There are a variety of reasons an IT manager may be *forced* by circumstance to prefer one solution over another
For example, in the company I work for, our software develpment team built a sophisticated interface for our online learning products out of ColdFusion.
At the beginning of the product cycle we ran three versions side by side, a Windows NT site with IIS, a Windows NT site with Apache, and a *nix site with Apache.
After 2 months of development we ran into serious problems with bot the Windows Apache and *nix Apache sites due to integration problems between ColdFusion and the web servers.
Allaire (maker of ColdFusion) sent in techs to investigate the problems, and after spending countless man hours at it, couldn't fix the problem and advised us to wait for the next code rev to fix it.
So, we continued onward with our Windows IIS portion of the project and the other two gradually fell behind.
Nearly 8 months later Allaire released the next major code rev, and guess what? No fix for our problem.
Eventually the decision was made to stop supporting the Apache versions of the site and devote the development time to the Windows NT/IIS solution.
Since it was launched over a year ago, we have had exactly 5 minutes of unplanned down time, due to a problem with our co-location provider's internal network (ATT hosting).
Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, we haven't had any severe problems with our Windows servers. The different portions of the site are load-balanced/clustered, so we can bring individual servers out and patch them when needed, so far twice in a year, without the site being unavailable.
Due to proper security practice, our site wasn't affected by any worms, trojans, etc.
That being said, I think my main thrust is that IT should have an open mind and use the best tool for the job, and not let prejudices color their decisions one way or another.
Sometimes the solution can be suprising.
The cost of licensing software is very minor compared to cumulative costs for supporting the wrong platform/solution out of some hard-headed belief that OSS is the only way to go, in our case it would have meant an inoperative product, or an extremely lengthened development cycle. Pretty serious stuff for a small company, we can't afford to waste weeks of developer time hunting down product bugs for other companies, nor can we afford to drastically miss launch dates in a competetive market.
You're all stuck in your high and mighty 'don't reprimand the genius' bs that you refuse to lay blame where it belongs: with the parents.
They pushed him, and pushed him, and pushed him. And he broke.
This is not he school's fault.
His parents were responsible for indoctrinating him in the conventions of society, of following rules, and of dealing with disappointment. They failed.
Don't give me any of this crap about how unfair it is the punish kids for screwing with computers, that is IRRELEVANT. He didn't get kicked out of school, or sent to juvenile hall, he got suspended, not a too-harsh punishment in reality.
The kid overreacted because his parents were laying some brain-washing mumbo-jumbo on him thick and heavy, and he couldn't take it any more.
This is Darwin at his best, culling the herd of another mentally unstable person, even if this instability was caused by bad parenting.
Don't even dare to flame me for my remarks about bad parenting, I am a parent, and what these people did to their child disgusts me.
People would like to close their eyes so that a huge problem would disappear without having to deal with it, and then they dress this up as a 'solution' and say they're 'saving millions of dollars per mile' for their cabling project.
Think about this, New York is a festering hive of who-knows-what, layer upon layer of cabling, pipes, electrical conduits, and other miscellaneous detrius of centuries of city living.
New York has been the most densely populated 'modern' city for quite a long time, and by that I mean all the little things like electrical and water access everywhere, etc.
In the past when something broke, they pathced it, instead of doing a more thorough fix, they just paved over a huge sinkhole in a road without looking into why it sunk in the first place, they just pile more new crap on top of the old crap until it's impossible to sort out what lies under the surface.
Now someone want to use an ancient (by modern standards) system, in whatever unknown condition it is in, and try to make a new utility out of it. People are going to come to depend on this utility like they depend on electricity and water, but the infrastructure being used to build it is already over a hundred years old.
'We don't want to dig up the city' they say, 'it'll cost too much money'.
Yes, it will cost a lot of money, but you know what? That money will actually go stright into the economy, workmen will have jobs to go to for the next decade; city infrastructure will be vastly improved as old pipes and cabling are exposed and replaced as their condition is shown; perhaps a new design in city infrastructure management will be put in place so that the same problem doesn't happen again, we could make the entire city of New York what the Epcot Center was supposed to be.
Do you people not have vision at all? This could be the spark for the largest urban redevelopment project ever attempted by humankind, but all you people can do is put your hands over your eyes and carry on the chant 'Do it the cheap fast way!'.
So you don't consider field names to be critical data?
I'll leave that one alone, as I'm not your manager...
'~ms tools translates into time and money' Actually, all the tools I need and use are provided free with my operating system, gratis from MS. If you ever feel the next to double-check this astounding revelation, go to some productive person you know who runs NT workstation and ask them to display the Administrative Tools folder in the start menu. Then, if you're feeling really punchy, download the free resource kit which is just chock full of goodies to manage an NT enterprise. Watch out though, you may be required to fire up notepad and read a few text files to figure out what they do.
'~no local bulk load in Oracle'
RTFM. Need I really say more?
