because we're the ones who frequently have to drop what we're doing quickly and might forget to save an open document. We're also the ones most likely to work odd hours. yeah, just like the councillors who are saying we need to get rid of parking spaces at workplaces, but not at the council offices as he needs to get to his constituency at a moment's notice.
You're focussed on yourself, I bet if you went out and asked the users you'd get a lot of replies around "yeah, the stupid thing tries to shut itself off just when you don't want it to".
oh yes. This is so true, I have an issue where we have a proxy to the outside internet, and SSL traffic is sent through it. But, when you view a server running over SSL you cannot say 'ignore the proxy for all internal servers', you can't even put in a CIDR exclusion range, or even put the host names in - all these are possible but none of them work reliably. You have to put in *all three* to be sure, and even then you have to do it on the clients.
FF *needs* admin-friendly configuration for it to be used in a corporate environment, or it'll never be taken up except by the odd individual here and there. If mozilla's goal is to increase uptake, then central settings, options that work for non-home users will have to be implemented.
I would not recommend C at all as it leaves out too much good (e.g. data structures)
trust me, I know C extremely well - too well I'd say). I refer the honourable gentleman to the struct keyword.
Perhaps you'd like a link to the definitions of "know" and "extremely" as well?
6 languages everyone should know... C, obviously - it is as close to hardware as you want to come and gives you a good understanding of what really would happen in other langauges under their syntactic "easyness".
But the others... well, maybe, but only from an academic perspective. You'd want to know SQL for definite, and a scripted language (who cares whether its PHP, Python, Javascript or VBScript the point is you get to see how powerful its flexiblity is and how weak the features that give it that flexibility is)
Smalltalk is a good one, but I'd say any OO language is good enough nowadays, you don't need the holy grail of OO to understand it, you'll only get pissed off with lesser OO facilities.
His list is the ultimate set of languages to describe different ways to program, but I think learning "real-world" languages to get a slightly lesser understanding would be more worthwhile. In academia I'd be more than happy for people to learn those, but if you're adding to your skillset to become more employable, go for C, C++, Java (or C#, same difference), SQL and Javascript.
I've just been reading a nice blog about how the modern world is chucking more and more stuff at us (yes, I'm looking at you Microsoft C#/.NET teams) so we barely have time to learn something before its obsoleted; cannot learn enough about all of the new features that are being pushed at us; stress out that we think we need to learn in order to keep up-to-date with modern development practices; etc.
This review comes as a pleasant reminder that you don't have to chuck your old code away and rewrite it all in the latest, coolest tech-fashion. Keep the old stuff working, refactor it so it can still be maintained, enjoy producing applications that your customer wants and that work well for your customer.
for example, I had a meeting with some of my american colleagues early this week where they wanted to "throw away all our old SQL access code and rewrite it all using LINQ". Please, lets not.
anyone can get over the privacy issues, Mozilla just needs to encrypt the user's settings with a strong key and store the encrypted data to the server. Only the user can decrypt it (assuming he remembers his passphrase) and you're done.
If you make this a non-optional feature then it can be touted as a big privacy win and people will surely be happier wit it. If you allow the passphrase to be stored locally then ease of use is solved too (obviously you'd still need to enter it if you used a browser not on your home PC, but that's ok).
it depends how its packaged. I run VMware server 1.04 on Centos without issue (apart from having to recompile a memory manager module everytime the kernel is updated).
VMWare's ESX could be just the same thing, a proprietary app bundled with a free OS.
As another posted said, ESX is Linux, but ESX 3i is a proprietary hypervisor.
Don't misunderstand - the OP said that "with silverlight you have access to the entire.net runtime features", which is pretty useful, but if you've written an app that does use some.net feature, then you need the.net runtime to be installed. obviously.
So when I had my new box to install, one of the first things I do is go to windows update and there are a heap of.net runtimes sitting in the list waiting to be installed. No-one tells me not to bother with 1.1 and 2.0, and go straight to 3.5. Experience has shown that skipping runtimes causes problems with other apps so I install them all. and then the service packs (as you do), and the security updates (as you should).
