There was a time in my career that I'd have said yes, the developers make the most sense as they are the only ones that really understand the process. But now I know that's exactly the problem with having developers doing the installs. For a production system you need to have a well defined process that produces repeatable results. The only way to ensure that is to have a separation of duties, whether it's an administrator that's being intelligent hands for a human-readable script, or is simply kicking off a developer provided computer readable script.
I spent a month there a year ago; the trains are the best. Anywhere my wife and I wanted to go, there were two trains an hour. We never worried about transportation on the far end; you can nearly always find a cab even in the sticks.
TfL's London Transport Museum is off the beaten path, and has a fair amount of cool stuff.
You're trying to build a strategy to migrate from.NET 1.1 to.NET 2.0. In a couple of years time, MS will have introduced.NET 2.1, or.NET 3.0 or whatever, and you'll be back to square one, migrating your application into a new framework. You have to ask yourself, What business am I in? Are you in the business of delivering solutions to customer problems, or are you in the business of applying another vendor's solution to the problem they created?
All of the popular frameworks are immature. They'll be completely different in a couple of years, and if you're lucky -- I mean really lucky -- they'll incorporate some sort of backward compatibility to let you leverage your existing code base. I wouldn't count on that though.
Of course, all that being said, if your principle work product is billable hours, then by all means go with the latest and greatest framework. The customer gets some great whiz-bang that they can pay another chunk of big money to upgrade in a few years. I mean, have you tried to hire an entry-level ASP programmer lately?
It doesn't really matter if the OS is superior. It's not about the OS. It's about the application stack that rides on that OS. As long as Apple isn't a direct competitor with Microsoft, Apple users can enjoy the availability of a few core application suites from Microsoft (such as Office). As soon as Apple starts competing directly with Microsoft in the OS arena, it's quite conceivable that MS will stop selling the Mac version of these products.
Ok, so before I get a flood of "use open source!" responses, let me add this: The company I work for is a Microsoft shop. Yet there are a few co-workers that have been able to secure Mac Powerbooks as their company issued equipment because Microsoft Office works on the Mac. If MS-Office goes away, a major hurdle is introduced for adoption of Macs in business.
So it wouldn't surprise me at all if Apple's official position will continue to be that they won't sell Mac OSX86 for anything other than Mac hardware. I also seems conceivable that they'll look the other way when crafty individuals figure out how to run it on white boxes. It's free extra sales they won't have to support, it expands the user base for the software vendors, and gives the Apple platform more traction.
From MS site: This problem occurs because Windows XP SP2 changes 1394b ports to S100 speed when you upgrade.
That's painful. The last S100 bus system I had only ran at 6MHz, and only had 64kb of RAM. But hey, those dual 8" floppy SSDD disk drives were schweet!
It seems that Windows is always popping something up on the screen that forces the user to stop what they're doing to acknowledge before they can continue. And most of these pop-ups are totally meaningless. At times getting anything done with Windows is like playing a game of "Whack-a-mole".
To be fair, not all of the annoying pop-ups come from Windows itself. Norton is really bad about popping up windows that say nothing more than "I'm here to completely interrupt your work to let you know that everything is just fine. Please click here to make me go away for a little while." However, it is a larger problem with WinXP if only because it's become an accepted practice among the software vendors.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong (wait -- this is Slashdot -- someone will correct me mercilessly if I'm wrong) but doesn't the Mac have pretty well defined UI guidelines that cover things like this?
Except it isn't teenage girls. It's my father in law.
I work from home semi-regularly, and my broadband connection is my lifeblood at those times. For a variety of reasons, the in-laws visit fairly regularly. My father-in-law doesn't travel anywhere without his laptop, and since he's without broadband where he lives, he takes every opportunity to suck my connection dry by downloading every latest Linux ISO image he can find -- which really blows when I'm trying to get serious work done. I'd really love to be able to throttle his bandwidth down to sub dial-up speeds during my normal working hours.
(Ok, before everyone starts pinging me for not to him about it: I DID. HE DIDN'T GET IT.)
I saw one of these in action at Summit Point Racew^h^h^h^h^h Motorsports Park this past weekend. This gizmo provides live T&S just like you get on-line for the pro races. It's really sweet. The club racers (there's a lot of us out there) are buying this up like crazy. It's already being used in FranAm and I'm sure once it proves itself there, it will be adopted for NASCAR and other series. 5000 units? They'll do that the first NASCAR weekend it's used.
I'm using it in a very similar situation: I'm the sole developer for a Windows based Delphi application. I've found it to be VERY easy to use; it supports branches/version snapshots/etc, it's fast, and it easily supports binaries as well as text. Tortoise integrates into the Windows explorer, providing icon overlays in the tree view and the file view indicating the status of tracked files and a bunch of other things. No need to pull up the DOS penalty box to issue commands -- it's all there. It's really sweet.
