exactly, I never see the point of a 'higher level" language that compiles down to java. Now, if it went to C then we might have a good reason for using it - all the benefits of fast, raw C but created from a simple-to-build language that simplifies many common constructs.
you can clean the expensive ones. Unscrew the keyboard half from the circuitboard half and pop it in your dishwasher without detergent on the quick and warm cycle (not the 3 hour blast baked-on-crap cycle).
Let it dry and you've got a squeaky clean keyboard. Do not put the electronics in or it'll break.
I have an ancient compaq that I did this with, came out shiny and bright and the 6 key was no longer gunked up with spilled beer.
generally producers that are shown to set that price in collusion with their competitiors are guilty of forming a cartel. IANAL but it appears that telling Amazon to raise their prices means Macmillan was choosing to set a price based on what its competitor set (ie the price on Apple's store).
They could have told Apple to reduce their prices and they'd probably be guilty just the same, the idea is that they set the price according to the market - not artificially set the prices outside the consumer marketplace, and certainly not tell a retailer what their margin on the products should be.
It worked against the airlines, they kept prices according to their competitors and engaged in shady deals to keep each other from reducing prices competitively. When the whistle was blown on them, British Airways was fined £271m - in the UK, you'd be fined 10% of turnover if found guilty of price-fixing.
Linux admins are not that expensive, Linux systems are seriously not that difficult to work with - you don't need to go on MSCP training courses just to find out how to add a mailbox!
Nowadays, nearly all Linux admin is web GUI based (with cmd line if you prefer, or want to script it) and I find the stuff I use to be generally easier than the Windows admin stuff, usually tucked away deep in a configuration property page on some mmc snapin tree control, 5 branches deep.
My advice: go have a look at some linux stuff before you spout such ill-informed rubbish, you'll save yourself some embarrassment in the future.
Incidentally, if your 3 servers can handle 15k users... it appears that the NYC admins need your help! Though I can't see how, if Exchange/Windows administration is as easy as you purport it to be.
someone recommended Zimbra. With the proprietary extensions (activesysnc, outlook connector etc) you get a lot of functionality you have with Exchange. (I think those extensions need to be paid for as they use licenced software themselves).
The basic edition is open source though, you might like to give it a go and see where the weak points are.
Exchange is one of those 'enterprise' systems that is just broken. It epitomises some of the MS tech we have nowadays where everything is intertwined in a truly awful complicated mess. It makes it all fragile and difficult to administer, and perform badly too.
I've used Outlook for many years in corporate life, and I don't know *anyone* who uses it for more than calendar and email. I tried to use tasks and notes, but somehow no-one could be bothered with those. Even my last MS-only company used sharepoint for contacts, not exchange! (and a spreadsheet for non-company contacts).
There are alternatives for remote wiping of devices. I use a security software that allows me to wipe my Android device (lookout) so it's not like you need your email server to do this. I mean, really, it should not even be part of the whole email system anyway. If you want security, put security on there, not email!
I know a lot of companies rely on Exchange, but then they aso rely on lots of other MS software, and I think just buy MS regardless. Even in cases where alternatives exist and could provide a better solution (and cheaper, which is important in cases like this one) they just don't know or care.
Perhaps MS has slowed it down deliberately - because if you only needed 1 server to handle al those users, they wouldn't be able to sell you the enterprise server farm edition for a dozen licences.
See, it isn't zealotry to simply recommend something better.
hmm, come to think of it, I'm not sure you were being sarcastic there.
I used to run a little web server, postfix handled 2000 mail users on an old single-core 1.6Ghz CPU with 1 GB RAM. I don't know how many more it would have handled before it was noticeably slow, but I can safely say it could handle a lot more than your Exchange server. After all, we're not talking a handful of clients here, we're talking thousands upon thousands. If you need 10+ full-power modern servers just to handle email and a calendar then you know your software is total rubbish.
Well, either that, or deliberately slowed down so you have to buy lots more expensive licences!
what you need is a IT that stands up and says "NO! we can't do it with Microsoft tech". We need to drop maybe ten thousand or so dollars on a decent server and run postfix, dovecot and caldav on it instead. Not drop $1m on it to run Exchange that will still need additional funds in the future.
It is ITs fault for specifying a huge resource hog like Exchange when they knew they had limited funds (ie the money would run out eventually) for licences and servers. Someone here said that MS's capacity planner tool suggested it would work fine with only 5 to 10 servers for that many ipad users. That's 5 to 10 modern-day servers not cheap PCs in a rack.