So I'm sure silverlight works fine without needing the runtimes, but if developers are going to be utilising other.net stuff in there as well (because its easy to do, and they have the runtimes on their boxes so it works for them), then expect it not to work for the ordinary user unless they have a hefty download to go with it.
Its not much different from having to download the VB runtime in the past, only back then there was just the one to get.
300MB disk i/o utilisation. lol. Mind, I think they did well with 190mbps all things considered.
Sounds to me you either need to contact VMware to talk to them about i/o performance tuning or whatnot, or just not to virtualise these DBs. VM is not a magic bullet that solves all problems (there isn't such a thing) and your requiremnents are just too high for this solution. simple as that.
I don't think 10gb ethernet will solve your problem, you may need something with less latency. (see this)
IP addresses: I can't remember my IPv4 addresses without looking them up, so I'd be no worse off than with IPv6. You'll get older too son, then you'll agree with me:)
As for web hosting providers, they won;t ever have to 'change your IP address', they'll just have to tell you it in the first place, then you're done.
In both cases, IPv6 supports auto-registration so you won't have to fiddle with it anyway. As the IETF says"Since IPv6 addresses are too long to remember and EUI64-based addresses are too complicated to remember, they are not suitable for such identifiers"
IIRC you don't need DHCP anymore with stateless autoconfiguration.
NAT: think for a moment what NAT does. All you have is your router attached to the internet, and all your computers connected to the router. Unless you explicitly allow incoming connections to pass through, your PCs are "firewalled" at the router.
If you have IPv6, you'll still have the router. I hope that all router manufacturers will be shipping them with incoming connectivity disabled by default, just like it is at the moment. Then, you'll be no less secure with IPv6 than you are today.
You will have the benefit of being able to "DMZ" as many of your PCs as you like, not just one of them. This is best of both worlds.
I think IPv6 will be a good thing, if it ever happens. I can't see that happening anytime soon though, there's too much infrastructure out there.
no, it applies to all sectors. The thing with IT though is that your boss doesn't know everything and expects you (and others) to honestly inform him, and that is more open to abuse than, say a bank, where the boss used to do your job pretty much the same way you're currently doing it now and knows when you're talking bull.
and I believe ESX server is mostly RedHat Linux anyway.
The simple answer is Linux everytime, (though you have to recompile a memory module if you change the kernel in VMware) as you only need the host OS to run the virtualisation software, and Linux is free. My boss was sold on CentOS for this reason, I have the only (or the first, depending how you look at it) 2 linux servers in the company because of this.
VMware ESX isn't that expensive but the addons (vmotion, consolidated backup etc) can add significantly to the cost.
lol. Shows you don't have what it takes to work at a consultancy...
"We want you to virtualize this system. How much will it cost?" "Okay... um, what are the hardware specifications?" no, no no nonononono.
"We want you to virtualize this system. How much will it cost?" "Okay... um, quite a small amount that, amortised over the duration of the contract and combined with our leading edge technical capacity and skill-based best-of-breed approaches to migration technologies will end up saving you significant sums compared to your current total cost of ownership. Oh, and there will be a small, tiny, insignificant, additional cost based upon actual usage of capacity going forward, nothing to worry about that last bit. really. honest."
I wonder if your problems are due to disk layout - ie the DB files are causing the underlying file to be grown as more data is being written to it; have you got enough memory assigned to it? how about the networking being detected and configured correctly? What happens if you put just 1 DB on the virtualised platform instead of running it on the server without the virtualisation layer?
Possibly something else, but you shouldn't overlook the fact that sometimes virtualisation isn't the correct technology to use. You need to check out why you're getting poor performance. I've used Oracle and SQL Server DBs without problem, but they weren't exactly maxing out a single server's capacity.
so if I were to skip the install of the.NET runtime v2 in Windows update, then all.NET apps will work, right?
Most people install everything there is, they don't skip the one in the middle because they think it might not be needed. After all, if it wasn't needed, MS would remove it from the list and only offer you v3 for download, if its not needed...