'~different hardware'
Well, I just reloaded to my laptop here at just over 110MB per minute. MS SQL 7.0 on Win2k, 600 mhz p3, 128 mb ram Dell inspiron 3800. Your desktop is probably about as powerful, yes? btw, I was running Outlook 2k, Work2k, 8 internet explorer windows, my firewall monitoring/logging utility, 2 command prompts, an ssh shell, dns administrator, ws-ftp client, norton antivirus autoprotect agent, and SQL server desktop edition when I just ran my restore or a 1.2 gb database off my network server to my laptop...not even a local copy of the data.
I have a few beefs with your post... 1. Oracle on NT a. '~crash by mistyping...' The answer to that of course, is to not mistype mission critical data, you should be using scripts for bulk trtansfer anyway. b. '~no remote management on NT' Where the hell does this come from? Oh, I know. You have no clue how to manage an NT enterprise, you're just taling out your a$$. As an NT engineer, I can do ANYTHING from my laptop, from ANYWHERE in the world. Using only MS tools and a few scripts I wrote in vbscript. I concede that sometimes it would be nice to have a 'true' terminal connection to the server, but you don't 'need' it. 2. '~Bulk import of Oracle for Linux.' Only 20mb a minute? bwahahahaha I can reload data into my NT, MS SQL server at over 150MB PER MINUTE. So, after a 3.5 hour restore, I can go to the bar and get a few brews while you sweat away for almost ANOTHER ENTIRE DAY. Oh, and get this. I can buy RAID tape devices that are supported under NT, and restore at up to 600MB per minute. Anybody want to restore a 30GB db in less than hour? I do. 3. '~use restores on backup db' Why not use any one of many excellent database mirroring/synchronization products on the market? Setup both servers, specify replication partners, and don't worry about it anymore. You may want to learn how to manage enterprise applications before spouting off on them. And before anyone flames me as a M$ booster or something, let me say that I do actually have and use *nix systems in my work. However, they do not run my enterprise messaging applications, databases, etc; they are for development processes because my company's clients require us to test on compliant systems. (I also use one of them for security / penetration testing. The tools developed for the *nix platform are better than on NT. However, I believe this is due to a loyal fanbase of long-time *nix users, and not because of any perceived flaws or inequalities of other os's. EvilGrin Fighting misinformation wherever it can be found.
Slashdot Mirror
What industry do you work for? I've also been on a several week troubleshoot that is driving me insane.
For example, in the company I work for, our software develpment team built a sophisticated interface for our online learning products out of ColdFusion. At the beginning of the product cycle we ran three versions side by side, a Windows NT site with IIS, a Windows NT site with Apache, and a *nix site with Apache. After 2 months of development we ran into serious problems with bot the Windows Apache and *nix Apache sites due to integration problems between ColdFusion and the web servers. Allaire (maker of ColdFusion) sent in techs to investigate the problems, and after spending countless man hours at it, couldn't fix the problem and advised us to wait for the next code rev to fix it. So, we continued onward with our Windows IIS portion of the project and the other two gradually fell behind. Nearly 8 months later Allaire released the next major code rev, and guess what? No fix for our problem. Eventually the decision was made to stop supporting the Apache versions of the site and devote the development time to the Windows NT/IIS solution.
Since it was launched over a year ago, we have had exactly 5 minutes of unplanned down time, due to a problem with our co-location provider's internal network (ATT hosting).
Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, we haven't had any severe problems with our Windows servers. The different portions of the site are load-balanced/clustered, so we can bring individual servers out and patch them when needed, so far twice in a year, without the site being unavailable. Due to proper security practice, our site wasn't affected by any worms, trojans, etc.
That being said, I think my main thrust is that IT should have an open mind and use the best tool for the job, and not let prejudices color their decisions one way or another.
Sometimes the solution can be suprising.
The cost of licensing software is very minor compared to cumulative costs for supporting the wrong platform/solution out of some hard-headed belief that OSS is the only way to go, in our case it would have meant an inoperative product, or an extremely lengthened development cycle. Pretty serious stuff for a small company, we can't afford to waste weeks of developer time hunting down product bugs for other companies, nor can we afford to drastically miss launch dates in a competetive market.
Thanks for reading this, have a good day.
Can you imagine using his techniques to search through Google's image archives, or perhaps a gnutella network just to see what is sitting out there?
This sounds like it could uncover yet another seedy underbelly of world culture.
I imagine there could potentially be millions of hidden messages out there that noone knows about.
I'm serious, it is the parents fault.
You're all stuck in your high and mighty 'don't reprimand the genius' bs that you refuse to lay blame where it belongs: with the parents.
They pushed him, and pushed him, and pushed him. And he broke.
This is not he school's fault.
His parents were responsible for indoctrinating him in the conventions of society, of following rules, and of dealing with disappointment. They failed.
Don't give me any of this crap about how unfair it is the punish kids for screwing with computers, that is IRRELEVANT. He didn't get kicked out of school, or sent to juvenile hall, he got suspended, not a too-harsh punishment in reality.
