You are playing a crapshoot with older hardware. Ask any Windows 7 hatter? They will ramble about BSODs with their usually Dell computers and then go rant on how IE 9 is slower than IE 8. This shows usually flaky non certified drivers. The engineers designed the hardware to work for XP, not vista or 7. I had a roomate who had a laptop that crashed with 7 every few hours. After going back to XP the problem went away. If I were an I.T. Manager I would keep XP til the systems died and replace os with new hardware at the same time.
This is how Windows use to be upgraded. Remember? Windows 7 is almost 2 years old. Want to keep it? Go ahead. Besides Metro the only other thing for it besides IE 10. You can download that for Windows 7. My hunch is corporate America will stick with Windows 7 because it has service pack 1. Or they still will run Xp until 2014 and then will exodus to Windows 8. Does Windows 8 have anything at all exciting besides IE 10 and jtml 5 applets? Its safe to stick with Windows 7
Glad they showed those radical socialists in the bush white house a thing or too. With this and their stance on the budget I fear what they will be 4 years from now. How much more extreme can you go?
Now if they snooped in a hard drive or cracked an account to read private or friends only posts then that is a different matter. Facebook is voluntary.
Flash and some programs are iffy on x64. Also many Unix users (more typical of Solaris than Linux) use old software too that may not run well on x64 or the vendor wont support it with the version the company has installed.
"This crisis is entirely voluntarily precipitated by our political leadership"
I created my own crises as I prefered not to have my credit rating trashed at home and deal with things on my own terms.
After a nasty divorce I voluntarily repoed my car (totally paid) and sold it to pay off a portition of my exwife's debt. I used the rest of the money to live on and moved back in with my parents. I have cash in the bank now and am looking for work in a new city. Bad position I am in to do this, but it is what I had too to avoid an even worse decision made by the banks at my own expense.
My exwife sold her car for $2,500 and moved back from Alaska to California and she has no job. What did she do? Get a $7,000 car hoping she would be able to pay for it next September if they hire her as a teacher! LOL. I would have bought a $800 clunker and after the first month's paycheck trade it in the for the $7,000 car later. They are not hiring teachers anymore in California and I feel for my step kids. Sigh
6 months from now who will be in a better position? I may have a clunker by then yes. But I will at least have a car and a hopefully inproved credit rating. She may lose her car and get fired from work because she can't show up.
My point? The point is we do need to tackle the debt and trust me it is much better on our terms than the banks terms. I do not want to declare bankruptacy which is what I would have to do if I wanted to keep my car:-(. I would be unemployable with that kind of credit rating and I could never buy a house so that means no retirement. It is no different with the government. Jobs are outsourced, rich have their tax breaks and are lobbying to keep it too themselves or they spend it overseas to help China's economy, but not our own.
I think defaulting is retarded, but I voted for Obama because democrats are more fiscally responsible than republicans. I get flamed for this in CNN postings, but it is true historically. If the republicans want my vote then they need to spend and tax within reason.
I did with my life and it sucked. Government has to do the same until China becomes rich enough for jobs to come back here or we have more businesses paying taxes. All that is long term and short term we need to start by creating our own financial ceilings and repo's and restructuring on own terms before the banks come in.
"If the browsers had to wait for the standards to be finalized, IE 6 would still be relevant"
That is why IE 6 still is relevant and why new software coming off the shelves today require IE 6 and nothing else. IE waited on things to be finalized because it something was implemented and the standard changed it would break intranet and internet site usage. Businesses do not like this. They want things to just work.
IE 9 was a break from this. If they kept their old way of doing things HTML 5 would not be supported until 2016 or something stupid until the W3c finalized it. This makes corporate users nervous and resistant to leave IE 6 and Windows XP until 2014.
It is frustrating, but I believe the mobile market is driving HUGE demand for HTML 5, and IE would still be waiting to implement something finalized if it were not for the IPhone and IPAD.
My personal hunch is that IE 6 was intentionally crippled.
Under Gates, Microsoft has been known to make things intentionally proprietary and crippled to make adoption hard so people only stick with Microsoft products. When slashdotters were debating who should replace Balmer, my first reaction was Gates even though as a user I do not want him back. I have read comments from old Unix geeks here on slashdot who even accused Xenix of being crippled on purpose as it is so hard to port Unix software to Xenix/Sco that MS hoped you would simply keep using it. I can't prove that, but I can prove MS crippled DOS to make Lotus 123 incompatible.
But, think about the damage proprietary software has done to favor Microsoft? How many businesses would even consider a Mac or any other platform? Alternative office product? Anything without the MS logo? It is because of lock in and history of macs and wordperfect not opening certain documents and software running only on Windows is why no company wants to touch anything else even if it is cool today with Apple having a comeback. It is why IE is so popular. There are deployment tools now yes, but MS won before they took off. Even if Mozilla had these deployment tools business users love that letter guaranteeing that 10 years of support for obsolete software.