I would be nice to have the government say something like "OK all you companies, decided on a format for word processor documents and stick to it untill the you issue a new standard after that", but for government to decide the standard its self probably wouldn't be good.
And that very same approach is why HDTV in the US is so hopelessly screwed up. Industry couldn't settle on a standard, so the FCC adopted 17 different digital formats, and left it up to the TV manufacturers to come up with a chip that automatically displays the correct picture no matter which format the broadcaster chose to use.
Simply telling industry to work it out themselves doesn't always work, especially in the software realm. Remember back to the early days of the PC? The 8-bit to 16-bit transition era? Remember all of the different word processors that were available? WordStar, WordPerfect, PC-Write, Write, Word, and I'm sure there's dozen's of others I never got a chance to use. They all had different file formats, and the only way to exchange information with someone on a different platform was on paper.
More importantly than simple file formats though, is the notion that the Internet is like a public service or utility -- like railroads or electric utilities or public highways. The government has to be the one to establish certain standards to ensure that everyone can participate.
...depending upon how you define "country" life. I live in Jefferson County, WV. I've been working for a Fairfax, VA company for ten years now. Along the way, I've worked on one project that put me on-site at the State Department and I've had various other projects which have required some degree of face-time at the customer site. Some would argue that I'm crazy for living where I live, that the commute must be a killer, but it's not that bad. We've got the MARC train to get you downtown if you need to, and we've got fairly easy commutes to the 270 corridor, and a not too bad commute to NOVA. Fairfax is only about 1:20 on average.
If, on the other hand, you really hate long commutes, then you might want to look other places to settle, unless your employer will consider letting you telecommute.
Throwing 10 times the people at a problem doesn't yield a 10 times increase in performance. It just simply doesn't work that way. If it did, you could turn the entire population of China loose on rebuilding Iraq (for example), and have the project done in under an hour.
No, if you replace that one domestic programmer with ten foreign programmers, all you get is a domestic project manager to run the show, and a programming staff that is far less accountable. And you can probably bet that the service company's project manager's agenda is only marginally congruent with your agenda.
...to see when he turns on Microsoft. It's no secret that BSD code is in Windows. Hell, the NT TCP/IP stack came straight from BSD. If he's claiming ownership of BSD, then it isn't too far a stretch to think that MS would be next.
McBride: All your base are belong to us. ALL of them.
I can see it now: Twice a year your software will stop working for for a week or two at a time, while it bombards you with incessant messages extolling the virtues of becoming a "member," while only permitting you to perform useful tasks for about 5-10 minutes each hour.
This makes it pretty much guaranteed that IBM won't buy out SCO
Yes, but does SCO know that? After the most recent 8k filing, SCO's lawyers are basically saying they'd rather have a guaranteed chunk of change than a percentage of the award. Lawyers aren't dumb, they make sure they get paid. Add to that, the fact that Boies wasn't a signer of the answers to ammended counter claims, it seems to me that Boies, Schiller & Flexner has pretty much decided that they can't win this one. They put in the second string lawyers (the ones with billing rates that won't exhaust the not-to-exceed amount of their new agreement), they fire all their guns at once and (a) hope for a miracle and the judge tosses the case out, or (b) justice prevails and the SCO becomes a grease spot on the information super highway. Either way, I'm getting the impression that the lawyers are trying to wrap it up quickly.
"I don't think that any company is going to see a lawsuit rolled out to them that hasn't been given an honest and fair chance to purchase a license," he said.
Yeah, just like the honest and fair chance they gave IBM...
They're actually not being vicious bastards in this one...
I'm so conflicted over this. I mean, on the one hand, I applaud MS's stance in all of this. By breaking their browser, they are sending a message to the world that software patents suck. On the other hand, they're breaking their browser and making a lot of busy work for web developers to go back and fix their sites.
The part I really love though is the instructions for dealing with the changes. Basically, if your Active-X control references content which is outside of the loading page, the confirm box pops up. Ah, but if you encode all of your parameters in base64 and pass them in that way, the confirm box won't pop up (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
If it were the case that Linux has SCO IP in the kernel, then IBM's case would have no merit.
IANAL, but I'm not letting that stop me from saying... buzz! Wrong! You fail to recognize that the Linux kernel is the effort of hundreds, each holding copyright to their own contributions. IBM has their own contributions in there, too. And the whole lot is covered under a license that places certain restrictions on what one may do with the material. If you don't agree to the terms of the license, then normal copyright law takes effect. And according to copyright LAW, what SCO is alledged to have done is illegal.
