Yea! Since I just saw a factoid saying Windows 2000 is the largest 'program' ever writen (I'd say it's multiple programs...) - from Learning Kingdom - "A complete printout of its
29 million lines of source code would form a stack of pages 193 feet
high (59 meters), about as tall as a 19-story building."
So are faster processors a good thing? That is, doing a whole bunch of dumb things really fast is not nesc. better than doing a few smart things slower. Tell me about how x86 is being utterly thrown out the window and that will be exciting.
I thought BizTalk was a DTD, when did it become a server? I think MS is dual-branding again, by a Biz-Talk server they're talking about a product that provides some kind of GUI for the DOM and some easy way of linking transformations and application calls based on... presumably based on logic we provide. So I'm not sure this is about XML at all, it's about a server which is (implicitly?) implementing a DTD at the expense of another DTD. How much you want to bet the thing will easily transform other DTDs to biztalk? It'll have to. And you know BizTalk wouldn't have had a ghost of a chance if the existing standards bodies had managed to get the XML spec completed in under 3 years - you know it's like 2 years late? This particular democracy just broke down into territorial pissing.
This isn't meant to be a troll, honestly it seems like this is just another MS technology to be used or ignored, I don't see how it threatens standards creation unless it's so widely implemented it will create defacto standards. At 25k/processor I wonder if that will happen.
Coming from a support background it seems to me end user's requirements are largely based around making the software work like a toaster. One push button, only goes one way, makes toast. Only it should also load the toast, from the refrigerator, where it put it after it bought the bread, with the money it earned selling newspaper subscriptions to the infirm encephalitic marketing execs who caught their disease by prostituting their companies to end users who want a toaster.
You know? I mean to say that user's don't need to be "computer scientists" but people need to understand computers to a certain extent. We can do better in meeting them half-way but that's as far as we (computer people) can go.
I just finished watching it (ghee I waited till the 2 hours was over before judgement) and I must say style over... not substance but storytelling - this was a bea-u-ti-ful redition. And it has a peculiar greek-tragedy feel to it I don't recall in the book or the first movie but which I like. However. However, the story line, the story-telling, was appauling. Skipping over essential elements, both dramatic and narrative, utterly ignoring the heart of the story, the sense, the sensibility, the meaning, in exchange for? Not in exchange for anything, nothing was sacrificed - god the main shortfalling of the first movie was trying to pack too much into 2 hours, this one has[d] (6?) and hasn't managed to transmit, to engange, to relay or in any way transubstanciate the soul of the story.
But it's beautiful. It fails to tell the story but in the details, in the skin of the movie, it shows a part of the story so much better than the first movie that I'll be back to watch the rest.
And scream at it.
Most of Japan is very... rural and a bit old-fashioned, you can go to towns where you are the first (blonde/redhead/italian/etc.) they have ever seen and they'll treat you a bit special as a result but you can also get the opposite reaction for the same reason. Tokyo, however, is utterly different. US firms are pretty desparate for people who understand the details of making Japanese and English software play nicely together. Either working for a US firm or as a consultant (Japan has very reasonable laws regarding foreign workers) you'll get top dollar - I was recently offered $US150/h and I barely know how to use a mouse (ok exageration but I am not uber-programmer-geek).
HOWEVER you must, simply must, learn some basic japanese - you can learn the writing so long as you avoid the chinese-based character system without much problem and the spoken language is really rather easy so long as you don't have to count (different words for one, two, three depending on what you're counting, there are dozens of ways to say one, it's scary).
Housing is not bad, there is a foriegner's ghetto (by Japanese standards) to get a place in and if you're single (male or female) you'll find the dating scene is unbelievably tilted in your favor - it seems people from Tokyo really don't want to date eachother, foreigners are highly prized. If you're blonde, forget it, virtual mob scenes can be expected if you're reasonably good looking.
Just my 2 cents.
Exchange database is a mess. It's nearly impossible to restore a single user's mailbox unless you have a duplicate exchange server to work with - each of our 10 offices has not one but 2 $50,000 exchange servers, one as a hot backup because the thing crashes so often (and to restore mailboxes) - when the entire mail system goes down you're likely to find that at least 1/2 of your backups are unusable (you discover this about 2/3rds of the way through the restore I've found).
Our last failure knocked us out for 3 days, that's working 24/7 to restore. Microsoft, of course, was of little help.
On the client side the DB (.ost file) also is subjec to frequent corruption and is utterly unrecoverable (this usually happens one hour into your 16 hour flight to Tokyo).
On the plus side you have slipstick which is an amaizing exchange and outlook resource, and you have 'groupware' features. Kind of. For example, if you want to share contacts between people you can, but not if you want to do it through the API (i.e. make your neat Word letter template see someone else's contacts for addresses). Here's one I just had to deal with - exchange automatically resolves email addresses entered in contacts to the GAL (Global Address List) - and resolves them with an x400 format REGARDLESS of how you have the user's mail configured in the GAL. Even if you don't *have* an x400 mail entry (because Exchange 5.5 uses x400 as the default protocol, I think). Try to send a contact to someone and all they see is O=[Org]/OU=[unit]/CN=[user]. Try to access the GAL through the API and you get the same thing. Beautiful.
I could continue but it's depressing me. I hear Exchange 2000 is *much* better but I'll have to see it to believe it.
Get the facts - from gallup
OTHER SPECIFIC - 1%
NONE - 8% (athiest or agnostic I presume)
UNDESIGNATED - 2%
I'd say a good 10% of Americans are non-judeo-christian, a bit higher than some other figures bantered about here.