Of course, if IT already had the exchange system in place for a few users, and the business came and told them to support a few thousand extra, that's when IT should stand up and say "We've analysed the capacity and we need either a few million dollars extra, or we need to re-architect the system to cope".
part of the problem is that Exchange is not an email server (many people think that because they only use it for email). It's a "groupware" server that does email, calendars, notes, journals, todo lists, integrated MSN status, etc.
Now admittedly, all those things shouldn't be particularly resource intensive, but the Exchange systems that have been around for years always struggled to to simple things. I think that they made it better at resource usage, but then probably made it much worse by bundling in crap like MSN status updates and probably facebook integration by now too.
If they replaced Exchange with a straightforward mail server like Dovecot, they'd handle a hundred times those users with ease. Sure, they wouldn't have an integrated calendar... but which of those users uses the exchange calendar anyway, using some preferred iOS or Google calendar.
In short, Exchange should only ever be used if you're inside a corporate network and you're an all-Microsoft shop. And you're rich enough to buy the super servers and licences you'll need. For everyone else, stick with stuff that just does a couple of things very well.
no, you're getting the difference between being a car mechanic and a car driver confused. What I'm saying is that to be a car mechanic, you need to know the nuts and bolts of a car, not have the simplified 'plug the laptop into the car's diagnostic chip, still don't understand what's wrong with it, so just charge the customer for an entirely new component in the hope that fixes it' (yes, I have a modern car and have had some dealings with the manufacturer's dealer's service).
Now in the very early years of driving you needed to know how to fix the primitive engine and perhaps you've got a point comparing the old cars with ancient computers, but I'd say that comparison applies to older mainframe/mini computers where the hardware circuits were almost the computer code, not quite with 8-bit microcomputers of my youth.
I really think that's the issue when people talk about computers of yore, its not that we now have 3.8Gh quad-core chips with megabytes of RAM as cache that appear to perform the tasks we set them with less user responsiveness than the old computers, I think its because in the old days, you got the chance to be clever to make it work. Today's computers are built up with layer after layer of bloat that is designed to make it easier to code, but really makes the overall experience for the end user less than optimal. (and many would say, not as easy to code as you'd expect anyway, just reducing the need to actually sit down and learn how the things work).
Though maybe we just want more responsive computers and don't care too much about the glass effect titlebar that I don't even notice anymore.
my first computer was an Acorn Atom.. in fact I still have it in a box on my wardrobe.. I might just see if it works.
Crazy thing about it was that my dad built it for me, not like todayÃs computers where 'building a rig' means slotting cards into slots on a PCB. Dad soldered the chips and other electronics into place directly on the PCB.
I'm not so sure, though obviously teaching stuff needs to be a little entertaining to attract enough attention from the kids now they stopped them from being beaten, but...
when I was a lad, I learned a lot of programming by typing in code from magazines. This was back in the day before floppy drives, magazines would write a simple app in the on-board BASIC, I'd type it in and run it. The typing fixed many of the simple concepts in my head as I worked out why they'd done what they did.
This wouldn't be suitable for anything more than the basics, but... it seems that's what is needed to be taught to the kids who know nothing at all about coding and are being taught MS Office.
if you have a c++ API and cannot expose it through a simplified C-style wrapper (using extern "C" functions), then you use SWIG to generate an API for use.
As it is, what's happened is that wrappers are written over and over again for all the languages that want to use this GObject API.
phew. thanks for that. I thought we were using up all the wind!
Of course, it would have helped if the summary had said something like that instead of suggesting renewable sources were somehow finite (in any practical way, sure the sun will stop one day, but I doubt any of us will care by then)
The problem is with Microsoft. They will happily bundle a browser, media player, and soon an AV system with the OS for free, yet they will not let other companies access to the system's update mechanism without charging a fortune for it. I don't think you can claim the 'profitable' line considering how much stuff MS gives away for free. Opening the update system so other manufacturers could include their own repositories wouldn't bankrupt them overnight.
Its not HPs fault - or its also every other manufacturer's fault too, I have a java updater, a ATI updater, an Adobe updater, an updater built into my browser, my mail client, my paint program.. almost everything has to do their own updaters.
The other OSes are a superior in this regard, obviously and totally. Maybe Bert64 just forgot about Windows (or Microsoft) Update, which is understandable as its practically only used by MS themselves.
