ability to do my projects, feel the need for a coffee an a bite to eat, stroll down the the cafeteria, and check up on my stuff from there.
Another way they are being used is providing a centralised Sun SPARC compute resource for Post Graduate & Doctorate students in labs and offices all over the campus. Check out http://www.bcs.ie/tipperaryinstitute.pdf
Regards,
JB
I have never used SCO Unix but I have a lot of experience with OpenServer. IMHO "scoadmin", the tool administring everything on a sco box, was a work of art.
The transparent (to the user) method it had for Kernel compiles is something I would love to see Linux do. Not that I haven't cut a few Linux kernels myself, but it was very neat.
Another great thing was the software installer, and driver support from major manufacturers. Download drivers from Compaq, go to scoadmin/software, add the new software and it would recompile the kernel if needed. Sweet!!
Just picking up one of your points:
"The average user does not have an SQL database installed on their desktop systems"
Should they even be allowed to store mail locally, SQL DB or no. I have seen so many "dummy spits" when locally stored email goes bang!!
This is one area where coherent client-server is a must.
JB
Very true. I haven't downloaded StarOffice/OpenOffice in a while, but maybe that is something they should focus on, which might generate a true competitor to MS Office.
That said, I am not a technology evanglist(sp!) by any means, and am a MCSE and Sun certified engineer. MS Office is wining the desktop war by being quite reasonable to good. Of all the alternative mail clients / office suites, StarOffice is the first one I have seen in use in the wild in a long long time.
Some may think that this is off-topic, but choice of client seems to determine the backend in the vast majority of cases.
JB
Hi,
.pst file sizes in the order of 1GB is not unusual. Try opening something like that in pine! And this is not going to change for the better with the advent of unifed messaging (1 information store for voice, email, Video??).
Having worked for a IT sales organisation as a Systems Engineer, you quickly become used to corrupt email stores, sluggish mail systems, due mostly ignorance of the Sales people with it comes to their mission critical application. Outlook
Exchange is still a reasonable mail system even if the database is Access. Where I am working now (Large network kit manufacturer, sssh!) a team is in the process of rolling out what will be a mission critical Exchange 2000 implementation. Their major gripe / concern: having to place the exchange db's on several machines / EMC storage array. Despite the mission critical nature of this, no clustering is involved.
Oracle have really latched on to the storage / manageability / reliability problems inherent in large mail systems (and these are only going to get bigger and bigger)and have a great system based on Oracle 9i. It's benefits - huge scalability and easy clustering, management etc. What it doesn't have: the online calandering and collaboration tools that exchange has.
Notes is db backended as well, and being based on views, it can be very quick. It's cross platform, has a very rich client, and all the collaboration tools you could need. I can't understand why it seems to be losing ground to Exchange (at least that's my opinion of the Irish marketplace)
If anybody out there is considering developing a new mail system, the things I would look for are:
* RDBMS Back end (ala Oracle or notes, not exchange)
* LDAP integration for user management (ala Exchange)
* Bolt on interfaces, such as http / imap / pop3 / wap / voice, others can be added as necessary
* Support for clustering, replication
* Perhaps built in HSM, allowing users to migrate old email at the server rather than at the client. Never give the user the opportunity to store email locally, it will come back to bite you !!!
Just my few cent.
Jonathan Bourke
I have developed a web-based Contact Management System for internal user where I work. It is comprised of an Access Database of 25,000 records, ODBC, Tango Application Server, and Apache Web server running on NT. While not under huge load (3-5 full time users) it performs quite well.
Why I mention this is because Pervasive are due to release (any day now) a Linux version of Tango Application Server (also available for Solaris, and various other *nix's). Their database product is also due soon for Linux, P.SQL, which is the original Betreive, and is both relational and transactional.
Tango App's are a breeze to develop, no asp, no perl (if you don't want it, use it if you do!!), no cgi, hooks to any ODBC compliant database, Oracle, etc.
http://www.pervasive.com/products/pervasive2000/ta ngo2000-desc.html
I know of other building blocks for Linux based e-Commerce sites, if people want to get in touch (Credit Card payments in 116 currencies for example)