To a Mac/Linux user like me, it sure sounds like babying. The hoops you Windows users have to jump through just to keep your systems "clean" is amazing. Especially on Windows 9x. Sure, Macs require some care and feeding, but it is more along the lines of changing the oil in your car regularly. With Windows it is more like walking on thin ice.
It is just common sence stuff that would keep even windows XP from crashing. One of these days, system restore is going to let you down and you will know exactly what i mean.
Thankfully, I don't have to put up with XP either. But I'd certainly prefer XP (or 2000) over 9x. Even on lower end hardware. Windows 9x/ME are abominations that should never have existed.
Because 2 people focused on doing what they are each good at are more effective and efficient than 1 person bouncing back and forth trying to do it all. The only problem would be situations where there simply isn't enough work to keep more than one busy.
but all the companies want somebody who has 10+ years experience AJAX, XHTML, CSS, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash, Javascript, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion each.
Seems like good criteria for deciding who not to work for.
Definitely not stable - I agree with all the other opinions posted. You constantly have to be on your toes, both from a front-end perspective (understanding HTML/XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc...) as well as from the programming perspective (different options like ASP.NET w/C# or any other myriad languages, Java/JSP, PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc...) And as if it didn't get worse, the languages themselves seem to change as frequently as the which ones are in vogue (take PHP, for example.) And then, at a higher level than even the web development languages, you have the various frameworks that they utilize (Struts, Ruby on Rails, and others).
I definitly wouldn't recommend that anyone try to be both a frontend and backend expert. I've found tjat good HTML/CSS design and programming are not skill sets with much overlap. Very few people can do both really well. I would suggest that anyone serious about making solid web apps team up with someone (or many people) to complete a well rounded set. You many think "I am a Perl/PHP/Ruby/Java whiz, I can do HTML good enough..." No. You can't. Don't even try. Find a good framework with proper MVC model so you can decouple the front end from the backend and find someone (or a whole team) to complement your skills.
Although Javascript is a bit of an exception to the front-end/backend separation. As a programmer, you'll probably want to take on a lot of Javascript to help the designer.
I can't tell you how much my web development job satisfaction improved once I gave up on trying to be an XHTML/CSS expert. Now I can just ask the designer, "Do you have the layout done yet so i can hook it into the backend?"
And it is too bad, really. I would kill for a good OS X server (PowerPC) virtualization product. I've got a bunch of G4 towers running specialized services that are mostly idle. I know Parallels has workstation for Intel Macs, but thats just not very useful.
Normally I hate getting chain letters, but at $40/lb, it might not be such a bad deal. I'm not worried about bad luck so I'd just sell them when the price is high. Shall I email you my snail-mail address?
Dare I verbalize my thoughts on what you can do with your misguided assumptions...?:-)
Sorry, but you really did imply that you were using an older distribution because the machine has a mere 64MB of RAM. Given your other "strange" choices for OSes, I think it was appropriate to be a little baffled. I still think you are a little crazy, BTW. But what "PC hobbyists" aren't?;-)
Many people are willing to update a free peice of software to the most recent version, so users on an older Windows who use Firefox likely follow releases to a reasonable degree - without the continued support the issues in the older Firefox version will now be a means of infection which will produce the slowdowns on networks that noone likes.
Wouldn't continued security updates for older versions of Firefox be sufficient? I mean, if that is all you are worried about.
Maybe I just know more sysadmin types? A system administrator doesn't upgrade unless he has to, having a working system is better than being bleeding edge.
Well I am a sysadmin and I like to keep my systems up to date even if they are technically working fine. Debian, for example, is so easy to upgrade that is hard to justify keeping old Woody systems going. You never know when you are goign to want to run some new piece of software that requires some newer library or something. I have discovered over the years that it is much easier to keep a server up to date than to wait several years until it is so hopelessly out of date that upgrading becomes a major event.
One of the major advantages to using free software is that you can keep things up to date without worrying about budgets and licenses and crap. So why not take advantage of it?
