Windows XP is fast, (relatively) stable, pretty, and easy for the average user.
XP can be MADE to be fairly fast, but it can even more easily be made to be a big, slow pig.
For some time hooking up a stock XP machine to the 'net would bring it crashing to a worm-infested halt within minutes--literally. XP has reached a point of stability but for a great deal of its lifetime it was unstable as hell--mostly because of its massive vulnerability to exploits and "turned on by default" philosophy regarding services.
Whether XP is "pretty" is a matter of taste--I personally find the default gummybear, theme-by-fisher-price look repulsive.
Microsoft has kept it patched and updated (to some degree), and provided a service pack for some larger upgrades.
Perhaps with the latest IE vulnerability they should reach for a higher degree. SP2 was definitely the right move but the truly correct thing to do would've been to put much of what was in SP2 into XP in the first place.
And at the same time they've released several versions of media center, tablet pc, etc.
This is not innovation. This is the same old garbage with fresh new garbage piled on top...and they have been midle commercial successes at very best.
All the while building the tools for their future strategies, including VS.net 2005,.net2.0, MSSQL Server 2005, biztalk.
This is Microsoft's biggest saving grace--they make some top-notch developer tools. I really think that if it were not for Visual Studio that not even monopoly-induced inertia could keep them secure as industry leader. Ballistic Ballmer was right on the mark when ha ambled around the stage, stomping and beating his chest yelling "developers! developers! developers!". The only thing is that their future strategies seem a bit hard to pin down...that and they've on occasion pissed off said developers by throwing compatibility to the wind (a lot of depressed VB6 coders out there...and there are a number of annoyances in migrating from.net 1.x to 2.0). This is a challenge given the Windows community worships on the altar of compatibility and many windows depelopers are change-averse.
What is it that you need so bad from Vista other than 3d desktop graphics?
Almost nothing at all. Vista was hyped as a big new thing...then MS suddenly had to pay attention to security and put out some big fires and "reload". Oops...no time for WinFS...gotta cut back on the ambitios rewrite of system componenets in.net managed code...etc... and now all that is left is a pail fuzzy inkjet printout of the original vision.
There is one thing that is welcome...and that is the deprecation of the registry and DCOM...but both are still there. At least there are supported, standard alternatives in Vista in the form of Indigo and XML based.config files.
XP will still do everything my MacOSX box will do (and much faster) and with the proper tweaking, it'll do everything my Ubuntu laptop does as well.
XP will do it "good enough". It just does a mediocre job of most things. My experience with Macs as of late is limited but I really notice little difference speed-wise, considering the amount of eye-candy that OS X (which I also find a bit off-putting once in awhile).
Windows XP is a great operating system, and I'm glad to have something stable enough that we don't have to upgrade every year
Except that we actually do upgrade it in a sense--every month when Windows Update has a round of patches to install.
MS has a problem on its hands really...it has slipped into managin Windows a bit like an open source project--it is updated often but rarely is there a ground-up, major reworking. It has made XP into a mediocre but (finally) stable and usable OS, and if MS just kept issuing updates and service packs it would evolve into what could be considered a true quality product. The problem comes in because
'm not sure if this is FUD or just plain stupidness, but it is certainly not true. Windows' design was monolithic, and IE certainly didn't help, but IE is no more in the windows kernel than say nautilus or konqeror, it's just a program with a library that is far too widely used.
I did NOT say IE was in the kernel...I was stating two separate examples of stupid design choices that have led to Windows being an opaque, unmanageable monolith of ugly code:
1. Unlike Firefox or Epiphany or Konqueror (etc.) IE was engineered right into the OS product--sprinkled thoroughout the system directory right alongside.dlls for low-level system operations, and now we have important system components and applications that have critical dependencies on IE (even 3rd parties have done this at the encouragement of Microsoft I might add). You are correct in that IE plays in userland--but considering that it is so embedded into Windows that it can no longer be removed completely without breaking things makes it nearly as stupid as if it were running in kernel space. MS has actually made it hard NOT to run at least some IE components, some of the time, with full administrator privleges.
2. All manner of drivers and the GUI ARE INDEED resident in kernel space--right up to Windows XP, and as such run without limitations on privliges. Some have boasted that Windows NT/2K/XP has a "microkernel architecture" however there seems to be little to justify it being called "micro" when so much garbage in other.dlls hitches along for the ride.
Perhaps I should've spelled it out VERY CLEARLY for the people who speed-read over all the articles and other small words in each post. In any case Windows is so messed up architecturally that it has proven to be unmaintainable. I look forward to see what MS has to offer in its first major post-Vista release. Until then, I have migrated my personal computer to OpenSuSE and will remain a Linux user without giving Microsoft serious consideration as an option. At least I won't have to put up with product activation, massively critical bugs and a too-rapid hardware upgrade cycle.
Microsoft did not get into this mess because of its relentless pursuit of total, perpetual compatibility. As most people know, while a lot of effort has gone into compatibility the simple fact is that the current version of Windows is no more compatible with its legacy products (windows 3.x, dos) than Linux or OS2--it uses the "Windows on Windows" virtual environment to run 16-bit legacy code, and XPs compatibility with Win9x/Me games, etc. was more of a bolt-on than something that permeates into the core of XP. The result is that Windows is remarkably compatible but not totally so (any 16-bit Windows/DOS program that relies on communications ports for example will crash in NT/2000/XP). The large compatibility layer has resulted in a bloated, crusty registry and APIs that would only be purposely designed like they are by crack addicts. However, although this makes Windows a sometimes-frustrating environment to program at lower levels it is not what makes it nearly unmaintainable even by behemoth Microsoft.
The REAL poor design decision was electing to create a tightly integrated system. This was the root cause that made other questionable choices at Microsoft (compatibility and "Featureitis") difficult or impossible to correct. When Microsoft wanted to bundle its web browser with Windows it decided to take IE (which wasn't ingtegrated with Win95 at all initially) and sprinkle its libraries in the system directory and link a whole bunch of other components to it...to the point that even the GUI shell will not operate without IE components. It threw the GUI and all these drivers into kernel space. It made one big monolithic, multi-million-LOC pile of crap and justified it by doing it in the name of a "seamless user experience" at a good level of performance.
There is no excuse for this now--we have machines powerful enough to host full-featured virtual machines that can run self-contained copies of legacy OSes, so if customers really (often foolishly) want to run software that is over a decade old to do important things then they can take that route. The sad thing is that political reasons rather than technical reasons prevent Microsoft from taking the proper course of action. Microsoft should've "pulled an Apple" right after the release of XP and immediately set about developing a totally new OS as different from the NT-based XP as NT was from DOS (and the Win9x/Me derivatives). Apple smartly got out to market faster by building its foundation on open software.
The problem is MS is probably loathe to heavily depend on open source for its flagship product, and the problem is that Apple beat them to the most viable BSD-licensed option. Since MS has been asleep at the wheel there for far too long, they have two difficult options ahead: Firstly, they could bite the bullet and plan the first major, post-Vista Windows release around a BSD-licensed UNIX core as Apple has already done. MS would be risking a lot by doing this as they become less differentiated from Apple than before--can MS out-class Apple on the UI front, or maintain enough legacy Windows compatibility to keep its customer base? Second, they could try and engineer a new kernel/core system themselves and bolt on chunks of updated Vista as componenets. This could take longer than the first option but it is a made-at-MS solution. In the meantime competitors will have even more time to catch up.
Basically, Windows as we know it is fast approaching the end of its life cycle. I personally don't think it is really sustainable for even one more major release after Vista. Although this presents a great opportunity for Linux-based and OS X systems I don't think it is the nail in MS' coffin just yet. I figure that with the kind of shake up that looks possible to occur in the next few months at MS that in around 2010 we'll all be eagerly anticipating the release a completely new Microsoft OS--with a very UNIX-like architecture (holy shades of XENIX batman!) under the hood but something very 21st centurey on top.
He's a manager, not a coder. He doesn't need to push back, he needs to spend his time managing.
What do you think management is if it isn't "pushing"? This fellow is managing a major web development project, and resource allocation (resources being time, money and people) is an essential, unavoidable part of the process. Unless you are a "supreme manager" who answers to nobody, like a president or COO or something, then it is this guys job to estimate as accurately as possible what resources are required to achieve the goals of the project.
Market the idea to the rest of company. Sending out mockups and ROI case studies of other companies can entice your manager and/or his manager
If this guy was already tasked with managing this project and already has coders working on it, the appropriate time to obtain buy-in has long since passed--his employer has bunged things up big time if there is no buy-in now. In my place of employment, it is NOT the job of project managers to sell the project (whether it is internal or external)--there are other people to do that ("business development specialists" for external projects and committees for internal projects).
Use your budget more effectively.
I'd say that you should remove the first two words...this guy should "budget more effectively" and have a strong argument to back those numbers to his superiors (this is where the "pushback" comes into play). If your superior is not convinced then you must compromise on your deliverables/goals. If this guy cannot get enough of a budget to hire more coders then examine outsourcing/contractors. If the budget is still too lean, make do with the meagre number of people and revise the schedule, and be firm to superiors about that schedule. If the schedule is too long then cut down features/scope. If you are still not in a good place then push to have the project cancelled entirely. That'll get the big bosses attention and if it is as important as your company's online presence that is 1990s stale then the guy being the roadblock will have drawn a lot of negative attention to himself.
Build trust. You need to gain a reputation as someone who gets things done, and can be trusted with a task.
Not just getting things done...getting them done on time and within budget. Even Larry the Cable Guy can "git 'er done". To garner a reputation of trust you must set attainable goals and meet them reliably. You won't get respect by throwing together your online store in record time if it is full of bugs, awkward to use and has a dumb security hole like SQL injection that lets a hacker clear all passwards or steal customer purchasing information..even though you "got things done".
Don't make excuses. Learn to put a positive spin on timetables, instead.
Not always possible to put a positive spin on scheduling things (I wonder how positive BillG or ballistic Ballmer felt when they learned Vista was pushed back to January 2007). And there are always valid excuses--I prefer to call them "reasons". You just have to acknowledge when you are responsible for them and make sure people know when THEY are responsible for them. And don't dewll on the excuse, concentrate on the solution.
Don't commit to a project unless you and your superiors are agreed on the timetables.
If your employer is as screwed up as I suspect this guys was, it is possible that he wasn't voluntarily committed to the schedule. In fact, he might not have even been given a specific schedule or had much cooperation in defining the goals or the design. In that case there will never be an end. He says his employer's site has been stagnant for eight years...back in the 1990s it was the thing to do to put "under construction" on a site. I'd bet that this site might still have those nasty little notices on it.
What is with the VGA port? Are they that much more expensive than DVI?