If IE followed standards then why would business users want to keep IE around 10 years ago during the first browser wars? Businesses would have been using Firefox more by now or at least a more modern IE. That is bad for profits as it encourages people to use things like other platforms and tools. If I were the CEO of Microsoft you bet, I would make IE a worse browser and use something retarded like XAML to replace HTML and have it only work with Visual Studio (TM) + Sharepoint Designer (TM).... more money! This is how the old Microsoft used to operate and the lack of this is why the Blackberry, Iphone, and now Andriod is eating the corporate mobile market for lunch. Not making Exchange proprietary using encryption was a bad move. MS could have owned 80% of the smart phone market if they did.
IE 6 was a success because of its horrible code and support is a big win for Microsoft. It stopped all competition cold and brought money from more companies that now can't switch to Macs because of ActiveX control intranet sites... goal! If you try to refute me and say you use firefox just remember Microsoft doesn't care. IE is a loss leader for the benefit to sell its backoffice and developers tools to corporate users. That is IE's core market and how it brings in revenue and poor quality is key to making more money and something MS is losing track of with IE becoming good again and supporting open standards.
Originally, an MBA was a particular program for *engineers* who wanted to get involved in management, but did not have accounting, leadership, or other skills needed to manage projects and know how the rest of the business ran outside their area of expertise.
Today, you need pre-managerial skills and having a b.a. in business administration is essential. I listened to NPR last year, and an economist was on saying businesses today used to have former engineers become promoted to senior management positions. Today, accountants and financial anaylsts are being promoted to these positions and what they were trained on is how to raise the stock price and cut costs. The program continued saying how these financial guru's are great with giving Wall Street what they want are dumb by relying so much on JIT inventory and using only 1 supplier and ignoring things like I.T. that something like a single supply disruption can cripple the whole us economy. Interesting...
But these trends come and go. I personally feel Wall Street is becoming unreasonable and it is maxed out. Growth can not continue indefinitely, and people today are looking at other investment options. If it can't continue then perhaps the engineers will become the new CEO's again and not the accountants.
Well 16k Ram Pack has a point. Yes Visual Studio is not cheap, but it would take him much longer to start in Php and therefore it would eat up the cost savings rather quickly. Businesses sometimes pay more for non free software because they have a time/money cost analysis functions at play from the bean counters.
The downside of course is after you need your own dedicated servers you are looking at some serious licensing fees. I had a friend who was part of a failed startup that did financial services for clients and banks on their startup. MS charged them $100,000 for an unlimited licensing free for SQL Server, Windows 2003 Server, IIS, and Visual Studio 2005. In the end they couldn't afford the licensing fee and pay all 4 of the developers and they went out of business.
So if you are going to use the big boys you need to make sure you each transaction brings in a good revenue each with the higher cost. If your site is like a news site...ala slashdot or digg... then a free mysql or casandra would be better as it has the least transaction cost.
To me by the time I am making 400k a year in transactions then I can dump the free ones and I wont care which platform as I will pay someone else to write it and focus on just business at that point.
If you are a one man show never doubt the productivity gains you can make with tools you know. It is his work or his idea is done.
I am biased agaisn't MySQL because I remember 3.x didn't have triggers, views, transactions, inner joins etc. True I am more of a dreamer, but I am aware of it at least and want to change that. I am leaning more towards PostgreSQL due to transaction and ACID support so it is more tailored to my goals. It is interesting you brought up python as it is very popular and runs the glue behind Gnome and popular tools like add/remove program for Ubuntu. There was a famous win32 program tool that used it and I just can't remember the name? I know bittorrent is python based too and it is quite popular. It seems like a great tool for rapid prototyping to get stuff done simply with a good range of api's to choose from. It is quite popular, but it is interpretted and therefore sucks as serving web pages. Jython though would solve this running inside a JVM, but yes that is academic more than practical.
But like you said, the business leaders focused on the technology more than the goal to make money. This is what happens when simple undergraduates in computer science try to do a startup. This not to say that all non business majors or MBA's are morons, but many are just not the managerial or CEO type of person. They do not have the mindset nor the training to understand how financing, leadership, nor process engineering work. To me I view technology as a way to do a demo to an investor or make small money on the side first and as I grow I can then get a large scale Java or.NET program in later. It maybe a fun project but it needs to generate money. Other than that is is a cute portfolio for a web designer job otherwise.
I assumed there were MULTIPLE networks. Before 10 years ago this is how it was done. You get a T1 and use x.25 or whatever protocol you wanted and had routers and both ends. Please tell me such places still use them? The military in particularly I assumed had a secure big ass intranet or some proprietary satellite wan/lan topogology. I would be troubled if banks even considered using tunneling and VPN over the internet. Too insecure and dangerous.
Corporations already have their secure Intranet but no one wants to do dialup to use it in this day and age so VPN to a gateway to the secure intranet is the standard way.
"Your idea won't work. How can people employed at power plants, banks, etc. use bitcoins (the only secure currency of the future) if their network isn't connected to the Internet?