As an OS/2 user who likes a certain amount of gaming, I need at least two boxes to keep me happy, and I hate dual-booting a lot. I've also found time to play with things like Solaris, BeOS, FreeBSD, and a number of Linux variants on occasion, mainly which makes having multiple desktop boxes useful. Welcome to the world of the PC hobbyist.:-) Old boxes are cheap, so why not collect a few?
Because they take up space, make noise, and suck electricity.
To be fair, it also runs Win2k, but I had an additional legal license for Win95 OSR2 and decided to see if it would run. It does. I'm in the process of replacing both with Mandrake 8.2 (which is old but fitting for a 64MB file server), though, so it'll soon be a moot point.
See, this is the kind detail that irks me. Any current linux distribution would work just fine with 64MB in the capacity of a file server without using significantely more RAM. And yet you choose an obsolete distribution. Baffling.
Why should we upgrade? i say we save up and wait for everything to die.
That isn't the way it works. Things dont' just all die at once. In most places, businesses and orgs, 'saving up' isn't much of an option. You either spend the money on IT or you spend it on something else. Replacing everything at once will be relatively expensive and disruptive. You could start by, say, upgrading the server to somethign that will support modern OSes. Then upgrade a few workstations here and there as they die.
You must have had a vastly different Windows 95 experience than I did. Just keeping it running and stable was a chore. That is what baffles me about people who choose to run Win95. I understand "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But as far as I could tell Win95 is broken. I mean, it was neat and all to see such graphics on a PC back in '95, but to do any serious work and to get any sense of stability in Windows back then required Windows NT, such as it was.
I use them rather heavily. Since I have an 8-port KVM switch at home, I can use a rather large mix of boxes on a regular basis, and I find that I tend to bounce between Warp 4 and Win95 OSR2 most of the time.
No offense, but you are a freak.
One of the Win95 OSR2 boxes is my secondary desktop box at home which I use almost daily (mainly things like Word 97, StarOffice 5.1a, FireFox, various MIDI apps for my Yamaha keyboard, Visio, etc.) and which is still my main gaming box (I play a lot of classics like UT, Tribes 1, TA, SC, AOE2, HomeWorld, NFS 3/4, Madden 2001, etc).
"Secondary" desktops?? WTF are you talking about? Do you ever leave teh house?
A second Win95 OSR2 box is my main fileserver (a Proliant 2500), and a third is smaller fileserver dedicated to MP3 files (an IBM IntelliStation 6899, which is a VERY nice PPro box).
Oh come on. Win95 as a server? On A Proliant 2500?
Most of the others are multiboot boxes which are booted into other things most of the time (Linux variants, eCS, or OS/2), but which are booted to Windows 95 OSR2 with a QuikMenu 4 desktop if I want to put together a gaming LAN, so those copies are mostly idle. That much less reason to upgrade them, though.
I suspect you might have some serious mental health issues. But if it works for you, more power to you.
Quite the opposite for me. The ease (and cheapness) of upgrade of Linux (well Debian, at least) makes it relatively trivial process. On one hand you have "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." On the other hand you have, "Hey, why won't this GTK+ app compile against my GTK+ 1.0 libraries!?" At least in the Linux world, staying up on the latest version of your distribution is almost a nececity if you want to take advantage of installing packaged versions of the latest software. Nobody is building.debs for Debian older than Woody, for example.
You're wrong, people do care about if something still runs on Mac OS 9, the people who have hardware which is still perfectly fine and an operating system that still does everything they need. These people see no reason to upgrade to a new machine with new operating system because it hold no benifits, it's just a bunch of money they'd rather use on something like bills.
The same people for whom OS 9 is still good enough tend to be the same people for whom old applications are good enough. And besides, they often don't have the resources to run the latest and greatest software even if they could. Also, a lot of people are "stuck" on old OSes because they want to run old software. So the whole point is moot. The rest of the world is better off when they can cut loose the legacy support. If Firefox is easier to support and debug and imrove because it drops tons of legacy support then I'm all for it. OS 9/Win95 user be damned.