You could do what my Epson workforce pro does - it's wireless built-in, so once you've got it connected to the network, you can just put whereever there's a power socket.
There's a print-via-email webservice they have, you email your document to a special email address and the (internet-allowed) printer will fetch the document and print it for you. (no, I don't know if it polls regularly or gets a notification sent to a web service running on the printer).
There's an android app to print your pictures (but not pdfs yet) directly from your phone or your dropbox/evernote/etc service.
So no there's no universal solution that does everything, but we're getting closer.
just because there's an update service in Windows doesn't mean its readily available to HP. I've only seen a few drivers in there - realtek mainly for my system.
How much does it cost to add your binaries to Windows Update? The Linux system is still far superior, partly because its free to add your code to it, and partly because even if you didn't want that, you can include your own update repository to it.
remember: it was originally not a MS product, they bought it from Forefront as a corporate AV system. That t was really good just shows that they did their diligence in deciding which company to buy.
So its ok to continue to hate MS developed products:)
It is good - it used to be Forefront security until MS bought it, then they ran it only on corporate servers (ie it was designed to be sold as a very expensive AV for corporate networks) until someone thought it'd be a great idea to give it away for free to all Windows users.
in short - don't knock it because its a Microsoft product, the only involvement MS had in its innovation was getting their chequebook out.
we could all just agree on a byte code standard like the Java byte code standard.
hahahahahahahhahahaaaaa.
agree on something like this, oh boy, that's a good one. I mean, the old Java standards were incompatible. Even Microsoft's.NET has differences between C# and VB.NET (ie - those 2 languages have different features that the other doesn't have).
I think the web devs are stubborn with JS because its there, it works and they can get on with work in stead of arguing the toss over which language is better - the lucky buggers only have 1.
there is a 'software patent' for the light switch. Guys at Sun used to have competitions with each other to file the most stupid patents they could, James Gosling's bets effort was this. He said it was dwarfed in comparison to some of the other ones.
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exactly, I never see the point of a 'higher level" language that compiles down to java. Now, if it went to C then we might have a good reason for using it - all the benefits of fast, raw C but created from a simple-to-build language that simplifies many common constructs.
you can clean the expensive ones. Unscrew the keyboard half from the circuitboard half and pop it in your dishwasher without detergent on the quick and warm cycle (not the 3 hour blast baked-on-crap cycle).
Let it dry and you've got a squeaky clean keyboard. Do not put the electronics in or it'll break.
I have an ancient compaq that I did this with, came out shiny and bright and the 6 key was no longer gunked up with spilled beer.
generally producers that are shown to set that price in collusion with their competitiors are guilty of forming a cartel. IANAL but it appears that telling Amazon to raise their prices means Macmillan was choosing to set a price based on what its competitor set (ie the price on Apple's store).
They could have told Apple to reduce their prices and they'd probably be guilty just the same, the idea is that they set the price according to the market - not artificially set the prices outside the consumer marketplace, and certainly not tell a retailer what their margin on the products should be.
It worked against the airlines, they kept prices according to their competitors and engaged in shady deals to keep each other from reducing prices competitively. When the whistle was blown on them, British Airways was fined £271m - in the UK, you'd be fined 10% of turnover if found guilty of price-fixing.
lol, and now which of us is the zealot?
Linux admins are not that expensive, Linux systems are seriously not that difficult to work with - you don't need to go on MSCP training courses just to find out how to add a mailbox!
Nowadays, nearly all Linux admin is web GUI based (with cmd line if you prefer, or want to script it) and I find the stuff I use to be generally easier than the Windows admin stuff, usually tucked away deep in a configuration property page on some mmc snapin tree control, 5 branches deep.
My advice: go have a look at some linux stuff before you spout such ill-informed rubbish, you'll save yourself some embarrassment in the future.
Incidentally, if your 3 servers can handle 15k users... it appears that the NYC admins need your help! Though I can't see how, if Exchange/Windows administration is as easy as you purport it to be.
someone recommended Zimbra. With the proprietary extensions (activesysnc, outlook connector etc) you get a lot of functionality you have with Exchange. (I think those extensions need to be paid for as they use licenced software themselves).
The basic edition is open source though, you might like to give it a go and see where the weak points are.
Exchange is one of those 'enterprise' systems that is just broken. It epitomises some of the MS tech we have nowadays where everything is intertwined in a truly awful complicated mess. It makes it all fragile and difficult to administer, and perform badly too.
Linux zealot, lol.