"
You can get seperate WAN links that go through each office or plant and lease a T1 or T3 that is direct and does not use the internet. This was the standard way to do business 10 years ago and older before VPN and PPTP took off. Bitcoins is a made up currency that is artificially created by mining and has no inherent value. But people or executives can not check work from home unless you are on a dialup like in the old days this way.
My first reaction, was let it just die already and GIVE UP. I do not like Sony. Infact, I hate it. My ex had a Sony camcorder, Sony Vaio, and a camera. She freaked out when I lost her only memory stick for the camera. Why? You can't get it anymore. Memory stick 2.0 is not compatible with 1.1 or whatever it was and they no longer sell it. Lose the stick and the Sony Camera is useless. Also her Vaio only accepted these sticks. If she upgraded to a laptop that didn't get 200F and melted her clothes, she could not upload her photos.
Terrible products and it seems only a small minority use them, but those of us that do are stuck on an upgrade use trendmill every few years. I will never buy a Sony product. In the 1980's Sony meant quality and made great walkman and TV's but it seems American style management made them go cheap and use proprietary hardware like IBM to milk its consumers.
The benchmarks I have seen are debatable. PostgreSQL performs slower for the first 100 users but quickl outscales it when access becomes heavy with hundreds of concurrent connections. I do admit this was several years ago and Mysql is adding the extra features, but views, triggers, and stored procedures are usefull in conserving memory and optimizing performance with large tables if used properly and this is where PostgreSQL shined as Mysql 4.0 did not have half of these. PostgreSQL comes iwth the most conservative settings by default too on a fresh install on any Linux distro. You need to configure it to boast performance.
Features are not just for easier development, but also to reduce the work on the RDBMS and increase performance.... I am not a DBA so I dunno. I am learning postgresql for a project I am working on so I am little biased.
I went for a job interview a few years ago which was very SQL intense. I looked at some SQL code in C# for both ODBC as well as direct SQL Server code, and it was the most complex thing I have ever seen and frankly hair pulling ugly. It was no simple UPDATE INTO TABLE like simply MySQL with php.
Rather, It was weird ASYNC VSYNC Data.adaptor,x and weird eseortoric lines consisting of 35 to 40 lines of code for each insert doing God knows what! Maybe a SQL programmer can explain what a Vsync was and what a data,adaptor is and why was that code so evil? The question was how to fix it? I realized I was obviously not qualified for the job.
I googled the code and it seemed it was operating optimally with all that stuff. Sure you can use a simple insert statement, but that is frowned upon as not optimized by SQL programmers. Most of them use very complicated steps and layers of abstraction where KISS is frowned upon, because if the database doesn't perform well you do not want to look like an *ss.
PHP is really nice for it's simplicity, but as soon as you move to Java or C# it gets very ugly and each database requires different code and optimization techniques and a rewrite if you change your schema. Again, I am not a SQL programmer so hopefully I wont get bashed too much here by the real ones, but it is just what I observe as I want to learn this myself. I have a feeling this is why Hibernate is becoming popular to avoid these things as it is a framework that does some of the nasty details in a seperate layer... at least from what I read.
But with Java or.NET you can get caching, transaction control, and other neat things you can't get with PHP but it comes at a cost. Same is true with a real database like PostgreSQL, SQL Server, DB 2, or Oracle. SQL statements are a small part of the code and the rest is proprietary with working with the RDBMS. My hunch is the vendors love these as it encourages lock in with expensive licensing fees.
Just because they are setup for customers to eye them does not give permission to install software. You have no permission to drive a car at a dealership too, but the sales person is nice and lets you do for a given few miles. Apple needs to lock these down and I have a feeling they do not because they sell the display units when inventory is low and do not want customers complaining when they get home.... and Steve Jobs comment from 1997 was correct then. IE was a great browser over Netscape and the Mac version trounced the PC version. Safari and Firefox of course are better but they did not exist then.
Apple stores are notorious for people walking in with Ipods and downloading MAC office to them and walking out. One of the advantages of not using a registry or downside in the case for Apple is the ease of installing and uninstalling programs.
This alone would make me want to lock them as piracy does cost Apple money. My guess is when they are out of boxes they sell the display macs for a discount just like retailers do. When I worked at OfficeMax, I wrote down the password and gave instructions how to uninstall the kiosk program which locked them. It was pretty easy, but hey it was 11% cheaper and some technical folks like us here on slashdot know how to add/remove programs once given the password.
"The entire country was certainly at risk and getting the Secret Service involved was definitely the right thing to do. There's no way a local policeman could have reprimanded him."
I am aware that comment was made out of sarcasm, but I feel the secret service got involved probably because of this. It has been a decade since I lived in NYC, but the FBI does have an office there and it is likley, they purchased some of these laptops or an employee noticed it, or perhaps the DHS is trying to track down anyone who installs spyware to find any criminals/governments. Macs are used by government employees and this is a very big deal to them. It seems silly like an overeaction, but I have read comments on other news sites of people getting a brand new laptop out of the box at BestBuy that has not even been connected to the internet yet, uninstalling anti virus software and disabling Windows Update. I wish this was news so HP, Dell, or whoever can get a Sony style PR nightmare. Only this would correct the problem.