The kid overreacted because his parents were laying some brain-washing mumbo-jumbo on him thick and heavy, and he couldn't take it any more.
This is Darwin at his best, culling the herd of another mentally unstable person, even if this instability was caused by bad parenting.
Don't even dare to flame me for my remarks about bad parenting, I am a parent, and what these people did to their child disgusts me.
People would like to close their eyes so that a huge problem would disappear without having to deal with it, and then they dress this up as a 'solution' and say they're 'saving millions of dollars per mile' for their cabling project.
Think about this, New York is a festering hive of who-knows-what, layer upon layer of cabling, pipes, electrical conduits, and other miscellaneous detrius of centuries of city living.
New York has been the most densely populated 'modern' city for quite a long time, and by that I mean all the little things like electrical and water access everywhere, etc.
In the past when something broke, they pathced it, instead of doing a more thorough fix, they just paved over a huge sinkhole in a road without looking into why it sunk in the first place, they just pile more new crap on top of the old crap until it's impossible to sort out what lies under the surface.
Now someone want to use an ancient (by modern standards) system, in whatever unknown condition it is in, and try to make a new utility out of it. People are going to come to depend on this utility like they depend on electricity and water, but the infrastructure being used to build it is already over a hundred years old.
'We don't want to dig up the city' they say, 'it'll cost too much money'.
Yes, it will cost a lot of money, but you know what? That money will actually go stright into the economy, workmen will have jobs to go to for the next decade; city infrastructure will be vastly improved as old pipes and cabling are exposed and replaced as their condition is shown; perhaps a new design in city infrastructure management will be put in place so that the same problem doesn't happen again, we could make the entire city of New York what the Epcot Center was supposed to be.
Do you people not have vision at all? This could be the spark for the largest urban redevelopment project ever attempted by humankind, but all you people can do is put your hands over your eyes and carry on the chant 'Do it the cheap fast way!'.
Your lack of vision disturbe me.
rm -f -r /* oops, did my typo just affect the stability of my server? EvilGrin
So you don't consider field names to be critical data?
I'll leave that one alone, as I'm not your manager...
'~ms tools translates into time and money'
Actually, all the tools I need and use are provided free with my operating system, gratis from MS. If you ever feel the next to double-check this astounding revelation, go to some productive person you know who runs NT workstation and ask them to display the Administrative Tools folder in the start menu.
Then, if you're feeling really punchy, download the free resource kit which is just chock full of goodies to manage an NT enterprise.
Watch out though, you may be required to fire up notepad and read a few text files to figure out what they do.
'~no local bulk load in Oracle'
RTFM. Need I really say more?
'~different hardware'
Well, I just reloaded to my laptop here at just over 110MB per minute. MS SQL 7.0 on Win2k, 600 mhz p3, 128 mb ram Dell inspiron 3800.
Your desktop is probably about as powerful, yes?
btw, I was running Outlook 2k, Work2k, 8 internet explorer windows, my firewall monitoring/logging utility, 2 command prompts, an ssh shell, dns administrator, ws-ftp client, norton antivirus autoprotect agent, and SQL server desktop edition when I just ran my restore or a 1.2 gb database off my network server to my laptop...not even a local copy of the data.
EvilGrin
have a nice day
I have a few beefs with your post... 1. Oracle on NT a. '~crash by mistyping...' The answer to that of course, is to not mistype mission critical data, you should be using scripts for bulk trtansfer anyway. b. '~no remote management on NT' Where the hell does this come from? Oh, I know. You have no clue how to manage an NT enterprise, you're just taling out your a$$. As an NT engineer, I can do ANYTHING from my laptop, from ANYWHERE in the world. Using only MS tools and a few scripts I wrote in vbscript. I concede that sometimes it would be nice to have a 'true' terminal connection to the server, but you don't 'need' it. 2. '~Bulk import of Oracle for Linux.' Only 20mb a minute? bwahahahaha I can reload data into my NT, MS SQL server at over 150MB PER MINUTE. So, after a 3.5 hour restore, I can go to the bar and get a few brews while you sweat away for almost ANOTHER ENTIRE DAY. Oh, and get this. I can buy RAID tape devices that are supported under NT, and restore at up to 600MB per minute. Anybody want to restore a 30GB db in less than hour? I do. 3. '~use restores on backup db' Why not use any one of many excellent database mirroring/synchronization products on the market? Setup both servers, specify replication partners, and don't worry about it anymore. You may want to learn how to manage enterprise applications before spouting off on them. And before anyone flames me as a M$ booster or something, let me say that I do actually have and use *nix systems in my work. However, they do not run my enterprise messaging applications, databases, etc; they are for development processes because my company's clients require us to test on compliant systems. (I also use one of them for security / penetration testing. The tools developed for the *nix platform are better than on NT. However, I believe this is due to a loyal fanbase of long-time *nix users, and not because of any perceived flaws or inequalities of other os's. EvilGrin Fighting misinformation wherever it can be found.