Yup, seems annoying since I'd think that if someone wants a tiny system then they'd opt for an LCD panel and the analogue port is just wasted electronice. However there is the NL board that at least does away with the bulky 15-pin VGA port, though a small header connector and the DAC circuitry are still there.
Another thing which most of these SFF boards lack is dual ethernet, or at least gigE.
Actually Via and most other Mini-ITX board makers offer at least one model of board equipped with dual ethernet--the EPIA PD series of boards all have scads of ports--including 2 ethernet ports. VIA pushed these for use as point-of-sale terminals (because they also have a whole bunch of RS-232 and USB ports for communication with all those POS gadgets like cash drawers, credit/debit PIN pads, pole displays and so on) but they are also popular choices for fancy routers.
In addition to the nano boards, some C7-based mini-ITX boardsd have also trickled out onto the market and theseare allequipped with a single gigabit ethernet port. VIA is planning to come out with a Luke-based replacement for the PD boards that'll run faster and may be available with at least one of the two ethernet ports capable of gigabit. VIA is being notoriously vague about its schedule but it is included in their 2006 product catalogue so I guess they're at least hoping for release inthen ext few months...
One of the best teachers I ever had (back in 1990) banned note taking entirely for his Trigonometry and Calculus classes.
Quite interesting--though I do remember that I gave up trying to transcribe what was written on the board to my notes anyways and just jotted select concepts and formulae in my math-heavy classes anyways so I think he had a point.
However, the professor in question wants people to switch from laptops to paper, basically making them less efficient at note-taking, giving them even less time to pay attention to what she's saying. I don't think she understands that side-effect.
Woah...wait a minute...pencil and paper is LESS efficient than using a computer....in MATH? I'd sure like to have YOUR laptop man...it must have quite a decent digital cam on mounted on the outside of the lid to capture all those graphs, diagrams and math formulae--or maybe a good touchscreen to doodle them right into your document, cuz I'd NEVER be able to take decent math notes on a computer and keep up with the lecture.
In any case, if she's worried that note-taking is a distraction, why doesn't she just prepare all her material ahead of time, provide it to the students, and then go over it in class in detail?
Because then she'd be talking to a mostly empty classroom, and the people that did bother to attend would be zoned out (we have the notes...why bother coming to a lecture?)...not to say that there is no merit in the prof preparing the notes in advance--it's just that they shouldn't be distrubuted in advance. A good way that some profs do it is they do the lecture and essentially take notes from the class, annotating the prepared lecture notes with questions/comments/additional discussion points that came up during the lecture (flipping things around--funky when you think about it). The annotated lecture notes would then be available online a day or two later.
The first bullet point: You're an asshole. Get over it. Some people have stuff that you don't have, and they don't have much to talk about besides their stuff.
I never said I had a problem with it myself, except to say that people who have nothing more to talk about besides their fancy stuff tend to be viewed as losers...just making a point...no need to be offended.
The second bullet point: Not your problem.
Yes it is---it detracts from every participant in a lecture when one person is so distracted that they start acting like "just don't get it" guy" and waste everyone's time with stupid questions they wouldn't need to ask if they just paid attention
The third: This is a slightly real issue but sooner or later there won't be any manual labor jobs left and every job in existence will involve using computers simply because it won't be cost-effective to have humans do manufacturing, or delivery, or whatever.
It's been a long day at work and I could use a little of what you've been smoking...I cannot quite figure out how the shift in the labour market towards using computers relates to the annoyance of keyboards clicking away (and another annoying trait of some "laptop losers"--neglecting to mute speakers so warning chimes can be heard by all). My job heavily involves computers and there are times when we are supposed to put them away. When we have important informational meetings at work there are at most two computers in the room: the presenter's machine and the meeting recorder's PC, and only the recorder actually does any meaningful amount of typing.
my best guess is you are saying that eventually we'll all get in our skycars and go to the officepod and sit and type at computers every day for a living and that keyclicks will eventually just be background noise we all just learn to deal with. I think that by the time we get to the point where "every job in existence will involve computers" that keyboards (personal computers in general in fact) will already be obsolete for most tasks we perform on computers today. This is already happening as we all start carrying Blackberries and so on. In fact the aforementioned meeting recorders PC at work has recently been replaced by a smart whiteboard and voice recording, precicely because writing meeting minutes was too tedious and typing them too annoying.
The fourth: This has nothing to do with being a laptop user, and everything to do with being an asshole. Guess you were both in good company.
Nice to meet you Pot, my name is Kettle.
Anyways, it is pretty clear that you are disturbed that people could've thought of you as a loser when you brought your laptop into lectures. Although my message was bluntly stated and touched a personal nerve of yours it was honestly not intended to offend so much as it was meant in jest and to offer frank advice (basically that there is a time and a place for certain technology and that laptops in a lecture is an example of an INappropriate use of technology).
Of course, laptops weren't quite as elegant in the early-to-mid 90s and the geekiness factor of toting a laptop with you wherever you went was much higher. However, "the laptop guy" was pretty high up on the "piss of the class list"--probably higher up than the "just doesn't get it and asks too many stupid questions that should be saved for after class guy". Why was "laptop guy" the target of such derision?
* he was being a showoff--"look at the fancy toy I bought courtesy of the Bank of Mum and Dad...too bad for you with your big loans and Kraft Dinner Diet that you can't be elite like me" (remember this was before the age of mandatory laptops for students)
* the laptop screen projected an "attention force field" that caused him to zone out and fall out of the loop...at times this would get bad enough that he became "just doesn't get it" guy.
* the constant clicking on the keyboard annoyed all neighbouring classmates
* his occasional bitching about the prof changing the overhead transparency too quickly, before he could transcribe it into his machine, grew annoying within a few weeks.
Perhaps you're personally a pretty nice guy, but I'd be willing to bet a number of people have quetly labelled you a "laptop loser", and if your professors knew you attitide towards their teaching methods (basically that they couldn't possibly know anything about teaching people) they might be somewhat offended.
There is another problem with "laptop losers" in the classroom...they're becoming "laptop losers" in the boardroom as well. The problem is getting bad enough that laptops are banned from most meetings where I work (for non-presenters only of course since we are still addicted to powerpoint here). So speaking from the corporate perspective I might offer this suggestion: if you plan to have a career outside academia then youd best be putting away your laptop during lectures so you can "learn to learn" effectively in an informational meeting and be a meaningful contributor to discussions when in the boardroom.
All the heavy lifting should be elsewere, and the "results" should be in front of you.
That depends if you are a starving student living in a dorm room or cramped apartment, or if you are looking for the ultimate media system to hook into your 7.1 surround system and gigantic hi-def screen that you just had installed in the home theatre room of your upscale house. If it is the former then you probably don't have room to spare for the "heavy lifting" machine, nor the money to purchas the extra hardware. Even if you did find somewhere to put it, the big back-end box with all the whirring drives and fans would probably be audible from every part of your small pad. If it is the latter then I'm sure you have a large attic, basement utility room or spare closet you could wire up and soundproof, as well as the money to get scads of hard drive storage and computing power--so in that case your suggestion is the best one.
The secret? Fast networking. Note that doesn't necessarily imply TCP/IP. Just a LAN that's fast enough to get the job done.
The newest generation of EIPA Mini-ITX boards (C7/"Luke" based) are equipped with gigabit ethernet onboard so they'll meet your needs nicely. You can already buy limited quantities of the first model (so they are not vapourware as some VIA detractors have said, despite VIA's delivery track record being nearly as spotty as Microsoft's).
and you don't have to bend over backwards to solve all the present problems
I don't think that there are really any problems solved by your suggestion personally--if you have a LAN based solution you probably have to do more work to get it to operate to your satisfaction. I suppose it depends on the problems you are trying to solve--if you have 100 movies and thousands of songs and want enough spare drive space to record another 100 hours of TV then you have problems that can only be solved by haveing a media server hidden away somewhere. If you are just looking for a TiVO-like PVR that is hack-friendly and doesn't require paying huge monthly fees for your cable company's "on-demand" digital package, then you have no problems to solve--just get a Mini-ITX board, fill the RAM slots and stuff it in a cute little box with a laptop hard drive of reasonable size and the bulk of your time will be software configuration.
If its one thing we do better than any countries out there its dodge critical questions and pass the buck.
Actually, I'd say the problem in many places outside the US is that their judiciaries do NOT "pass the buck". This is a problem in Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia anyways. Judges are supposed to make judgements based on a reasonalby strict interpretation of the law, and it is important that they be fair and independent from influence by the legislature so they can rule a law invalid should it violate the constitution of the country or if the interpretation is politically unpopular. The problem comes in when judges overstep their bounds and decide to pronounce important decisions in absence of valid law instead of directing politicians to address the legislative void democratically.
The judge was doing his job correctly in dismissing the obscenity case and leaving the question open rather than setting a precident that effectively creates a new law. The origins of the patchwork of US obscenity laws makes little sense in the age of the internet, but it came about because a judge "passed the buck" there too--basically, saying that there was no viable legislation that defined obscene speech federally and that it was the responsibility of state and local authorities to establish "community standards". In the absence of such standards then all obscenity cases should be thrown out as this one was unless they violate criminal law (child porn, inciting violence, making threats, defamation, etc).
So how would I define community standards in the age of the Internet? I'd probably use the "lowest common denominator" however in the US the most politically popular might be to be fairly strict with community standards on a national basis. I think that's where the Clinton administration was going with the CDA. I would defer to the community standards that apply to the locality of the author/distributor myself, and if it was my decision I would say that if there was any mechanism that limited the consumption of content from an internet site to a "membership list", that no community standards of any physical jusristiction should apply. Because the community consists of people who voluntarily sign up to access the content and by that they give consent that they believe the content meets the standards of that "virtual community" then no such site could ever be obscene. Such a rule would probably be best enshrined in law democratically but it seems sensible to me.
If I was making a site that consisted of kinky BDSM photography that would undoubtedly be obscene in many locales that is what I would do--I'd have a sign-in page that clearly states that "viewer discresion is advised" and require people to sign up to visit the virtual gallery. I wouldn't collect a huge amount of information--just require a person to sign in with a username and password. If they even go through that much trouble then no user can argue that "obscene material" was thrown in their face.
You make good points, but your arguments would carry more weight if they weren't so MS-centric.
I made mention of Microsoft because of their track record--they have previously been agressive lobbyists for software patenting in Europe, for example, and has been extremely forceful in defending its closed-source position in its attempt to block Massachusetts bureaucrats from making its own IT policy that even suggests favourtism towards open source (Massachusetts in fact has suggested NOTHING at all that favours open source applications over closed applications--it merely wants to mandate the user of open standards in FILE FORMATS in order to ensure interoperability and protect against obsolescence and vendor lock-in).