These people are out there, and will stay out there for a long time. The Internet will always have traces of these legacy systems as long as it exists in it's current form, is it not better to at least try to give them something reasonably up-to-date in order to protect ourselves from their inevitable infections?
They are already reasonably protected from infections just by running software that nobody cares about writing malware for anymore. And we are protected from them because our software has long since been patched. So who cares? I'm sick of software than invests too much resources in legacy support. Microsoft being a prime example. If Microsoft had had the balls to say "Windows NT won't natively run software written for Win3.1/9x which doesn't obey certain security protocols" in the first place, maybe Windows users wouldn't be running Windows XP as admin all the time and we wouldn't have so many security problems. Microsoft should have done something like Apple and run non-NT apps in a "classic" sandbox until nearly everyone found modern alternatives. Legacy support does nothing but cripple modern software.
That is why OpenSSH runs on so many systems, it was meant to remove a insecurity via telnet and rlogin from the Internet, for everyone's benifit.
I'm sure if supporting some 11 year old system compromized the security of OpenSSH for everyone, they'd drop support in a heartbeat. Similarly, if support for obsolete OSes creates bloat and cruft in Firefox, I say drop it.
Oh sure, Microsoft has a policy of planned obsolescence. That is why you can seemlessly run Windows programs from 1995 on Windows XP (and Vista, I presume). Must be an extremely long term strategy. Sometimes planned obsolescence is a good thing. It is a good thing, for example, that Apple had the balls to ditch OS 9 completely and start from scratch. If only Microsoft had such balls.
I use Windows 95 OSR2 on several boxes at home, and nasties don't happen. Why? Because OSR2 doesn't support many of the infection vectors present in newer Win32 flavors. It's too old.
You use them or just happen to have them sitting around gathering dust? There is a difference. I used to "use" and old HP 9000 server in my house until I realized the difference between using a computer and simply being an ubergeek with a tendancy to collect crap.
'Cause they don't want to pay for a new version or bother getting a pirate copy, or deal with the headaches of upgrading, and maybe it simply works for them and feel no obligation to change?
I've personally never met anyone for whom Windows 98 Just Works. But I guess maybe that has something to do only being brought in when the Windows 98 shit hit the fan. Seriously though, who could still be running an original installation of Windows 98? Standard operating procedure for Win 98 pretty much dictates a fresh reinstall every so often anyway. Why not upgrade while you're at it?
What is it with Windows and legacy support, anyway? Only in the Windows world (it seems) do you get a significant number of people who stubornly refuse to give up their applications and OS from 1995. Well, I guess there might still be some Amiga users out there...;-) IF they're happy with an OS from before 2000, they should be happy with a browser from 2006. Can they really expect developers to continue to support them?
What's wrong with this? Does anyone care if Firefox runs on 7 year old Linux distributions? No. Do Mac users care if an application still runs on OS 9? No. There is no reason why anyone should be running anything less than Win 2k. If they are, they certainly shouldn't expect to be able to run the latest and greatest of software. If they are OK with an OS older than 2000, they should be OK running a browser version stuck in 2006. I say clean up the code and drop legacy support. Don't make Microsoft's mistake.
"Wires where you need it. Wireless where you'd like it." "It" being network access, of course. Wireless should be treated as a convenience in an office environment. It is not reliable. Especially in a high density place like Manhattan. You never know when someone is going to stomp on your channel space. And with all those radios (enough for 1 per 15 people), it will happen. Another consideration is performance. I don't care what kind super-duper-double-data wireless standard you run, it'll never perform like a good ol' fashioned 100Mbit full duplex switched network. And you won't have the option to go 1000Mbit where you need it unless you do some ad hoc wiring, which always turns out bad.
Just spend the cash to wire the office properly with good labeling and patch panels. You won't regret it. There really isn't any room for debate here. You'd be a fool to go all wireless.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes me want to cry. Does she have any idea what she is missing?