I fully support the DHS and secret service to find out what flash ram products are infected and where they are coming from. Keep in mind this guy did something illegal and it is not like they are busting into your home and seizing things without a warrant, but still spooky.
When you have several billion from investors, you can rewrite your stuff later.
FYI I plan to use PostgresSQL and perhaps a little noSQL in the mix to reduce the need to use joins for multiple tables (where SQL really hurts when doing ACID). I am just not a DBA person nor do I have the experience to learn how to do relational math with a no-SQL database.
Anyway PHP is another problem for such a large scale site. Wasn't Facebook the one who had to rewrite php in C++? I plan to switch to Java or C#.NET later on when I have money, Facebook has the cash to do this. The only downside is it will take hundreds of thousands if not millions of lines of code in either platform and rushing programmers is bad and creates the same problem of bad design in the first place. Are there any frameworks or CMS that only require a few months instead of years to setup that can handle the needs of a company like facebook? I could only imagine it would take years to write a few million lines of code in Java that is well written and tested and this is not an option for Facebook.
If that is the case, perhaps filing for violations of the sherman anti trust act is in order as you describe a monopoly with horizontal and vertical integration qualities. It is strange as it is a cartel rather than a single company probably to avoid anti trust actions. It acts like a single corporation and a lawyer can bust that. What do you all think?
On my restore partition Windows 7 comes with loads of crap like BestBuy's software installer, which nags and reinstalls spyware on your machine, Trend Micro, flash 9.1 (security risk), and a bunch of other things.
During a restore it takes 15 minutes when it discovers devices, then 30 minutes installing windows live and the drivers, then after booting I uninstall TrendMicro reboot (5 minutes), install pc-decrapifier and run it to uninstall Windows Live, Adobe, BestBuy softwareware finder (20 minutes... especially to uninstall Windows Live), then comes Windows Update (1.5 hours 600 megs!)... meanwhile my system is insecure and I can't use the internet while I wait because TrendMicro is off and about 83 updates are needed to secure it.
It takes a good 4 hours on my 6 core system with 8 gigs of ram!... now comes World of Warcraft... sigh (4 more hours) and walaa 8 hours later my system is ready. True the 4 hours of Wow are not necessary with Ubuntu unless you are sick enough to try it under Wine. But at least with my pc it is a pain in the damn ass as you can tell and a modest hardware platform with a FIOS internet connection. I suppose if I had a pure Windows 7 CD with service pack 1 it might be much quicker, but then I would have a driver issue.
Ubuntu is great when it works and it SUCKS when something is not supported or flaky like a WIFI that disconnects every 3 minutes.
The problem is the republicans wont budge. They are the ones who all of the sudden decided agaisnt' raising the ceiling. For reference the ceiling has been raised almost 50 times in order to keep up with inflation. With the recovery act this year the number is much much higher than normal and the republicans are seizing on it.... correction the Tea Party is seizing it. When Bush expanded government the Tea Party didn't even exist. When somone with a D next to their name comes into office all of the sudden this grass movement appears. Give me a break. Half the bailout was designed by Paulson under Bush, not Obama.
Either way the intended effect is done and we are going to create an artificial austerity measure on purpose rather than necessity to make sure another R is in the White House next year regardless of America's bond rating going into the toilet and another 3,000 point crash. Sigh
For the record I am in favor of some of this deficit reduction and think government is too large. I just hate the slimy politics of this with lies and deceptions. Please republicans raise the darn taxes if you are going to walk the walk on the upper class and save 3.8 trillion. It makes me mad as the Tea Party is not dictating Obama's policies as well as the Republicans do not want to lose their seats to this small minority crowd who is active in the primaries.
I wrote that on a cell phone with a crappy screen in a dark room and I am embarrased by the grammar. Normally I put more emphasis on grammar when I can see what I am writting with a responsive screen/phone. Slashdot is very slow to edit on it and preview can screw it up where I can't see what I typed....
Anyway, I wanted to clear that before I got another user name due to sheer embarasement. My point was that 4 year computer science programs are very traditional compared to other majors that become modern. I understand that less coding was important when a single overloaded mainframe was the only computer students needed and that editing and debugging the program on paper with mathmatics had to be done first. That is still important today, but now the field demands the things I mentioned and not just be used to statisticians and scientists. The coursework is geared to finding ultimate mathmatical purity in data sorting and no one does this outside of Google, IBM, or the IRS.
All other majors change over time, such as accounting becoming its own speciality complete with financial forecasting in Excel.
Employers need things done right away and computer science programs in India teach these very skills in addition to theory. If students can write software as good and administor servers as these top graduates in Russia or India then maybe HR wouldn't be so quick to look overseas.