There are indeed other closed-software companies out there who are rabidly protectionist..the most (in)famous of all being SCO--but of course SCO is the laughingstock of the corporate world and a pipsqueak in the industry. Apple is also a distant second in comparison to Microsoft, and its track record isn't as consistently bad as Microsoft's has been. Truthbully, Apple's track record is all over the place: it has been a willing participant in open source by basing the foundation of OS X on an open UNIX platform and establishing the Darwin project to allow public participation in its development. OTOH, it has also not been the most cooperative partner in open software projects either (ask Konqueror developers how nicely Apple plays--it tended to take much more easily than it gave when it came to Safari). Apple has also been quite protectionist in its hardware and music service business--it puts up as many artificial barriers as it can to 3rd party particiapation in the iTunes/iPod community and despite a brief, bungled experiment is allowing "official" Mac clones in the 1990s, the entire Mac line has remained notoriously and tightly closed. Even though it has moved to Intel, Apple has continued to make a protectionist, closed hardware/software platform central to its computer business.
Despite the spotty record in contributing to open systems, Apple has not been a stron lobbyist for government protection as Microsoft has--and would probably welcome the sizeable credits it would get for its use of BSD and even GNU technology in its OS. Yes, it is given a too-easy ride by a lot of/.ers but Apple wouldn't make a strong example.
Adobe is in the same place as Apple--it has been nasty at times in protecting its closed technology but has also accepted and even provided lukewarm endorsement of open software: it has released a Linux verion of its Acrobat reader and has been far more willing to share Postscript and PDF with others to establish a fairly open standard document format. Also, while it has initiaited some nasty lawsuits over circumvention of its pretection schemes (for example) Adobe has not been forefront in trying to legislate protectionist policies for the closed software industry.
So basically, I am puzzled as to how using Microsoft--the strongest example--to defend my argument could possibly weaken that argument. Perhaps I could be modded "-1 unoriginal" at best though I must admit...
I think that tax incentives for open source development would be a great way for governments to "pay for" the open source software they use as well, but I think the pushback from closed software developers would be too much for such an idea to take hold.
Microsoft, either directly or through industry lobbyists, would argure that it represents an unfair subsidy of its competition. Yes, Microsoft would be able to participate in open source development to take advantage of the tax incentive just like everyone else, but MS wouldn't belabour that point. The big argument would be that Microsoft Research wouldn't be able to get tax breaks unless it distributed its source code the way the government tells it to do so, and that for the most part those distribution methods are incompatible with the MS business model.
I might (hopefully) be wrong, but I think this is one idea that'll die on the vine. If it does not, and such a tax break is implemented, count on it to define "open source" so broadly as to include any "source available" research projects, such as the "look but don't tough" MS Shared SOurce initiative, or even developers who only offer source code upon payment of a license fee and a signature on an iron-clad NDA. I suppose that would be better than nothing though.
Now the next hurdle to get over is the profound aversion to giving up tax revenue that most governments cannot seem to shake...
Your "solution" of creating a separate, isolated domain for the offinding application is completely inappropriate. It reminds me of when the police did a crackdown on prostitution in a notorious inner-city neighbourhood in our city. On the surface they were very successful--hookers and Johns are dramatically less visible in "the beltline" now, and the developers are falling all over each other to buy out all the slumlords, tear down the decades-old shacks and put up shiny new executive condominiums.
In reality the crackdown was mostly a failure. It did nothing whatsoever to reduce prostitution or related organised crime. Prostitutes and their pimps just found another 'hood for a hangout. Unfortunately the new hangout was probably even less appropriate for that kind of activity than the old one: an older, working-class neighbouthood with significantly more children residing in the area than were present in the old strolls. Schoolgirls not even in high school waiting to cross the street are targeted by some Johns now and gang activity and drug trafficking are also growing at accelerated rates in the area.
Your proposing the electronic equivalent of simple chasing the hookers and pushers into another neighbourhood and it ignores the root problem: YOU STILL HAVE MAJOR SECURITY ISSUES--they are just slightly less limited in scope. If the offensive application is a mission-critical app it is still unacceptable:
* Disgruntled employees could use their domain admin rights to sabotage the system * Unscrupulous users could use admin privleges to impersonate other users and compromise audit trails * Incompetent users could accidentally damage or destroy the system with unlimited rights on the domain (erase the wrong files, alter configurations, etc).
A number of people have already suggested an answer to the question posed in the article: You don't "deal with" such a badly written application--you make the vendor fix it our do everything in your power to have it removed completely from your company, and when dealing with management you do not present a technical case beyond stating that the application presents "serious weaknesses in security", you present a BUSINESS case:
* taking measures to "work around" the seciruty risks will cost $x thousands to implement and $x thousans/year extra to maintain (don't need to mention firewalls, VPMs, separate domains etc or you'll lose them)
* taking measures to secure the bad application will mean it will not work as well (or not at all) with other business systems. This means wasted time and money because employees will have separate logins, have to enter information twice or manually copy data, etc (managers hate the idea of having to remember more than one login, and the big push in a lot of companies is to "integrate business systems" so suggesting that you have to move away from that goal will be convincing)
* even after taking all these measures, if your company is an American-based, publicly-traded company, YOU WOULD BE BREAKING THE LAW if you followed the vendors suggestions. Sarbanes-Oxley requires such companies to maintain proper audit trails and put in place adequate protections against circumventing such mechanisms. If an application requires administration rights of any kind there are NO protections of any kind against potential fraudulent manipulation of records. The same is true about shared logins, and both practices also violate regulations in healcare, food/beverage, and other industries as well.
There are bad applications and there are BAD applications. What the article described is unacceptable bad to the point that you do not try to "balance with security" or otherwise deal with it...your plan of action should be a plan to migrate very quickly AWAY from the app.
I concede that MySQL is very good at querying massively large tables of information, and as you point out its weakness is in referential integrity and data validation. Also, MySQL is not good with databases that are very dynamic--it is best that data be static (inserted once then selected ad-infinitum with few UPDATEs or DELETEs). Very excellent for most data logging or discussion forum websites, with few tables and simple relationships or none at all.
So to clarify, "small" refers to schema size and complexity, NOT the quantity of data within that schema.
When i have a programming project, i want my contractors to get the job done. They have specifications and functional requirements and they can be as creative with that as they want to be.
[...]
IT professionals are no longer the new surgeons. They're plumbers.
Wow. Perhaps you are personally a fine person, but I bet as a boss people think you are a bit of a jerk.
In my experience the result of this sort of work environment is often mediocre and sometimes disastrous, particularly in a "waterfall" project management environment. My comments don't relate excluseively to programmers, they include the people who write the specs and functional requirements--ESPECIALLY the latter, because poor design and planning can doom a project before one line of code is written. And as for programmers, I do not want them to be confrontational, but I fully expect them to be creative and make suggestions to improve upon a specification.
Although a person can get lost in "creative" pursuits and mired in details that do not contribute to end goals, the opposite can happen too. Engineers and developers can pigeon-hole themselves into doing things a certain way, using certain tools. Sometimes you cannot avoid it because you are working with an existing system, but if you are developing from the ground up you should ALWAYS use some creativity.
I expect professionalism, and something that will stand the test of time. And i pay them accordingly.
Professionalism goes both ways you know. If you expect professionalism from your developers, then you should respect them as professionals, not deride them with opinions that they are just "plumbers" and "aren't paid for creativity". Just as is the case with open source coding, "many eyes make bugs shallow" in a specification, and when a programmer asks why it is the way it is and "wouldn't it work better this way" it can be very beneficial.
VS2005 is certaily a stellar development environment, I'll agree with you there, but IT people implement systems, they don't often do heavy developmet anymore. Linux does need a "VS2005 killer" though, so that developers are encouraged to expand on teh libraray of applicatios availabel for Linux.
I'd have to disagree wih you on the remote and automated management however. Yes, Windows has some great tools to handle automated deploymet of patches/upgrades/etc, but RedHat and Novell have done a great job there. Furhtermore you can do a superior job with large, remote backups using no-exra-cost toolsin Linux than you can with Windows backup solutions that cost thousands. Furthermore, the Windows command shell and batch files are pretty weak compared to what is available for Linux so you too often have to resort to using a cumbersome GUI to remotely administer machines. I suppose it is personal taste though, but I much prefer rattling off a script to plodding my way through some MMC snap-in, wading throughtrees and menus and such with my mouse.
I can't be bothered to learn something new when it seems everything supports MySQL.
I'm glad you don't work for me with that attitude. I'd rather work with someone who is interested in learning new things and will bring some creativity to the job. People of your mentality have to be careful they don't fall into the "false laziness" trap--using some tool or technique or techology because you are too lazy to learn something new, only to end up doing load of extra work to avoid the shortcomings of your inappropriate design choices. The result is scads of legacy code at higher layers of an application to handle things like datatype verification, basic referential integrity and so on.
All the various different executables to do different tasks rather then one shell like MySQL, a permission system which seemed from my limited usage more perverse then MySQL's
I've never found it to be a major struggle to use PostgreSQL, though being a more full-featured database it will naturally be a bit more complex to manage. I'm puzzled about the "all the various executables" part too, since many of them were invocable from the psql shell anyways. Also, it sounds like you've not lookded at PostgreSQL for awhile because its permissions system has undergone a lot of work--certainly it can be complex but it is very flexible and powerful, and honestly it gets rid of most excuses you had to execute all your database operations under the database superuser (or some other single user account) in your backend code.
I have better things to do with my time, like write cool code that uses MySQL.
You might want to examine how you used your time...if you had spent a few hours or a couple days learning something new for a change (like PostgreSQL) then it might've saved weeks or hours of frustration trying to use mySQL for too-complex tasks.
MySQL might have grownup a lot in recent years, but at its heart it was meant for much more modest tasks, like storing guestbook entries, record collections, as a temporary datastore/embedded database, high-performance querying of relatively static ad/or non-critical data and so on.
My point is that the tool is not always the problem. Now if C++'s integer arithmetic had an issue, that is another story, but the programmer simply was not good.
No, the tool IS part of the problem in such cases. If the programmer was not that good at C then C was the wrong tool and thus part of the problem. The programmer should've taken the time to study up on C, or picked a different tool. There are times when the tool is not appropriate for the job--you probably shouldn't use C if you need to do heavy text processing and need to get the job done fast (use Perl instead), or if you are less experienced and want a language that supports sound object-oriented programming maybe try Python, etc.
MySQL was not designed as a robust relational database, and its creators didn't seem to be intent on making it so, or else they'd have designed it differently. It was designed as a very quick and quite dirty SQL frontend/ISAM backend system to support small, informal databases (or so it seems): Basically, its heritage is to be like the old Ashton-Tate dBase but using SQL to query the tables. Since then it has lost that focus and now we have large websites storing millions of records in mySQL.