This isn't just an IBM vs SCO thing. It's a Linux kernel contributor vs. SCO thing.
SCO has not yet looked into whether, in its opinion, the free BSDs legally are derivative of the Unix sources. I assume if SCO can get a handle on the Linux situation, it'll go after the free BSDs next.
Didn't Microsoft base their Windows NT TCP/IP stack on code taken straight from BSD? Isn't there a whole bunch more in Windows taken from BSD? The license fees MS recently paid to SCO aside, what happens if SCO goes after MS and MS decides to buyout SCO?
Think Totally Immersive Environment. This would be like the ultimate game screen! Quake|Unreal|Half-Life|Whatever from the front row in Astounding 7.1 digital. Whoa.
So how long before we see posts from theatre employees telling about running the latest FPS on the big screen?
Sure, people laughed at me then, but I'm damned glad I bought all of those Slim Whitman albums when I had the chance. When those ugly green heads start popping like zits on a teenager's face, who's gonna be laughing now, huh? Morons...
Slashdot Mirror
There was a time in my career that I'd have said yes, the developers make the most sense as they are the only ones that really understand the process. But now I know that's exactly the problem with having developers doing the installs. For a production system you need to have a well defined process that produces repeatable results. The only way to ensure that is to have a separation of duties, whether it's an administrator that's being intelligent hands for a human-readable script, or is simply kicking off a developer provided computer readable script.
I spent a month there a year ago; the trains are the best. Anywhere my wife and I wanted to go, there were two trains an hour. We never worried about transportation on the far end; you can nearly always find a cab even in the sticks. TfL's London Transport Museum is off the beaten path, and has a fair amount of cool stuff.
You're trying to build a strategy to migrate from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0. In a couple of years time, MS will have introduced .NET 2.1, or .NET 3.0 or whatever, and you'll be back to square one, migrating your application into a new framework. You have to ask yourself, What business am I in? Are you in the business of delivering solutions to customer problems, or are you in the business of applying another vendor's solution to the problem they created?
All of the popular frameworks are immature. They'll be completely different in a couple of years, and if you're lucky -- I mean really lucky -- they'll incorporate some sort of backward compatibility to let you leverage your existing code base. I wouldn't count on that though.
Of course, all that being said, if your principle work product is billable hours, then by all means go with the latest and greatest framework. The customer gets some great whiz-bang that they can pay another chunk of big money to upgrade in a few years. I mean, have you tried to hire an entry-level ASP programmer lately?
Ok, so before I get a flood of "use open source!" responses, let me add this: The company I work for is a Microsoft shop. Yet there are a few co-workers that have been able to secure Mac Powerbooks as their company issued equipment because Microsoft Office works on the Mac. If MS-Office goes away, a major hurdle is introduced for adoption of Macs in business.
So it wouldn't surprise me at all if Apple's official position will continue to be that they won't sell Mac OSX86 for anything other than Mac hardware. I also seems conceivable that they'll look the other way when crafty individuals figure out how to run it on white boxes. It's free extra sales they won't have to support, it expands the user base for the software vendors, and gives the Apple platform more traction.
That's painful. The last S100 bus system I had only ran at 6MHz, and only had 64kb of RAM. But hey, those dual 8" floppy SSDD disk drives were schweet!
To be fair, not all of the annoying pop-ups come from Windows itself. Norton is really bad about popping up windows that say nothing more than "I'm here to completely interrupt your work to let you know that everything is just fine. Please click here to make me go away for a little while." However, it is a larger problem with WinXP if only because it's become an accepted practice among the software vendors.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong (wait -- this is Slashdot -- someone will correct me mercilessly if I'm wrong) but doesn't the Mac have pretty well defined UI guidelines that cover things like this?
I work from home semi-regularly, and my broadband connection is my lifeblood at those times. For a variety of reasons, the in-laws visit fairly regularly. My father-in-law doesn't travel anywhere without his laptop, and since he's without broadband where he lives, he takes every opportunity to suck my connection dry by downloading every latest Linux ISO image he can find -- which really blows when I'm trying to get serious work done. I'd really love to be able to throttle his bandwidth down to sub dial-up speeds during my normal working hours.
(Ok, before everyone starts pinging me for not to him about it: I DID. HE DIDN'T GET IT.)
300bps? That would have been luxury! Why back in my day, we used a 110baud Teletype ASR-33, uphill, in the snow, both ways, And We Liked It!
I saw one of these in action at Summit Point Racew^h^h^h^h^h Motorsports Park this past weekend. This gizmo provides live T&S just like you get on-line for the pro races. It's really sweet. The club racers (there's a lot of us out there) are buying this up like crazy. It's already being used in FranAm and I'm sure once it proves itself there, it will be adopted for NASCAR and other series. 5000 units? They'll do that the first NASCAR weekend it's used.