To a Mac/Linux user like me, it sure sounds like babying. The hoops you Windows users have to jump through just to keep your systems "clean" is amazing. Especially on Windows 9x. Sure, Macs require some care and feeding, but it is more along the lines of changing the oil in your car regularly. With Windows it is more like walking on thin ice.
Thankfully, I don't have to put up with XP either. But I'd certainly prefer XP (or 2000) over 9x. Even on lower end hardware. Windows 9x/ME are abominations that should never have existed.
-matthew
Because 2 people focused on doing what they are each good at are more effective and efficient than 1 person bouncing back and forth trying to do it all. The only problem would be situations where there simply isn't enough work to keep more than one busy.
Seems like good criteria for deciding who not to work for.
-matthew
I definitly wouldn't recommend that anyone try to be both a frontend and backend expert. I've found tjat good HTML/CSS design and programming are not skill sets with much overlap. Very few people can do both really well. I would suggest that anyone serious about making solid web apps team up with someone (or many people) to complete a well rounded set. You many think "I am a Perl/PHP/Ruby/Java whiz, I can do HTML good enough..." No. You can't. Don't even try. Find a good framework with proper MVC model so you can decouple the front end from the backend and find someone (or a whole team) to complement your skills.
Although Javascript is a bit of an exception to the front-end/backend separation. As a programmer, you'll probably want to take on a lot of Javascript to help the designer.
I can't tell you how much my web development job satisfaction improved once I gave up on trying to be an XHTML/CSS expert. Now I can just ask the designer, "Do you have the layout done yet so i can hook it into the backend?"
-matthew
And it is too bad, really. I would kill for a good OS X server (PowerPC) virtualization product. I've got a bunch of G4 towers running specialized services that are mostly idle. I know Parallels has workstation for Intel Macs, but thats just not very useful.
-matthew
Normally I hate getting chain letters, but at $40/lb, it might not be such a bad deal. I'm not worried about bad luck so I'd just sell them when the price is high. Shall I email you my snail-mail address?
-matthew
Dare I verbalize my thoughts on what you can do with your misguided assumptions...? :-)
;-)
Sorry, but you really did imply that you were using an older distribution because the machine has a mere 64MB of RAM. Given your other "strange" choices for OSes, I think it was appropriate to be a little baffled. I still think you are a little crazy, BTW. But what "PC hobbyists" aren't?
-matthew
Many people are willing to update a free peice of software to the most recent version, so users on an older Windows who use Firefox likely follow releases to a reasonable degree - without the continued support the issues in the older Firefox version will now be a means of infection which will produce the slowdowns on networks that noone likes.
Wouldn't continued security updates for older versions of Firefox be sufficient? I mean, if that is all you are worried about.
-matthew
Maybe I just know more sysadmin types? A system administrator doesn't upgrade unless he has to, having a working system is better than being bleeding edge.
Well I am a sysadmin and I like to keep my systems up to date even if they are technically working fine. Debian, for example, is so easy to upgrade that is hard to justify keeping old Woody systems going. You never know when you are goign to want to run some new piece of software that requires some newer library or something. I have discovered over the years that it is much easier to keep a server up to date than to wait several years until it is so hopelessly out of date that upgrading becomes a major event.
One of the major advantages to using free software is that you can keep things up to date without worrying about budgets and licenses and crap. So why not take advantage of it?
-matthew
As an OS/2 user who likes a certain amount of gaming, I need at least two boxes to keep me happy, and I hate dual-booting a lot. I've also found time to play with things like Solaris, BeOS, FreeBSD, and a number of Linux variants on occasion, mainly which makes having multiple desktop boxes useful. Welcome to the world of the PC hobbyist. :-) Old boxes are cheap, so why not collect a few?
Because they take up space, make noise, and suck electricity.
To be fair, it also runs Win2k, but I had an additional legal license for Win95 OSR2 and decided to see if it would run. It does. I'm in the process of replacing both with Mandrake 8.2 (which is old but fitting for a 64MB file server), though, so it'll soon be a moot point.