MySQL is a great tool if used as intended, however it definitely IS a problem if your accounting system uses it for example. People started doing crap like that and complained about mySQL's lack of features, thus we have things tacked on like innoDB tables and such to add this robustness.
PostgreSQL was not always as super-robust as it is now, and in its present form its source code is probably almost unrecognisable from 10 years ago, however its architecture was more sound and thought out from the start, as its heritage was as an academic project. Its challenge was not to add features as was the case with mySQL--PgSQL was designed for extensibility. PostgreSQL had to catch up in performance and stability, which it has done in spades.
Personally, I always use UNIX timestamps (seconds since 1970). They can be directly added, sorted, and converted into any timezone, and its very portable. But thats just me. (Yes, UNIX timestamps do nothing before 1970, etc, etc).
It seems somehow wrong that your business logic has to perform low-level validation of basic datatypes, and it is cumbersome and error-prone to deal with unrecognisable representations. Only the geekiest of geeks could tell me whether 1984293617 falls on a Thursday without runing it through some kind of conversion program (simple as that may be for a geek). What about people who point-and-click their way through some report designer--they're gonna have to deal with some giant integer in a column entitled "something-date". The other problem is that it is not very precise for some applications that need sub-second timestamp values.
Personally, I like PostgreSQL because it accepts ISO standard formats, you don't need to do anything to convert timezones--you simply specify the time zone when you insert or query and it issmart enough to figure it out when you query fordatain Eastern time zone and it was inserted in Pacific timezone. Furthermore, it knows Feb 30 isn't valid, and knows when leap years occur, and can format the date in many different ways with simple built-in functions, can be accurate to the millisecond and won't crash and burn in 2038.
FYI, I believe the "seconds since UNIX epoch" representation of date/time values is a SIGNED integer, so they are in fact good for earlier dates than 1970 (they are good to some time in late 1901 in fact). That is still a pretty limited range and why early systems didn't use that representation inmany cases (couldn't store birthdates for a lot of people who were still alive in the early 1970s becasue they were born before 1901). It is still a problem in some applications ad that is why 32-bit "UNIX-style" time is discouraged.
I think it's a shame that people resort to such kludges without adequately lookig for more appropriate alternatives...but that's just me;-)
all they are doing is waiting to precect the way they can screw their customers, and making them wait for it
Sony is now officially admitting that they will miss the Christmas season completely--even in Japan (if your shipments haven't reached retail customers by the end of October you have "missed Christmas"). No manufacturer in their right mind would voluntarily miss Christmas with a new product--especially in North America. If it involved a company's flagship product, it would mean certain death for that company. The PS3 is not "the" flagship product for Sony but it'll still be a huge setback.
Big, established companies don't need to wait to "predict the way they they can screw their customers" because they already know how. The best time to release a new, overhyped product is in the fall: You must get the first shipments out the factory door by the end of October so they can be on US store shelves in time for Thanksgiving long weekend. It helps to take pre-orders and manufacture jsut enough to fill those orders, plus a few more: you need to get enough units out to establish a market position but create enough of a shortage so that you can keep prices elevated (and in the videogame console market that often means minimise losses).
Don't worry, Sony will learn its lesson...it's missing Christmas this year..that means MS will enjoy another solid XBox360 Christmas without serios Sony competition. It also means that Nintendo could debut its Revolution without competition from Sony as well. All in all it means 2007 will likely be a real hurtin' year for Sony.
Each license of Redhat Advanced Server Linux costs me about $1200.
Yup, that it does...so if I choose to use this box for a PostgreSQL database server it costs me $1200...if I decide I want RedHat's support and whatever other goodies. If I don't I can go to Novell and get their enterprise product for as little as $350 (1 or 2 CPUs) and no more than $900 (up to 16 CPUs). Or I can roll my own server using a no-cost distribution.
Note something about these prices too--they are based on servers/server processors. There are no CALs or client limitations...so even if you decide that buying a commercial enterprise distro is worth it, your licensing costs are $1200/$900/$350...period. You can use your RedHat (or SuSE or whatever) server with a database to serve up, say, an accounting system for an enterprise with 1000 users. Required licensing is as follows:
SuSe + PostgreSQL: $900 RH + PostgreSQL: $1200 Windows 2003 Server + MSSQL 2005: $9000 *
* W2k3 standard ($1000) with external connector license ($2000) + 1 SQL 2005 standard processor license ($6000)
Note that if you want to use a multi-processor box the Microsoft solution gets even more expensive...with SuSE and RedHat the price is for systems that support multiprocessing up to 16-way...that's a savings of $7800 to $8100 in licensing for a single server. And enterprises have a lot of servers. Seems to me that it'd be worth looking at.
Then there are the intangables: There are more viruses released per day for windows than there have been for Linux during its entire existence. There are free (and Free) software tools often bundled with Linux distros that are extra cost for Windows. Remote and automated management of Linux boxes is much more powerful than for Windows. If you want terminal services it is no extra cost for Linux--it is an in-built capability of X, whereas you have to pay through the nose to get terminal services licensing for Windows. The cost advantages go on and on.
...but I still don't see the big differentiator here that'll convince a UNIX shop to adopt Windows over the latest iteration of their existing platform.
This isn't a really huge move actually--it is just more of the same "bundling" stuff that Microsoft has done with its OSes forever (applets in Win 3.0 is where it started and now we have Media Player, IE, firewall, etc). Microsoft has finally seen how successful projects like Cygwin have eaten into its SFU market space, and relatively speaking SFU has been a mild failure for Microsoft. W2K3 R2 now simply bundles an improved SFU right into its OS distribution and is betting that customers will be "lazy" enough to use their solution rather than adopt 3rd party solutions like Cygwin.
I do not think this will accelerate the demise of UNIX all that much though...I think that this will simply be more appealing to customers who are already migrating towards a Microsoft solution from legacy UNIX systems. Using Win2k3 as a drop-in replacement for a UNIX box simply because you can doesn't seem justified here, even if licensing and hardware costs are lower than for, say, SUN/Solaris. THe description just sounds like a model of inefficiency to me: All the UNIX stuff runs outside the kernel and still seems "bolted on". You have all this powerful hardware and all the work is being done by these bolt-ons and you still have the Windows kernel, fancy GUI and a load of services and drivers to support what you might not tough more than 5% of the time when in production. The only way that sounds appealing to me is if you are migrating to Windows and have new critical enterprise applications that run in the Windows environment alongside UNIX legacy apps.
Windows will only TRULY "ursurp UNIX" when it TRULY adopts a UNIX-like architecture: It has to un-couple all the client-ish stuff (well all of its components really) and offer tools to support this more modular architecture. W2K3 R2 is not nearly there yet. However, MS is definitely heading closer in that direction: The windows registry is essentially deprecated as of the release of Vista (it is supported but is considered "legacy support"...a lot of.NET experts recommend using XML-based, application-specific.config files over the monolithic registry). The Monad shell promises to be quite powerful and could address the severe shortcomings of the existing command shell and allow the OS to run usefully without a GUI. POSIX/UNIX compatibility will be further developed...and so on.
"Vista Server" (or whatever they call it) won't be totally there but the one after that will be close enough...Windows server will NEVER become just another UNIX clone, but out of necessity it'll probably evolve into a very UNIX-like architecture that uses proprietary/"extended" protocols, languages, libraries, interfaces...
The ActiveRecord pattern is NOT new, and it won't scale out past a few dozen tables.
How many applications out there have more than a few dozen tables? I'd have serious concerns with a system that had a single application, with a single database, comprising of hundreds of tables. In reality such systems are quite rare--for every massive ERP implementation there are hundreds or thousands of smaller applications where Ruby on Rails' Active Record model would work very well.
For TOY applications, it might be fine, but for say something like an ERP system with thousands of tables, it just won't scale out performance or maintanence wise, never will.
There are other approaches to system design as well--how about applying a modular "UNIX philosophy" to an enterprise system with several distinctly defined "TOY applications" each dealing with a smaller number of tables, all loosely coupled together? Even big, old accounting systems are broken into "modules" after all (which historically are more tightly coupled with the main system but still deal solely with a smaller subset of tables/files).
I, for one, like "toy applications". I don't think I've ever heard a developer get real enthusiastic about implementing or maintaining an ERP system--not the way a manager or marketing person does anyways. Come to think of it I don't know a lot of enthusiastic end users of such systems either. Perhaps a mega-corporation saves a lot of time and makes its business more efficient with its mega-ERP systems, however, feeding and caring of that beast is still tedious and annoying--it's just less tedious, annoying and expensive than dealing with mistakes, redundancies and general idiocy an enterprise has to deal with in the absence of a good business management system.
One thing is certain: there are different tools suited to different jobs, and Ruby on Rails/Active Record is best suited to smaller-sized applications where everything is developed from the ground up. Saying it lacks legitimacy because it cannoy scale to handle apps of gigantic proportions or properly interface to complicated, arcane legacy systems (ALL contemporary ERP systems in production use today are "legacy systems" IMHO) is like saying the familiar operator interface of an automobile is a failure because it cannot "scale out" to handle "real" vehicles like high-speed super-trains, jumbo jets or spacecraft. Over 90% of us never need to scale out past four wheels going up to 125km/h and carrying a couple of passengers.
And don't get me started on performance: Java was widely criticised for its performance, as were PHP and Perl for being interpreted and "slow"...however the use of all of those in very high-volume, demanding production systems. The hardware is out there to handle it now, and I've never heard people complain that Rails or Active Record are way too slow to handle the tasks asigned to them.
Further funding has been provided by Microsoft Corporation
XORP is licensed under BSD, thus it is not only extensible but embraceable as well. Microsoft likes anything it can embrace and extend.
The Windows NT TCP/IP stack is substantially made up of lifted BSD-licensed code anyways (or at least started out that way). I imagine "Vista Server" could be equipped with "innovative", "advanced" routing capabilities compliments of XORP.
I've found wireless network service in the following places:
* Rogers, Bell and Telus all offer hotspot service in addition to their cellphone service. I hooked up at a truck stop in Regina.
* West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton provides hotspot service. Some small town high schools connected to Supernet in Alberta have wireless access.
* Hotspots are provided by either telcos or Airport Authorities at international airports across Canada. I've seen service in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Toronto and Montreal airports myself so I think it's a standard thing everywhere now.
* In Alberta, there is a company called "community networks" that provides high-speed internet to farms and villages all over ther province.
Sounds like a pretty large wireless market to me...
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Windows XP is fast, (relatively) stable, pretty, and easy for the average user.
.net2.0, MSSQL Server 2005, biztalk.