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You are playing a crapshoot with older hardware. Ask any Windows 7 hatter? They will ramble about BSODs with their usually Dell computers and then go rant on how IE 9 is slower than IE 8. This shows usually flaky non certified drivers. The engineers designed the hardware to work for XP, not vista or 7. I had a roomate who had a laptop that crashed with 7 every few hours. After going back to XP the problem went away. If I were an I.T. Manager I would keep XP til the systems died and replace os with new hardware at the same time.
This is how Windows use to be upgraded. Remember? Windows 7 is almost 2 years old. Want to keep it? Go ahead. Besides Metro the only other thing for it besides IE 10. You can download that for Windows 7. My hunch is corporate America will stick with Windows 7 because it has service pack 1. Or they still will run Xp until 2014 and then will exodus to Windows 8. Does Windows 8 have anything at all exciting besides IE 10 and jtml 5 applets? Its safe to stick with Windows 7
Glad they showed those radical socialists in the bush white house a thing or too. With this and their stance on the budget I fear what they will be 4 years from now. How much more extreme can you go?
Nothing unethical about it.
Now if they snooped in a hard drive or cracked an account to read private or friends only posts then that is a different matter. Facebook is voluntary.
Flash and some programs are iffy on x64. Also many Unix users (more typical of Solaris than Linux) use old software too that may not run well on x64 or the vendor wont support it with the version the company has installed.
"This crisis is entirely voluntarily precipitated by our political leadership"
I created my own crises as I prefered not to have my credit rating trashed at home and deal with things on my own terms.
After a nasty divorce I voluntarily repoed my car (totally paid) and sold it to pay off a portition of my exwife's debt. I used the rest of the money to live on and moved back in with my parents. I have cash in the bank now and am looking for work in a new city. Bad position I am in to do this, but it is what I had too to avoid an even worse decision made by the banks at my own expense.
My exwife sold her car for $2,500 and moved back from Alaska to California and she has no job. What did she do? Get a $7,000 car hoping she would be able to pay for it next September if they hire her as a teacher! LOL. I would have bought a $800 clunker and after the first month's paycheck trade it in the for the $7,000 car later. They are not hiring teachers anymore in California and I feel for my step kids. Sigh
6 months from now who will be in a better position? I may have a clunker by then yes. But I will at least have a car and a hopefully inproved credit rating. She may lose her car and get fired from work because she can't show up.
My point? The point is we do need to tackle the debt and trust me it is much better on our terms than the banks terms. I do not want to declare bankruptacy which is what I would have to do if I wanted to keep my car :-(. I would be unemployable with that kind of credit rating and I could never buy a house so that means no retirement. It is no different with the government. Jobs are outsourced, rich have their tax breaks and are lobbying to keep it too themselves or they spend it overseas to help China's economy, but not our own.
I think defaulting is retarded, but I voted for Obama because democrats are more fiscally responsible than republicans. I get flamed for this in CNN postings, but it is true historically. If the republicans want my vote then they need to spend and tax within reason.
I did with my life and it sucked. Government has to do the same until China becomes rich enough for jobs to come back here or we have more businesses paying taxes. All that is long term and short term we need to start by creating our own financial ceilings and repo's and restructuring on own terms before the banks come in.
"If the browsers had to wait for the standards to be finalized, IE 6 would still be relevant"
That is why IE 6 still is relevant and why new software coming off the shelves today require IE 6 and nothing else. IE waited on things to be finalized because it something was implemented and the standard changed it would break intranet and internet site usage. Businesses do not like this. They want things to just work.
IE 9 was a break from this. If they kept their old way of doing things HTML 5 would not be supported until 2016 or something stupid until the W3c finalized it. This makes corporate users nervous and resistant to leave IE 6 and Windows XP until 2014.
It is frustrating, but I believe the mobile market is driving HUGE demand for HTML 5, and IE would still be waiting to implement something finalized if it were not for the IPhone and IPAD.
My personal hunch is that IE 6 was intentionally crippled.
Under Gates, Microsoft has been known to make things intentionally proprietary and crippled to make adoption hard so people only stick with Microsoft products. When slashdotters were debating who should replace Balmer, my first reaction was Gates even though as a user I do not want him back. I have read comments from old Unix geeks here on slashdot who even accused Xenix of being crippled on purpose as it is so hard to port Unix software to Xenix/Sco that MS hoped you would simply keep using it. I can't prove that, but I can prove MS crippled DOS to make Lotus 123 incompatible.
But, think about the damage proprietary software has done to favor Microsoft? How many businesses would even consider a Mac or any other platform? Alternative office product? Anything without the MS logo? It is because of lock in and history of macs and wordperfect not opening certain documents and software running only on Windows is why no company wants to touch anything else even if it is cool today with Apple having a comeback. It is why IE is so popular. There are deployment tools now yes, but MS won before they took off. Even if Mozilla had these deployment tools business users love that letter guaranteeing that 10 years of support for obsolete software.