See, this is the kind detail that irks me. Any current linux distribution would work just fine with 64MB in the capacity of a file server without using significantely more RAM. And yet you choose an obsolete distribution. Baffling.
-matthew
Why should we upgrade? i say we save up and wait for everything to die.
That isn't the way it works. Things dont' just all die at once. In most places, businesses and orgs, 'saving up' isn't much of an option. You either spend the money on IT or you spend it on something else. Replacing everything at once will be relatively expensive and disruptive. You could start by, say, upgrading the server to somethign that will support modern OSes. Then upgrade a few workstations here and there as they die.
Then again, don't upgrade. Whatever works.
-matthew
All you have to do is baby it... No thanks.
-matthew
You must have had a vastly different Windows 95 experience than I did. Just keeping it running and stable was a chore. That is what baffles me about people who choose to run Win95. I understand "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But as far as I could tell Win95 is broken. I mean, it was neat and all to see such graphics on a PC back in '95, but to do any serious work and to get any sense of stability in Windows back then required Windows NT, such as it was.
-matthew
WinME? ROFL! That is universally recognized as one of Microsoft's biggest fuckups. And you CHOOSE to run it. I'll never figure some people out.
-matthew
I use them rather heavily. Since I have an 8-port KVM switch at home, I can use a rather large mix of boxes on a regular basis, and I find that I tend to bounce between Warp 4 and Win95 OSR2 most of the time.
No offense, but you are a freak.
One of the Win95 OSR2 boxes is my secondary desktop box at home which I use almost daily (mainly things like Word 97, StarOffice 5.1a, FireFox, various MIDI apps for my Yamaha keyboard, Visio, etc.) and which is still my main gaming box (I play a lot of classics like UT, Tribes 1, TA, SC, AOE2, HomeWorld, NFS 3/4, Madden 2001, etc).
"Secondary" desktops?? WTF are you talking about? Do you ever leave teh house?
A second Win95 OSR2 box is my main fileserver (a Proliant 2500), and a third is smaller fileserver dedicated to MP3 files (an IBM IntelliStation 6899, which is a VERY nice PPro box).
Oh come on. Win95 as a server? On A Proliant 2500?
Most of the others are multiboot boxes which are booted into other things most of the time (Linux variants, eCS, or OS/2), but which are booted to Windows 95 OSR2 with a QuikMenu 4 desktop if I want to put together a gaming LAN, so those copies are mostly idle. That much less reason to upgrade them, though.
I suspect you might have some serious mental health issues. But if it works for you, more power to you.
-matthew
Quite the opposite for me. The ease (and cheapness) of upgrade of Linux (well Debian, at least) makes it relatively trivial process. On one hand you have "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." On the other hand you have, "Hey, why won't this GTK+ app compile against my GTK+ 1.0 libraries!?" At least in the Linux world, staying up on the latest version of your distribution is almost a nececity if you want to take advantage of installing packaged versions of the latest software. Nobody is building .debs for Debian older than Woody, for example.
-matthew
You're wrong, people do care about if something still runs on Mac OS 9, the people who have hardware which is still perfectly fine and an operating system that still does everything they need. These people see no reason to upgrade to a new machine with new operating system because it hold no benifits, it's just a bunch of money they'd rather use on something like bills.
The same people for whom OS 9 is still good enough tend to be the same people for whom old applications are good enough. And besides, they often don't have the resources to run the latest and greatest software even if they could. Also, a lot of people are "stuck" on old OSes because they want to run old software. So the whole point is moot. The rest of the world is better off when they can cut loose the legacy support. If Firefox is easier to support and debug and imrove because it drops tons of legacy support then I'm all for it. OS 9/Win95 user be damned.
These people are out there, and will stay out there for a long time. The Internet will always have traces of these legacy systems as long as it exists in it's current form, is it not better to at least try to give them something reasonably up-to-date in order to protect ourselves from their inevitable infections?