.net 1.x to 2.0). This is a challenge given the Windows community worships on the altar of compatibility and many windows depelopers are change-averse.
.net managed code...etc... and now all that is left is a pail fuzzy inkjet printout of the original vision.
.config files.
XP can be MADE to be fairly fast, but it can even more easily be made to be a big, slow pig.
For some time hooking up a stock XP machine to the 'net would bring it crashing to a worm-infested halt within minutes--literally. XP has reached a point of stability but for a great deal of its lifetime it was unstable as hell--mostly because of its massive vulnerability to exploits and "turned on by default" philosophy regarding services.
Whether XP is "pretty" is a matter of taste--I personally find the default gummybear, theme-by-fisher-price look repulsive.
Microsoft has kept it patched and updated (to some degree), and provided a service pack for some larger upgrades.
Perhaps with the latest IE vulnerability they should reach for a higher degree. SP2 was definitely the right move but the truly correct thing to do would've been to put much of what was in SP2 into XP in the first place.
And at the same time they've released several versions of media center, tablet pc, etc.
This is not innovation. This is the same old garbage with fresh new garbage piled on top...and they have been midle commercial successes at very best.
All the while building the tools for their future strategies, including VS.net 2005,
This is Microsoft's biggest saving grace--they make some top-notch developer tools. I really think that if it were not for Visual Studio that not even monopoly-induced inertia could keep them secure as industry leader. Ballistic Ballmer was right on the mark when ha ambled around the stage, stomping and beating his chest yelling "developers! developers! developers!". The only thing is that their future strategies seem a bit hard to pin down...that and they've on occasion pissed off said developers by throwing compatibility to the wind (a lot of depressed VB6 coders out there...and there are a number of annoyances in migrating from
What is it that you need so bad from Vista other than 3d desktop graphics?
Almost nothing at all. Vista was hyped as a big new thing...then MS suddenly had to pay attention to security and put out some big fires and "reload". Oops...no time for WinFS...gotta cut back on the ambitios rewrite of system componenets in
There is one thing that is welcome...and that is the deprecation of the registry and DCOM...but both are still there. At least there are supported, standard alternatives in Vista in the form of Indigo and XML based
XP will still do everything my MacOSX box will do (and much faster) and with the proper tweaking, it'll do everything my Ubuntu laptop does as well.
XP will do it "good enough". It just does a mediocre job of most things. My experience with Macs as of late is limited but I really notice little difference speed-wise, considering the amount of eye-candy that OS X (which I also find a bit off-putting once in awhile).
Windows XP is a great operating system, and I'm glad to have something stable enough that we don't have to upgrade every year
Except that we actually do upgrade it in a sense--every month when Windows Update has a round of patches to install.
MS has a problem on its hands really...it has slipped into managin Windows a bit like an open source project--it is updated often but rarely is there a ground-up, major reworking. It has made XP into a mediocre but (finally) stable and usable OS, and if MS just kept issuing updates and service packs it would evolve into what could be considered a true quality product. The problem comes in because
Windows Server 2003 was released in 2001?
Windows Server 2003 was a MAJOR revision?
'm not sure if this is FUD or just plain stupidness, but it is certainly not true. Windows' design was monolithic, and IE certainly didn't help, but IE is no more in the windows kernel than say nautilus or konqeror, it's just a program with a library that is far too widely used.
.dlls for low-level system operations, and now we have important system components and applications that have critical dependencies on IE (even 3rd parties have done this at the encouragement of Microsoft I might add). You are correct in that IE plays in userland--but considering that it is so embedded into Windows that it can no longer be removed completely without breaking things makes it nearly as stupid as if it were running in kernel space. MS has actually made it hard NOT to run at least some IE components, some of the time, with full administrator privleges.
.dlls hitches along for the ride.
I did NOT say IE was in the kernel...I was stating two separate examples of stupid design choices that have led to Windows being an opaque, unmanageable monolith of ugly code:
1. Unlike Firefox or Epiphany or Konqueror (etc.) IE was engineered right into the OS product--sprinkled thoroughout the system directory right alongside
2. All manner of drivers and the GUI ARE INDEED resident in kernel space--right up to Windows XP, and as such run without limitations on privliges. Some have boasted that Windows NT/2K/XP has a "microkernel architecture" however there seems to be little to justify it being called "micro" when so much garbage in other
Perhaps I should've spelled it out VERY CLEARLY for the people who speed-read over all the articles and other small words in each post. In any case Windows is so messed up architecturally that it has proven to be unmaintainable. I look forward to see what MS has to offer in its first major post-Vista release. Until then, I have migrated my personal computer to OpenSuSE and will remain a Linux user without giving Microsoft serious consideration as an option. At least I won't have to put up with product activation, massively critical bugs and a too-rapid hardware upgrade cycle.
Microsoft did not get into this mess because of its relentless pursuit of total, perpetual compatibility. As most people know, while a lot of effort has gone into compatibility the simple fact is that the current version of Windows is no more compatible with its legacy products (windows 3.x, dos) than Linux or OS2--it uses the "Windows on Windows" virtual environment to run 16-bit legacy code, and XPs compatibility with Win9x/Me games, etc. was more of a bolt-on than something that permeates into the core of XP. The result is that Windows is remarkably compatible but not totally so (any 16-bit Windows/DOS program that relies on communications ports for example will crash in NT/2000/XP). The large compatibility layer has resulted in a bloated, crusty registry and APIs that would only be purposely designed like they are by crack addicts. However, although this makes Windows a sometimes-frustrating environment to program at lower levels it is not what makes it nearly unmaintainable even by behemoth Microsoft.
The REAL poor design decision was electing to create a tightly integrated system. This was the root cause that made other questionable choices at Microsoft (compatibility and "Featureitis") difficult or impossible to correct. When Microsoft wanted to bundle its web browser with Windows it decided to take IE (which wasn't ingtegrated with Win95 at all initially) and sprinkle its libraries in the system directory and link a whole bunch of other components to it...to the point that even the GUI shell will not operate without IE components. It threw the GUI and all these drivers into kernel space. It made one big monolithic, multi-million-LOC pile of crap and justified it by doing it in the name of a "seamless user experience" at a good level of performance.
There is no excuse for this now--we have machines powerful enough to host full-featured virtual machines that can run self-contained copies of legacy OSes, so if customers really (often foolishly) want to run software that is over a decade old to do important things then they can take that route. The sad thing is that political reasons rather than technical reasons prevent Microsoft from taking the proper course of action. Microsoft should've "pulled an Apple" right after the release of XP and immediately set about developing a totally new OS as different from the NT-based XP as NT was from DOS (and the Win9x/Me derivatives). Apple smartly got out to market faster by building its foundation on open software.
The problem is MS is probably loathe to heavily depend on open source for its flagship product, and the problem is that Apple beat them to the most viable BSD-licensed option. Since MS has been asleep at the wheel there for far too long, they have two difficult options ahead: Firstly, they could bite the bullet and plan the first major, post-Vista Windows release around a BSD-licensed UNIX core as Apple has already done. MS would be risking a lot by doing this as they become less differentiated from Apple than before--can MS out-class Apple on the UI front, or maintain enough legacy Windows compatibility to keep its customer base? Second, they could try and engineer a new kernel/core system themselves and bolt on chunks of updated Vista as componenets. This could take longer than the first option but it is a made-at-MS solution. In the meantime competitors will have even more time to catch up.
Basically, Windows as we know it is fast approaching the end of its life cycle. I personally don't think it is really sustainable for even one more major release after Vista. Although this presents a great opportunity for Linux-based and OS X systems I don't think it is the nail in MS' coffin just yet. I figure that with the kind of shake up that looks possible to occur in the next few months at MS that in around 2010 we'll all be eagerly anticipating the release a completely new Microsoft OS--with a very UNIX-like architecture (holy shades of XENIX batman!) under the hood but something very 21st centurey on top.
...of a manager's role.
He's a manager, not a coder. He doesn't need to push back, he needs to spend his time managing.
What do you think management is if it isn't "pushing"? This fellow is managing a major web development project, and resource allocation (resources being time, money and people) is an essential, unavoidable part of the process. Unless you are a "supreme manager" who answers to nobody, like a president or COO or something, then it is this guys job to estimate as accurately as possible what resources are required to achieve the goals of the project.
Market the idea to the rest of company. Sending out mockups and ROI case studies of other companies can entice your manager and/or his manager
If this guy was already tasked with managing this project and already has coders working on it, the appropriate time to obtain buy-in has long since passed--his employer has bunged things up big time if there is no buy-in now. In my place of employment, it is NOT the job of project managers to sell the project (whether it is internal or external)--there are other people to do that ("business development specialists" for external projects and committees for internal projects).
Use your budget more effectively.
I'd say that you should remove the first two words...this guy should "budget more effectively" and have a strong argument to back those numbers to his superiors (this is where the "pushback" comes into play). If your superior is not convinced then you must compromise on your deliverables/goals. If this guy cannot get enough of a budget to hire more coders then examine outsourcing/contractors. If the budget is still too lean, make do with the meagre number of people and revise the schedule, and be firm to superiors about that schedule. If the schedule is too long then cut down features/scope. If you are still not in a good place then push to have the project cancelled entirely. That'll get the big bosses attention and if it is as important as your company's online presence that is 1990s stale then the guy being the roadblock will have drawn a lot of negative attention to himself.
Build trust. You need to gain a reputation as someone who gets things done, and can be trusted with a task.
Not just getting things done...getting them done on time and within budget. Even Larry the Cable Guy can "git 'er done". To garner a reputation of trust you must set attainable goals and meet them reliably. You won't get respect by throwing together your online store in record time if it is full of bugs, awkward to use and has a dumb security hole like SQL injection that lets a hacker clear all passwards or steal customer purchasing information..even though you "got things done".
Don't make excuses. Learn to put a positive spin on timetables, instead.
Not always possible to put a positive spin on scheduling things (I wonder how positive BillG or ballistic Ballmer felt when they learned Vista was pushed back to January 2007). And there are always valid excuses--I prefer to call them "reasons". You just have to acknowledge when you are responsible for them and make sure people know when THEY are responsible for them. And don't dewll on the excuse, concentrate on the solution.
Don't commit to a project unless you and your superiors are agreed on the timetables.
If your employer is as screwed up as I suspect this guys was, it is possible that he wasn't voluntarily committed to the schedule. In fact, he might not have even been given a specific schedule or had much cooperation in defining the goals or the design. In that case there will never be an end. He says his employer's site has been stagnant for eight years...back in the 1990s it was the thing to do to put "under construction" on a site. I'd bet that this site might still have those nasty little notices on it.
What is with the VGA port? Are they that much more expensive than DVI?