-=ping GOD: Unknown Host God =-
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Yea! Since I just saw a factoid saying Windows 2000 is the largest 'program' ever writen (I'd say it's multiple programs...) - from Learning Kingdom - "A complete printout of its 29 million lines of source code would form a stack of pages 193 feet high (59 meters), about as tall as a 19-story building." So are faster processors a good thing? That is, doing a whole bunch of dumb things really fast is not nesc. better than doing a few smart things slower. Tell me about how x86 is being utterly thrown out the window and that will be exciting.
I thought BizTalk was a DTD, when did it become a server? I think MS is dual-branding again, by a Biz-Talk server they're talking about a product that provides some kind of GUI for the DOM and some easy way of linking transformations and application calls based on ... presumably based on logic we provide. So I'm not sure this is about XML at all, it's about a server which is (implicitly?) implementing a DTD at the expense of another DTD. How much you want to bet the thing will easily transform other DTDs to biztalk? It'll have to. And you know BizTalk wouldn't have had a ghost of a chance if the existing standards bodies had managed to get the XML spec completed in under 3 years - you know it's like 2 years late? This particular democracy just broke down into territorial pissing.
This isn't meant to be a troll, honestly it seems like this is just another MS technology to be used or ignored, I don't see how it threatens standards creation unless it's so widely implemented it will create defacto standards. At 25k/processor I wonder if that will happen.
Coming from a support background it seems to me end user's requirements are largely based around making the software work like a toaster. One push button, only goes one way, makes toast. Only it should also load the toast, from the refrigerator, where it put it after it bought the bread, with the money it earned selling newspaper subscriptions to the infirm encephalitic marketing execs who caught their disease by prostituting their companies to end users who want a toaster. You know? I mean to say that user's don't need to be "computer scientists" but people need to understand computers to a certain extent. We can do better in meeting them half-way but that's as far as we (computer people) can go.
I just finished watching it (ghee I waited till the 2 hours was over before judgement) and I must say style over ... not substance but storytelling - this was a bea-u-ti-ful redition. And it has a peculiar greek-tragedy feel to it I don't recall in the book or the first movie but which I like. However. However, the story line, the story-telling, was appauling. Skipping over essential elements, both dramatic and narrative, utterly ignoring the heart of the story, the sense, the sensibility, the meaning, in exchange for? Not in exchange for anything, nothing was sacrificed - god the main shortfalling of the first movie was trying to pack too much into 2 hours, this one has[d] (6?) and hasn't managed to transmit, to engange, to relay or in any way transubstanciate the soul of the story.
But it's beautiful. It fails to tell the story but in the details, in the skin of the movie, it shows a part of the story so much better than the first movie that I'll be back to watch the rest.
And scream at it.
Most of Japan is very ... rural and a bit old-fashioned, you can go to towns where you are the first (blonde/redhead/italian/etc.) they have ever seen and they'll treat you a bit special as a result but you can also get the opposite reaction for the same reason. Tokyo, however, is utterly different. US firms are pretty desparate for people who understand the details of making Japanese and English software play nicely together. Either working for a US firm or as a consultant (Japan has very reasonable laws regarding foreign workers) you'll get top dollar - I was recently offered $US150/h and I barely know how to use a mouse (ok exageration but I am not uber-programmer-geek).
HOWEVER you must, simply must, learn some basic japanese - you can learn the writing so long as you avoid the chinese-based character system without much problem and the spoken language is really rather easy so long as you don't have to count (different words for one, two, three depending on what you're counting, there are dozens of ways to say one, it's scary).
Housing is not bad, there is a foriegner's ghetto (by Japanese standards) to get a place in and if you're single (male or female) you'll find the dating scene is unbelievably tilted in your favor - it seems people from Tokyo really don't want to date eachother, foreigners are highly prized. If you're blonde, forget it, virtual mob scenes can be expected if you're reasonably good looking.
Just my 2 cents.
Exchange database is a mess. It's nearly impossible to restore a single user's mailbox unless you have a duplicate exchange server to work with - each of our 10 offices has not one but 2 $50,000 exchange servers, one as a hot backup because the thing crashes so often (and to restore mailboxes) - when the entire mail system goes down you're likely to find that at least 1/2 of your backups are unusable (you discover this about 2/3rds of the way through the restore I've found). Our last failure knocked us out for 3 days, that's working 24/7 to restore. Microsoft, of course, was of little help. On the client side the DB (.ost file) also is subjec to frequent corruption and is utterly unrecoverable (this usually happens one hour into your 16 hour flight to Tokyo). On the plus side you have slipstick which is an amaizing exchange and outlook resource, and you have 'groupware' features. Kind of. For example, if you want to share contacts between people you can, but not if you want to do it through the API (i.e. make your neat Word letter template see someone else's contacts for addresses). Here's one I just had to deal with - exchange automatically resolves email addresses entered in contacts to the GAL (Global Address List) - and resolves them with an x400 format REGARDLESS of how you have the user's mail configured in the GAL. Even if you don't *have* an x400 mail entry (because Exchange 5.5 uses x400 as the default protocol, I think). Try to send a contact to someone and all they see is O=[Org]/OU=[unit]/CN=[user]. Try to access the GAL through the API and you get the same thing. Beautiful. I could continue but it's depressing me. I hear Exchange 2000 is *much* better but I'll have to see it to believe it.
Get the facts - from gallup OTHER SPECIFIC - 1% NONE - 8% (athiest or agnostic I presume) UNDESIGNATED - 2% I'd say a good 10% of Americans are non-judeo-christian, a bit higher than some other figures bantered about here. -=ping GOD: Unknown Host God =-