They are already reasonably protected from infections just by running software that nobody cares about writing malware for anymore. And we are protected from them because our software has long since been patched. So who cares? I'm sick of software than invests too much resources in legacy support. Microsoft being a prime example. If Microsoft had had the balls to say "Windows NT won't natively run software written for Win3.1/9x which doesn't obey certain security protocols" in the first place, maybe Windows users wouldn't be running Windows XP as admin all the time and we wouldn't have so many security problems. Microsoft should have done something like Apple and run non-NT apps in a "classic" sandbox until nearly everyone found modern alternatives. Legacy support does nothing but cripple modern software.
That is why OpenSSH runs on so many systems, it was meant to remove a insecurity via telnet and rlogin from the Internet, for everyone's benifit.
I'm sure if supporting some 11 year old system compromized the security of OpenSSH for everyone, they'd drop support in a heartbeat. Similarly, if support for obsolete OSes creates bloat and cruft in Firefox, I say drop it.
-matthew
Oh sure, Microsoft has a policy of planned obsolescence. That is why you can seemlessly run Windows programs from 1995 on Windows XP (and Vista, I presume). Must be an extremely long term strategy. Sometimes planned obsolescence is a good thing. It is a good thing, for example, that Apple had the balls to ditch OS 9 completely and start from scratch. If only Microsoft had such balls.
-matthew
My work uses only win98 and win95 because newer versions of windows won't connect to the server.
Let me guess, your server is Banyan Vines (or whatever that was called) or Netware 3.x.
Firefox is the only browser that we can use safely.
And you will continue to run Firefox... just not 3.0.
-matthew
Sounds like a candidate for LInux (without KDE or Gnome).
-matthew
I use Windows 95 OSR2 on several boxes at home, and nasties don't happen. Why? Because OSR2 doesn't support many of the infection vectors present in newer Win32 flavors. It's too old.
You use them or just happen to have them sitting around gathering dust? There is a difference. I used to "use" and old HP 9000 server in my house until I realized the difference between using a computer and simply being an ubergeek with a tendancy to collect crap.
-matthew
'Cause they don't want to pay for a new version or bother getting a pirate copy, or deal with the headaches of upgrading, and maybe it simply works for them and feel no obligation to change?
;-) IF they're happy with an OS from before 2000, they should be happy with a browser from 2006. Can they really expect developers to continue to support them?
I've personally never met anyone for whom Windows 98 Just Works. But I guess maybe that has something to do only being brought in when the Windows 98 shit hit the fan. Seriously though, who could still be running an original installation of Windows 98? Standard operating procedure for Win 98 pretty much dictates a fresh reinstall every so often anyway. Why not upgrade while you're at it?
What is it with Windows and legacy support, anyway? Only in the Windows world (it seems) do you get a significant number of people who stubornly refuse to give up their applications and OS from 1995. Well, I guess there might still be some Amiga users out there...
-matthew
What's wrong with this? Does anyone care if Firefox runs on 7 year old Linux distributions? No. Do Mac users care if an application still runs on OS 9? No. There is no reason why anyone should be running anything less than Win 2k. If they are, they certainly shouldn't expect to be able to run the latest and greatest of software. If they are OK with an OS older than 2000, they should be OK running a browser version stuck in 2006. I say clean up the code and drop legacy support. Don't make Microsoft's mistake.
-matthew
"Wires where you need it. Wireless where you'd like it." "It" being network access, of course. Wireless should be treated as a convenience in an office environment. It is not reliable. Especially in a high density place like Manhattan. You never know when someone is going to stomp on your channel space. And with all those radios (enough for 1 per 15 people), it will happen. Another consideration is performance.
I don't care what kind super-duper-double-data wireless standard you run, it'll never perform like a good ol' fashioned 100Mbit full duplex switched network. And you won't have the option to go 1000Mbit where you need it unless you do some ad hoc wiring, which always turns out bad.
Just spend the cash to wire the office properly with good labeling and patch panels. You won't regret it. There really isn't any room for debate here. You'd be a fool to go all wireless.
-matthew
Slashdot is just trolling you
Wow, I thought that only happened in Soviet Russia.