Yup, seems annoying since I'd think that if someone wants a tiny system then they'd opt for an LCD panel and the analogue port is just wasted electronice. However there is the NL board that at least does away with the bulky 15-pin VGA port, though a small header connector and the DAC circuitry are still there.
Another thing which most of these SFF boards lack is dual ethernet, or at least gigE.
Actually Via and most other Mini-ITX board makers offer at least one model of board equipped with dual ethernet--the EPIA PD series of boards all have scads of ports--including 2 ethernet ports. VIA pushed these for use as point-of-sale terminals (because they also have a whole bunch of RS-232 and USB ports for communication with all those POS gadgets like cash drawers, credit/debit PIN pads, pole displays and so on) but they are also popular choices for fancy routers.
In addition to the nano boards, some C7-based mini-ITX boardsd have also trickled out onto the market and theseare allequipped with a single gigabit ethernet port. VIA is planning to come out with a Luke-based replacement for the PD boards that'll run faster and may be available with at least one of the two ethernet ports capable of gigabit. VIA is being notoriously vague about its schedule but it is included in their 2006 product catalogue so I guess they're at least hoping for release inthen ext few months...
One of the best teachers I ever had (back in 1990) banned note taking entirely for his Trigonometry and Calculus classes.
Quite interesting--though I do remember that I gave up trying to transcribe what was written on the board to my notes anyways and just jotted select concepts and formulae in my math-heavy classes anyways so I think he had a point.
However, the professor in question wants people to switch from laptops to paper, basically making them less efficient at note-taking, giving them even less time to pay attention to what she's saying. I don't think she understands that side-effect.
Woah...wait a minute...pencil and paper is LESS efficient than using a computer....in MATH? I'd sure like to have YOUR laptop man...it must have quite a decent digital cam on mounted on the outside of the lid to capture all those graphs, diagrams and math formulae--or maybe a good touchscreen to doodle them right into your document, cuz I'd NEVER be able to take decent math notes on a computer and keep up with the lecture.
In any case, if she's worried that note-taking is a distraction, why doesn't she just prepare all her material ahead of time, provide it to the students, and then go over it in class in detail?
Because then she'd be talking to a mostly empty classroom, and the people that did bother to attend would be zoned out (we have the notes...why bother coming to a lecture?)...not to say that there is no merit in the prof preparing the notes in advance--it's just that they shouldn't be distrubuted in advance. A good way that some profs do it is they do the lecture and essentially take notes from the class, annotating the prepared lecture notes with questions/comments/additional discussion points that came up during the lecture (flipping things around--funky when you think about it). The annotated lecture notes would then be available online a day or two later.
The first bullet point: You're an asshole. Get over it. Some people have stuff that you don't have, and they don't have much to talk about besides their stuff.
I never said I had a problem with it myself, except to say that people who have nothing more to talk about besides their fancy stuff tend to be viewed as losers...just making a point...no need to be offended.
The second bullet point: Not your problem.
Yes it is---it detracts from every participant in a lecture when one person is so distracted that they start acting like "just don't get it" guy" and waste everyone's time with stupid questions they wouldn't need to ask if they just paid attention
The third: This is a slightly real issue but sooner or later there won't be any manual labor jobs left and every job in existence will involve using computers simply because it won't be cost-effective to have humans do manufacturing, or delivery, or whatever.
It's been a long day at work and I could use a little of what you've been smoking...I cannot quite figure out how the shift in the labour market towards using computers relates to the annoyance of keyboards clicking away (and another annoying trait of some "laptop losers"--neglecting to mute speakers so warning chimes can be heard by all). My job heavily involves computers and there are times when we are supposed to put them away. When we have important informational meetings at work there are at most two computers in the room: the presenter's machine and the meeting recorder's PC, and only the recorder actually does any meaningful amount of typing.
my best guess is you are saying that eventually we'll all get in our skycars and go to the officepod and sit and type at computers every day for a living and that keyclicks will eventually just be background noise we all just learn to deal with. I think that by the time we get to the point where "every job in existence will involve computers" that keyboards (personal computers in general in fact) will already be obsolete for most tasks we perform on computers today. This is already happening as we all start carrying Blackberries and so on. In fact the aforementioned meeting recorders PC at work has recently been replaced by a smart whiteboard and voice recording, precicely because writing meeting minutes was too tedious and typing them too annoying.
The fourth: This has nothing to do with being a laptop user, and everything to do with being an asshole. Guess you were both in good company.
Nice to meet you Pot, my name is Kettle.
Anyways, it is pretty clear that you are disturbed that people could've thought of you as a loser when you brought your laptop into lectures. Although my message was bluntly stated and touched a personal nerve of yours it was honestly not intended to offend so much as it was meant in jest and to offer frank advice (basically that there is a time and a place for certain technology and that laptops in a lecture is an example of an INappropriate use of technology).
...we'd call people like you losers.
Of course, laptops weren't quite as elegant in the early-to-mid 90s and the geekiness factor of toting a laptop with you wherever you went was much higher. However, "the laptop guy" was pretty high up on the "piss of the class list"--probably higher up than the "just doesn't get it and asks too many stupid questions that should be saved for after class guy". Why was "laptop guy" the target of such derision?
* he was being a showoff--"look at the fancy toy I bought courtesy of the Bank of Mum and Dad...too bad for you with your big loans and Kraft Dinner Diet that you can't be elite like me" (remember this was before the age of mandatory laptops for students)
* the laptop screen projected an "attention force field" that caused him to zone out and fall out of the loop...at times this would get bad enough that he became "just doesn't get it" guy.
* the constant clicking on the keyboard annoyed all neighbouring classmates
* his occasional bitching about the prof changing the overhead transparency too quickly, before he could transcribe it into his machine, grew annoying within a few weeks.
Perhaps you're personally a pretty nice guy, but I'd be willing to bet a number of people have quetly labelled you a "laptop loser", and if your professors knew you attitide towards their teaching methods (basically that they couldn't possibly know anything about teaching people) they might be somewhat offended.
There is another problem with "laptop losers" in the classroom...they're becoming "laptop losers" in the boardroom as well. The problem is getting bad enough that laptops are banned from most meetings where I work (for non-presenters only of course since we are still addicted to powerpoint here). So speaking from the corporate perspective I might offer this suggestion: if you plan to have a career outside academia then youd best be putting away your laptop during lectures so you can "learn to learn" effectively in an informational meeting and be a meaningful contributor to discussions when in the boardroom.
All the heavy lifting should be elsewere, and the "results" should be in front of you.
That depends if you are a starving student living in a dorm room or cramped apartment, or if you are looking for the ultimate media system to hook into your 7.1 surround system and gigantic hi-def screen that you just had installed in the home theatre room of your upscale house. If it is the former then you probably don't have room to spare for the "heavy lifting" machine, nor the money to purchas the extra hardware. Even if you did find somewhere to put it, the big back-end box with all the whirring drives and fans would probably be audible from every part of your small pad. If it is the latter then I'm sure you have a large attic, basement utility room or spare closet you could wire up and soundproof, as well as the money to get scads of hard drive storage and computing power--so in that case your suggestion is the best one.
The secret? Fast networking. Note that doesn't necessarily imply TCP/IP. Just a LAN that's fast enough to get the job done.
The newest generation of EIPA Mini-ITX boards (C7/"Luke" based) are equipped with gigabit ethernet onboard so they'll meet your needs nicely. You can already buy limited quantities of the first model (so they are not vapourware as some VIA detractors have said, despite VIA's delivery track record being nearly as spotty as Microsoft's).
and you don't have to bend over backwards to solve all the present problems
I don't think that there are really any problems solved by your suggestion personally--if you have a LAN based solution you probably have to do more work to get it to operate to your satisfaction. I suppose it depends on the problems you are trying to solve--if you have 100 movies and thousands of songs and want enough spare drive space to record another 100 hours of TV then you have problems that can only be solved by haveing a media server hidden away somewhere. If you are just looking for a TiVO-like PVR that is hack-friendly and doesn't require paying huge monthly fees for your cable company's "on-demand" digital package, then you have no problems to solve--just get a Mini-ITX board, fill the RAM slots and stuff it in a cute little box with a laptop hard drive of reasonable size and the bulk of your time will be software configuration.
If its one thing we do better than any countries out there its dodge critical questions and pass the buck.
Actually, I'd say the problem in many places outside the US is that their judiciaries do NOT "pass the buck". This is a problem in Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia anyways. Judges are supposed to make judgements based on a reasonalby strict interpretation of the law, and it is important that they be fair and independent from influence by the legislature so they can rule a law invalid should it violate the constitution of the country or if the interpretation is politically unpopular. The problem comes in when judges overstep their bounds and decide to pronounce important decisions in absence of valid law instead of directing politicians to address the legislative void democratically.
The judge was doing his job correctly in dismissing the obscenity case and leaving the question open rather than setting a precident that effectively creates a new law. The origins of the patchwork of US obscenity laws makes little sense in the age of the internet, but it came about because a judge "passed the buck" there too--basically, saying that there was no viable legislation that defined obscene speech federally and that it was the responsibility of state and local authorities to establish "community standards". In the absence of such standards then all obscenity cases should be thrown out as this one was unless they violate criminal law (child porn, inciting violence, making threats, defamation, etc).
So how would I define community standards in the age of the Internet? I'd probably use the "lowest common denominator" however in the US the most politically popular might be to be fairly strict with community standards on a national basis. I think that's where the Clinton administration was going with the CDA. I would defer to the community standards that apply to the locality of the author/distributor myself, and if it was my decision I would say that if there was any mechanism that limited the consumption of content from an internet site to a "membership list", that no community standards of any physical jusristiction should apply. Because the community consists of people who voluntarily sign up to access the content and by that they give consent that they believe the content meets the standards of that "virtual community" then no such site could ever be obscene. Such a rule would probably be best enshrined in law democratically but it seems sensible to me.
If I was making a site that consisted of kinky BDSM photography that would undoubtedly be obscene in many locales that is what I would do--I'd have a sign-in page that clearly states that "viewer discresion is advised" and require people to sign up to visit the virtual gallery. I wouldn't collect a huge amount of information--just require a person to sign in with a username and password. If they even go through that much trouble then no user can argue that "obscene material" was thrown in their face.
You make good points, but your arguments would carry more weight if they weren't so MS-centric.
/.ers but Apple wouldn't make a strong example.
I made mention of Microsoft because of their track record--they have previously been agressive lobbyists for software patenting in Europe, for example, and has been extremely forceful in defending its closed-source position in its attempt to block Massachusetts bureaucrats from making its own IT policy that even suggests favourtism towards open source (Massachusetts in fact has suggested NOTHING at all that favours open source applications over closed applications--it merely wants to mandate the user of open standards in FILE FORMATS in order to ensure interoperability and protect against obsolescence and vendor lock-in).