WTF (that's not Windows Transaction Foundation BTW, but give them a couple of months.....:-) ) is XNA?
scrub that - I've just googled it. Sounds good (LOL). I particularly liked the "The XNA Framework Content Pipeline is a set of tools that allows Visual Studio and XNA Studio "as the key design point around organizing and consuming 3D content". [7]" (from wikipedia)
just goes to show how MS went from being the most developer friendly company in the world to a buzzword bulls**t marketing company only interested in selling us more toolkits.
possibly, but in the past MS released products that really were better, and people wanted to use them (a bit like how firefox has been taken up by a fairly large proportion of the web userbase).
Now, MS releases a bewildering array of products, libraries, APIs, toolsets, language features, etc and none of them are particularly stunning enough to make people want to find out what they are and what they do. I think a lot of developers have been overloaded with stuff from MS that they have started to wait and see what settles. (partly because there is such a lot released, but also because as soon as you start looking at something its 'obsoleted' by something cooler and newer that does roughly the same thing).
no, its not just you. I think MS is churning out way too much stuff than is good for them, and of course, all of it based on.NET in some way.
I had reason to check out WWF (Workflow in case you're not up to date with the WxF acronyms), I can't see it being around in years, just like, say, crappy sharepoint or biztalk or commerce server. I wish they'd concentrate on creating small amounts of really good stuff instead of masses of bits that are slapped around all over the place.
well, deployment is a perfect example of why a web client is used even in corporate environments. But they could deploy thick-client GUIs based on Winforms; or thick clients based on WPF; or smart clients based on either; or silverlight apps, or HTML+JS webpages; or just use RDP to connect remotely to a thick client running on a server (aka citrix).
The problem is that MS has been producing too much stuff, none of it mature and no-one knows whether it will be any good once they've developed a serious application with it or whether it will remain fully supported or just fade away like other MS technologies that didn't quite take off.
Silverlight is probably a good thing, but MS needs to let the market decide whether it is good or not. Forcing downloads of it (and the many.net runtimes) is a bad thing, it could be that no-one is using it because there are too many disadvantages to it. Or possibly, just because no-one wants to use it as they have existing systems already in place. If the latter is true, then you'll be installing all the silverlight runtimes solely to view the MS webpages.
The functionality that having the entire.Net framework at the tips of your fingers while developing is a godsend.
Hi, to get the best user experience from this product, you need to install the.NET runtime v1.1, the.NET Runtime v2.0, the.NET runtime v3.0, the.NET runtime v3.5, the.NET runtime service pack 1, the.NET runtime v2 service pack 1, the.NET runtime v3.0 service pack 1, the.NET 3.5 recommended update and the.NET runtime v1.1. security update.
I know, I've just been doing that on the new server, getting it ready... 300 MB of download and 3 reboots (that's no counting the rest of the windows updates I needed to get).
Note that the runtimes are optional components in WU, so many of your potential customers will not have the latest and greatest versions (which, naturally, will be required) including those customers running Vista.
A decade ago, the US government passed laws basically making it illegal to deny someone a loan just because they didn't have enough income really? I'm interested in which laws these were, please post me a link or more information.
but if you put them in their element, they swim like a shark, they can fix a program to any specification you deliver faster than all the other people you'll interview combined. And they're exactly the people the resume/interview process is designed to weed out. unfortunately the business world is not as simple as you want to make out. Such programmers are also dangerous to a business. Want to send them on-site to fix a customer issue? oh dear. Want them to do what you told them to do when they've decided to "rewrite it in c# 'cos that old stuff is just so crufty" and introduce more bugs and take more time? oh dear.
I used to sit next to a 'brilliant' programmer. Apart from his anti-social habit of sucking crumbs off the cellophane his sandwiches were wrapped in, I ended up being given all his work as he was more interested in playing with OS/2 and 'new cool stuff' instead of doing the job he was paid to do.