I've used Outlook for many years in corporate life, and I don't know *anyone* who uses it for more than calendar and email. I tried to use tasks and notes, but somehow no-one could be bothered with those. Even my last MS-only company used sharepoint for contacts, not exchange! (and a spreadsheet for non-company contacts).
There are alternatives for remote wiping of devices. I use a security software that allows me to wipe my Android device (lookout) so it's not like you need your email server to do this. I mean, really, it should not even be part of the whole email system anyway. If you want security, put security on there, not email!
I know a lot of companies rely on Exchange, but then they aso rely on lots of other MS software, and I think just buy MS regardless. Even in cases where alternatives exist and could provide a better solution (and cheaper, which is important in cases like this one) they just don't know or care.
Perhaps MS has slowed it down deliberately - because if you only needed 1 server to handle al those users, they wouldn't be able to sell you the enterprise server farm edition for a dozen licences.
See, it isn't zealotry to simply recommend something better.
lol.
hmm, come to think of it, I'm not sure you were being sarcastic there.
I used to run a little web server, postfix handled 2000 mail users on an old single-core 1.6Ghz CPU with 1 GB RAM. I don't know how many more it would have handled before it was noticeably slow, but I can safely say it could handle a lot more than your Exchange server. After all, we're not talking a handful of clients here, we're talking thousands upon thousands. If you need 10+ full-power modern servers just to handle email and a calendar then you know your software is total rubbish.
Well, either that, or deliberately slowed down so you have to buy lots more expensive licences!
what you need is a IT that stands up and says "NO! we can't do it with Microsoft tech". We need to drop maybe ten thousand or so dollars on a decent server and run postfix, dovecot and caldav on it instead. Not drop $1m on it to run Exchange that will still need additional funds in the future.
It is ITs fault for specifying a huge resource hog like Exchange when they knew they had limited funds (ie the money would run out eventually) for licences and servers. Someone here said that MS's capacity planner tool suggested it would work fine with only 5 to 10 servers for that many ipad users. That's 5 to 10 modern-day servers not cheap PCs in a rack.
Of course, if IT already had the exchange system in place for a few users, and the business came and told them to support a few thousand extra, that's when IT should stand up and say "We've analysed the capacity and we need either a few million dollars extra, or we need to re-architect the system to cope".
part of the problem is that Exchange is not an email server (many people think that because they only use it for email). It's a "groupware" server that does email, calendars, notes, journals, todo lists, integrated MSN status, etc.
Now admittedly, all those things shouldn't be particularly resource intensive, but the Exchange systems that have been around for years always struggled to to simple things. I think that they made it better at resource usage, but then probably made it much worse by bundling in crap like MSN status updates and probably facebook integration by now too.
If they replaced Exchange with a straightforward mail server like Dovecot, they'd handle a hundred times those users with ease. Sure, they wouldn't have an integrated calendar... but which of those users uses the exchange calendar anyway, using some preferred iOS or Google calendar.
In short, Exchange should only ever be used if you're inside a corporate network and you're an all-Microsoft shop. And you're rich enough to buy the super servers and licences you'll need. For everyone else, stick with stuff that just does a couple of things very well.
yes, serves me right for browsing /. on the phone.
1 kilobyte. (actually it has 2Kb, but we upgraded it to the 12kb top spec).
no, you're getting the difference between being a car mechanic and a car driver confused. What I'm saying is that to be a car mechanic, you need to know the nuts and bolts of a car, not have the simplified 'plug the laptop into the car's diagnostic chip, still don't understand what's wrong with it, so just charge the customer for an entirely new component in the hope that fixes it' (yes, I have a modern car and have had some dealings with the manufacturer's dealer's service).
Now in the very early years of driving you needed to know how to fix the primitive engine and perhaps you've got a point comparing the old cars with ancient computers, but I'd say that comparison applies to older mainframe/mini computers where the hardware circuits were almost the computer code, not quite with 8-bit microcomputers of my youth.
I really think that's the issue when people talk about computers of yore, its not that we now have 3.8Gh quad-core chips with megabytes of RAM as cache that appear to perform the tasks we set them with less user responsiveness than the old computers, I think its because in the old days, you got the chance to be clever to make it work. Today's computers are built up with layer after layer of bloat that is designed to make it easier to code, but really makes the overall experience for the end user less than optimal. (and many would say, not as easy to code as you'd expect anyway, just reducing the need to actually sit down and learn how the things work).