There are indeed other closed-software companies out there who are rabidly protectionist..the most (in)famous of all being SCO--but of course SCO is the laughingstock of the corporate world and a pipsqueak in the industry. Apple is also a distant second in comparison to Microsoft, and its track record isn't as consistently bad as Microsoft's has been. Truthbully, Apple's track record is all over the place: it has been a willing participant in open source by basing the foundation of OS X on an open UNIX platform and establishing the Darwin project to allow public participation in its development. OTOH, it has also not been the most cooperative partner in open software projects either (ask Konqueror developers how nicely Apple plays--it tended to take much more easily than it gave when it came to Safari). Apple has also been quite protectionist in its hardware and music service business--it puts up as many artificial barriers as it can to 3rd party particiapation in the iTunes/iPod community and despite a brief, bungled experiment is allowing "official" Mac clones in the 1990s, the entire Mac line has remained notoriously and tightly closed. Even though it has moved to Intel, Apple has continued to make a protectionist, closed hardware/software platform central to its computer business.
Despite the spotty record in contributing to open systems, Apple has not been a stron lobbyist for government protection as Microsoft has--and would probably welcome the sizeable credits it would get for its use of BSD and even GNU technology in its OS. Yes, it is given a too-easy ride by a lot of
Adobe is in the same place as Apple--it has been nasty at times in protecting its closed technology but has also accepted and even provided lukewarm endorsement of open software: it has released a Linux verion of its Acrobat reader and has been far more willing to share Postscript and PDF with others to establish a fairly open standard document format. Also, while it has initiaited some nasty lawsuits over circumvention of its pretection schemes (for example) Adobe has not been forefront in trying to legislate protectionist policies for the closed software industry.
So basically, I am puzzled as to how using Microsoft--the strongest example--to defend my argument could possibly weaken that argument. Perhaps I could be modded "-1 unoriginal" at best though I must admit...
I think that tax incentives for open source development would be a great way for governments to "pay for" the open source software they use as well, but I think the pushback from closed software developers would be too much for such an idea to take hold.
Microsoft, either directly or through industry lobbyists, would argure that it represents an unfair subsidy of its competition. Yes, Microsoft would be able to participate in open source development to take advantage of the tax incentive just like everyone else, but MS wouldn't belabour that point. The big argument would be that Microsoft Research wouldn't be able to get tax breaks unless it distributed its source code the way the government tells it to do so, and that for the most part those distribution methods are incompatible with the MS business model.
I might (hopefully) be wrong, but I think this is one idea that'll die on the vine. If it does not, and such a tax break is implemented, count on it to define "open source" so broadly as to include any "source available" research projects, such as the "look but don't tough" MS Shared SOurce initiative, or even developers who only offer source code upon payment of a license fee and a signature on an iron-clad NDA. I suppose that would be better than nothing though.
Now the next hurdle to get over is the profound aversion to giving up tax revenue that most governments cannot seem to shake...
Your "solution" of creating a separate, isolated domain for the offinding application is completely inappropriate. It reminds me of when the police did a crackdown on prostitution in a notorious inner-city neighbourhood in our city. On the surface they were very successful--hookers and Johns are dramatically less visible in "the beltline" now, and the developers are falling all over each other to buy out all the slumlords, tear down the decades-old shacks and put up shiny new executive condominiums.
In reality the crackdown was mostly a failure. It did nothing whatsoever to reduce prostitution or related organised crime. Prostitutes and their pimps just found another 'hood for a hangout. Unfortunately the new hangout was probably even less appropriate for that kind of activity than the old one: an older, working-class neighbouthood with significantly more children residing in the area than were present in the old strolls. Schoolgirls not even in high school waiting to cross the street are targeted by some Johns now and gang activity and drug trafficking are also growing at accelerated rates in the area.
Your proposing the electronic equivalent of simple chasing the hookers and pushers into another neighbourhood and it ignores the root problem: YOU STILL HAVE MAJOR SECURITY ISSUES--they are just slightly less limited in scope. If the offensive application is a mission-critical app it is still unacceptable:
* Disgruntled employees could use their domain admin rights to sabotage the system
* Unscrupulous users could use admin privleges to impersonate other users and compromise audit trails
* Incompetent users could accidentally damage or destroy the system with unlimited rights on the domain (erase the wrong files, alter configurations, etc).
A number of people have already suggested an answer to the question posed in the article: You don't "deal with" such a badly written application--you make the vendor fix it our do everything in your power to have it removed completely from your company, and when dealing with management you do not present a technical case beyond stating that the application presents "serious weaknesses in security", you present a BUSINESS case:
* taking measures to "work around" the seciruty risks will cost $x thousands to implement and $x thousans/year extra to maintain (don't need to mention firewalls, VPMs, separate domains etc or you'll lose them)
* taking measures to secure the bad application will mean it will not work as well (or not at all) with other business systems. This means wasted time and money because employees will have separate logins, have to enter information twice or manually copy data, etc (managers hate the idea of having to remember more than one login, and the big push in a lot of companies is to "integrate business systems" so suggesting that you have to move away from that goal will be convincing)
* even after taking all these measures, if your company is an American-based, publicly-traded company, YOU WOULD BE BREAKING THE LAW if you followed the vendors suggestions. Sarbanes-Oxley requires such companies to maintain proper audit trails and put in place adequate protections against circumventing such mechanisms. If an application requires administration rights of any kind there are NO protections of any kind against potential fraudulent manipulation of records. The same is true about shared logins, and both practices also violate regulations in healcare, food/beverage, and other industries as well.
There are bad applications and there are BAD applications. What the article described is unacceptable bad to the point that you do not try to "balance with security" or otherwise deal with it...your plan of action should be a plan to migrate very quickly AWAY from the app.
But on "small", I think you are unfair.
I concede that MySQL is very good at querying massively large tables of information, and as you point out its weakness is in referential integrity and data validation. Also, MySQL is not good with databases that are very dynamic--it is best that data be static (inserted once then selected ad-infinitum with few UPDATEs or DELETEs). Very excellent for most data logging or discussion forum websites, with few tables and simple relationships or none at all.
So to clarify, "small" refers to schema size and complexity, NOT the quantity of data within that schema.
When i have a programming project, i want my contractors to get the job done. They have specifications and functional requirements and they can be as creative with that as they want to be.
[...]
IT professionals are no longer the new surgeons. They're plumbers.
Wow. Perhaps you are personally a fine person, but I bet as a boss people think you are a bit of a jerk.
In my experience the result of this sort of work environment is often mediocre and sometimes disastrous, particularly in a "waterfall" project management environment. My comments don't relate excluseively to programmers, they include the people who write the specs and functional requirements--ESPECIALLY the latter, because poor design and planning can doom a project before one line of code is written. And as for programmers, I do not want them to be confrontational, but I fully expect them to be creative and make suggestions to improve upon a specification.
Although a person can get lost in "creative" pursuits and mired in details that do not contribute to end goals, the opposite can happen too. Engineers and developers can pigeon-hole themselves into doing things a certain way, using certain tools. Sometimes you cannot avoid it because you are working with an existing system, but if you are developing from the ground up you should ALWAYS use some creativity.
I expect professionalism, and something that will stand the test of time. And i pay them accordingly.
Professionalism goes both ways you know. If you expect professionalism from your developers, then you should respect them as professionals, not deride them with opinions that they are just "plumbers" and "aren't paid for creativity". Just as is the case with open source coding, "many eyes make bugs shallow" in a specification, and when a programmer asks why it is the way it is and "wouldn't it work better this way" it can be very beneficial.
VS2005 is certaily a stellar development environment, I'll agree with you there, but IT people implement systems, they don't often do heavy developmet anymore. Linux does need a "VS2005 killer" though, so that developers are encouraged to expand on teh libraray of applicatios availabel for Linux.
I'd have to disagree wih you on the remote and automated management however. Yes, Windows has some great tools to handle automated deploymet of patches/upgrades/etc, but RedHat and Novell have done a great job there. Furhtermore you can do a superior job with large, remote backups using no-exra-cost toolsin Linux than you can with Windows backup solutions that cost thousands. Furthermore, the Windows command shell and batch files are pretty weak compared to what is available for Linux so you too often have to resort to using a cumbersome GUI to remotely administer machines. I suppose it is personal taste though, but I much prefer rattling off a script to plodding my way through some MMC snap-in, wading throughtrees and menus and such with my mouse.
I can't be bothered to learn something new when it seems everything supports MySQL.
I'm glad you don't work for me with that attitude. I'd rather work with someone who is interested in learning new things and will bring some creativity to the job. People of your mentality have to be careful they don't fall into the "false laziness" trap--using some tool or technique or techology because you are too lazy to learn something new, only to end up doing load of extra work to avoid the shortcomings of your inappropriate design choices. The result is scads of legacy code at higher layers of an application to handle things like datatype verification, basic referential integrity and so on.
All the various different executables to do different tasks rather then one shell like MySQL, a permission system which seemed from my limited usage more perverse then MySQL's
I've never found it to be a major struggle to use PostgreSQL, though being a more full-featured database it will naturally be a bit more complex to manage.
I'm puzzled about the "all the various executables" part too, since many of them were invocable from the psql shell anyways. Also, it sounds like you've not lookded at PostgreSQL for awhile because its permissions system has undergone a lot of work--certainly it can be complex but it is very flexible and powerful, and honestly it gets rid of most excuses you had to execute all your database operations under the database superuser (or some other single user account) in your backend code.
I have better things to do with my time, like write cool code that uses MySQL.
You might want to examine how you used your time...if you had spent a few hours or a couple days learning something new for a change (like PostgreSQL) then it might've saved weeks or hours of frustration trying to use mySQL for too-complex tasks.
MySQL might have grownup a lot in recent years, but at its heart it was meant for much more modest tasks, like storing guestbook entries, record collections, as a temporary datastore/embedded database, high-performance querying of relatively static ad/or non-critical data and so on.
My point is that the tool is not always the problem. Now if C++'s integer arithmetic had an issue, that is another story, but the programmer simply was not good.
;-)
No, the tool IS part of the problem in such cases. If the programmer was not that good at C then C was the wrong tool and thus part of the problem. The programmer should've taken the time to study up on C, or picked a different tool. There are times when the tool is not appropriate for the job--you probably shouldn't use C if you need to do heavy text processing and need to get the job done fast (use Perl instead), or if you are less experienced and want a language that supports sound object-oriented programming maybe try Python, etc.