If IE followed standards then why would business users want to keep IE around 10 years ago during the first browser wars? Businesses would have been using Firefox more by now or at least a more modern IE. That is bad for profits as it encourages people to use things like other platforms and tools. If I were the CEO of Microsoft you bet, I would make IE a worse browser and use something retarded like XAML to replace HTML and have it only work with Visual Studio (TM) + Sharepoint Designer (TM). ... more money! This is how the old Microsoft used to operate and the lack of this is why the Blackberry, Iphone, and now Andriod is eating the corporate mobile market for lunch. Not making Exchange proprietary using encryption was a bad move. MS could have owned 80% of the smart phone market if they did.
IE 6 was a success because of its horrible code and support is a big win for Microsoft. It stopped all competition cold and brought money from more companies that now can't switch to Macs because of ActiveX control intranet sites ... goal! If you try to refute me and say you use firefox just remember Microsoft doesn't care. IE is a loss leader for the benefit to sell its backoffice and developers tools to corporate users. That is IE's core market and how it brings in revenue and poor quality is key to making more money and something MS is losing track of with IE becoming good again and supporting open standards.
Originally, an MBA was a particular program for *engineers* who wanted to get involved in management, but did not have accounting, leadership, or other skills needed to manage projects and know how the rest of the business ran outside their area of expertise.
Today, you need pre-managerial skills and having a b.a. in business administration is essential. I listened to NPR last year, and an economist was on saying businesses today used to have former engineers become promoted to senior management positions. Today, accountants and financial anaylsts are being promoted to these positions and what they were trained on is how to raise the stock price and cut costs. The program continued saying how these financial guru's are great with giving Wall Street what they want are dumb by relying so much on JIT inventory and using only 1 supplier and ignoring things like I.T. that something like a single supply disruption can cripple the whole us economy. Interesting ...
But these trends come and go. I personally feel Wall Street is becoming unreasonable and it is maxed out. Growth can not continue indefinitely, and people today are looking at other investment options. If it can't continue then perhaps the engineers will become the new CEO's again and not the accountants.
Well 16k Ram Pack has a point. Yes Visual Studio is not cheap, but it would take him much longer to start in Php and therefore it would eat up the cost savings rather quickly. Businesses sometimes pay more for non free software because they have a time/money cost analysis functions at play from the bean counters.
The downside of course is after you need your own dedicated servers you are looking at some serious licensing fees. I had a friend who was part of a failed startup that did financial services for clients and banks on their startup. MS charged them $100,000 for an unlimited licensing free for SQL Server, Windows 2003 Server, IIS, and Visual Studio 2005. In the end they couldn't afford the licensing fee and pay all 4 of the developers and they went out of business.
So if you are going to use the big boys you need to make sure you each transaction brings in a good revenue each with the higher cost. If your site is like a news site ...ala slashdot or digg ... then a free mysql or casandra would be better as it has the least transaction cost.
To me by the time I am making 400k a year in transactions then I can dump the free ones and I wont care which platform as I will pay someone else to write it and focus on just business at that point.
If you are a one man show never doubt the productivity gains you can make with tools you know. It is his work or his idea is done.
I am biased agaisn't MySQL because I remember 3.x didn't have triggers, views, transactions, inner joins etc. True I am more of a dreamer, but I am aware of it at least and want to change that. I am leaning more towards PostgreSQL due to transaction and ACID support so it is more tailored to my goals. It is interesting you brought up python as it is very popular and runs the glue behind Gnome and popular tools like add/remove program for Ubuntu. There was a famous win32 program tool that used it and I just can't remember the name? I know bittorrent is python based too and it is quite popular. It seems like a great tool for rapid prototyping to get stuff done simply with a good range of api's to choose from. It is quite popular, but it is interpretted and therefore sucks as serving web pages. Jython though would solve this running inside a JVM, but yes that is academic more than practical.
But like you said, the business leaders focused on the technology more than the goal to make money. This is what happens when simple undergraduates in computer science try to do a startup. This not to say that all non business majors or MBA's are morons, but many are just not the managerial or CEO type of person. They do not have the mindset nor the training to understand how financing, leadership, nor process engineering work. To me I view technology as a way to do a demo to an investor or make small money on the side first and as I grow I can then get a large scale Java or .NET program in later. It maybe a fun project but it needs to generate money. Other than that is is a cute portfolio for a web designer job otherwise.
I assumed there were MULTIPLE networks. Before 10 years ago this is how it was done. You get a T1 and use x.25 or whatever protocol you wanted and had routers and both ends. Please tell me such places still use them? The military in particularly I assumed had a secure big ass intranet or some proprietary satellite wan/lan topogology. I would be troubled if banks even considered using tunneling and VPN over the internet. Too insecure and dangerous.
Corporations already have their secure Intranet but no one wants to do dialup to use it in this day and age so VPN to a gateway to the secure intranet is the standard way.
"Your idea won't work. How can people employed at power plants, banks, etc. use bitcoins (the only secure currency of the future) if their network isn't connected to the Internet?