Though maybe we just want more responsive computers and don't care too much about the glass effect titlebar that I don't even notice anymore.
my first computer was an Acorn Atom.. in fact I still have it in a box on my wardrobe.. I might just see if it works.
Crazy thing about it was that my dad built it for me, not like todayÃs computers where 'building a rig' means slotting cards into slots on a PCB. Dad soldered the chips and other electronics into place directly on the PCB.
It had a whole 1 Mb of RAM. Happy days!
oh yes, get off my lawn.
I'm not so sure, though obviously teaching stuff needs to be a little entertaining to attract enough attention from the kids now they stopped them from being beaten, but...
when I was a lad, I learned a lot of programming by typing in code from magazines. This was back in the day before floppy drives, magazines would write a simple app in the on-board BASIC, I'd type it in and run it. The typing fixed many of the simple concepts in my head as I worked out why they'd done what they did.
This wouldn't be suitable for anything more than the basics, but ... it seems that's what is needed to be taught to the kids who know nothing at all about coding and are being taught MS Office.
if you have a c++ API and cannot expose it through a simplified C-style wrapper (using extern "C" functions), then you use SWIG to generate an API for use.
As it is, what's happened is that wrappers are written over and over again for all the languages that want to use this GObject API.
it definitely isn't the technology, not since they junked most of it and 'partnered with microsoft' to use bing for the searching.
phew. thanks for that. I thought we were using up all the wind!
Of course, it would have helped if the summary had said something like that instead of suggesting renewable sources were somehow finite (in any practical way, sure the sun will stop one day, but I doubt any of us will care by then)
oooh, who feels far too strongly about this. lol
The problem is with Microsoft. They will happily bundle a browser, media player, and soon an AV system with the OS for free, yet they will not let other companies access to the system's update mechanism without charging a fortune for it. I don't think you can claim the 'profitable' line considering how much stuff MS gives away for free. Opening the update system so other manufacturers could include their own repositories wouldn't bankrupt them overnight.
Its not HPs fault - or its also every other manufacturer's fault too, I have a java updater, a ATI updater, an Adobe updater, an updater built into my browser, my mail client, my paint program .. almost everything has to do their own updaters.
The other OSes are a superior in this regard, obviously and totally. Maybe Bert64 just forgot about Windows (or Microsoft) Update, which is understandable as its practically only used by MS themselves.
You could do what my Epson workforce pro does - it's wireless built-in, so once you've got it connected to the network, you can just put whereever there's a power socket.
There's a print-via-email webservice they have, you email your document to a special email address and the (internet-allowed) printer will fetch the document and print it for you. (no, I don't know if it polls regularly or gets a notification sent to a web service running on the printer).
There's an android app to print your pictures (but not pdfs yet) directly from your phone or your dropbox/evernote/etc service.
So no there's no universal solution that does everything, but we're getting closer.
exactly the point - a single codebase will be much cheaper to maintain in the long term, and also allow additional network-connected features.
There's no reason why the $250 can't have these too, it should provide a value-add feature in usability that might help sell the printers.
just because there's an update service in Windows doesn't mean its readily available to HP. I've only seen a few drivers in there - realtek mainly for my system.
How much does it cost to add your binaries to Windows Update? The Linux system is still far superior, partly because its free to add your code to it, and partly because even if you didn't want that, you can include your own update repository to it.
remember: it was originally not a MS product, they bought it from Forefront as a corporate AV system. That t was really good just shows that they did their diligence in deciding which company to buy.
So its ok to continue to hate MS developed products :)
It is good - it used to be Forefront security until MS bought it, then they ran it only on corporate servers (ie it was designed to be sold as a very expensive AV for corporate networks) until someone thought it'd be a great idea to give it away for free to all Windows users.
in short - don't knock it because its a Microsoft product, the only involvement MS had in its innovation was getting their chequebook out.
we could all just agree on a byte code standard like the Java byte code standard.
hahahahahahahhahahaaaaa.
agree on something like this, oh boy, that's a good one. I mean, the old Java standards were incompatible. Even Microsoft's .NET has differences between C# and VB.NET (ie - those 2 languages have different features that the other doesn't have).
I think the web devs are stubborn with JS because its there, it works and they can get on with work in stead of arguing the toss over which language is better - the lucky buggers only have 1.
there is a 'software patent' for the light switch. Guys at Sun used to have competitions with each other to file the most stupid patents they could, James Gosling's bets effort was this. He said it was dwarfed in comparison to some of the other ones.