MySQL was not designed as a robust relational database, and its creators didn't seem to be intent on making it so, or else they'd have designed it differently. It was designed as a very quick and quite dirty SQL frontend/ISAM backend system to support small, informal databases (or so it seems): Basically, its heritage is to be like the old Ashton-Tate dBase but using SQL to query the tables. Since then it has lost that focus and now we have large websites storing millions of records in mySQL.
MySQL is a great tool if used as intended, however it definitely IS a problem if your accounting system uses it for example. People started doing crap like that and complained about mySQL's lack of features, thus we have things tacked on like innoDB tables and such to add this robustness.
PostgreSQL was not always as super-robust as it is now, and in its present form its source code is probably almost unrecognisable from 10 years ago, however its architecture was more sound and thought out from the start, as its heritage was as an academic project. Its challenge was not to add features as was the case with mySQL--PgSQL was designed for extensibility. PostgreSQL had to catch up in performance and stability, which it has done in spades.
Personally, I always use UNIX timestamps (seconds since 1970). They can be directly added, sorted, and converted into any timezone, and its very portable. But thats just me. (Yes, UNIX timestamps do nothing before 1970, etc, etc).
It seems somehow wrong that your business logic has to perform low-level validation of basic datatypes, and it is cumbersome and error-prone to deal with unrecognisable representations. Only the geekiest of geeks could tell me whether 1984293617 falls on a Thursday without runing it through some kind of conversion program (simple as that may be for a geek). What about people who point-and-click their way through some report designer--they're gonna have to deal with some giant integer in a column entitled "something-date". The other problem is that it is not very precise for some applications that need sub-second timestamp values.
Personally, I like PostgreSQL because it accepts ISO standard formats, you don't need to do anything to convert timezones--you simply specify the time zone when you insert or query and it issmart enough to figure it out when you query fordatain Eastern time zone and it was inserted in Pacific timezone. Furthermore, it knows Feb 30 isn't valid, and knows when leap years occur, and can format the date in many different ways with simple built-in functions, can be accurate to the millisecond and won't crash and burn in 2038.
FYI, I believe the "seconds since UNIX epoch" representation of date/time values is a SIGNED integer, so they are in fact good for earlier dates than 1970 (they are good to some time in late 1901 in fact). That is still a pretty limited range and why early systems didn't use that representation inmany cases (couldn't store birthdates for a lot of people who were still alive in the early 1970s becasue they were born before 1901). It is still a problem in some applications ad that is why 32-bit "UNIX-style" time is discouraged.
I think it's a shame that people resort to such kludges without adequately lookig for more appropriate alternatives...but that's just me
all they are doing is waiting to precect the way they can screw their customers, and making them wait for it
Sony is now officially admitting that they will miss the Christmas season completely--even in Japan (if your shipments haven't reached retail customers by the end of October you have "missed Christmas"). No manufacturer in their right mind would voluntarily miss Christmas with a new product--especially in North America. If it involved a company's flagship product, it would mean certain death for that company. The PS3 is not "the" flagship product for Sony but it'll still be a huge setback.
Big, established companies don't need to wait to "predict the way they they can screw their customers" because they already know how. The best time to release a new, overhyped product is in the fall: You must get the first shipments out the factory door by the end of October so they can be on US store shelves in time for Thanksgiving long weekend. It helps to take pre-orders and manufacture jsut enough to fill those orders, plus a few more: you need to get enough units out to establish a market position but create enough of a shortage so that you can keep prices elevated (and in the videogame console market that often means minimise losses).
Don't worry, Sony will learn its lesson...it's missing Christmas this year..that means MS will enjoy another solid XBox360 Christmas without serios Sony competition. It also means that Nintendo could debut its Revolution without competition from Sony as well. All in all it means 2007 will likely be a real hurtin' year for Sony.
Each license of Redhat Advanced Server Linux costs me about $1200.
Yup, that it does...so if I choose to use this box for a PostgreSQL database server it costs me $1200...if I decide I want RedHat's support and whatever other goodies. If I don't I can go to Novell and get their enterprise product for as little as $350 (1 or 2 CPUs) and no more than $900 (up to 16 CPUs). Or I can roll my own server using a no-cost distribution.
Note something about these prices too--they are based on servers/server processors. There are no CALs or client limitations...so even if you decide that buying a commercial enterprise distro is worth it, your licensing costs are $1200/$900/$350...period. You can use your RedHat (or SuSE or whatever) server with a database to serve up, say, an accounting system for an enterprise with 1000 users. Required licensing is as follows:
SuSe + PostgreSQL: $900
RH + PostgreSQL: $1200
Windows 2003 Server + MSSQL 2005: $9000 *
* W2k3 standard ($1000) with external connector license ($2000) + 1 SQL 2005 standard processor license ($6000)
Note that if you want to use a multi-processor box the Microsoft solution gets even more expensive...with SuSE and RedHat the price is for systems that support multiprocessing up to 16-way...that's a savings of $7800 to $8100 in licensing for a single server. And enterprises have a lot of servers. Seems to me that it'd be worth looking at.
Then there are the intangables: There are more viruses released per day for windows than there have been for Linux during its entire existence. There are free (and Free) software tools often bundled with Linux distros that are extra cost for Windows. Remote and automated management of Linux boxes is much more powerful than for Windows. If you want terminal services it is no extra cost for Linux--it is an in-built capability of X, whereas you have to pay through the nose to get terminal services licensing for Windows. The cost advantages go on and on.
...but I still don't see the big differentiator here that'll convince a UNIX shop to adopt Windows over the latest iteration of their existing platform.
.NET experts recommend using XML-based, application-specific .config files over the monolithic registry). The Monad shell promises to be quite powerful and could address the severe shortcomings of the existing command shell and allow the OS to run usefully without a GUI. POSIX/UNIX compatibility will be further developed...and so on.
This isn't a really huge move actually--it is just more of the same "bundling" stuff that Microsoft has done with its OSes forever (applets in Win 3.0 is where it started and now we have Media Player, IE, firewall, etc). Microsoft has finally seen how successful projects like Cygwin have eaten into its SFU market space, and relatively speaking SFU has been a mild failure for Microsoft. W2K3 R2 now simply bundles an improved SFU right into its OS distribution and is betting that customers will be "lazy" enough to use their solution rather than adopt 3rd party solutions like Cygwin.
I do not think this will accelerate the demise of UNIX all that much though...I think that this will simply be more appealing to customers who are already migrating towards a Microsoft solution from legacy UNIX systems. Using Win2k3 as a drop-in replacement for a UNIX box simply because you can doesn't seem justified here, even if licensing and hardware costs are lower than for, say, SUN/Solaris. THe description just sounds like a model of inefficiency to me: All the UNIX stuff runs outside the kernel and still seems "bolted on". You have all this powerful hardware and all the work is being done by these bolt-ons and you still have the Windows kernel, fancy GUI and a load of services and drivers to support what you might not tough more than 5% of the time when in production. The only way that sounds appealing to me is if you are migrating to Windows and have new critical enterprise applications that run in the Windows environment alongside UNIX legacy apps.
Windows will only TRULY "ursurp UNIX" when it TRULY adopts a UNIX-like architecture: It has to un-couple all the client-ish stuff (well all of its components really) and offer tools to support this more modular architecture. W2K3 R2 is not nearly there yet. However, MS is definitely heading closer in that direction: The windows registry is essentially deprecated as of the release of Vista (it is supported but is considered "legacy support"...a lot of
"Vista Server" (or whatever they call it) won't be totally there but the one after that will be close enough...Windows server will NEVER become just another UNIX clone, but out of necessity it'll probably evolve into a very UNIX-like architecture that uses proprietary/"extended" protocols, languages, libraries, interfaces...
The ActiveRecord pattern is NOT new, and it won't scale out past a few dozen tables.
How many applications out there have more than a few dozen tables? I'd have serious concerns with a system that had a single application, with a single database, comprising of hundreds of tables. In reality such systems are quite rare--for every massive ERP implementation there are hundreds or thousands of smaller applications where Ruby on Rails' Active Record model would work very well.
For TOY applications, it might be fine, but for say something like an ERP system with thousands of tables, it just won't scale out performance or maintanence wise, never will.
There are other approaches to system design as well--how about applying a modular "UNIX philosophy" to an enterprise system with several
distinctly defined "TOY applications" each dealing with a smaller number of tables, all loosely coupled together? Even big, old accounting systems are broken into "modules" after all (which historically are more tightly coupled with the main system but still deal solely with a smaller subset of tables/files).
I, for one, like "toy applications". I don't think I've ever heard a developer get real enthusiastic about implementing or maintaining an ERP system--not the way a manager or marketing person does anyways. Come to think of it I don't know a lot of enthusiastic end users of such systems either. Perhaps a mega-corporation saves a lot of time and makes its business more efficient with its mega-ERP systems, however, feeding and caring of that beast is still tedious and annoying--it's just less tedious, annoying and expensive than dealing with mistakes, redundancies and general idiocy an enterprise has to deal with in the absence of a good business management system.
One thing is certain: there are different tools suited to different jobs, and Ruby on Rails/Active Record is best suited to smaller-sized applications where everything is developed from the ground up. Saying it lacks legitimacy because it cannoy scale to handle apps of gigantic proportions or properly interface to complicated, arcane legacy systems (ALL contemporary ERP systems in production use today are "legacy systems" IMHO) is like saying the familiar operator interface of an automobile is a failure because it cannot "scale out" to handle "real" vehicles like high-speed super-trains, jumbo jets or spacecraft. Over 90% of us never need to scale out past four wheels going up to 125km/h and carrying a couple of passengers.
And don't get me started on performance: Java was widely criticised for its performance, as were PHP and Perl for being interpreted and "slow"...however the use of all of those in very high-volume, demanding production systems. The hardware is out there to handle it now, and I've never heard people complain that Rails or Active Record are way too slow to handle the tasks asigned to them.
Further funding has been provided by Microsoft Corporation
XORP is licensed under BSD, thus it is not only extensible but embraceable as well. Microsoft likes anything it can embrace and extend.
The Windows NT TCP/IP stack is substantially made up of lifted BSD-licensed code anyways (or at least started out that way). I imagine "Vista Server" could be equipped with "innovative", "advanced" routing capabilities compliments of XORP.
...Dog River Saskatchewan?
I've found wireless network service in the following places:
* Rogers, Bell and Telus all offer hotspot service in addition to their cellphone service. I hooked up at a truck stop in Regina.
* West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton provides hotspot service. Some small town high schools connected to Supernet in Alberta have wireless access.
* Hotspots are provided by either telcos or Airport Authorities at international airports across Canada. I've seen service in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Toronto and Montreal airports myself so I think it's a standard thing everywhere now.
* In Alberta, there is a company called "community networks" that provides high-speed internet to farms and villages all over ther province.
Sounds like a pretty large wireless market to me...