You need more leeway for hiring programmers, but they too have to fit in with the rest of the company, they're not allowed to be arrogant, anti-social, dysfunctional people. This is why all companies I've been with bot intervieweing and interviewed have 2 people asking the questions, one for the business side of things, and one for the technical.
PS. Even with this, you get crap people. I hired one last year, unfortunately he couldn't focus on the job at hand and ended up fired. He was really good at the technical interview though, I'm sure that was because he spent all his time just surfing technical stuff on the net.
Slashdot Mirror
hmm. remind me that electricity doesn't cost much next time we have a brownout.
oh, and my bills are just about to go up 15%, and last year my datacentre bill increased by 6%.
or you could just set group policy to set all PCs in a group to "hibernate after 2 hours inactivity".
You're focussed on yourself, I bet if you went out and asked the users you'd get a lot of replies around "yeah, the stupid thing tries to shut itself off just when you don't want it to".
Live by your own rules.
oh yes. This is so true, I have an issue where we have a proxy to the outside internet, and SSL traffic is sent through it. But, when you view a server running over SSL you cannot say 'ignore the proxy for all internal servers', you can't even put in a CIDR exclusion range, or even put the host names in - all these are possible but none of them work reliably. You have to put in *all three* to be sure, and even then you have to do it on the clients.
FF *needs* admin-friendly configuration for it to be used in a corporate environment, or it'll never be taken up except by the odd individual here and there. If mozilla's goal is to increase uptake, then central settings, options that work for non-home users will have to be implemented.
Perhaps you'd like a link to the definitions of "know" and "extremely" as well?
6 languages everyone should know... C, obviously - it is as close to hardware as you want to come and gives you a good understanding of what really would happen in other langauges under their syntactic "easyness".
But the others... well, maybe, but only from an academic perspective. You'd want to know SQL for definite, and a scripted language (who cares whether its PHP, Python, Javascript or VBScript the point is you get to see how powerful its flexiblity is and how weak the features that give it that flexibility is)
Smalltalk is a good one, but I'd say any OO language is good enough nowadays, you don't need the holy grail of OO to understand it, you'll only get pissed off with lesser OO facilities.
His list is the ultimate set of languages to describe different ways to program, but I think learning "real-world" languages to get a slightly lesser understanding would be more worthwhile. In academia I'd be more than happy for people to learn those, but if you're adding to your skillset to become more employable, go for C, C++, Java (or C#, same difference), SQL and Javascript.
I've just been reading a nice blog about how the modern world is chucking more and more stuff at us (yes, I'm looking at you Microsoft C#/.NET teams) so we barely have time to learn something before its obsoleted; cannot learn enough about all of the new features that are being pushed at us; stress out that we think we need to learn in order to keep up-to-date with modern development practices; etc.
This review comes as a pleasant reminder that you don't have to chuck your old code away and rewrite it all in the latest, coolest tech-fashion. Keep the old stuff working, refactor it so it can still be maintained, enjoy producing applications that your customer wants and that work well for your customer.
for example, I had a meeting with some of my american colleagues early this week where they wanted to "throw away all our old SQL access code and rewrite it all using LINQ". Please, lets not.
anyone can get over the privacy issues, Mozilla just needs to encrypt the user's settings with a strong key and store the encrypted data to the server. Only the user can decrypt it (assuming he remembers his passphrase) and you're done.
If you make this a non-optional feature then it can be touted as a big privacy win and people will surely be happier wit it. If you allow the passphrase to be stored locally then ease of use is solved too (obviously you'd still need to enter it if you used a browser not on your home PC, but that's ok).
it depends how its packaged. I run VMware server 1.04 on Centos without issue (apart from having to recompile a memory manager module everytime the kernel is updated).
VMWare's ESX could be just the same thing, a proprietary app bundled with a free OS.
As another posted said, ESX is Linux, but ESX 3i is a proprietary hypervisor.
Don't misunderstand - the OP said that "with silverlight you have access to the entire .net runtime features", which is pretty useful, but if you've written an app that does use some .net feature, then you need the .net runtime to be installed. obviously.