"
You can get seperate WAN links that go through each office or plant and lease a T1 or T3 that is direct and does not use the internet. This was the standard way to do business 10 years ago and older before VPN and PPTP took off. Bitcoins is a made up currency that is artificially created by mining and has no inherent value. But people or executives can not check work from home unless you are on a dialup like in the old days this way.
My thought exactly.
My first reaction, was let it just die already and GIVE UP. I do not like Sony. Infact, I hate it. My ex had a Sony camcorder, Sony Vaio, and a camera. She freaked out when I lost her only memory stick for the camera. Why? You can't get it anymore. Memory stick 2.0 is not compatible with 1.1 or whatever it was and they no longer sell it. Lose the stick and the Sony Camera is useless. Also her Vaio only accepted these sticks. If she upgraded to a laptop that didn't get 200F and melted her clothes, she could not upload her photos.
Terrible products and it seems only a small minority use them, but those of us that do are stuck on an upgrade use trendmill every few years. I will never buy a Sony product. In the 1980's Sony meant quality and made great walkman and TV's but it seems American style management made them go cheap and use proprietary hardware like IBM to milk its consumers.
The benchmarks I have seen are debatable. PostgreSQL performs slower for the first 100 users but quickl outscales it when access becomes heavy with hundreds of concurrent connections. I do admit this was several years ago and Mysql is adding the extra features, but views, triggers, and stored procedures are usefull in conserving memory and optimizing performance with large tables if used properly and this is where PostgreSQL shined as Mysql 4.0 did not have half of these. PostgreSQL comes iwth the most conservative settings by default too on a fresh install on any Linux distro. You need to configure it to boast performance.
Features are not just for easier development, but also to reduce the work on the RDBMS and increase performance. ... I am not a DBA so I dunno. I am learning postgresql for a project I am working on so I am little biased.
Well if you guys stopped forcing Mysql as the only RDBMS on your ISP we would use PostgreSQL instead.
I went for a job interview a few years ago which was very SQL intense. I looked at some SQL code in C# for both ODBC as well as direct SQL Server code, and it was the most complex thing I have ever seen and frankly hair pulling ugly. It was no simple UPDATE INTO TABLE like simply MySQL with php.
Rather, It was weird ASYNC VSYNC Data.adaptor,x and weird eseortoric lines consisting of 35 to 40 lines of code for each insert doing God knows what! Maybe a SQL programmer can explain what a Vsync was and what a data,adaptor is and why was that code so evil? The question was how to fix it? I realized I was obviously not qualified for the job.
I googled the code and it seemed it was operating optimally with all that stuff. Sure you can use a simple insert statement, but that is frowned upon as not optimized by SQL programmers. Most of them use very complicated steps and layers of abstraction where KISS is frowned upon, because if the database doesn't perform well you do not want to look like an *ss.
PHP is really nice for it's simplicity, but as soon as you move to Java or C# it gets very ugly and each database requires different code and optimization techniques and a rewrite if you change your schema. Again, I am not a SQL programmer so hopefully I wont get bashed too much here by the real ones, but it is just what I observe as I want to learn this myself. I have a feeling this is why Hibernate is becoming popular to avoid these things as it is a framework that does some of the nasty details in a seperate layer ... at least from what I read.
But with Java or .NET you can get caching, transaction control, and other neat things you can't get with PHP but it comes at a cost. Same is true with a real database like PostgreSQL, SQL Server, DB 2, or Oracle. SQL statements are a small part of the code and the rest is proprietary with working with the RDBMS. My hunch is the vendors love these as it encourages lock in with expensive licensing fees.
Just because they are setup for customers to eye them does not give permission to install software. You have no permission to drive a car at a dealership too, but the sales person is nice and lets you do for a given few miles. Apple needs to lock these down and I have a feeling they do not because they sell the display units when inventory is low and do not want customers complaining when they get home. ... and Steve Jobs comment from 1997 was correct then. IE was a great browser over Netscape and the Mac version trounced the PC version. Safari and Firefox of course are better but they did not exist then.
Apple stores are notorious for people walking in with Ipods and downloading MAC office to them and walking out. One of the advantages of not using a registry or downside in the case for Apple is the ease of installing and uninstalling programs.
This alone would make me want to lock them as piracy does cost Apple money. My guess is when they are out of boxes they sell the display macs for a discount just like retailers do. When I worked at OfficeMax, I wrote down the password and gave instructions how to uninstall the kiosk program which locked them. It was pretty easy, but hey it was 11% cheaper and some technical folks like us here on slashdot know how to add/remove programs once given the password.
"The entire country was certainly at risk and getting the Secret Service involved was definitely the right thing to do. There's no way a local policeman could have reprimanded him."
I am aware that comment was made out of sarcasm, but I feel the secret service got involved probably because of this. It has been a decade since I lived in NYC, but the FBI does have an office there and it is likley, they purchased some of these laptops or an employee noticed it, or perhaps the DHS is trying to track down anyone who installs spyware to find any criminals/governments. Macs are used by government employees and this is a very big deal to them. It seems silly like an overeaction, but I have read comments on other news sites of people getting a brand new laptop out of the box at BestBuy that has not even been connected to the internet yet, uninstalling anti virus software and disabling Windows Update. I wish this was news so HP, Dell, or whoever can get a Sony style PR nightmare. Only this would correct the problem.