Of course I use Gentoo Linux...
...and it takes a month just to install.
I'm using it in a very similar situation: I'm the sole developer for a Windows based Delphi application. I've found it to be VERY easy to use; it supports branches/version snapshots/etc, it's fast, and it easily supports binaries as well as text. Tortoise integrates into the Windows explorer, providing icon overlays in the tree view and the file view indicating the status of tracked files and a bunch of other things. No need to pull up the DOS penalty box to issue commands -- it's all there. It's really sweet.
And that very same approach is why HDTV in the US is so hopelessly screwed up. Industry couldn't settle on a standard, so the FCC adopted 17 different digital formats, and left it up to the TV manufacturers to come up with a chip that automatically displays the correct picture no matter which format the broadcaster chose to use.
Simply telling industry to work it out themselves doesn't always work, especially in the software realm. Remember back to the early days of the PC? The 8-bit to 16-bit transition era? Remember all of the different word processors that were available? WordStar, WordPerfect, PC-Write, Write, Word, and I'm sure there's dozen's of others I never got a chance to use. They all had different file formats, and the only way to exchange information with someone on a different platform was on paper.
More importantly than simple file formats though, is the notion that the Internet is like a public service or utility -- like railroads or electric utilities or public highways. The government has to be the one to establish certain standards to ensure that everyone can participate.
If, on the other hand, you really hate long commutes, then you might want to look other places to settle, unless your employer will consider letting you telecommute.
Only if it jams cell phones in the process...
No, if you replace that one domestic programmer with ten foreign programmers, all you get is a domestic project manager to run the show, and a programming staff that is far less accountable. And you can probably bet that the service company's project manager's agenda is only marginally congruent with your agenda.
McBride: All your base are belong to us. ALL of them.
I can see it now: Twice a year your software will stop working for for a week or two at a time, while it bombards you with incessant messages extolling the virtues of becoming a "member," while only permitting you to perform useful tasks for about 5-10 minutes each hour.
Yes, but does SCO know that? After the most recent 8k filing, SCO's lawyers are basically saying they'd rather have a guaranteed chunk of change than a percentage of the award. Lawyers aren't dumb, they make sure they get paid. Add to that, the fact that Boies wasn't a signer of the answers to ammended counter claims, it seems to me that Boies, Schiller & Flexner has pretty much decided that they can't win this one. They put in the second string lawyers (the ones with billing rates that won't exhaust the not-to-exceed amount of their new agreement), they fire all their guns at once and (a) hope for a miracle and the judge tosses the case out, or (b) justice prevails and the SCO becomes a grease spot on the information super highway. Either way, I'm getting the impression that the lawyers are trying to wrap it up quickly.
Yeah, just like the honest and fair chance they gave IBM...
...and 2DVD is equal to 2VD^2, who's first deriviative is VD, which no one really wants.
[so shoot me if my math sucks, it's been 20 years since I had Calc... I did it for the punch line]
I'm so conflicted over this. I mean, on the one hand, I applaud MS's stance in all of this. By breaking their browser, they are sending a message to the world that software patents suck. On the other hand, they're breaking their browser and making a lot of busy work for web developers to go back and fix their sites.
The part I really love though is the instructions for dealing with the changes. Basically, if your Active-X control references content which is outside of the loading page, the confirm box pops up. Ah, but if you encode all of your parameters in base64 and pass them in that way, the confirm box won't pop up (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
IANAL, but I'm not letting that stop me from saying... buzz! Wrong! You fail to recognize that the Linux kernel is the effort of hundreds, each holding copyright to their own contributions. IBM has their own contributions in there, too. And the whole lot is covered under a license that places certain restrictions on what one may do with the material. If you don't agree to the terms of the license, then normal copyright law takes effect. And according to copyright LAW, what SCO is alledged to have done is illegal.
This isn't just an IBM vs SCO thing. It's a Linux kernel contributor vs. SCO thing.
Didn't Microsoft base their Windows NT TCP/IP stack on code taken straight from BSD? Isn't there a whole bunch more in Windows taken from BSD? The license fees MS recently paid to SCO aside, what happens if SCO goes after MS and MS decides to buyout SCO?
Think First Person Shooter...
Think Totally Immersive Environment. This would be like the ultimate game screen! Quake|Unreal|Half-Life|Whatever from the front row in Astounding 7.1 digital. Whoa.
So how long before we see posts from theatre employees telling about running the latest FPS on the big screen?
Sure, people laughed at me then, but I'm damned glad I bought all of those Slim Whitman albums when I had the chance. When those ugly green heads start popping like zits on a teenager's face, who's gonna be laughing now, huh? Morons...