.net runtimes sitting in the list waiting to be installed. No-one tells me not to bother with 1.1 and 2.0, and go straight to 3.5. Experience has shown that skipping runtimes causes problems with other apps so I install them all. and then the service packs (as you do), and the security updates (as you should).
.net stuff in there as well (because its easy to do, and they have the runtimes on their boxes so it works for them), then expect it not to work for the ordinary user unless they have a hefty download to go with it.
So when I had my new box to install, one of the first things I do is go to windows update and there are a heap of
So I'm sure silverlight works fine without needing the runtimes, but if developers are going to be utilising other
Its not much different from having to download the VB runtime in the past, only back then there was just the one to get.
300MB disk i/o utilisation. lol. Mind, I think they did well with 190mbps all things considered.
Sounds to me you either need to contact VMware to talk to them about i/o performance tuning or whatnot, or just not to virtualise these DBs. VM is not a magic bullet that solves all problems (there isn't such a thing) and your requiremnents are just too high for this solution. simple as that.
I don't think 10gb ethernet will solve your problem, you may need something with less latency. (see this)
not me, but you could use google. Or try this link: http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_MajorChangesAndAdditionsInIPv6.htm
IP addresses: :)
I can't remember my IPv4 addresses without looking them up, so I'd be no worse off than with IPv6. You'll get older too son, then you'll agree with me
As for web hosting providers, they won;t ever have to 'change your IP address', they'll just have to tell you it in the first place, then you're done.
In both cases, IPv6 supports auto-registration so you won't have to fiddle with it anyway. As the IETF says "Since IPv6 addresses are too long to remember and EUI64-based addresses are too complicated to remember, they are not suitable for such identifiers"
IIRC you don't need DHCP anymore with stateless autoconfiguration.
NAT:
think for a moment what NAT does. All you have is your router attached to the internet, and all your computers connected to the router. Unless you explicitly allow incoming connections to pass through, your PCs are "firewalled" at the router.
If you have IPv6, you'll still have the router. I hope that all router manufacturers will be shipping them with incoming connectivity disabled by default, just like it is at the moment. Then, you'll be no less secure with IPv6 than you are today.
You will have the benefit of being able to "DMZ" as many of your PCs as you like, not just one of them. This is best of both worlds.
I think IPv6 will be a good thing, if it ever happens. I can't see that happening anytime soon though, there's too much infrastructure out there.
no, it applies to all sectors. The thing with IT though is that your boss doesn't know everything and expects you (and others) to honestly inform him, and that is more open to abuse than, say a bank, where the boss used to do your job pretty much the same way you're currently doing it now and knows when you're talking bull.
and I believe ESX server is mostly RedHat Linux anyway.
The simple answer is Linux everytime, (though you have to recompile a memory module if you change the kernel in VMware) as you only need the host OS to run the virtualisation software, and Linux is free. My boss was sold on CentOS for this reason, I have the only (or the first, depending how you look at it) 2 linux servers in the company because of this.
VMware ESX isn't that expensive but the addons (vmotion, consolidated backup etc) can add significantly to the cost.
"Okay... um, what are the hardware specifications?" no, no no nonononono. "We want you to virtualize this system. How much will it cost?" "Okay... um, quite a small amount that, amortised over the duration of the contract and combined with our leading edge technical capacity and skill-based best-of-breed approaches to migration technologies will end up saving you significant sums compared to your current total cost of ownership. Oh, and there will be a small, tiny, insignificant, additional cost based upon actual usage of capacity going forward, nothing to worry about that last bit. really. honest."
I wonder if your problems are due to disk layout - ie the DB files are causing the underlying file to be grown as more data is being written to it; have you got enough memory assigned to it? how about the networking being detected and configured correctly? What happens if you put just 1 DB on the virtualised platform instead of running it on the server without the virtualisation layer?
Possibly something else, but you shouldn't overlook the fact that sometimes virtualisation isn't the correct technology to use. You need to check out why you're getting poor performance. I've used Oracle and SQL Server DBs without problem, but they weren't exactly maxing out a single server's capacity.
so if I were to skip the install of the .NET runtime v2 in Windows update, then all .NET apps will work, right?