I fully support the DHS and secret service to find out what flash ram products are infected and where they are coming from. Keep in mind this guy did something illegal and it is not like they are busting into your home and seizing things without a warrant, but still spooky.
When you have several billion from investors, you can rewrite your stuff later.
FYI I plan to use PostgresSQL and perhaps a little noSQL in the mix to reduce the need to use joins for multiple tables (where SQL really hurts when doing ACID). I am just not a DBA person nor do I have the experience to learn how to do relational math with a no-SQL database.
Anyway PHP is another problem for such a large scale site. Wasn't Facebook the one who had to rewrite php in C++? I plan to switch to Java or C#.NET later on when I have money, Facebook has the cash to do this. The only downside is it will take hundreds of thousands if not millions of lines of code in either platform and rushing programmers is bad and creates the same problem of bad design in the first place. Are there any frameworks or CMS that only require a few months instead of years to setup that can handle the needs of a company like facebook? I could only imagine it would take years to write a few million lines of code in Java that is well written and tested and this is not an option for Facebook.
If that is the case, perhaps filing for violations of the sherman anti trust act is in order as you describe a monopoly with horizontal and vertical integration qualities. It is strange as it is a cartel rather than a single company probably to avoid anti trust actions. It acts like a single corporation and a lawyer can bust that. What do you all think?
On my restore partition Windows 7 comes with loads of crap like BestBuy's software installer, which nags and reinstalls spyware on your machine, Trend Micro, flash 9.1 (security risk), and a bunch of other things.
During a restore it takes 15 minutes when it discovers devices, then 30 minutes installing windows live and the drivers, then after booting I uninstall TrendMicro reboot (5 minutes), install pc-decrapifier and run it to uninstall Windows Live, Adobe, BestBuy softwareware finder (20 minutes ... especially to uninstall Windows Live), then comes Windows Update (1.5 hours 600 megs!) ... meanwhile my system is insecure and I can't use the internet while I wait because TrendMicro is off and about 83 updates are needed to secure it.
It takes a good 4 hours on my 6 core system with 8 gigs of ram! ... now comes World of Warcraft ... sigh (4 more hours) and walaa 8 hours later my system is ready. True the 4 hours of Wow are not necessary with Ubuntu unless you are sick enough to try it under Wine. But at least with my pc it is a pain in the damn ass as you can tell and a modest hardware platform with a FIOS internet connection. I suppose if I had a pure Windows 7 CD with service pack 1 it might be much quicker, but then I would have a driver issue.
Ubuntu is great when it works and it SUCKS when something is not supported or flaky like a WIFI that disconnects every 3 minutes.
The problem is the republicans wont budge. They are the ones who all of the sudden decided agaisnt' raising the ceiling. For reference the ceiling has been raised almost 50 times in order to keep up with inflation. With the recovery act this year the number is much much higher than normal and the republicans are seizing on it. ... correction the Tea Party is seizing it. When Bush expanded government the Tea Party didn't even exist. When somone with a D next to their name comes into office all of the sudden this grass movement appears. Give me a break. Half the bailout was designed by Paulson under Bush, not Obama.
Either way the intended effect is done and we are going to create an artificial austerity measure on purpose rather than necessity to make sure another R is in the White House next year regardless of America's bond rating going into the toilet and another 3,000 point crash. Sigh
For the record I am in favor of some of this deficit reduction and think government is too large. I just hate the slimy politics of this with lies and deceptions. Please republicans raise the darn taxes if you are going to walk the walk on the upper class and save 3.8 trillion. It makes me mad as the Tea Party is not dictating Obama's policies as well as the Republicans do not want to lose their seats to this small minority crowd who is active in the primaries.
I wrote that on a cell phone with a crappy screen in a dark room and I am embarrased by the grammar. Normally I put more emphasis on grammar when I can see what I am writting with a responsive screen/phone. Slashdot is very slow to edit on it and preview can screw it up where I can't see what I typed ....
Anyway, I wanted to clear that before I got another user name due to sheer embarasement. My point was that 4 year computer science programs are very traditional compared to other majors that become modern. I understand that less coding was important when a single overloaded mainframe was the only computer students needed and that editing and debugging the program on paper with mathmatics had to be done first. That is still important today, but now the field demands the things I mentioned and not just be used to statisticians and scientists. The coursework is geared to finding ultimate mathmatical purity in data sorting and no one does this outside of Google, IBM, or the IRS.
All other majors change over time, such as accounting becoming its own speciality complete with financial forecasting in Excel.
Employers need things done right away and computer science programs in India teach these very skills in addition to theory. If students can write software as good and administor servers as these top graduates in Russia or India then maybe HR wouldn't be so quick to look overseas.