Most people install everything there is, they don't skip the one in the middle because they think it might not be needed. After all, if it wasn't needed, MS would remove it from the list and only offer you v3 for download, if its not needed...
WTF (that's not Windows Transaction Foundation BTW, but give them a couple of months..... :-) ) is XNA?
scrub that - I've just googled it. Sounds good (LOL). I particularly liked the "The XNA Framework Content Pipeline is a set of tools that allows Visual Studio and XNA Studio "as the key design point around organizing and consuming 3D content". [7]" (from wikipedia)
just goes to show how MS went from being the most developer friendly company in the world to a buzzword bulls**t marketing company only interested in selling us more toolkits.
possibly, but in the past MS released products that really were better, and people wanted to use them (a bit like how firefox has been taken up by a fairly large proportion of the web userbase).
Now, MS releases a bewildering array of products, libraries, APIs, toolsets, language features, etc and none of them are particularly stunning enough to make people want to find out what they are and what they do. I think a lot of developers have been overloaded with stuff from MS that they have started to wait and see what settles. (partly because there is such a lot released, but also because as soon as you start looking at something its 'obsoleted' by something cooler and newer that does roughly the same thing).
no, its not just you. I think MS is churning out way too much stuff than is good for them, and of course, all of it based on .NET in some way.
I had reason to check out WWF (Workflow in case you're not up to date with the WxF acronyms), I can't see it being around in years, just like, say, crappy sharepoint or biztalk or commerce server. I wish they'd concentrate on creating small amounts of really good stuff instead of masses of bits that are slapped around all over the place.
well, deployment is a perfect example of why a web client is used even in corporate environments. But they could deploy thick-client GUIs based on Winforms; or thick clients based on WPF; or smart clients based on either; or silverlight apps, or HTML+JS webpages; or just use RDP to connect remotely to a thick client running on a server (aka citrix).
.net runtimes) is a bad thing, it could be that no-one is using it because there are too many disadvantages to it. Or possibly, just because no-one wants to use it as they have existing systems already in place. If the latter is true, then you'll be installing all the silverlight runtimes solely to view the MS webpages.
The problem is that MS has been producing too much stuff, none of it mature and no-one knows whether it will be any good once they've developed a serious application with it or whether it will remain fully supported or just fade away like other MS technologies that didn't quite take off.
Silverlight is probably a good thing, but MS needs to let the market decide whether it is good or not. Forcing downloads of it (and the many
The functionality that having the entire .Net framework at the tips of your fingers while developing is a godsend.
.NET runtime v1.1, the .NET Runtime v2.0, the .NET runtime v3.0, the .NET runtime v3.5, the .NET runtime service pack 1, the .NET runtime v2 service pack 1, the .NET runtime v3.0 service pack 1, the .NET 3.5 recommended update and the .NET runtime v1.1. security update.
Hi, to get the best user experience from this product, you need to install the
I know, I've just been doing that on the new server, getting it ready... 300 MB of download and 3 reboots (that's no counting the rest of the windows updates I needed to get).
Note that the runtimes are optional components in WU, so many of your potential customers will not have the latest and greatest versions (which, naturally, will be required) including those customers running Vista.
I used to sit next to a 'brilliant' programmer. Apart from his anti-social habit of sucking crumbs off the cellophane his sandwiches were wrapped in, I ended up being given all his work as he was more interested in playing with OS/2 and 'new cool stuff' instead of doing the job he was paid to do.
You need more leeway for hiring programmers, but they too have to fit in with the rest of the company, they're not allowed to be arrogant, anti-social, dysfunctional people. This is why all companies I've been with bot intervieweing and interviewed have 2 people asking the questions, one for the business side of things, and one for the technical.
PS. Even with this, you get crap people. I hired one last year, unfortunately he couldn't focus on the job at hand and ended up fired. He was really good at the technical interview though, I'm sure that was because he spent all his time just surfing technical stuff on the net.